The national Republican party has money which they can dynamically allocate to different states. If they want to pitch exciting offers to California, such as solutions for transportation or healthcare, then so be it.
Kevin McCarthy is the house minority leader for the GOP and he's using his airtime by talking about how the presidential election is a fraud. That's a taste of the calibre of counter-narrative the GOP chooses to air.
I would argue there's more healthy idea generation within party than between party.
Half the country thinks it's a fraud just like half the country thought the last election was a fraud. And just like last time, the next few years will have to take up this matter for discussion and ripping society apart. The only difference i see is that there won't be a federal investigation into the matter this time, leaving a lot of people convinced that indeed this was a rigged election.
Who's arguing the last election was a fraud? I can't recall any major Democrat who claimed, continually without evidence, that Russia or Republicans engaged in voter fraud. The argument was that Russia interfered and/or colluded with the Trump campaign to spread misinformation and hack the DNC. No one was claiming the votes themselves were fraudulent.
There have been investigations into allegations of voter fraud in this election. In fact one of the cases the Trump campaign alleged in Pennsylvania turned out to be true! The guy voted for Trump twice!
However you want to see it, half the country thinks Trump was an illegitimate president, elected thanks to external manipulation of the Russian government. This is a fact that has consumed all of media and good chunk of the population for 3 years.
It's true it's not an exact mirror copy of the current election predicament. Nevertheless, the outcome of questioning the election and democracy in general is the result of both cases.
That's factually incorrect. The vast majority of voters on both sides viewed Trump's election as legitimate. [0]
There is a substantial difference between claiming that you lost for reasons that are problematic (i.e. propaganda and the structure of the electoral college) and claiming that you didn't lose at all, despite being behind by 7 million votes, because of a massive conspiracy so powerful as to make our democracy meaningless.
> The vast majority of voters on both sides viewed Trump's election as legitimate
In 2018, 66% of democrats believed it was “probably true” or “definitely true” that Russia “tampered with vote tallies” to help Trump win the election. That’s a majority of voters on one side.
Note this poll was taken a year and a half after the poll you cited. This emphasizes the point that the media drove this issue as a wedge through the populace and corrupted its viewers’ faith in the election.
> In 2018, 66% of democrats believed it was “probably true” or “definitely true” that Russia “tampered with vote tallies” to help Trump win the election.
It's worth noting that (at least with the phrasing you're giving) that does not necessarily imply a belief that Trump did not in fact win in 2016.
Also, given the amount of legitimate criticism that electronic touchscreen voting machines have gotten in the tech community for decades, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd have gotten a similar result in a poll of technology professionals & enthusiasts.
There is a difference between difference of opinion and difference of facts. And yes it’s true popular opinion affects things irrespective of their factual basis, yet having a factual basis does play a strong and often determining role.
Trump lost the election, objectively. Elections are the basis of democracy. if you do not accept their outcome, you do not support democracy. The vocal left did not LIKE the outcome of the last election, and did not approve of the electoral colleges role. But they did not at any poin reject that the democratic process was valid . They are arguing very different things ultimately.
I am replying for the sake of the hidden sibling comment:
I don't watch any major media coverage of politics, but a mathematician and comedian I follow on YouTube (from a different country who presumably has no horse in the race) has analyzed some of the numerical allegations of fraud:
As a European I ask myself why there’s no proportional voting system at all in the US. The states should be independent enough to introduce one for themselves, and there are also referendums.
> As a European I ask myself why there’s no proportional voting system at all in the US.
Because change in voting systems has well-studied partisan and ideological impacts, and many of the people who know enough to understand the way that our current voting system contributes to widely-recognized problems in governance also have studied the issue well enough to understand those impacts, and many of them, even while accepting the problems as problems, think that the likely shift in ideological outcomes would be more adverse to their preferenced than the current set of problems.
> The states should be independent enough to introduce one for themselves
They are, but they don't want to. The only major voting system reform that has anywhere close to critical mass is IRV, which should have minimal impact (which is actually why it is within the space of possibility, though obviously not something advocates publicly trumpet.)
