4 ms·

I wish people were more honest about it, but is it even bad to care more about political outcomes than arbitrary details about the structure of the government?

• kodah 5y ago
  I would say caring about direct outcomes is okay, but probably myopic, as a citizen. The government is supposed to build a framework that seeks to put us on equal footing. People invisionong outcomes is short term thinking, and that seems to be often what gets us in trouble.
• whatshisface 5y ago
  Your state legislature may be more or less accessible to you than the federal government depending on how your state legislature is structured, the number of people in your state, and the relative concentration of people who share your special interest in your state vs. in the whole country.
• glenstein 5y ago
  >I wish people were more honest about it, but is it even bad to care more about political outcomes than arbitrary details about the structure of the government? Of course it's not bad. What's bad is degrading the role of truth in political debates by selectively invoking states rights or federal rule as sacred principles, only to be abandoned or reaffirmed depending on the needs of any given debate.
• sokoloff 5y ago
  I think the responsibility distribution (and magnitude of power) strongly affects the long-term outcome of our country. Concretely, I prefer power to be decentralized to the most local and smallest group of people that is feasible. (Feasible is doing a lot of work in that sentence; I acknowledge.) In the limit, the smallest group of people is a single individual. Even if a more powerful federal government would be likely to decide “my way” on Friday April 22, 2022’s three most important topics to me, I’d still want that decision to be as local as possible because, over the course of my life and my children’s lives, I think we get better decisions and outcomes from more local decisions where the people affected know the people discussing and deciding.