A few things.
1. We are the Land of Liberty, and liberty is described by our founders as "Freedom from onerous government intrusion", not anarchy. People get hung-up on 'freedom' and don't understand that Liberty is the core American value, which is called "freedom" but which is really Liberty.
2. US Freedom is misinterpreted to mean individual freedom at all costs. US Freedom is not just individual freedom, it's local rule and local soverignity. People often don't realize that the US has a dual-sovereign system where States and the Federal government share soverignity. This is a critical factor in "freedom".
Going further, counties, towns and local governments have a lot more freedom to rule as they please than you might think. You'd think, it should all be top down federal law to ensure equity, but in reality, every county is it's own fiefdom, especially in more lax states, as it is states that reign in local governments, not the feds.
So, when you consider American liberty to mean respecting individual, local, state and federal authority, and not just individual total freedom, you can see a system designed to put lots of power in the hands of local governments, which actually creates localized zones of not-so-freedom!
After all, the US is free enough where counties and cities can enforce a lot of silly things!
Not even that local. With the few exceptions from the Constitution, U.S. states wield supreme power and can override any actual local attempt at governing.
Freedom is freedom for the States, not the people.
Disagree. A perfect example is the subject of the article you're commenting on - zoning laws.
Which is crazy btw. I hear a lot of people saying "I'm not a tenther". Like, oh really, I didn't know I could own slaves again just by being "not a thirteenther"
Humans are weird.
Every complaint about the Electoral College is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of this aspect of our system of government.
Living in NYC now after 30+ years in Missouri, I'm more convinced than ever that this is a critically important check on mob rule and that the implementation of a nationwide popular vote would be a disaster for our democracy.
Nobody here is actually making this case. You’re all assuming it.
Federalism is not.
Unequal representation is.
The former does not require the latter; the fact that the two are both present in through US system is the result of a deliberate choice to implement systematic selective disenfranchisement along with federalism, not inherent in the nature of federalism.
I think that's an assumption that needs argued for (and one that ignores powerful cultural, historical, geographical forces).
[0] I'm sure we could think of all kinds of situations under which people collectivize precisely because their numbers would be too small to otherwise matter. I wouldn't want to argue that such systems are in principle unfair (and I don't think you would, either).
The Electoral College isn't a perfect system, and I'm not opposed to defining a set of rules to take its place that explicitly codify its federalist intentions. It doesn't have to be the EC.
But the alternative is emphatically not a nationwide popular vote, which, again, would be an unmitigated disaster.
An analogy:
Imagine a subdivision with 10 houses. Nine of those houses have a single person living in them. One house has a family of 15. When we go to vote on new rules in the subdivision, the unit of voting is the house. We don't let the family of 15 control the entire block.
It doesn't matter that this means those 15 people get the same vote as all the single people, because that's not the voting unit. The logical unit is the house. They can vote within their house about policy within the house, but they vote as a group on neighborhood policy.
This is federalism.
The unit is the state. Missourians combine to form a vote, just as Californians combine to form a vote, and so on. Individuals within the state vote individually on issues within the state. But they don't vote as individuals on national policy. Their votes are aggregated by the state in which they reside.
If this seems odd, it's only because modern Americans have largely stopped thinking of the United States as, well, a set of united states. But that's exactly what they are.
- The direct proximity and very small population allows changes to be discussed in person and in detail. A citizen of a nation is not able to discuss changes with his/her fellow citizens and develop anything meaningful out of those discussions due to this inability.
- The types of policy changes a small block of houses would vote on is almost NIL, with maybe an exception for HOAs.
- Your're analogy doesn't consider that that house of 15 people generates 90%[1] of the GPD of the subdivision. This isn't to say votes should be based on wealth generation, but rather to remind you that there's so much wealth generation there because of the larger population, and it's in the interest of everyone to create policies that facilitate the growth of the GPD (and policies that will attract and allow intelligent people of all nationalities and backgrounds)
- A family of 15 is still two parents, who count as two votes, not 15.
[1] 15/24 = 63% --> 63% * 50(states) = 31 states. The top 31 states generates 90% of the GPD
As a sort of meta-point: it’s never useful to point out the ways in which analogies fail in this way. [0] You know exactly what is meant by the analogy, as does everyone else. This isn’t responsive or helpful. All analogies are leaky.
In general, I’d encourage you to try to find the ways in which an analogy may elucidate. Anybody with an ounce of motivation can note the ways in which they don’t. If you start with that motivation, you’ll succeed every time, to no particular end.
[0] All this does is send us into a back-and-forth where I shore up the analogy by specifying that the 15 are all adults, and then specifying that, yes, in this neighborhood that's allowed, and so on, until eventually we've hashed out every pointless detail of the electoral system in this fictional town.