California does have some less-common voting systems in play - on my San Francisco ballots, the two interesting things I've seen:
- IRV is commonly used for local positions
- Other positions seem to use a system where all the political parties have the same primary, and then only the top two candidates are on the ballot for the general election. Wikipedia describes it well:
> Under California's non-partisan blanket primary law, all candidates appear on the same ballot, regardless of party. In the primary, voters may vote for any candidate, regardless of their party affiliation. In the California system, the top two finishers—regardless of party—advance to the general election in November, even if a candidate receives a majority of the votes cast in the primary election. Washington and Louisiana have similar "jungle primary" style processes for U.S. Senate elections, as does Mississippi for U.S. Senate special elections.
> Every senate election I can recall in California has been Democrat v Democrat by the general election.
So, you have a very short memory? The nonpartisan blanket primary was adopted in 2010, so no elections prior to that were Democrat-Democrat; 2012 also wasn't. 2016 and 2018 were.
What are the policies being put forward by the California state-level GOP? They may only be considering things that CA voters do not really find appealing:
> The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences.[2][3] According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.
I think the Green party position is likely more appealing to California voters than Feinstein's record, but name recognition and party support make it incredibly difficult for another Democrat to beat her.
> >Every senate election I can recall in California has been Democrat v Democrat by the general election
> Which is the point of the system.
Yes, but not the way you paint it.
> Republicans only have a shot if they don't compete with each other, and no third party candidate ever has a chance.
No, the point (at least, insofar as created by same-party general elections was the point) of the system was that Republican-leaning voters would have an impact on which Democrat was elected in safe Democratic seats.
That may have been the justification used to pass the system, but the result is still everything I've said and it's hard to believe that wasn't intended.
No, the result is not “Republicans only have a shot if they don't compete with each other” (except to the extent it it is equally “Democrats only have a shot if they don't compete with each other”; it does disadvantage a party having support spread among many candidates vs concentrated on a smaller number, but there's nothing that makes that more true for one party that the other.) And no third party candidate ever had a chance before the blanket primary. (The blanket primary probably slightly improves this for the Green Party in certain Democratic-dominant districts, but only if Democratic support is highly concentated on a single candidate such as an in-party popular incumbent, but its still not much of a chance.) But, again, that's not new with the blanket primary; classic partisan primaries and FPTP voting were more than sufficient to make that generally the case just as it pretty much is everywhere in the country that uses those systems.
So the two things that make up “everything you said” are not the result of the system.
Your post agrees that both of those things do happen under the system, and yet your conclusion is that they don't. What kind of gymnastics is happening in your head?
The point of the system is to encourage moderation, and it does well at this. Sometimes you get two Democrats, as in recent Senate elections, and sometimes one Democrat and one Republican, as in the 2018 governor's race.
That link shows higher support (for popular vote) from Democrats than Republicans in every data point on the graph: 2000, 2011, 2016, 2019, and 2020. Partisan support has not flipped in at least 20 years.
What "flipped" is that it went from overall < 50% to > 50%.
> That of course is why one of the two US political parties is staunchly against abolishing the electoral college.
It would require a constitutional amendment. In modern times, that would seem to require the sort of prolonged alignment that follows a deep and lasting shock to the country.
I don't want be around the sort of calamity that could produce a constitutional amendment.
Democratic voters are opposed to the electoral college, but the leadership knows that without it, some backwater state would report 4x its population voted for trump and we’d have a constitutional crisis
Because the parties that currently control all legislatures would lose out. In some areas a ballot initiative can eventually implement proportional voting (Maine passed an initiative for ranked choice), but that’s a very high bar to clear.
It seems like the best way to get proportional voting is to create your democratic system with it that way from the beginning.
A switch to proportional voting could require constitutional changes in most places. Also, proportional voting introduces all kinds of unnecessary problems like not having districts and thereby constituents having their votes diluted and not having a specific representative. Which is one things the American system gets right.
What we really need is a switch from "first past the post" to approval/score/range voting, which would dissolve the two party system by eliminating spoilers and thereby making third parties viable.
Score/range voting is "that thing the Olympics uses"; approval voting is "that thing the Olympics uses if the only possible scores a judge can give are 0 or 1".
As far as I can tell the biggest impediment to this is a lot of people proposing alternative systems that aren't as good (e.g. IRV) and then no change is made because proponents of change are divided on which change to make.
> A switch to proportional voting could require constitutional changes in most places.
