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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. (Gideo

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.”
- jfnixon 9y ago
  "The current constitution... incorporated and institutionalized racism to appease a certain local (regional) advocacy." 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.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  > I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about. 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.
tasty_freeze 9y ago
No doubt cynicism is as old as politics. But there is a difference when a wag says "don't trust the government" and when the newly elected President of the US says it. 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!
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  I agree that there is a difference. 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. :(

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.”

jfnixon 9y ago
"The current constitution... incorporated and institutionalized racism to appease a certain local (regional) advocacy." 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.
bzbarsky 9y ago
> I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about. 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.

tasty_freeze 9y ago

No doubt cynicism is as old as politics. But there is a difference when a wag says "don't trust the government" and when the newly elected President of the US says it. 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!

bzbarsky 9y ago
I agree that there is a difference. 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. :(