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Locke Dunnegan posted:See now, we're getting somewhere. You make an actual point as rebuttal for the thread's topic, but you gently caress up any chance of continued on topic responses from me by continuing to be a prick. Dude, you're the prick for whining about how people make fun of your bad ideas. Look, you're spouting off on stuff that I already learned as bogus in 9th grade government classes. Jerry Manderbilt posted:Yeah OP, for real, look at the screwjob happening in places like North Carolina (where plutocrat Art Pope singlehandedly bought the GOP legislative majorities in both houses), Kansas (home turf of the Koch brothers, currently reeling after tax cuts passed by the governor and teabag-dominated state legislature) and Wisconsin (need I say anything about Scott Walker?); special interests can pack state legislatures and do much more damage there. Or hell, how West Virginia barely ever punishes all the industries that dump toxic chemicals into the water supply.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:13
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paranoid randroid posted:I'm bullish on thalassocracies these days. "First Admiral" has a nice ring for a head of state, yeah? Worked for Hungary!
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Apr 14, 2015 17:14
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Locke Dunnegan posted:See now, we're getting somewhere. You make an actual point as rebuttal for the thread's topic, but you gently caress up any chance of continued on topic responses from me by continuing to be a prick. Oh my god you blew it fishmech. You blew it for all of us.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:14
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Anyway my high school government teacher was a cool dude. He explained how easy it was to influence local government by using his own side career as a landlord for an example - his buddy on the county Board of Chosen Freeholders (county legislature) got him some property tax deferred when he was starting to expand from just renting out his old house.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:20
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enraged_camel posted:Really? Outside of a few specific cases, I find this difficult to believe. More resources in pretty much every case. Even the poorest states still have plentiful resources to exploit. You would just see certain states/confederations take over larger and larger areas until you just had the United States of California or the United States of New York.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:23
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I may have too much faith in the American public, but I don't buy in to the idea that the states would turn on each other if they were independent. Not everyone's a power hungry politician. If my home state was attempting to annex Arkansas I sincerely doubt there would be a majority supporting it.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:41
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Locke Dunnegan posted:I may have too much faith in the American public, but I don't buy in to the idea that the states would turn on each other if they were independent. Not everyone's a power hungry politician. If my home state was attempting to annex Arkansas I sincerely doubt there would be a majority supporting it. But the politicians who run the states ARE power hungry politicians dude. It doesn't matter if a majority of the public supports it, you just need a majority in the government to support it. Like seriously there'd be no point to not taking over nearby states if they couldn't defend themselves. Especially since so many current metro areas cross state lines.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:47
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Locke Dunnegan posted:I may have too much faith in the American public, but I don't buy in to the idea that the states would turn on each other if they were independent. Not everyone's a power hungry politician. If my home state was attempting to annex Arkansas I sincerely doubt there would be a majority supporting it. Why does it matter if a majority supports it or not? Let's say they don't support it, and your state's politicians (who by definition are power-hungry politicians) decide, either for their own benefit or the benefit of their donors, that annexing Arkansas is the next big thing. Outline for me what happens next, please.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:47
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Locke Dunnegan posted:I may have too much faith in the American public, but I don't buy in to the idea that the states would turn on each other if they were independent. Not everyone's a power hungry politician. If my home state was attempting to annex Arkansas I sincerely doubt there would be a majority supporting it. Yeah and if you ever had trouble finding work in your own state, you could always travel to the newly independent south and get a job tugging on the ankles of hanged black teenagers to make sure they are dead.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:50
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Not only that, who says a state has to annex another one? What's to stop politicians in Arkansas selling huge swaths of land, or water rights, or mineral rights, or energy rights at a huge discount to Texas because they'll get a sweet job with a golden parachute at a Texas corporation after the fact while the common people in Arkansas get hosed over?