Yes, this is exactly my point. The EC comes from an earlier time when the US are instead of the US is. But that has clearly changed. Its a vestige of a different form of governance. The power of government derives from the people, not the past. How people currently view the US is how the government should operate.
So using the EC as some excuse for resistance against mob rule is not only against its original intended purpose but also against what people actually want currently. People want the US to be viewed as the identity of the country, not the individual separate countries. People want to elect the President, they don't want the States to.
Today, Californians are 12% of the US population. It's just an accident of history that all those people happen to count as one "state" – if it were to join the union today as a collection of states of the same relative size as 1850 California, that would be 30 states. If it were to split into individual states each with the population of today's Wyoming, that would be 67 states.
So yes, the unit of federalism is the state. But the way state lines are drawn are largely an accident of history, so state-based representation feels pretty arbitrary.
About two thirds of the population lives on the coast, and this grows every year. It doesn't make sense that each coastal person has only 2/3 (and decreasing) of a vote. Or, rather, it doesn't make sense that they don't have any vote because the votes are all in the swing states.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_state#Criticism
EDIT: Looks like someone replied with a similar argument while I was typing this up
And we should not forget that the balance of the EC (as it relates to the ratio of Senators and Congressmen to residents) has swung hugely in favor of rural states. As the number of residents per district has grown, with a capped number of Congressmen, states like CA and TX have effectively lost representation. If we adjusted the size of a Congressional district down to match the population of the smallest state, and increased the size of the house accordingly, the large states would pick up quite a few Congressmen, and therefore Electors.
2. I also take your point about proportionality, but, again, it doesn't invalidate the larger purpose (nor is it an argument for a nationwide popular vote). If the proportions are wrong, then the correction is to adjust the proportions.
You need the state level contests to moderate elections. Just because reactionaries control one party today doesn't change that. The country would have been a shambles if the northern political machines of the 20th century had unchecked power.
If EC votes in a state were allocated according to popular vote, then the existing system would be a lot fairer. Proportional EC essentially reduces the advantage of campaigning in swing states, since many more states become swing states due to the relative ease of swinging a single EV vs. a whole state. And it manages to do so without completely screwing over smaller states.
I did some napkin math a while ago for this, but if this was the case, Bush v Gore would've been decisively for Gore, Bush v Kerry would have been as close as OTL Bush v Gore, and Trump's margin of victory shrinks to about 20 electoral votes from 77.
http://mrgris.com/blog/2016-12-06-538-problems-but-a-swing-s...
I don't know that this is true.
1789, 1st Congress
Slave States (40 representatives)
Delaware 1
New Jersey 4
New York 6
Maryland 6
Georgia 3
North Carolina 5
South Carolina 5
Virginia 10
Free States (25 representatives)
Connecticut 5
Massachusetts 8
New Hampshire 3
Pennsylvania 8
Rhode Island 1
Another factor is that there was a much larger disparity in numbers of voters than there was in number of people. Many of the southern states had very restrictive requirements (such as needing to own a large amount of property) to be allowed to vote while while northern states had less restrictive requirements. In the 1789 election[0] Massachusetts had more than four times as many votes cast as Virginia while having fewer electoral votes and New Hampshire had more votes cast than Virginia while having less than half as many electoral vote. Massachusetts and New Hampshire alone had more than half of the votes cast in that election.
The biggest reason for the electoral college was to accommodate the aristocratic tendencies of some of the states. Contrary to what is often claimed, it wasn't intended to prevent the large states from dominating the small states; ironically it was the exact opposite. They wanted to prevent a tiny state like New Hampshire from being able to out vote, Virginia, the largest state.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_e...
The US started out as a federation more like how Switzerland is. But over time more and more authority was placed into the federal government and more and more cultural identity was placed there as well. So there are vestiges of government that persist from that earlier time.
This is stated as fact, but it's begging the question, of course, because the tension described is exactly what we're talking about. The United States still are a collection of states, to varying degrees, and the degrees are exactly what's under scrutiny here.
That's not a remnant from another time; it's the central conflict, still relevant today.
No, you can understand dual sovereignty, and support it and the separate powers of federal and state government, and still prefer both sovereignties be based on equal representation and democratic norms within their respective scopes.
More seriously, I agree with you. As I said below, I have no ideological opposition to adjusting the levers of the EC (or even replacing it with some other system that more explicitly defines its goals within a modern framework), so long as that system is not based on a simple popular vote (which I do oppose).
Also, don't know what mob you're referring to... that NYC and LA would rule the country without the EC is another trope that's easily debunked.
