What a time to be alive.
The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. - Ronald Reagan
No no, don't believe in auditing, and ethics, and holding officials accountable with voting, and when necessary prosecutions. Just be scared of the government, and withhold funding so it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. But today's Republicans miss his message (he'd be considered a liberal today, I think)
Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. From Reagan's inaugural address.
<i>But when the time came to pay up for risk reduction in the Obamacare exchanges, Congress reneged and paid only 12% of what was owed to the insurers.</i> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/im-a-former-health-insuranc...
They pull shenanigans like this all the time.
You can't compare little state sized homogenous countries in Europe to the enormous, diverse landscape of the US. Compare the US to any other country of similar population and you will see a performance standout in almost all categories.
Cherry picking European countries and comparing them to the US is like asking why Vermont, Massachusets, Connecticut, or New York are so much better off than Europe.
Why are Bel-Air and Manhatten so rich? They are just doing so much better than the rest of the US. They barely have any poor! Must be their local governments and better market economies!
Deep ignorance and denial how flawed their culture is. They believe their taxes go disproportionately to cities, and the poor, and that illegal immigrants get free health care who they also subsidize. They believe gays, gay marriage, women, and non-Christians are not equal to straight white men. And they HATE that they are forced by courts and laws to treat them as equal.
They've become skeptical of democracy because it's not working in their favor. When courts were siding with them on religion in schools and part of the public discourse, meaning they get to metaphorically slap minority gays and women around, it was great for them. But as they're on the losing end of these civil rights cases, they're not liking it.
Neither the economics, nor democracy are working for them. So they're attacking the entire system, and Republican politicians are really taking advantage of that in a variation of the Nixon southern strategy:
https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...
Rural folk don't seem to understand that 100 miles of distributed water and sewage, shared by not that many people, will cost a lot to maintain. Yet they get pissed that city folk are paying less for water and sewer, totally not understanding the concept of economies of scale. They have no idea that rural telephones have been subsidized by city folk for upwards of 100 years to make hundreds of miles of copper more affordable, basically neutralizing the fact they live in the boonies.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jun/19/americas-grea...
http://www.amny.com/transit/subway-construction-in-nyc-costs...
Instead of protecting a right to work concept, they protect specific tasks. So even if that task becomes obsolete, you still have to pay that union guy with that specialty to stand around doing nothing.
If it weren't for all the people you'd disenfranchise from such a process, what you'd want is a business, neighborhood, city, state delegation to create a federal law that totally preempts all state and local laws, for each major project, to cut through the red tape. shrug
Oh and middle men. There's a middle man for everything. Especially in Manhattan, it's almost not hyperbole to say the doorman has an accountant, a lawyer, and a therapist. And anybody making more money than a doorman, has two or more of each of those.
Great city. And a shit hole.
EDIT: Also, I think the 2nd Ave project is a big fat classist waste of money. The Lexington Ave/Park Ave line is not that far away, Manhattan has already a very dense subway service compared to Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.
> No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
(Gideon Tucker), and it was hardly a brand-new notion then. The fact is that government, even democratic government, puts its needs and desires first. To the extent that this matches up with the needs and desires of the people it's governing, things are good. To the extent that it doesn't, you get problems. Democracy helps a bit with making things align, but not terribly much. And the more non-local a government is, the less alignment of its needs and desires with the diverse needs and desires of the governed, all else being equal.
This last is why some people advocate for more local government power and less central government power...
There are legitimate debates to be had about the size and function of the government. But I've never understood the populist appeal of the declaration: The government only causes problems -- elect me and let me prove it to you!
But I suspect that a number of elected presidents of the US in the 1800s, and a number of the people involved in setting up the US government in the 1700s, would have said to not trust the US federal government in its current form. In fact, they would have been appalled by it.
Now times have changed since the 1800s, and we can indeed have debates about whether the government we have now is doing the things it should be doing, to the extent that it should be doing them. I wish such debates were more common, instead of everyone presupposing the answers. :(
That's obscure and it's also being taken out of context [1]. What I said, was "widespread notion in the Republican party" I do mean contemporary, this is not an exhaustive search or maybe I'd go back to the Magna Carte.
>The fact is that government, even democratic government, puts its needs and desires first.
Really, it's a fact? You have a citation for this fact? I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about. Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy?
Anyway the small government advocacy pretty much amounts to whining for being on the losing end of the stick by people with failed ideas or failed representation. And the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails: being selectively non-democratic. Top on that list I'd but ethnic discrimination (racism) and misogyny. Anywhere those are protected, democracy is under threat.
