It's not the voters fault; it's a systemic fault. Once you accept that violence can be used to force people to take certain actions; and that its proper place is not only as last resort for self defense you accept a system that will continually gain more power and use force more and more. People need to realize that the use of force, and living at the expense of another is not sustainable and will eventually collapse.

This was all laid out in Zbigniew Brzezinski's book "The Technetronic Era" back in the early 70s. They've been hard at work on all of this ever since. It's part of a clear detailed long-term vision and they've just been putting the finishing touches on it and everyone acts like it just happened all by itself.

http://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Ages-Americas-Technetronic...

>"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities." (This was an excellent prediction although it is slightly worse now.)

>'In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason." (Fox CNN and facebook?)

>"Today we are again witnessing the emergence of transnational elites ... [Whose] ties cut across national boundaries ...It is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook ... The nation-state is gradually yielding its sovereignty... Further progress will require greater American sacrifices. More intensive efforts to shape a new world monetary structure will have to be undertaken, with some consequent risk to the present relatively favorable American position."

great quotes!

Don't be naive, 'the use of force' has been the only thing keeping governments in power since civilization began.

Agreed, see Weber's focus on government legitimacy. In particular, government's role is to hold a monopoly on the use of force.

I'm not being naive at all, I question the very premises that you take for granted. I don't believe that any group can legitimately claim a monopoly on force, especially when consent is not granted. The justification of a Rousseauian social contract is an example of sloppy thinking, that has been used by the opportunistic to seize power.

It's irrelevant. Monopoly of force is claimed through the threat and/or use of force itself.

I'm not sure the voters can make a better choice.

In our winner-take-all electoral system, the voters are only given two viable choices, neither of which represents their own views. So our leaders are basically determined by who spends the most money in DC, with two options so life is simple for lobbyists and each party has competition. The system, quite accidentally, is designed for those who milk government, not those who pay the bills.

This system can be replaced, but given our Constitution, change is unlikely to happen to begin in DC. I think some sort of competing decision making system that is more trusted and uses proportional representation will have to be implemented that can then press for change.

Such a system would have no legal authority, but if highly trusted and transparent, it could have the moral authority to demand changes to the real electoral system. Especially if most people see the system consistently produce better decisions than Congress. That part's easy.

The trick is getting people to use such a system. Perhaps starting on the local or state level.

Any ideas?

Well, consider the '3 strikes' law in California - commit three felony offenses, go to jail for life. Several other states have similar laws (Texas was the first in 1974) but California's was enacted via a ballot initiative, so the voters had a direct say on the matter.

It passed with a good majority: lots of politicians thought it would be a good idea, the police and prison officers unions supported it (surprise - more work for them, and they are very powerful lobbying groups in CA politics), and it seems like a nice neat solution to a complicated problem...but in practice it doesn't work very well. Now our prisons are so overcrowded that we have to ship people out of state and the conditions have been ruled unconstitutional, plus keeping all these people imprisoned costs us a fortune and our courts are so backlogged that people sometimes go free because we can't get them into court within the time required for a 'speedy trial'. Nor has the three strikes law had much effect on crime or recidivism that we can tell.

Voters have watered it down a little bit, allowing some people to go into drug treatment programs if their crimes are not violent. In the recent election, the Republican candidate for Attorney General ran on a platform of repealing the law, because it just doesn't work very well. He lost.

So it's not just congress or state representatives. This kind of thing will always be a problem. I was going to say '...until people are more aware civics and the law,' but somehow I don't think that's going to change much. We could spend more money on education and suchlike but most people vote with their hearts instead of their heads.

You know, referendums sound great on paper, but there is so much subterfuge, you almost need a professional to figure out what many of them actually mean.

If only you could hire someone that agreed with your values and made it his career to effectively pursue your interests as you define them. Some sort of "representative"

Well, that was the whole point behind representative government. Except that in the US and many other places, the system works as if geography is the only thing that matters.

In a system using proportional representation that is not the case. You don't have to settle for someone who best pretends they agree with everyone in your area.

You can hire an expert to handle your legal matters, your health, your mechanical needs and hundreds of other things. And they do what you tell them to do. Why can't you have your chosen expert represent you in government?

Consider the power of this. If we had PR in the US Congress from the very beginning, African Americans could have had representatives in Congress the instant they got the vote, even if half their votes were never counted.

I want to agree. But my home country (Ireland) has PR, and where I live (in the bay area) local elections are run with PR, and I've lived in 2 other countries that use different forms of it (NL and Spain). I think it's a good thing, but it's no silver bullet. You can still have corruption and bad policy, unfortunately.

PR is not a silver bullet. It only gives you a choice, something we don't have at the moment. You still have to make good choices.

Even silver bullets won't kill the werewolf if you don't shoot straight.

Leaving as many things as possible with the individual or at the local level is a good remedy for corruption.

Especially when people can actually leave a city or state for a different one or start their own. They have this is Switzerland, as well as the requirement that many actions of the legislature be approved of by referendum.

So it takes several things to prevent corruption.

Oh, I'm Irish too. My mom is from Clare. Got my passport too.

> Well, consider the '3 strikes' law in California - commit three felony offenses, go to jail for life.

Three strikes is one of the most misunderstood laws on the books. The first two offenses have to be deemed "serious" offenses - which, if memory serves, only includes a violent felony or child molesting.

