2 ms·

Agreed, I spent some time talking to some of the people @ the Change Congress group when they first started. I told them the problem wasn't speech or lobbying

Agreed, I spent some time talking to some of the people @ the Change Congress group when they first started. I told them the problem wasn't speech or lobbying it was the amount of money that was being spent by congress, and that if they instead spent their efforts having legislation moved from federal to state they would succeed in making lobbying to expensive to be worth it. They told me I was pushing my own agenda and that I didn't care about corruption. You have to ask yourself are you looking at fixing systemic causes or merely putting a bandaid on a flawed system.

jerf 17y ago
I think increased Federalism is really our only hope. Increased centralization, or even our current level of centralization, simply makes the central control construct too rich a target to pass up, and too easy a target to capture. This is the 21st century, and everything else is decentralizing; why isn't governance? We shouldn't be arguing about which one-size-fits-all health care plan should be enacted at the national level (and it's extremely hazardous for an entity which can print money to be doing anything of that nature anyhow); we should be letting the lower jurisdictions work it out. (If you don't think states are large enough to do that, go look at actual stats; many states are larger than entire major European countries and nothing would prevent states from banding together or adopting each other's systems once proved, it's not like poor Rhode Island would have to come up with their own de novo plan. In fact such sharing mechanisms already exist to some extent.) It is also a trivial exercise to show this permits a much larger set of people to get the much more of the things they desire out of their government, whatever those things may be (including "less things" if that's what the people want).
- dantheman 17y ago
  In fact, you can see in MA we have a universal healthcare bill much like the one being proposed and let me tell you it's causing all sorts of problems. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/02/mass_healthcare_reform_is_failing_us/ http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/art...

jerf 17y ago

I think increased Federalism is really our only hope. Increased centralization, or even our current level of centralization, simply makes the central control construct too rich a target to pass up, and too easy a target to capture. This is the 21st century, and everything else is decentralizing; why isn't governance? We shouldn't be arguing about which one-size-fits-all health care plan should be enacted at the national level (and it's extremely hazardous for an entity which can print money to be doing anything of that nature anyhow); we should be letting the lower jurisdictions work it out. (If you don't think states are large enough to do that, go look at actual stats; many states are larger than entire major European countries and nothing would prevent states from banding together or adopting each other's systems once proved, it's not like poor Rhode Island would have to come up with their own de novo plan. In fact such sharing mechanisms already exist to some extent.) It is also a trivial exercise to show this permits a much larger set of people to get the much more of the things they desire out of their government, whatever those things may be (including "less things" if that's what the people want).

dantheman 17y ago
In fact, you can see in MA we have a universal healthcare bill much like the one being proposed and let me tell you it's causing all sorts of problems. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/02/mass_healthcare_reform_is_failing_us/ http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/art...