The Articles of Confederation prescribed such a weak central government, that it was pointless and a failure, and thus scraped in favor of the current one.
The current constitution, prescribes a more powerful central government, but also incorporated and institutionalized racism to appease a certain local (regional) advocacy. Upons that compromise coming under threat, the "state's rights" types came back out of the woodwork, and then ~650,000 people died. See Yugoslavia for another example of democracy + racism = not really a democracy now, is it?
This local advocacy continued on in the U.S. with things like local school boards emphasizing and deemphasizing pesky things called facts, in order to avoid troubling local sensitivities, and ensuring a nation can have different ideas about how history and science have transpired.
Kansas, a real life experiment in less central government and more local government. Total failure. Only governor Christ Christie is less popular than Brownback.
[1] Gideon was criticizing the lawyer for not realizing the law had changed. It is a quote of a quote. What Gideon wrote was: The error arose from want of diligent watchfulness in respect to legislative changes. He did not remember that it might be necessary to look at the statutes of the year before. Perhaps he had forgotten the saying, that “no man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.”
You may want to read "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott, or https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ for an illustrative review if you don't want to read the whole book. Some of the examples in the book are from totalitarian regimes, but Brazil is a democracy and still ended up with some of the same failure modes, and the blog post gives a hypothetical but oft-repeated in practice example of a less-local (city-wide or larger) government trampling all over people from a particular part of the city, all with the best of intentions, because it thinks (possibly correctly!) that it can't accomplish those intentions without making its job easier by destroying the local communities.
Democratic government does help avoid excesses like mass deaths due to obtuse state action, of course, and this is a pretty darned good endorsement given the history of the 20th century. But it certainly doesn't eliminate obtuse state action.
You do know that the anti-slavery advocates were the source of the 3/5ths compromise, right? Anti-slavery groups didn't want slaves to count at all for determining representation, while pro-slavery groups wanted slaves fully counted. If the 3/5ths compromise institutionalized racism in the Constitution, it was to 'appease' the anti-slavery advocates. Since you appear to misunderstand this, perhaps you should ask yourself what other facts you misunderstand.
For direct democracies with significant electoral control over what goes on, sure. For the thing that most "democratic" countries have, I disagree.
> Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy?
"Government" as understood in modern Western "democracies" is a combination of the bureaucracy and a certain number of elected officials.
You really haven't heard of elected officials putting their elected desires ahead of their nominal constituents'?
For the rest, as far as I can tell the main business of governing is in fact done by the bureaucracy in most Western countries, and bureaucratic departments tend to prioritize achievement of the goals they were set (often by themselves), without regard to how others would prioritize those goals. This is neither unheard of, unexpected, nor unusual. Everyone I've met who has thought about the problem at all, regardless of political persuasion, understands that this is a fundamental hazard of bureaucracy that needs to be addressed somehow. There are strong disagreements on how best to address it, of course.
> the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails
I think we agree on when and why it fails. The question is when it stops being democratic and along what dimensions.
For example, I consider the various statewide legislation passed recently in some states that forbids democratically-voted-for municipal wifi to be a failure of democracy in precisely the way you describe, and one that would be avoided by more-local devolution of power.
Now the problems you mention with discrimination are very real, and I have no problem with strongly centralized civil rights protections that are therefore uniformly applied to all citizens regardless of jurisdiction. There are certainly various other issues like this, where either there are significant externalities or a historical failure of local governance that ought to be the purview of more central government bodies.
This need for case-by-case analysis does mean that there are no easy solutions here, and I'm not claiming that there are. But I _am_ claiming that due to repeated failures in the current system, whether they were avoidable or not, there is fairly widespread perception that the central government is not to be trusted. And I don't think this perception really "dates back to Reagan" so much as that Reagan _expressed_ this rising perception. That is, Reagan was a consequence of the perception, not a cause of it.
Look at the construction of the Tappan Zee bridge near New York City, cost of construction and how long it took. Then look at estimates for its replacement.
So it's entirely rational to skip the actions you describe. But that's true for everyone. We'd all be happier if everybody contributed, but for each of us, we're better off not contributing, whether other people contribute or not. So nobody does much and we all end up worse off.
Problems like this crop up all the time and we have a way of dealing with them. Instead of deciding whether we'll personally contribute, we vote on whether we'll all contribute.
So if you really believe your first four statements, maybe you could consider voting for politicians who support a price on carbon.