Less places than you might think. It especially wouldn't for Congress (so long as it was proportional by a method similar to STV within state delegations, or within some subset of state delegations), as the only barrier there is a statutory prohibition on at-large districts for delegations greater than 1, adopted to head off the use of FPTP at-large districts to systematically deny representation not minorities.
> Also, proportional voting introduces all kinds of unnecessary problems like not having districts
Party list proportional would do that, but most other proportional systems would not.
> and thereby constituents having their votes diluted
Proportionality doesn't dilute votes; the more proportional a system is the more efficiently it allocated votes to give them maximum effect.
> and not having a specific representative
Proportional systems don't need to have that effect, either, no matter how you measure it (and FPTP—and any other simple singlr-member district system—definitely has that effect for supporters of the nonwinning party in a district, who are effectively unrepresented entirely.)
It causes your vote to be mixed with a larger number of other votes, which is the definition of dilution. By giving the candidates more alternative constituents to win over in order to stay in office, your vote is less important to them and there are more ways they can screw you over and still stay in office.
> the more proportional a system is the more efficiently it allocated votes to give them maximum effect.
That isn't inherently true. Suppose you have a state with two districts. 60% of the state are religious conservatives, 30% are libertarians, 10% are socialists. With proportional representation the socialists get disenfranchised because they don't get their own candidate. Even the libertarians might get disenfranchised if the religious conservatives manage to get two representatives. But with range voting, you end up with a candidate who has to make all the interests in their district as happy as possible because anyone who comes along and can make them happier would defeat them in an election -- so nobody gets disenfranchised because every victor needs to make everybody happier than anybody else.
Proportional systems also fail in the same way but worse when forming governing coalitions. Suppose you have a White party and a Black party and the White party voters are 70% of the population. Then proportional representation gives them 70% of the representatives, they form the majority coalition and the Black party representatives lose every vote.
Compare this to range voting where if you so much as have a White party, they lose even in many majority-White districts against a moderate candidate who can earn the support of both White and Black constituents. It promotes the election of moderates with broad appeal over the election of extremists who fight to gain a majority coalition that can steamroll over anyone in the outgroup.
"Diluted" means "spread out". AnthonyMouse's point is that voters would no longer vote for a particular representative. Their vote would be "spread out" across the whole party list.
There is this thing, where you vote for party, but give ratings for the representatives on party list. So basically if a guy is on the list down bellow but a lot of voters pick to prioritize him, then he moves to top. This happenes during ellections couple of months ago i LT, where guy was on 141 position, but still got a seat in parlament.
> What we really need is a switch from "first past the post" to approval/score/range voting, which would dissolve the two party system by eliminating spoilers and thereby making third parties viable.
Systems like approval voting or STV when used with single member districts do not reduce the two party duopoly. To achieve this you must use multi member districts, which has the effect of reducing the threshold to gain a seat. The best case study for this is maybe Australia, which has been running systems like this for a century. In their Senate they elect using very large multi member districts and have a representation from a number of parties, whereas in their House they use single member districts. And the result there is a two party duopoly.
For example at the moment in their Senate (multi member districts) currently there are seven parties and one independent:
Liberal (31)
Labor (26)
Greens (9)
National (5)
One Nation (2)
Centre Alliance (1)
Lambie Network (1)
Independent (1)
On the other hand the Australian House uses single member districts and third parties do much worse. For example look at how the Greens have a whopping 11% of the seats in the Senate above but an absurd 0.6% in the House below. This absurd 20x discrepancy for the Greens in proportion of seats between the Senate and House is the impact of whether you use multi member vs single member districts with RCV. And the size of the multi member districts will determine the size of the impact.
Labor (68)
Liberal (61)
National (15)
Liberal National (1)
Greens (1)
KAP (1)
Centre Alliance (1)
Independent (3)
As demonstrated here the Greens are clearly very popular with people but they just can't win in the duopoly reinforcing single-member districts. I would rather see us work to achieve an outcome like the the Australian Senate than the Australian House.
WRT your concern about who is your representative in the multi member case. It can be argued now ~40% of people who vote for the loser in our current system don’t have a representative, and a more proportional system would clearly improve this. So I think, if say we had RCV with five member districts, you could either just contact whichever member you prefer, contact them all, or they could introduce joint offices to work together, or a system could be set up to assign them to “sub district” that would be akin to our current districts. For example assign them based on who gets the most first preference votes in a district. Or rotate them every six months between sub districts. This might even reduce partisanship.