It's a very real fear that one of your neighbors will drive people away from your neighborhood, tank property values, and suddenly you have 20 families underwater on their mortgage. These rules are kinda dumb and often go way far because HoA members get a little drunk with power but they're essential for mobility in suburbia.
Isn't specific standards of property care, basically a more formal codification of nuisance law? Subjective laws being a pain to apply consistently, I was under the impression we frequently did this- some objective rule is established under the rule of an existing subjective rule, to improve enforcement & fairness.
I never tried to stop other plants from growing. The grass kept itself a monoculture through sheer density. I have never seen its like since I moved away.
So, by this understanding, the author isn't completely correct and that if the factory is not a nuisance it can be built in a residential neighborhood and it has to be proven that the factory causes harm?
I recently had to a file a code complaint because a landlord neighbor refuses to maintain his backyard, and out of control vegetation has damaged the fence, created a flood problem and is causing other nuisances.
If we want affordable housing, housing costs must necessarily fall behind inflation, which is the thing brown lawn regulations are trying to prevent.
I'm not saying brown lawns are the way to lower housing prices, but the whole point rests on the value judgement that expensive housing is better.
There is no “we”. Non home owners want affordable housing. Home owners want appreciation and have the power to make brown lawn regulations a reality.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/08/...
1. Location
2. Location
3. Location
4. Fads and marketing
They are not born of malice; they are born of fear.
The rules of the nearest HOA explicitly ban vehicles on blocks in the front yard. As though anybody around here would actually do that.
They go to the neighborhood with the worst property values, and they note, cargo-cult style, all of its salient features. Then they write up their rules, banning all of those features in their neighborhood. In this manner, they reason, their neighborhood will never have the worst property values in town. In reality, their neighborhood will never have the lowest property values in town because the commute to the major employers is twenty minutes, there are four grocery stores and two pharmacies within a ten minute drive, and all the houses are single-family with at least 2 bedrooms and 1500 ft^2 of finished floor area.
HOAs would mandate granite countertops and stainless steel appliances if they could come up with a decent rationale for it.
plus much of zoning still serves to discriminate against "undesirables" but now is masked behind feel good terms related to environment, pollution, quality of life, and historical. politicians and groups simply got the same results but learned how to dodge the courts and sway public opinion
[1] https://reason.com/blog/2018/05/24/georgia-town-brags-about-...
I'm sure that's often true. And I know that I mostly give nature relatively free rein on my country property. That said, I can at least appreciate the point of view of why suburban neighbors on fairly small land plots who keep meticulously neat lawns, gardens, and homes are going to have an issue with the person whose house has peeling paint, an unmaintained lawn, and generally looks abandoned.
Why shouldn’t a city be able set a specific image based on what their voters want? Same things happens in Europe, I doubt Rome would allow some massive modern looking building right next to the Colosseum.
If you have a problem move to the country (rural area). Shoot guns, grow your lawn, live in a trailer or don’t, no one cares.
I was think more like people living near farm land than rural areas where folks live in town.
The emphasis on freedom in the US, like many things around the world (like religion), is mostly a result of the conditions then the other way around. What would you do if you find yourself in a disorganized country of inequality and insecurity? You build the most available home construction of the most available material on the most available land. So if the economy crashes, you get sick with poor coverage or the government goes haywire you can still, in theory, live a decent life. It doesn't have that much to do with "everyone do whatever they want".
Also, it hasn't rained for weeks in our part of the UK. Our lawn is very brown, as are most of our neighbours'.
Relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/29/natura...
"... farmers have sent me images of verdant monocultures of perennial ryegrass, with the message: “Look at this and try telling me we don’t look after nature.” It’s green, but it’s about as ecologically rich as an airport runway..."
US-style freedom isn't only the individual freedom of action that people commonly believe. US freedom is also about allowing people to organize communities however they want. The US is the land where people can form neighborhoods of like-minded people and enforce their own local rules. Strata boards, neighborhood zoning, water control boards, "home rule"... it is all about little collectives organizing themselves in different ways. The individual's freedom is the right to move amongst these collectives. Don't like the neighborhood? Move.
Living in a place where there is no control, I'd say the US is right on this. If these laws are not enforced, the place will look like a 3rd world dump in a few years.
That's a fire protection rule. Both tall and dry grass/weeds are fire hazards and dangers to surrounding properties.
Like how in many places you are not allowed to have a brown lawn, or one with taller weeds instead of grass.
> Grass or weeds taller than 8 inches is in violation of Minneapolis ordinance. If grass or weeds are taller than 8", an inspector may issue an order to the property owner giving them at least 3 days to cut it. If the violation is not corrected, inspectors may authorize a contractor to cut the grass and assess the costs and administrative fees to the owner.