5 ms·
Because the federal government was meant to be extremely limited and mostly serve to mediate _actual_ interstate commerce and foreign affairs. The oft ignored
by ty6853 2y ago
Because the federal government was meant to be extremely limited and mostly serve to mediate _actual_ interstate commerce and foreign affairs. The oft ignored 10th amendment left most everything else to states or the people.
The system wasn't designed to fairly accommodate the gigantic social benefits, massive regulatory apparatus, and local spending apparatus the feds now get involved in. The people that designed the Senate thought that stuff mostly wildly unconstitutional. If they planned on that stuff being constitutional they'd have likely made the Senate more like the house in composition.
- mmooss 2y ago> The people that designed the Senate thought that stuff mostly wildly unconstitutional. Do you have evidence of that? It sounds like an 'appeal to authority' of the small government crowd. > the federal government was meant It was meant to be a democracy, where the people are free to make it what they want.
- ty6853 2y agoYes, see the FDR era and the threatening to pack the courts to change the interpretation to allow progressive reform. The reason why the thoughts of the people that designed our government is relevant is not appeal to authority but to understand the rational to how it was designed the way it was. >democracy The whole point here is the Senate is not a democracy in a conventional sense, but rather distorted on weight of vote per capita.
- mmooss 2y ago20th century events are not evidence of your claim about 18th century people. And yes, of course it's not a pure democracy; I'm not debating terminology. The point is self-determination - Americans get to decide what their country is like. You don't get to impose what you want on them because you have lots of rationalizations.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ty6853 2y ago... the 20th century event was notable because it marked a change from the thought at time of founding up to then. You can ignore history but simply declaring it can't be imposed on you ignores all the inertia of a system only partially amended since the 18th Century (and amended using mostly 18th century imposed criteria). It imposes whether you acknowledge it or not, and no matter how soundly you might think your rebuttal it does zero to change that.
- mmooss 2y ago> ... the 20th century event was notable because it marked a change from the thought at time of founding up to then. Can you back that up? The history I learned is of constant change. It's another 'appeal to authority' to say your way is the true way and therefore others shouldn't get to vote for their way. How about trying to persuade people on the merits of different options, and then they can vote?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jack_h 2y ago> Do you have evidence of that? It sounds like an 'appeal to authority' of the small government crowd. It's well known that people like John Lock, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, William Blackstone, David Hume, Francis Bacon, and others influenced the founders in the US. A lot of the ideas espoused by those people formed the philosophical underpinning for our country. Even in the 19th century authors like Alexis de Tocqueville traveled and wrote about the great experiment embarked upon by the Americans in "Democracy in America". I think a lot of the ideas of the founding generation can be summed up by Frederic Bastiat who said in the the 19th century "[l]ife, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." > It was meant to be a democracy, where the people are free to make it what they want. The federal government includes many anti-democratic features. Let's just take bills of attainder as an example. In a democracy this is possible, you can legislatively vote that someone is guilty. In our system this is just not allowed, at least not without amending the constitution which requires a very wide margin of support. The Supreme Court and judicial review is anti-democratic, as is the electoral college, as was the senate until the 17th Amendment. The Bill of Rights are what we now call negative rights, but these can be traced back to John Locke's conception of rights as a limitation on government as opposed to what many people today consider rights, e.g. right to an education which is a positive right. To draw an analogy to software development, it seems like we have a legacy code base that we really want to make changes to with a bunch of new ideas. Just like software development though, too many people don't understand the code base at all and any changes that are made carry a very high risk of breaking something else.
- mmooss 2y agoI don't understand your first paragraph. The other commenter said "The people that designed the Senate thought that stuff mostly wildly unconstitutional." I asked about evidence, as you quoted. I don't see how your paragraph is evidence ... > The federal government includes many anti-democratic features. No matter how much detail someone includes, you can always correct them with more, pointing toward democracy or a million other things. It's an enormous subject. The federal government includes many many democratic features, such as electing the legislature and executive. For a short comment on HN, it's safe to say 'It was meant to be a democracy'.
- _w1tm 2y ago> Because the federal government was meant to be extremely limited and mostly serve to mediate _actual_ interstate commerce and foreign affairs. The oft ignored 10th amendment left most everything else to states or the people. What some people in the 18th century intended it to be matters little in the 21st. Today it’s a massive legacy system that is almost impossible to reform without a rewrite.
- ty6853 2y agoClearly it does, as we now have a system highly maladaptive for what it delivers; and that is the legacy you refer to built from 18th century intentions.