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"Government doesn't work. Elect us and we'll prove it!" --One of the two major political parties in the US. We get the government we voted for, so I guess that

"Government doesn't work. Elect us and we'll prove it!" --One of the two major political parties in the US. We get the government we voted for, so I guess that's the one we deserve.

ironman1478 6y ago
The majority didn't vote for this government. We do not deserve this.
- roamerz 6y ago
  That is by design. I wish our state (Oregon) was of similar design so that all interests are represented. As it is now the populous centers, mostly Portland and Eugene, dictate their values to the rest of the state.
  - axaxs 6y ago
    I've met two 40-50 something ex-Oregoners who've said the same thing. They were extremely libertarian, and truly unlike anyone I'd met before. Almost like they came from some foreign(to me) culture. Both complained about how the population influx of Portland ruined the state, whatever that means, and both left looking for new adventures. I'm really curious what Oregon in the 70's-80's was like. The way they described it almost reminds me of Appalachian culture.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      You will still find those types in Roseburg, Medford, parts of Clackamas county (I'm looking at you, Damascus), etc, where they refuse to pay for things like local libraries. Ask them why Coos Bay is full of drugs and see what sort of look you get from them.
  - paulmd 6y ago
    Rural areas are already heavily overrepresented in the american system. We certainly don't need to put the thumb on the scale further. The ultimate problem is that "the rest of the state" (for virtually all states) is empty, hardly anybody lives there, and letting a minority override the will of everybody else is tyranny of the minority. Taken to the extreme, this is ultimately what killed South Africa and Rhodesia and other countries - a relatively small minority imposing their will on the majority, things getting worse and worse with no recourse for the people whose lives were actually affected until things boiled over. At its core, this is ultimately an argument for anti-democratic principles.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      You don't think the people who live somewhere should have a say in what happens there? Having city dwellers decide what happens in rural areas is the tyranny of imperialism.
      - majormajor 6y ago
        So it's better to have rural dwellers with an outsized voice in deciding what happens in city areas? You also are performing a convenient geographic sidestep where suddenly "where you live" isn't the country or even the state but is really only concerned with the local. So the rest of the people who live in the nation are diminished. Localism has led to lots of problems in American history, now we can add a shitshow of a Coronavirus response on top of the others. The party of localism tends to be gung-ho about that huge federal military operation... yet refuses a necessarily-similar intervention in a pandemic.
        nitrogen 6y ago
        You paint the not-city with way too broad a brush, and nowhere did I say that people outside of cities should control the city. But you are literally advocating for subjugation without representation. The opposite of localism you describe is imperialism/colonialism.
      - vmladenov 6y ago
  - newacct583 6y ago
    Do you have examples of state level legislating in Oregon that you think needs to be changed? The big right-wing bugaboos in the PNW tend to be about federal policy (c.f. land use regulation), and the most impactful progressive laws tend to be at the city government level (Portland's $15 minimum wage, say). I mean... what exactly are you complaining about? The straw ban?
  - ninkendo 6y ago
    The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. Moreover, why does people's location on a 2d grid matter at all for grouping people under representatives? Why not the first letter of their surname? Their age? Maybe the altitude of their home? Seems just as arbitrary.
    - Proziam 6y ago
      > The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. This is a rather short-sighted position. There's a reason the tyranny of the majority was avoided, and it's because the majority will always vote for their own benefit. If they do so, it almost always hurts the 49%. You have to balance the needs of a state as if it were a living organism. You can't simply optimize everything for the heart when the lungs have needs as well, or the body dies.
