IMO the most pressing problem in the USA is that we have “consensus protocols” that can fail to achieve consensus. If the USA government was a software product, these would be considered massive bugs:
The presence of both a House of Representatives and a Senate, and both bodies need to approve legislation with a majority in order for the legislation to become law. This is fundamentally broken, because there’s no guarantee that both houses will be controlled by the same party. Imagine if a database locked up because it had only 2 replicas, and if they ever became out of sync, all writes would stop, with no way to achieve a majority.
The fact that the president can veto legislation. As above, this can result in a complete lockup of the government’s basic functionality, since there is no guarantee that Congress and the president are controlled by the same party.
The electoral college. The fact that it is capable of installing as president the loser of the election is an obvious and massive flaw.
If we eliminated these bugs, then we would be able to achieve party-wise accountability; At the moment, when the House, Senate, and/or presidency are controlled by different parties, both parties can blame the other for inaction. In reality, the true problem is the fact that the Senate exists and that the President has veto power. If we had 1 democratic body (the House) and no Senate, then the party that controls the House would be directly accountable for its successes and failures, and I would expect American cynicism and apathy about “government not working” to decrease as a result.
Yeah, but these systems also act as corruption-prevention mechanisms.
They’re more like fault tolerant computations: if both bodies don’t agree on something, then that something must be flawed and should not be applied.
With only one democratic body, it might be faster to pass laws, but they would all be quite flawed because they would lack peer-review from an independent body…
In practice, its the two-party-only system and fptp that screws things up.
Alright I like the way you think! Now perhaps let’s ahem apply that type of logic to companies? If we fix our corrupt companies they won’t be able to corrupt the government any more.
IMO the most pressing problem in the USA is that we have “consensus protocols” that can fail to achieve consensus. If the USA government was a software product, these would be considered massive bugs:
If we eliminated these bugs, then we would be able to achieve party-wise accountability; At the moment, when the House, Senate, and/or presidency are controlled by different parties, both parties can blame the other for inaction. In reality, the true problem is the fact that the Senate exists and that the President has veto power. If we had 1 democratic body (the House) and no Senate, then the party that controls the House would be directly accountable for its successes and failures, and I would expect American cynicism and apathy about “government not working” to decrease as a result.
Yeah, but these systems also act as corruption-prevention mechanisms.
They’re more like fault tolerant computations: if both bodies don’t agree on something, then that something must be flawed and should not be applied.
With only one democratic body, it might be faster to pass laws, but they would all be quite flawed because they would lack peer-review from an independent body…
In practice, its the two-party-only system and fptp that screws things up.
The electoral college is more of a equality-prevention mechanism. One vote in rural america, racist america if you will, is equal to ten in a city.
These are more symptoms than the actual problem, that the US is a dictatorship of capital.
Alright I like the way you think! Now perhaps let’s ahem apply that type of logic to companies? If we fix our corrupt companies they won’t be able to corrupt the government any more.