Funnily, my learnings from this are the exact opposite.

The majority of US problems come from the inherent duality of the political system. Every matter gets split among political lines, with one party for, the other against, regardless of merits. What would fix that would be to move to popular votes (real, proportional popular votes, not first past the post disenfranchising the vast majority of the population), which would result in more parties emerging, which would lead to more nuance, actual debates and compromises.

If your proposal is enacted, what changes? Governors, elected by first past the post (checking the stats for 2022, with 40-60% of the vote)[1], or state congresses, which are also elected by first past the post and thanks to gerrymandering are usually highly partisan with near total domination of one party[2], elect the two senators for the state. What's the difference? Same two parties as before, same stupid dividing lines on every single topic, same impossible to achieve supermajority needed to do anything significant.

Oh, and actual political finance limits. Whoever came up with "companies donating millions to politicians is free speech so nothing can be done to limit that" is either a massive idiot or extremely biased towards big money influencing elections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_gubernatori...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_state_legis...

>>Whoever came up with "companies donating millions to politicians is free speech so nothing can be done to limit that" is either a massive idiot or extremely biased towards big money influencing elections.

So Elon Musk wants to spend millions on politics it is OK, but if I and 10,000 of my friends want to form a corporation to spend millions it is idiotic??

And if you want to Limit Elon how do you get around the 1st amendment ?

Nope, do it the other way around. No political campaign can receive more than X money in donations / more than Y money of it's own funds, adjusted for inflation yearly, with highly public transparency lists on who donated to what campaign when.

Well then, that will only service to make the media the selector then, as who ever can get the most "free" media air time would win. What if I went all Bezo's and bought a newspaper or TV Station... What about the corporations that own those networks, Does every time they talk favorably about Biden count as a Campaign Ad?

I dont see how you can achieve that while maintaining a support free expression, unless of course you do not care about free speech?

This is already a solved problem in other countries, but of course unless you are for absolute free speech to weird extents like money is speech that means you don't care about free speech. Free speech in politics also means making sure everyone is heard, not only the richest/loudest participants.

You enforce that all media networks give similar time (and slots) to the different political candidates, treating time spent talking about a candidate or interviewing them separately from ad time.

OK. And what do we do about Pelosi's husband? What about his brother? What about his business partner who lives in another country? The primary issue with this line of thinking is that it simply makes things more difficult to track. The idea with the current system is that at least it's all out in the open.

In general, our government is dysfunctional and has many points at which we may have a tyranny of the minority. I'd do a few things to resolve it:

- greatly reduce the power of the Senate, effectively limiting it to the ability to veto legislation and judicial appointments with a two-thirds majority (effectively a "state's veto" over a runaway federal government)

- the House of Representatives should be elected based on per-state proportional representation; districts are an antiquated concept from an era where people traveled by ship and horseback, and don't really make sense in an age of telecommunications, air travel, automobiles, etc.

- the President should be elected by a direct majority, as the electoral college has outlived its usefulness and exists only to enable a president to win an election with a majority of votes

I could see #1...

I am not sure how that is different from today? Do you want all Reps to be "At Large" so instead of voting for 1 person, in CA would would vote for 54 people?

I am not sure that is tenable but an interesting concept.

I have always supported the Wyoming Rule, and supported taking congressional redistricting out of the hands of legislatures moving towards fixed allocation based on something non-political like zip codes.

On the Electoral College... 10000000% disagree. The President should absolutely not be elected by direct majority, that is taking the same mistake of the senate and making it for the president

First and foremost the office of president should be reduced in power, Congress and abdicated far too much power to the executive, that is what has made the Presidential election soo important, is should not be.

Secondly, I would be in favor of a change to the electoral process where by the votes are allocated proportional just like the house, instead of First Pass the Post like we do today, but I would Strongly Oppose just moving to a pure democracy system. That would effectively make many states have no vote in the election of the president and almost fully remove republicanism from the US system, if not completely put us on that path

"Republic" and "democracy" are not antonyms. This was a bit of linguistic prescriptivism put in by the John Birch Society that I feel the need to correct. "Republic" just means that the head of state is elected and "democracy" just means that there's voting. Whether they're voting on individual bills or voting for representatives, it's still democracy. Hell, people in the UK refer to themselves as "republicans" because they want to get rid of the monarchy, not because they oppose direct democracy.

The problem with state-appointed Senators is that it was warping gubernatorial politics. If you didn't like your Senator, you had to have the state governor replace him, and in practice most people were treating their vote for state governor as a senatorial vote anyway. Direct election of Senators just cut out the middleman.