      - ninkendo 6y ago
        > tyranny of the majority I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way? If you start picking this apart it really just comes down to "yeah but the majority can sometimes be wrong", which, I have news for you, applies to the minority as well. At the end of the day, representative democracy exists instead of "pure" democracy because there's issues scaling the operation of government into something where everybody votes on everything. So we decide to have 1 representative for every N people. To do this, we need to break people into cohorts somehow, such that each cohort is roughly the same size. There's lots and lots of ways to do this, but we seemed to have settled on geographic locations, and sizing so that they (mostly) have similar numbers of people. But since populations can be extremely concentrated in some areas, cohorting people by geographic location becomes less and less useful. It seems to me in an ideal world, everyone would be randomly assigned to a cohort via some sort of consistent hash, and they would be evenly distributed. Mind explaining to me why this would be inferior to cohorting on geographic location?
        Proziam 6y ago
- ChrisLomont 6y ago
  Majority vote was not the deciding criteria, known to all well before the election. So this is an odd complaint - that somehow the majority needs to decide. Also, the majority didn't vote for the Democrats either. Of those who voted, 48% voted D, 46% voted R, 3% voted Johnson, 1% voted Stein, misc voted to others. So would a D win also have been somehow not deserved because they didn't get a majority? And this is only of those who voted, which is only 55% of eligible voters. So D (and R) both got ~25% of the eligible vote. Some of this is because many people were disgusted by both parties. Trump and Hillary were the two worst Presidential candidates in history, as measured by unfavorability ratings [1]. Had the Dems run anyone with a somewhat normal rating, they would have likely trounced Trump. We set up some rules that were not entirely unreasonable, and enough people did vote for the outcome that we got that the US does indeed deserve this. And both parties ran record level disliked candidates, so what did you expect would happen? [1] "Among U.S. adults, Clinton now has a 56% unfavorability rating, while Trump had 63%. And with registered voters, the two are basically tied: Clinton has 59% unfavorability and Trump has 60%." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/08/31/poll-clinton-trump-most-unfavorable-candidates-ever/89644296/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...
  - deepakhj 6y ago
    I don't think the OP meant the president. The senate has about 400+ bills sitting on it's desk. If we had a functioning senate, then it would force the president to publicly veto the bill.
    - ChrisLomont 6y ago
      The Senate also has the right to publicly not debate on bills, which also sends information to voters, just as if the President vetoed a bill. Each of the three pieces has these powers and should exercise them as they think they were elected to do.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- refurb 6y ago
  The President is not the government. Democrats have the house. Republicans have a small majority in the Senate.
dominotw 6y ago
Problem here seem to be scaling on demand. Unemployment systems aren't designed to scale up and down based on demand.
nine_zeros 6y ago
> We get the government we voted for, so I guess that's the one we deserve. Underrated comment. We elected a joke president with a track record of failures, reneging on promises and bad leadership. Those attributes combined with a pandemic is showing us what we deserve for our choices.
mindslight 6y ago
"We" didn't do anything. The roughly 25% of people that voted for Trump and his enablers got what they asked for. The rest of us are victims of late stage democracy.
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into generic political flamewar. These sequences just endlessly repeat, and repetition is what we most try to avoid here. Consider how much better the top subthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859830 is with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860042 as the top comment instead of this one. The difference is striking. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859830)