If someone commits two violent crimes and then commits a third felony, they're probably not someone who was going to wise up. A guy who commits third degree murder once, gets out of jail seven years later, commits aggravated assault, gets out of jail five years later, and then commits a third felony just doesn't get it, and is obviously going to keep committing crimes.

There was a famous case people were outraged about where a guy got three-strikes life in jail for stealing a stereo system. What the newspapers didn't report enough was that he'd already mugged someone with a knife and stuck up a convenience store at gunpoint. I think there's a pretty reasonable case that that guy was going to keep doing stupid violent stuff until you locked him up forever...

(I did a little research into this - I was really against three strikes at first, until I actually learned more about it. It actually seems pretty sensible. The overcrowding problem at prisons is largely unrelated to three strikes, and has more to do with prison sentences on some offenses that you could probably just issue a fine and move on)

Well, I wouldn't want anyone to draw a conclusion about it from my 8-word summary reference! And certainly, some people just don't get it - here's a case that just hit the news today: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/three-strikes_opponen...

However, it's quite a bit more complex than you suggest here. Someone with two non-serious felony convictions who is then convicted of a serious felony, for example, can also get the full effect. Those servicing a second sentence can have their time doubled. And not everything that qualifies as a serious felony is the sort of violent crime most people imagine.

You might find these analyses from the Legislative Analyst's Office interesting - accessible non-partisan explanation of the effects and rules in the first one, and an update on how they're affecting state budgets in the second: http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm http://www.lao.ca.gov/analysis_2009/crim_justice/crimjust_an...

Interesting, interesting. Thanks for those links, I'll read them through next time I'm on a break.

> We as voters let this happen in not opposing the interests of the Military-Industrial-Financial complex with real votes on the issues..

It's not that simple - one thing people to fail to realize is that when you authorize extraordinary powers for your own favorite causes, they'll inevitably be used for other worse causes as well.

It's not military/industrial/financial - even things as simple as letting the government take a driver's license for not paying child support means that there's now a precedent for denying someone's right to mobility for punitive reasons unrelated to actually operating a car. People support this when it's to get those no-good child support dodgers, but then they're shocked when this is broadly expanded to other civil offenses where they wouldn't support it.

People are naive. They think, "Oh, the Democrats will reverse the Republican's terrible policies when they get in." No they won't. They'll co-opt the power for their causes, and vice-versa. It's not clear which party is responsible for starting the reckless deficit spending, but now they both do it. They both give employment and money to sectors that support them. (Republicans in military, Democrats in social causes)

But don't be fooled for a minute that the excessive powers the Republicans authorize for the first time won't be taken up by the Democrats. And the excessive powers the Democrats take up will be used by Republicans.

It's not any one sector. Excessive government powers anywhere leads to excessive government power everywhere.

(And note - the Democrats are the banner-leaders in censoring and spying on the internet - I don't think that's because the Democrats are worse, but rather because I don't think the Republicans understand the internet. So it's not exactly military/financial/industrial that's doing this one)

Oh, geez. Give me a break. One party is responsible for deficit spending, it's the party that supported Reagan and Bush. Look at a chart. (in between, Clinton balanced the budget by cutting the military and raising taxes)

And ditto for military/industrial/financial. Every time those industries come up, conservatives are all rah rah go america and the liberals are derided as hippies.

If you feel a certain way, fine, I'm not even motivated to argue, really. Just don't give us the false equivalency stuff.. there's a pretty recent and pretty obvious historical record here.

There's truth to that, but don't forget that NAFTA and "house for every family" also came from Clinton. Obama has done a few things differently than Bush to be sure, but not as much I think most would have suspected given a majority in the House and Senate.

The last time the U.S. had no deficit was 1845. The largest rampup of government spending and deficit spending was under FDR.

The most responsible presidents post-WWII seem to be Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Clinton. I've got LBJ pegged as the least responsible, with no one else coming even close. Carter didn't run much of a deficit, but caused a lot of problems with price controls.

I'm much less of an admirer of Reagan than most people. He did some important consolidation and his tax cuts seemed to fuel a lot of the money that then went into the tech boom in the 1990's, but I agree his domestic policies were so-so. The first Bush seems like he was a decent president. Clinton had a good run. G.W. Bush had a mix of good and bad policies. The book's still open on his foreign policy, and will be for 10-20 years. If Iraq and Afghanistan become allies of the USA the way West Germany, Taiwan, and Japan became following WWII, and South Korea became following the Korean War, then we might look much for favorably upon him later. (Remember, Truman was despised following his leaving office, about as much as Bush. Now he's generally regarded favorably)

Obama's presidency seems like a mess to me, but I think McCain's would've been a mess too.

I think it's fair to say that Republicans tend to make larger short term deficit expenditures for war, but create less permanent structural spending. Even that's not entirely true though, since Eisenhower went isolationist, and LBJ greatly ramped up America's military involvement following Kennedy's assassination.

This is before even getting in Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, etc. Jackson was a Democrat, but I think you'd consider him an ancestor of the modern Republican Party. Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican, then a Progressive, but I think it'd be fair to say he was an ancestor of the modern Democrats.

Anyways, it's complicated. I'm not in love with either of the parties. I was originally happy with Obama winning, but I hope he's defeated next run by a government that focuses on consolidation, investing, cutting/paying off bad debts, and a non-interventionist foreign policy, along with no moral/social controls or social engineering.

I'm not sure how likely that is to happen, but one can hope.

No matter who you vote for, the lobbyists and military/intel institutions run things from behind the scenes. Until the public at large realizes this, they'll retain false hopes.