Furthermore, we should be very careful with veto powers in a democratic system. Have you ever heard about a study which claims that the US is run by rich people? Well, the thing is, it's true, but not entirely. All classes are still capable of advancing an agenda. Louis Rossman can sit on a chair and yell into the microphone about right-to-repair[0] and get a bunch of state bills proposed. But rich people uniquely have veto power. They can, say, have a 'robust conversation' with a Senator or Representative to kill an R2R bill, or have New York State's governor change the R2R bill at the last minute to completely remove the legislative intent.

Filibusters are another veto mechanism; they raise the vote threshold from 50 to 60. Furthermore with the procedural filibuster they are significantly easier to use, so they get used all the time.

You know how Brexiteers were really mad about how the EU has a lot of unelected political appointees making law? They're not wrong about that. You see, whenever a political party in Germany, France, or the UK (pre-Brexit) wanted to push an unpopular policy, they'd make it into an EU-wide regulation and then blame the EU for it, because they think voters are stupid[1]. They were able to do this specifically because the EU works exactly like how the US Senate used to, with member state representatives not elected by the people and thus not accountable to them. And the only democratic accountability provided to stop this is to replace your member state's government with one that'll replace the appointee in the European Commission, which is now two levels of indirection.

Personally I'd rather live in the world with a straightforward democratic system with as little indirection as possible and few veto powers. Yes, you can point to rising populism as a counterargument, but the problem is that populism is rising because nobody's voice is getting heard. The more that the rich use their veto powers instead of relenting to the will of the majority, the more that the majority will turn to non-democratic means of power, and then we'll wind up in a dictatorship with exactly the kinds of people you don't want running things in office.

[0] Right to repair is a political campaign to undo several harmful effects of copyright and trade secrets law by explicitly requiring manufacturers to sell replacement parts and provide unlock codes to pair them onto equipment. It does not actually obligate them to repair the device, in fact that's counterproductive to the actual point, which is to restore ownership of your device (or car, or tractor) back to you.

[1] They're not.

What you're proposing to fix this is to make sure lamb is always on the menu, no matter how many lambs there are to outvote the wolves.

And yes, there must always be dinner. Ok, we aren't literally eating people in real politics, but still, winners and losers must be picked on occasion. This is simply because political resources are limited. Furthermore, the "2 wolves and lamb" situation is less common than you think. Literally speaking, one lamb cannot support that many wolves. Applied to human politics in the real world, 70% of the population can't benefit from harming the other 30% - there's not enough "meat" to go around. But 1% can benefit greatly from harming 99%. So in practice, democratic accountability puts bounds on how shitty governments can get.

Free speech is not a pesky barrier that democracy tries to get around. It is a peace treaty; an agreement by the government that it will not prosecute culture wars. Furthermore, said culture wars are usually pushed by extremely small minorities - i.e. one wolf splits the two hundred lamb votes in half so he can eat one or two of them in the ensuing chaos. That's how you usually get "two wolves and a lamb" rather than the opposite of "two lambs and a wolf", which is more common

And for the record: yes Canada and the EU have free speech. Maybe not as extremely guarded as America does, but it's still there.

I'm not going to get involved in the gun debate aside from pointing out that guns are not a backstop against abuses of government power. You have a pistol, they have nuclear weapons.

The only thing I can think of for why you'd argue that Canada or the EU are dystopias is that they have mildly more progressive governments and higher tax rates. While I'm not going to argue that paying tax is a moral imperative, I will argue that this is the kind of argument a wolf would make. In fact, wolves have been pointing out the whole "two wolves and a lamb" thing for a while now. This isn't an argument against democracy, it's a threat. "Give us what we want, or we'll stop asking nicely."

Collectivism and individualism are a false dichotomy. Any functional society requires both. Extreme collectivism was the fallacy of the Soviet Union, but extreme individualism has it's own problems.

>>Applied to human politics in the real world, 70% of the population can't benefit from harming the other 30% - there's not enough "meat" to go around. But 1% can benefit greatly from harming 99%. So in practice, democratic accountability puts bounds on how shitty governments can get.

I think we are seeing today that is not true. You seem to be under the same false narrative that the rich do not "pay their fair share", and the poor pay more than their far share when in reality nationally more than 50% of the population pays zero income tax, and 60-70% get more direct government transfer payments than they pay into the system

The people have been continually voting for more and more government largess funded mainly by debt, and by continually moving the goal posts on what "fair share" is and who should be paying that "fair share"

>>Free speech is not a pesky barrier that democracy tries to get around.... And for the record: yes Canada and the EU have free speech. Maybe not as extremely guarded as America does, but it's still there.