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Apr 14, 2015 17:56
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Locke Dunnegan posted:I may have too much faith in the American public, but I don't buy in to the idea that the states would turn on each other if they were independent. Not everyone's a power hungry politician. If my home state was attempting to annex Arkansas I sincerely doubt there would be a majority supporting it. Even if they wouldn't turn on each other militarily they'd certainly gently caress each other over other ways. Right now the states have to deal with each other civilly and there is a structure in place for that to occur, but once that gets taken away all bets are off. If New York wants to start charging extortionate fees on shipping through Buffalo what can Illinois really do about it? It's not like maritime shipping can go through anywhere else. It's either pay up or start asking Michigan and Canada for airspace rights for their bombers. The real danger is that many of these newly empowered state governments would turn on their own populaces, or at least the "undesirable" elements of them. The Federal government enforces a baseline level of decency on the states, and while some of them would respect those norms on their own there's a lot of them that only do it because they're forced to. Gay Utahns had better hope that California accepts refugees and Hispanic Arizonans should prepare to get poo poo on mightily.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:09
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A Winner is Jew posted:Not only that, who says a state has to annex another one? I'm just asking questions!! Through your snark you have missed out on receiving a serious response from me.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:11
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Soviet Commubot posted:Even if they wouldn't turn on each other militarily they'd certainly gently caress each other over other ways. Right now the states have to deal with each other civilly and there is a structure in place for that to occur, but once that gets taken away all bets are off. If New York wants to start charging extortionate fees on shipping through Buffalo what can Illinois really do about it? It's not like maritime shipping can go through anywhere else. It's either pay up or start asking Michigan and Canada for airspace rights for their bombers. In other words, exactly the problems we had with the Articles of Confederation.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:13
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Oh no, something from the past failed so we must never try to change thing ever again
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Apr 14, 2015 18:16
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Prop 8 passed in California, no need to ever attempt gay rights ever again cause we failed.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:17
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Instead of saying poo poo like "it wont work because we tried it before and it failed" why don't you do something about it? Stop bitching on a loving website.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:18
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Stop bitching on a loving website. gently caress
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Apr 14, 2015 18:18
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Obdicut posted:No, you can choose to make on topic responses. You're deciding not to because you're huffy. Get the gently caress over yourself.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:41
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Obdicut posted:A basic textbook would be a good way to start. Most school textbooks still tell that bullshit story about the pilgrims and Thanksgiving so I highly doubt he'll learn much from them.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:57
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Nintendo Kid posted:Dude, you're the prick for whining about how people make fun of your bad ideas. Look, you're spouting off on stuff that I already learned as bogus in 9th grade government classes. No, he's right about this. Being condescending is a lot less effective than actually arguing your points.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:40
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Locke Dunnegan posted:At the ripe old age of 27, I have become a bit disillusioned with the American political system. Our federal government is corrupt with gerrymandering, lies, special interest, bribery, and strong-arming. The military budget vastly outstrips every other country's, the rich pay the government to dismantle hard-won and important checks to defend the poor and disenfranchised, and Hillary Clinton is bad with computers. We are doing self-destructive, myopic things like widespread fracking, drug prohibition, and ignoring crumbling infrastructure. Shrinking the power of the federal government - which isn't quite as much as you think it is - would have disastrous consequences for nearly every state economically, and would especially impact anyone who has benefited from any type of civil rights national legislation since the Declaration of Independence. Agreed - cut the military spending. Cut it in half, and it still won't be too much. End foreign military conflicts involving US soldiers. Strengthen ties not only with the EU, but also with Russia and China. Strengthen trade and improve relations with South America. That's foreign policy. As far as domestic policy is concerned, the biggest problem is the actual self-enlarging bureaucracy. If you go right down from the US Constitution through all of the various federal agencies, what starts out as a "really great idea for government" turns into a "massive shitstorm of neverending paperwork and bullshit." One of the last classes I took in law school was Administrative Law - this is a class that normal people wouldn't want to take, but for whatever reason I preferred lecture classes to small seminar-type classes - but whatever. The point is that the whole rulemaking process (which is where the power of the bureaucracy actually lies) is incredibly bloated because of the way it must be conducted. Congress can make any number of laws - and they don't do a whole lot of that, actually - but what they do in the US Congress is red tape kindergarten compared to the nonsense that happens at the agency level. It's not even about spending, either - we agree that the military portion of our national budget is so largely overinflated that making cuts there is really the only logical and reasonable