Many people think the same way and we have a long way to convince people that their attitudes and behavior need to be modified --both here _and_ in the developing world. It's likely more acute in the developing world since their governments have fewer resources to dedicate to the issue so the populous is on their own to modify behavior and attitudes.
Ignoring this issue (that this kind of attitude exists) just compounds the problem. We need to work knowing people think this way and keep that in mind when developing policy.
> I'm not sure it is possible to convince someone
It is possible, but first you have to open a real dialog. That isn't going to happen without first learning to speak their language, because this is "More than just Resistance to Science"[1].
> Only new facts will do the trick
Arguments based on facts are useful when trying to persuade people fluent in the language of science and logic. Unfortunately I suspect only a minority of the population has sufficient understanding of data-focused language. Most people instead see language as phatic expression[2][3] first.
A good example of this from the other side of the language divide that still retains mutual intelligibility are Trump's repeated - and often self-contradictory - promises that he would "build the wall". People that primarily use language to convey facts often claims his rhetoric sounds ignorant, useless, or xenophobic. Trump's intended audience, on the other hand, hears the language of emotion that promises protection. Trump isn't trying to convey facts, so self-contradiction and other ignorant claims are not important.
To reach people on the other side of this divide, it is probably necessary to first learn their language of social hierarchy, emotion, etc. Skipping that step and continuing to throw facts at them is about as useful as sending them a textbook written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
[1] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression
[3] While I'm discussing this as a language problem, some people may prefer George Lakoff's explanation[4] about "framing", which is a different interpretation of essentially the same ideas.
It's not about information.
> Like, a tornado destroys their house or such.
That's more like it. In other words, until something is personal people have a very hard time relating to it, no matter how irrefutably true it is.
When you see government officials and Hollywood high-rollers flying in private chartered airplanes to exotic locations for climate change conferences telling the rest of us how we should live, it's hard to think of it as a real crisis.
I believe there are plenty of people paving the way for our post-carbon world, building a new and clean world from the filth left behind by the baby boomer generation.
Currently millenials do not put 2 and 2 together when it comes to climate change and their personal habits of consumerism, we did better in the 1970's after the crisises of the time at turning lights off when not needed. But this time round we have people using sensors and things like LED lights to keep the energy consumption sensible.
The only way for countries like the UK to meet their emissions targets and air quality targets is to get rid of the targets (Brexit) or to get serious about electric cars. Right now one energy company is converting lamp posts to charging points, so soon on-street charging will become very easy. A small step but an important one as it makes the impossible possible and at affordable cost. So you might just get an EV because that is how it works and you just charge up every time you park next to a lamp post.
There are only four petrol stations inside the congestion charge zone in London, there used to be far more. Imagine a time when there are none and you have to go to a motorway to find petrol or diesel for your classic retro vehicle.
Even General Motors are taking EVs seriously.
As for the disposable bag, try visiting the UK. They went extinct when stops started charging for them. The other day I found a hoard of three in a drawer. In former times people would have small cupboards full of the things. It took a long time coming, but the end of the disposable free bag was survived by retailers and consumers alike.
I think that EV cars will be like flat screen televisions and ICE cars will be like CRT monitors in not too many years to come. We didn't initially get a better picture with flat screen displays but those richer colours did not save the CRT, even if there were no 'dead pixels'.
In a matter of time the batteries will be integrated into the frame or the wheels or even the furnishings and these EV cars will be a far simpler product than those ICE things. The supply chain will die out for ICE and this new post carbon world will start to happen. Watch and see.
As for the Dutch, yes, we have a lot of bicycles and people tend to get a bit more exercise here but there is still plenty wrong with Dutch society and if you took a 10 km altitude photograph of the country you'd probably still conclude the dominant life form is a steel box on wheels.
Wait, I thought we were blaming The Millennials (tm) for everything.
Unfortunately you lost nearly all your credibility by using the Dutch as a positive example. The Dutch economy is overwhelmingly based on the extraction, production, and export of natural gas, chemicals, and fuel [1]. This doesn't seem environmentally friendly to me.
No matter what law you pass or what incentive you give, recent college grads (I'm a liberal from Berkeley, myself) will find a way to maximize my utility at the expense of the environment. Corporations do this and so do millions of people around the world. Even the Dutch are not immune.
If you want to truly save the environment, go work in battery science and solar production. Because right now, even in HN's beloved Scandinavian countries, oil and gas remains their number one industries. The Norwegians especially know this and are milking it for all it's worth. How will you convince them if you can't convince me - someone not distracted by the billions of dollars involved with oil and gas drilling?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Netherlands