Canada and the EU disprove your statement, when people are arrested / convicted because their dog raised a paw on video, or because someone was offended by a tweet or have compelled speech laws to force one person refer to another person based on their declared preference... you can not claim to have free speech. Sorry no the EU nor Canada has free speech today.

>>I'm not going to get involved in the gun debate aside from pointing out that guns are not a backstop against abuses of government power. You have a pistol, they have nuclear weapons.

I guess UKR should just give up to Russia then if that is your logic.

In reality you can not control a nation or its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drones. The fighter jets can not kick down your door at 3AM to search your home... The military can not maintain a police state, and enslave a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening, glassing large area's.

The government would not want to kill all of this people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrannical in the first place.

Remember it took 20 years, 4 presidents, trillions of dollars, and plenty of tanks, jets, and military arms to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.... All the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal amounted to nothing.

So it is good you refrain from the gun debate as you would lose.

>While I'm not going to argue that paying tax is a moral imperative

not only is it not a moral imperative, Income based taxation is actively immoral and unethical.

Some types of Taxation could be ethical such as a Single Tax system on natural resources. Income based taxation should be viewed for what is it, theft of labor, something I assume you accuse the evil rich of doing

> Canada and the EU disprove your statement, when people are arrested / convicted because their dog raised a paw on video, or because someone was offended by a tweet or have compelled speech laws to force one person refer to another person based on their declared preference... you can not claim to have free speech. Sorry no the EU nor Canada has free speech today.

Cancel culture is a US thing, bro.

Having lived for more than a decade in both the US and France, I'd say the former is probably a bit more dystopic in terms of how awful it is if you're poor. Also, waaaayy more mass shootings (muh gun rights!).

The only real difference in free speech restrictions between the US and France is you're not allowed to be Nazi in France. You can critique the government all you want, the whole ultra-woke pronouns is somewhat present amongst leftist types but overall if you're a public figure (eg bigshot CEO) with a habit of saying outrageous things you're probably better off being French than American, you're less likely to get completely cancelled for saying something that isn't politically correct in France, although that may change.

> Some types of Taxation could be ethical such as a Single Tax system on natural resources. Income based taxation should be viewed for what is it, theft of labor, something I assume you accuse the evil rich of doing

Let's get one thing straight here - a government is a protection racket. They take your stuff, in return give you "protection", but the exchange is never voluntary - you can't really opt out short of leaving the country. Because the government needs to know just how much of your stuff to take, they invent money - you can read Graeber's Debt if you'd like more info on this, but basically, there's a reason all primitve coins had the heads of kings on them. Because now you know that every tax season you have to give the taxman X gold coins or risk being thrown in jail, gold coins are valuable.

Now if you define a rich person as someone with a lot of resources, you'll notice two things -

1) insofar as they are exploiting the labor of others to enrich themselves, they can only do so *with the help of the government*. Employment contracts only work when you have the threat of force to enforce them.

2) the government being a protection racket, the more you have to protect, the more work it has to do for you - the government do a lot more work making sure Bobby Billionaire's 3 houses don't get robbed, his private jet works because of all the massive technical and regulatory infrastructure that exists to make sure it doesn't fall out of the sky or crash into something, and his hundreds of happy collaborators are all educated in some common language so that they can efficiently create wealth and controlled by a legal system that ensure they won't do anything that could harm his business interest then it does for Homeless Harry who lives off of rats he manages to trap using a piece of moldy peanut butter as bait.

So they "rich people should pay more taxes thing" is not a moral argument - it's just business logic.

You expect AWS to charge Netflix more than some one dev team running a website that 5 people visit per year? Because it seems logical that if you get more value out of a business, that business will charge you more?

Congrats, you believe the rich should pay more taxes, by the logic expounded in the preceding paragraphs ^_^

feel free to ask for clarification if needed, or you can try to point out any flaws in my argument if you see any :)

what would you say was the lesson of athens? a quick search shows a wide range of opinions on different subjects, many of which are interesting.

Democracy tends to depend on Empire Building. The more democratic the US has become the more imperialist we have also become. This results in many of the problems we have were we look to nationalize more things to enable resources and power to be directed external.

Ryan Chapman has a great video on DEMOCRACY: From Antiquity to Modernity [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UplwT_a1IT8

So the Spanish American war was not imperialistic... Or the US controlling most of South America (Monroe Doctrine)... How about taking control of most of North America from the First Nations through genocidal actions?

Your claim is not based in the actual history of the US, but instead viewing it through a politicized and simplistic lens.

Other than an incredible brief era at the start of the US, we've been imperialistic in our foreign policy.