> Systems like approval voting or STV when used with single member districts do not reduce the two party duopoly.
What do you mean?
Suppose you have a single member district with four parties running: Democrats, Republicans, Greens and Libertarians. First past the post polling shows 48% Democrat, 48% Republican, 2% Green and 2% Libertarian. Your preferred candidate is polling at 2%.
You're then going to vote for one of the major parties because you know perfectly well that your preferred candidate is not going to win and you also know that you prefer one of the major party candidates over the other one.
By contrast, with approval voting, all four candidates get around 50% approval because there are no spoilers and no reason not to approve of the candidate you actually want, so one of the third parties can plausibly edge out both of the major parties for the highest approval and win the district. They also have a much better case that they could win which means they can get into the debates etc.
Also, approval voting makes it plausible for independents to win when they tailor their platform to the district, which just might destroy the political parties whatsoever -- and that would be most excellent.
> It can be argued now ~40% of people who vote for the loser in our current system don’t have a representative, and a more proportional system would clearly improve this.
No one disputes that the existing system is terrible. But approval voting still fixes that, because a candidate with 60% approval loses to one with 70% approval, so someone who can make more of the district happy wins. And there is no way to give full consideration to 100.0% of the voters short of direct democracy, which has its own set of problems.
"... Kristin Eberhard from Sightline Institute discusses her proposal to eliminate the state Senate, along with other ideas to save democracy in Oregon."
(Sorry, no timestamp.)
Eberhard claims that prior to eliminating multimember seats, Illinois' legislature was far more productive, constructive.
FWIW, I'm strongly in favor or unicameral legislatures at the state level, and I'm chewing on the notion for the federal level.
The purpose of a bicameral legislature is to have a process for placing them in office that sufficiently differs as to allows the bodies to represent distinct interests in the legislature.
The US Senate was originally appointed by the state legislatures and intended to represent the interests of the state governments at the federal level -- representation that they no longer have, leading to a massive federal takeover of government. Compare the ratio of tax revenues collected by the state vs. federal governments before and after the 17th amendment. There was a drastic, immediate, permanent shift.
>Also, proportional voting introduces all kinds of unnecessary problems like not having districts and thereby constituents having their votes diluted and not having a specific representative.
I'd rather phrase it, the proportional systems have quite large districts (or alternatively, much more of representatives per district) to achieve the proportional allocation. But I get what you mean.
However, it is very well possible to design variations to any traditional party list proportional system where (at least nominally) one representative is identified with each current-sized and located district.
For example, take a classic proportional system, and use it to select the number of representatives per party list. In proportional methods, usually the list is either preordered by the party or order within the list depends on the individual total popularity of candidates in all districts. So, to achieve nominal geographic representation, one can assign a district to each selected representative. E.G. each district is nominally represented by the one of those elected who had the largest share of votes in that district and is not yet assigned to some other district by the same rule (if one complains that one may have their representative elected by people out of one's district, this implicitly happens in such proportional systems anyway).
Alternatively, one could achieve remarkable amount of geographic identification by relaxing the "one representative <-> one district" requirement. For example, require that each party list can put forward only one candidate per (equally populous) district; a candidate gets personal votes only in that district, but the number of seats given to list is allocated proportionally over all districts, as usual in proportional systems. Then the order within list is assigned by the personal votes of each candidate. (This has the added complication -- or benefit -- that districts with low overall turnout may be left without a specifically named representative and the district with high turnout for all candidates standing there may get them all elected; nevertheless, all votes count towards the party list total sum, no matter the district.)
> As a European I ask myself why there’s no proportional voting system at all in the US.
As a European, the elections in my country are:
-- Presidential: uninominal majority (of course).
-- Assembly: uninominal majority.
-- Senate: no universal vote, voters emanate (mostly) from municipal councils majorities.
-- Regional: allegedly proportional lists, but in fact a majority vote, since the leading list gets a majority bonus of 25% of the seats, and then only proportional applies (and still, it is a two-round vote in which lists under 12.5% are evicted from the first round, and then can be evicted again at the second round, even from proportional). So in practice the leading list is always granted more than 50% of the seats.