"Government doesn't work. Elect us and we'll prove it!" --One of the two major political parties in the US. We get the government we voted for, so I guess that's the one we deserve.

ironman1478 6y ago

The majority didn't vote for this government. We do not deserve this.

roamerz 6y ago
That is by design. I wish our state (Oregon) was of similar design so that all interests are represented. As it is now the populous centers, mostly Portland and Eugene, dictate their values to the rest of the state.
- axaxs 6y ago
  I've met two 40-50 something ex-Oregoners who've said the same thing. They were extremely libertarian, and truly unlike anyone I'd met before. Almost like they came from some foreign(to me) culture. Both complained about how the population influx of Portland ruined the state, whatever that means, and both left looking for new adventures. I'm really curious what Oregon in the 70's-80's was like. The way they described it almost reminds me of Appalachian culture.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    You will still find those types in Roseburg, Medford, parts of Clackamas county (I'm looking at you, Damascus), etc, where they refuse to pay for things like local libraries. Ask them why Coos Bay is full of drugs and see what sort of look you get from them.
- paulmd 6y ago
  Rural areas are already heavily overrepresented in the american system. We certainly don't need to put the thumb on the scale further. The ultimate problem is that "the rest of the state" (for virtually all states) is empty, hardly anybody lives there, and letting a minority override the will of everybody else is tyranny of the minority. Taken to the extreme, this is ultimately what killed South Africa and Rhodesia and other countries - a relatively small minority imposing their will on the majority, things getting worse and worse with no recourse for the people whose lives were actually affected until things boiled over. At its core, this is ultimately an argument for anti-democratic principles.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    You don't think the people who live somewhere should have a say in what happens there? Having city dwellers decide what happens in rural areas is the tyranny of imperialism.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      So it's better to have rural dwellers with an outsized voice in deciding what happens in city areas? You also are performing a convenient geographic sidestep where suddenly "where you live" isn't the country or even the state but is really only concerned with the local. So the rest of the people who live in the nation are diminished. Localism has led to lots of problems in American history, now we can add a shitshow of a Coronavirus response on top of the others. The party of localism tends to be gung-ho about that huge federal military operation... yet refuses a necessarily-similar intervention in a pandemic.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        You paint the not-city with way too broad a brush, and nowhere did I say that people outside of cities should control the city. But you are literally advocating for subjugation without representation. The opposite of localism you describe is imperialism/colonialism.
    - vmladenov 6y ago
- newacct583 6y ago
  Do you have examples of state level legislating in Oregon that you think needs to be changed? The big right-wing bugaboos in the PNW tend to be about federal policy (c.f. land use regulation), and the most impactful progressive laws tend to be at the city government level (Portland's $15 minimum wage, say). I mean... what exactly are you complaining about? The straw ban?
- ninkendo 6y ago
  The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. Moreover, why does people's location on a 2d grid matter at all for grouping people under representatives? Why not the first letter of their surname? Their age? Maybe the altitude of their home? Seems just as arbitrary.
  - Proziam 6y ago
    > The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say. This is a rather short-sighted position. There's a reason the tyranny of the majority was avoided, and it's because the majority will always vote for their own benefit. If they do so, it almost always hurts the 49%. You have to balance the needs of a state as if it were a living organism. You can't simply optimize everything for the heart when the lungs have needs as well, or the body dies.
    - ninkendo 6y ago
      > tyranny of the majority I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way? If you start picking this apart it really just comes down to "yeah but the majority can sometimes be wrong", which, I have news for you, applies to the minority as well. At the end of the day, representative democracy exists instead of "pure" democracy because there's issues scaling the operation of government into something where everybody votes on everything. So we decide to have 1 representative for every N people. To do this, we need to break people into cohorts somehow, such that each cohort is roughly the same size. There's lots and lots of ways to do this, but we seemed to have settled on geographic locations, and sizing so that they (mostly) have similar numbers of people. But since populations can be extremely concentrated in some areas, cohorting people by geographic location becomes less and less useful. It seems to me in an ideal world, everyone would be randomly assigned to a cohort via some sort of consistent hash, and they would be evenly distributed. Mind explaining to me why this would be inferior to cohorting on geographic location?
      - Proziam 6y ago
ChrisLomont 6y ago
Majority vote was not the deciding criteria, known to all well before the election. So this is an odd complaint - that somehow the majority needs to decide. Also, the majority didn't vote for the Democrats either. Of those who voted, 48% voted D, 46% voted R, 3% voted Johnson, 1% voted Stein, misc voted to others. So would a D win also have been somehow not deserved because they didn't get a majority? And this is only of those who voted, which is only 55% of eligible voters. So D (and R) both got ~25% of the eligible vote. Some of this is because many people were disgusted by both parties. Trump and Hillary were the two worst Presidential candidates in history, as measured by unfavorability ratings [1]. Had the Dems run anyone with a somewhat normal rating, they would have likely trounced Trump. We set up some rules that were not entirely unreasonable, and enough people did vote for the outcome that we got that the US does indeed deserve this. And both parties ran record level disliked candidates, so what did you expect would happen? [1] "Among U.S. adults, Clinton now has a 56% unfavorability rating, while Trump had 63%. And with registered voters, the two are basically tied: Clinton has 59% unfavorability and Trump has 60%." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/08/31/poll-clinton-trump-most-unfavorable-candidates-ever/89644296/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...
- deepakhj 6y ago
  I don't think the OP meant the president. The senate has about 400+ bills sitting on it's desk. If we had a functioning senate, then it would force the president to publicly veto the bill.
  - ChrisLomont 6y ago
    The Senate also has the right to publicly not debate on bills, which also sends information to voters, just as if the President vetoed a bill. Each of the three pieces has these powers and should exercise them as they think they were elected to do.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
refurb 6y ago
The President is not the government. Democrats have the house. Republicans have a small majority in the Senate.

dominotw 6y ago

Problem here seem to be scaling on demand. Unemployment systems aren't designed to scale up and down based on demand.

nine_zeros 6y ago

> We get the government we voted for, so I guess that's the one we deserve. Underrated comment. We elected a joke president with a track record of failures, reneging on promises and bad leadership. Those attributes combined with a pandemic is showing us what we deserve for our choices.

mindslight 6y ago

"We" didn't do anything. The roughly 25% of people that voted for Trump and his enablers got what they asked for. The rest of us are victims of late stage democracy.

dang 6y ago

Please don't take HN threads further into generic political flamewar. These sequences just endlessly repeat, and repetition is what we most try to avoid here. Consider how much better the top subthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859830 is with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860042 as the top comment instead of this one. The difference is striking. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859830)