place to start cutting. No, agency spending isn't the issue. It's the rules. And the rules about making rules. And the rules about the process of making rules about the rules. A US President has quite enough to worry about with foreign policy, but a really good US President would be able to actually cut the bureaucracy of the federal agencies and would find a way to make the various states want to take on functions that are currently handled at the federal level. Take the EPA, for instance. You've got a handful of states that are on board with environmental protection, and would be perfectly capable of self-governing the environmental protection measures in their own states even more efficiently than the EPA can manage with the economy of scale afforded to a federal agency. On the other hand, there is a majority of states that truly don't give a gently caress about the environment and will turn every inch of land into either blacktop or a strip mine. That's the reason that federal agencies are as large as they are - enforcement of federal regulation. The way the whole thing is supposed to work is that the federal government can influence the behavior of state governments with the power of the purse - implement "x" policy and receive "y" funding in federal dollars for your efforts. If you don't implement those policies, well, you just don't get that money. And this is all perfectly reasonable, really. For areas where the federal government does not have the constitutional authority to regulate, the states have the sovereign power to do so. They can say "no" to federal programs. But if we go back to the EPA as an example, here is an area where there was a real struggle to establish that the federal government had any power whatsoever to regulate environmental policy. And most of us would agree (I hope) that in general, the EPA has done quite a bit to make our lives as Americans safer, cleaner, and has improved the future outlook of the ability to safely exploit our natural resources. But, it was expensive. It was expensive to taxpayers, it was expensive to states, and most of all it was expensive to business and industry to comply with new regulations that have almost certainly saved literally tens of thousands of lives, and counting. The actual need to make that constitutional authority stick arose out of dire and drastic circumstances - terrible pollution, toxic waste seeping into our streams and rivers, farmland literally washing away, smog, deforestation, etc. And by now, the major battles have been won. So, the EPA shouldn't need to be such a strong agency anymore, right? They can act in more of an advisory capacity, surely. Nope. It'll never happen. I'm not saying that the war is won or anything, but let's look at the accomplishments due to the EPA and really recognize that much has been done. But the EPA will never be cut back. Never. It's now an enforcement agency for a body of self-created federal regulations that were never made into law by the US Congress. These regulations were largely the work of agency rulemaking, and with limited oversight and very little challenge. And federal agencies don't willingly give up power. And none of this is evil, or done with malicious intent or even with any intention to wrest power away from the states and hold it. It's just a process that starts and self-perpetuates...and yeah, the Executive branch can do a lot to fix this phenomenon without any help whatsoever from Congress, but it would take DECADES to do so. Unfortunately, since we tend to switch presidents in such a manner that the one going out can't stand the one coming in, and the one coming in probably won because he claimed to be the enemy of the sitting president, this isn't likely. But here's the worst part. The states bring this upon themselves. The federal dollars fill holes in the state budgets that their own legislative bodies can't get from their own citizens. The REAL bloat in government is in the states themselves, because they are the sovereigns with the general power of government, only limited by what they permanently cede to the federal government. And when literally EVERY state representative or senator sitting in a state congress is there because they promised not to raise taxes, well...the federal dollars have to keep coming in. In short, if states really want to get the federal government out of their business, all they have to do is raise enough money in taxes to self-govern. If they don't need federal money, they don't have much to worry about from the federal government. Oh, but I would qualify what I said before about not cutting anything but military spending by also saying that I would eliminate the DEA. How the gently caress that isn't a general police power of the states is beyond me, even with the commerce clause bullshit.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:42
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And if I was not a straight white male of protestant heritage, there is no way in hell I'd want to give the states more power. You can blame the confederate states for the current state of affairs, and states continue to indicate that they will be backwards, theocratic, and racist if left to their own devices TO THIS VERY loving DAY.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:48
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KaiserSchnitzel posted:And if I was not a straight white male of protestant heritage, there is no way in hell I'd want to give the states more power. You can blame the confederate states for the current state of affairs, and states continue to indicate that they will be backwards, theocratic, and racist if left to their own devices TO THIS VERY loving DAY. So? There are plenty of racist, backwards and theocratic countries out there. Why can't we join them?
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Apr 14, 2015 19:58
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Typo posted:No, he's right about this. Being condescending is a lot less effective than actually arguing your points. No, he isn't right. He's just making excuses for why he can't put up an argument (it's because his ideas are incoherent and baseless).
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Apr 14, 2015 20:24
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:So? There are plenty of racist, backwards and theocratic countries out there. Why can't we join them? You mean we haven't already?
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Apr 14, 2015 20:42
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A Winner is Jew posted:You mean we haven't already? I mean as separate countries, not states. No one cares about a racist state.
