311–320 of 747 posts
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France, Portugal, South Korea, Ukraine, Romania, Costa Rica, Taiwan.....it's almost like you're intentionally ignoring all of the presidencies that meet your criteria.
France is on a different list than the one that is anchor linked, as well as the other countries you mentioned other than Costa Rica.
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The US Constitution is still the best one in the world. The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) is an example of what can go wrong with amendments.
Actually it's not. Constitution design is an academic field, a very niche area of political science, and nobody would ever implement anything like the US Constitution today. It would be like using ALGOL for a new project today instead of Python or Java. The US Constitution was very much a version 1.0 project, written before people even knew political parties would be a design constraint. Constitutions are on like ver…
Just because you wrote a good constitution doesn't make the government good. You can put anything you want into a constitution if you don't have the institutions set up right to maintain it.
Further, it's intentional that the federal government at times becomes unable to do it's job in times of intense disagreement. That was an intentional design feature.
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Why does all the "nation building" around the world by the United States never result in a US style constitution, but seemingly inevitably in something closer to the German one? I mean, Americans always talk about their Constitution's supremacy, but they never want to give it to others (not even to Puerto Rico).
It's out of copyright, so we don't have to give it to anyone. They can just take it.
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> It says practically nothing. Is that not the whole point? "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
This basic fact eludes the intelligentsia who all assume that federal power is The Way Things Are (or Should Be). They assume it's the default position, when in fact the Framers intended it to be a bare-bones fallback for only basic things like the national defense.
The framers were well before the Industrial Revolution; if they intended a right-libertarian bias, the economy they wanted unchecked was a smaller and tamer beast than this one. But anyway, they did give us the Commerce Clause.
I like the idea of the Constitution as a living document, updated over time, but I'm also really glad it's so hard to amend. It's not perfect, but there are usually extremely good reasons for pretty much everything in there, and so if we're going to change something, it seems like a prerequisite should be a deep understanding of why something was put in there in the first place. Take the Electoral College. It's en vo…
See also: Chesterton's Fence. https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see…
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Or people just don't trade with California and California doesn't have any pork.
This is not how it normally works, and I suspect you know that.
Regulation simply equals increased prices which is essentially a tax on the middle class and poor.
Whatever was regulated will become a luxury. The rich will have it but the middle class and poor will not.
See car prices, gas prices, food prices, liquor licenses, etc. Anything the government gets it's hand on to regulate increases prices.
The rich don't notice the increased cost of regulation but the middle class and poor suffer.
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Population shifts mean an ever-shrinking minority of the population can block changes to the constitution. It’s barely even double digits at this point. Constitutional amendments were supposed to be easier than right to rebellion. That’s not really the case any more. At the same time, the supreme court is just ignoring the law, over the objections of 66-75% of the population (depending on the ruling). These are dark…
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If you truly feel those are the most pressing issues in your mind/spheres, I would urge you to remember that social media is largely an echo chamber designed to distract from the actual issues, like the aforementioned sustained assault on the very basis of American society.
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The US tried that already in 1861, it didn't go well. Also you're advocating for the idea that Democracy is a bad idea here.
“Democracy” isn’t a one-dimensional issue. How you make decisions (majority vote) is one dimension. But who makes the decision—what group does the voting and is bound by the results of voting—is another dimension. Many countries balance these issues by having different levels of voting. Distinct communities wishing to govern themselves is a nearly universal phenomenon. My country exists because we didn’t want to be i…
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There's a few reasons this broke down... 1. The 17th amendment (1912) - Electing senators by popular vote broke the state representation in the federal government. States no longer had representation to protect their sovereignty. 2. The federal reserve act (1913) - enables government to self-fund by printing money and enforces everyone onto a single, centrally controlled bank. 3. The 16th amendment (1913) - Federal i…
Name the fucking enemy. Starts with a 'C' and ends in 'apitalism'. Read Richard Wolff's Democracy at Work . This is the way.
How do you think you're going to reduce poverty and create wealth without capitalism?
The alternative is a Constitutional Convention. Considering that each state would have equal representation, I can't imagine anyone on the Left liking that idea.
[0] https://conventionofstates.com/
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/closer-than-most-peo...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/19/conser...