6 ms·

That's one name for it. 'I still won't vote for taxes or meaningful legislation on the issue because they're just going to get it wrong anyway.' is the phase's

by ftlio 9y ago

That's one name for it. 'I still won't vote for taxes or meaningful legislation on the issue because they're just going to get it wrong anyway.' is the phase's actual name.

cmurf 9y ago
We can trace the widespread notions in the Republican party that the government cannot ever do anything correctly, and should be feared when it tries, to this quote: 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.
- rayiner 9y ago
  The Republican Party capitalizes on that perception but doesn't create it. America's governments are remarkably inept at doing even basic things. I just got back from Tokyo, where my 45 minute train ride from the airport arrived downtown within a minute of schedule. Meanwhile, the D.C. metro segment of my commute runs at best 20% over scheduled time. That's despite being one of the most expensive systems in the world. So many things are like that. We spend more on education than almost anyone else for worse results.
  - harryh 9y ago
    The question to me is why is this the case? What makes American government particularly disfunctional and how can that be fixed? I don't really have any answers.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      Totally escapes me too. I suspect deep-seated cultural differences. America is a more contentious, less cooperative society so we add layers of complexity to mediate between all these groups of people who can't agree on even basic things. In most European countries, for example, it's very difficult to block development projects through things like environmental review lawsuits. But there is also this basic level of trust that whoever is running the project won't build a chemical refinery next to an elementary school. Nobody has that trust in the U.S.
      - jjeaff 9y ago
        The real question is not why the US seems to lag behind it's peers in how effective our government is. It is, how is the US able to be so much better than it's peers? 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.
        rayiner 9y ago
        I'm talking about countries like the France and Germany, etc. The U.S. continues to outperform those countries but I'm not sure you can chalk it up to the effectiveness of our government. I'd chalk it up to the U.S. having a head start from WWII and the major European powers being late to adopt market economies. Since then, they've caught up. For example, the U.S. had 50% higher labor productivity per hour of work than France and Germany in the 1970s. Today, it's identical: http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/09/of-productivity-in-france-and-in-germany http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/09/of-productivity-in....
        jjeaff 9y ago
        But again, both countries have less than a third of the US population. And no, I don't think our government gives us any special advantage. But my point is that you can't begin to compare the US to these fractionally sized countries that have the advantage of chasing off all the poor into other cheaper countries in Europe due to high cost of living. 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!
  - ocschwar 9y ago
    The DC Metro is subject to malicious interference from a certain political party that LIKES it to be unpunctual and troubled. Gives them something to bash
    - rayiner 9y ago
      The D.C. Metro is funded and controlled by D.C. and various MD and VA counties that are overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats.
  - cmurf 9y ago
    The Republican party actively recruits incompetency and actively sabotages the system. It's a blatantly racist, classist, anti-democracy party at this point. The voter disenfranchisement they engage in is widespread. The nutty conspiracy theories about voter fraud, all involving brown people, is widespread. It's become the party that's questioning democracy now that democracy means people like them aren't winning elections, so they have to engage in the craziest methods of gerrymandering, voter registration purging, barriers to voter registration, and actively dissemination of factually incorrect information. <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-insurance-ceo-and-this-is-what-obamacare-repeal-will-do-2017-01-02?siteid=rss&rss=1 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/im-a-former-health-insuranc... They pull shenanigans like this all the time.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  That perception is _much_ older than Reagan. Back in 1866 we have: > 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...
  - cmurf 9y ago
    >No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. 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.”

by ftlio 9y ago

That's one name for it. 'I still won't vote for taxes or meaningful legislation on the issue because they're just going to get it wrong anyway.' is the phase's actual name.

cmurf 9y ago

We can trace the widespread notions in the Republican party that the government cannot ever do anything correctly, and should be feared when it tries, to this quote: 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.

rayiner 9y ago
The Republican Party capitalizes on that perception but doesn't create it. America's governments are remarkably inept at doing even basic things. I just got back from Tokyo, where my 45 minute train ride from the airport arrived downtown within a minute of schedule. Meanwhile, the D.C. metro segment of my commute runs at best 20% over scheduled time. That's despite being one of the most expensive systems in the world. So many things are like that. We spend more on education than almost anyone else for worse results.
- harryh 9y ago
  The question to me is why is this the case? What makes American government particularly disfunctional and how can that be fixed? I don't really have any answers.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Totally escapes me too. I suspect deep-seated cultural differences. America is a more contentious, less cooperative society so we add layers of complexity to mediate between all these groups of people who can't agree on even basic things. In most European countries, for example, it's very difficult to block development projects through things like environmental review lawsuits. But there is also this basic level of trust that whoever is running the project won't build a chemical refinery next to an elementary school. Nobody has that trust in the U.S.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      The real question is not why the US seems to lag behind it's peers in how effective our government is. It is, how is the US able to be so much better than it's peers? 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.
      - rayiner 9y ago
        I'm talking about countries like the France and Germany, etc. The U.S. continues to outperform those countries but I'm not sure you can chalk it up to the effectiveness of our government. I'd chalk it up to the U.S. having a head start from WWII and the major European powers being late to adopt market economies. Since then, they've caught up. For example, the U.S. had 50% higher labor productivity per hour of work than France and Germany in the 1970s. Today, it's identical: http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/09/of-productivity-in-france-and-in-germany http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/09/of-productivity-in....
        jjeaff 9y ago
        But again, both countries have less than a third of the US population. And no, I don't think our government gives us any special advantage. But my point is that you can't begin to compare the US to these fractionally sized countries that have the advantage of chasing off all the poor into other cheaper countries in Europe due to high cost of living. 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!
- ocschwar 9y ago
  The DC Metro is subject to malicious interference from a certain political party that LIKES it to be unpunctual and troubled. Gives them something to bash
  - rayiner 9y ago
    The D.C. Metro is funded and controlled by D.C. and various MD and VA counties that are overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats.
- cmurf 9y ago
  The Republican party actively recruits incompetency and actively sabotages the system. It's a blatantly racist, classist, anti-democracy party at this point. The voter disenfranchisement they engage in is widespread. The nutty conspiracy theories about voter fraud, all involving brown people, is widespread. It's become the party that's questioning democracy now that democracy means people like them aren't winning elections, so they have to engage in the craziest methods of gerrymandering, voter registration purging, barriers to voter registration, and actively dissemination of factually incorrect information. <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-insurance-ceo-and-this-is-what-obamacare-repeal-will-do-2017-01-02?siteid=rss&rss=1 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/im-a-former-health-insuranc... They pull shenanigans like this all the time.
bzbarsky 9y ago
That perception is _much_ older than Reagan. Back in 1866 we have: > 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...
- cmurf 9y ago
  >No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. 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.”