-- Departmental: uninominal majority
-- Municipal: in large towns, allegedly proportional lists, but in fact a majority vote, since the leading list gets a majority bonus of 50%!!! so there is not even a slight theoretical possibility of having a balance; in villages: plurinominal majority (so a list where every member gets 50%+1 votes gets 100% of seats).
So, not a single actual proportional election, even in those which purport to be such.
(That's France, if you wonder.)
As a practical note, I would like to add that concerning the Assembly, the uninominal voting system used to produce a sort of balanced result, because of differences in history, culture, sociology, traditions and so on in different voting districts; but at present the populations are mixed, the medias are national, everything is more standardised, and so votes are more uniform, and as a consequence a party who has a small lead now has it almost everywhere and can get an overwhelming majority of seats despite only having that small lead.
We have the system that made sense to the people in 1792. It’s a system that is practical with their technology, and it responds to the very specific political problem they had at the time: getting 13 independent countries to surrender their sovereignty to a federal government.
That system mostly worked, but it still required a civil war to prove the Union was really was sovereign and states could not leave.
When you’re baffled by things happening over here, remember that the United States is less analogous to France or Germany and more analogous to the European Union. The individual states are more analogous to EU nations. It’s not a perfect comparison, but it’s helpful.
Isn't that the point the poster is making? States have enough independence that they could introduce proportional representation themselves. The only voting reform that I know of in the United States is Maine introducing ranked choice for Governer. Other changes of voting system such as everyone votes for every city councillor seem more designed to keep certain groups out of power.
The US actually had quite a few cities with proportional voting in the early-mid 1900s. NYC for example had it from 1936 to 1947 when it was eliminated via referendum[1].
Proportional, and also ranked, that's awesome. Assigning ranks seems like a much more "high fidelity" way of describing what I want. The article's graph of vote vs representation is striking.
"[R]epeal advocates blamed proportional representation for the election of communists to the city council. While the communist issue might have doomed proportional representation, the true deathblow came when the Republicans joined the Democrats to oppose it. Republicans had been early champions of proportional representation, but defected due to their dwindling role within a diverse and mostly progressive minority coalition."
Our one saving grace is our "Democratic Party" is branding for 1,000s of individual party organizations. Ditto Republicans.
For instance, in my state, official (legally recognized, meaning access to the ballot) parties are organized by legislative, county, and state wide. Depending on the whatifs, who's got the real power changes over time and context.
And the intraparty Democratic fighting is far worse than the interparty stuff. IMHO.
(Though I've attended Republican events, having never participated in their orgs, I can't compare. Though from popular press accounts, insurgents like the Tea Party, taking on their establishments, sounds comparable.)
Then we have all sorts of non partisan politics. Like interest groups, lobbyists, agencies, media, etc.
So while doupoly sucks, and PR would be so much better, our current system is not monolithic.
Funnily enough, California's system did used to be slightly less one-sided, but an amendment introduced that was claimed would make it less one-sided actually ended up making it more.
As another European: proportional voting has nothing to do with it. Its more about ideologized voters who care more about ideology than merit when voting.
The natural balance of a system built on single member districts is two parties, which naturally has to oppose each other to the extreme in all topics. The final outcome is the US today.
See the radical shift when New Zeeland shifted to MMP, which although not perfect is better. [0] For party-list based systems some modification of the Webster/Sainte-Laguë method [1] is often used to have about perfect representation compared to the votes with the caveats you desire, e.g. lower thresholds and so on, while still allowing some choice in the actual person and not party representing you.
I firmly believe that better voting systems are the highest ROI changes we can make to government. Unfortunately the people the current system over-favors are the ones who need to do it. It’s a microcosm of the whole problem of politics :(
States do have complete power over elections, the problem is most state governments are just as corrupt as the feds and changing voting methods or procedures puts both republicans and democrats at risk of independent party members taking positions. It is about the two major parties trying to maintain political power despite increasing voter dissatisfaction going on decades.
> The sad part is that CA remains a one party state and this will just get swept under the rug. The power is too unchecked.
And I'm guessing the reason for that is that politics has gotten too nationalized, and the state-level opposition is too unwilling to distance itself from its national party to make itself competitive.
From what I've seen in California elections, as a California voter for the last 7 years:
- Republicans running for Congress (Senate and House of Reps) tend to be aligned with the national party platform, and therefore sound super out of touch to me. For this reason, I doubt we'll see a Republican Senator from California anytime soon.