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Apr 14, 2015 20:48
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Locke Dunnegan posted:I may have too much faith in the American public, but I don't buy in to the idea that the states would turn on each other if they were independent. Not everyone's a power hungry politician. If my home state was attempting to annex Arkansas I sincerely doubt there would be a majority supporting it. The hypothetical states wouldn't literally send troops at each other like a game of Risk. There are other forms of domination and annexation. Lets take a hypothetical Free New York. Millions of people in neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut depend entitely on NYC for their livelihood, whether they commute to the city for work, deliver their products to stores in the city, etc. Now New York has leverage on those other states, and can do things like put in tariffs, hike the toll fees, in order to get those states to play nice with any interstate agreements that they make. This leads to state policies dominated by the neighbor state, and eventual annexation
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Apr 14, 2015 20:51
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:The hypothetical states wouldn't literally send troops at each other like a game of Risk. There are other forms of domination and annexation. Lets take a hypothetical Free New York. Millions of people in neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut depend entitely on NYC for their livelihood, whether they commute to the city for work, deliver their products to stores in the city, etc. Now New York has leverage on those other states, and can do things like put in tariffs, hike the toll fees, in order to get those states to play nice with any interstate agreements that they make. This leads to state policies dominated by the neighbor state, and eventual annexation Cool, now I want to see it happen.
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Apr 14, 2015 20:54
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Most school textbooks still tell that bullshit story about the pilgrims and Thanksgiving so I highly doubt he'll learn much from them. I mean more a college textbook. For example, the Give Me Liberty series is pretty great. tsa posted:Get the gently caress over yourself. You seem tense.
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Apr 14, 2015 20:54
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:The hypothetical states wouldn't literally send troops at each other like a game of Risk. There are other forms of domination and annexation. Lets take a hypothetical Free New York. Millions of people in neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut depend entitely on NYC for their livelihood, whether they commute to the city for work, deliver their products to stores in the city, etc. Now New York has leverage on those other states, and can do things like put in tariffs, hike the toll fees, in order to get those states to play nice with any interstate agreements that they make. This leads to state policies dominated by the neighbor state, and eventual annexation Yeah, so what? It will be like free market principles applied to inter-state politics. 
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Apr 14, 2015 20:56
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Obdicut posted:I mean more a college textbook. For example, the Give Me Liberty series is pretty great. Thanks for reminding me why I hate college textbooks. The $$$ 
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Apr 14, 2015 20:57
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Cool, now I want to see it happen. They dont call it The Empire State for nothing
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Apr 14, 2015 20:58
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Thanks for reminding me why I hate college textbooks. The $$$ Libraries are pretty rad, though. And if you don't need it for class, you can just by an older edition for $.01
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Apr 14, 2015 21:00
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KaiserSchnitzel posted:words The EPA was probably the single worst example you could pick for an agency that saved the day and should go home, you know what with our barely extant response to climate change.
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Apr 14, 2015 21:04
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:They dont call it The Empire State for nothing Which is why any plan to abolish the federal government will just result in NY, CA, and TX dominating all of their neighboring states... so 2 out of 3 of those new countries would loving rule. Someone get on this.
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Apr 14, 2015 21:11
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Jagchosis posted:The EPA was probably the single worst example you could pick for an agency that saved the day and should go home, you know what with our barely extant response to climate change. let's play a game: try to pick a federal agency you could put in there in place of the EPA, but that wouldn't make you look incredibly clueless. I'm coming up blank.
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Apr 14, 2015 21:25
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Johnny Cache Hit posted:let's play a game: try to pick a federal agency you could put in there in place of the EPA, but that wouldn't make you look incredibly clueless. The Office Of War Information.
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Apr 14, 2015 21:28
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Obdicut posted:You seem tense. This thread is way more tense than it was meant to be. Keeps things exciting. I think reducing military spending in the US would help out with inequality and funding of other important projects, but my issue is how can it be done? How do we go from the ingrained "won't raise taxes, hard on crime, protect Lady Liberty from dirty foreigners" shtick of politicians only looking to get elected to a more productive and sustainable state? How do you drum up support for that? It seems pretty insurmountable, which is why I seem so bleak in my views.
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Apr 14, 2015 21:37
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Locke Dunnegan posted:This thread is way more tense than it was meant to be. Keeps things exciting. How about you read the textbook I recommended? Then you'll know more stuff than you do know, and that'd be cool, don't you think? 'cuz from what you've said in this thread, you've got mile-wide gaps in your understanding of US history and politics.
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Apr 14, 2015 21:39
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Nintendo Kid posted:The Office Of War Information. what did Rosie the Riveter ever do to you? 
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Apr 14, 2015 21:41
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