- Republicans running for state positions tend to be more moderate, and sound a lot more palatable as a result. Doubly so for the less political positions like state auditor and treasurer, which are not about making policy as much as just making sure we use the state's resources appropriately. At least, for the candidates I see on my ballot in San Francisco.
I’m not sure that party affiliation has anything to do with the level of corruption. I would imagine that corruption tracks far more closely to regional GDP - more money, more backroom deals.
I agree that more money probably means more backroom deals. This seems simple to me: One party wants to regulate, the other de-regulate. Which of those platforms attracts the most money?
> Deregulate consumer rights and now anyone can scam you and sell you something that doesn't work with no right to a refund.
Is the right to refund really regulated? Or it's that exact case where competition and market forces do work for the mutual benefit of seller and consumer?
Yes, and my guess is that there is more money to be made off of deregulation than on regulation. Thus, more corruption related to the party that wants to deregulate.
Really? Look at Tammany Hall in NYC and Chicago. And the planning commission in SF. All massive Bureaucracies where nothing could be done unless money greased the wheels.
Why are you sure of it? Regulation often gives more backroom deal type of corruption and monopolies, deregulation on the other hand can give more anarchy. I don't think simple view of having one, regulation or deregulation, and itsa good thing is very intelligent thought.
In the states that I have lived, the voter information pamphlet lists who supports and opposes every initiative. Every time that a new regulation on the ballot would benefit the public at the expense of business, it’s always the same: on one side are Republicans and some multi-national corporations, the other side are Democrats and public-interest groups (environmentalists, etc).
I don’t think that public-interest groups have as much money for backroom deals as multi-national corporations. So that’s why I’m pretty sure of it.
I’d bet that the dollar amounts involved where appointed officials corruptly use regulation to solicit bribes in the U.S. is orders of magnitude smaller than the amounts involved in “campaign donations” to elected officials to prevent and remove regulations.
The amount in question in that article is $5,000.
For comparison, the amount in question here is $34,000:
Would regulation with transparency be the best of both? Because it seems tax law changes so often and violating it so trivial I doubt it'd be better.
IMO those in charge should be forced to drink/breath from whichever area tested most polluted on a regular basis, and as a public event. Once they can no longer hide or pass on the consequences they should take the problems more seriously.
Regulation raises the barrier of entry for startups. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means less incentive for the incumbents to do "the right thing" in any field, be that hiring, ecological impact, consumer rights and so on.
When it comes to the economy, we should legislate and tax externalities. For everything else regulation is uniformly bad.
OK, fine. Let's remove all forms of regulation, shall we?
Someone joins your company and starts leaking all your intellectual property. It is all good, though, because legislation related to that doesn't exist.
A developer joins your company, and shortly after uploads your entire code base to github. That's OK due to lack of legislation saying otherwise.
A sysadmin changes all the passwords and asks you for a ransom to unlock your production database. That's also OK.
Your ISP randomly makes your internet 99% slower and then asks you for an exorbitant amount of money. That's also OK.
The accountant forged your signature and stole all the money. That's also OK.
Your customers randomly decide to not pay you. That's also OK.
Your employees start dismantling the office and taking furniture and equipment home. That's OK.
The mailman shows up wearing the company swag you ordered. Doesn't matter anymore.
HR people upload a spreadsheet with everyone's personal information and salaries to the Internet. That's OK.
Some larger company sends some gangsters to force you to sell the company for a fraction of its price. That's OK.
As you can see, saying "regulation is bad" is nonsensical. Without certain guarantees, businesses cannot exist.
I believe you are confused. Nobody is disputing the rule of law (and especially contract law) and the role of government in upholding it. What you are describing is pretty much anarchy and nobody is arguing for that.
I think the distinction between rule of law and regulation is fuzzy. Different people will draw the line in different places, with a heavy bias towards the current system for any given jurisdiction. (Devil you know.)
As a thought experiment: How would you solve those problems with your hands tied behind your back (i.e. you don't have a government to rely on)? Just try one - assume you're in a fictional universe and writing a novel or something.
Anywho, the problem with this trail of discussion is that you can come up with an infinite amount of "problems" and libertarians can likewise come up with a "solution" to each one. However your rebuttal would always be yet-another problem because the original "solution" didn't cater for some arbitrary corner case or something basic that you assume can only come from a society with a government.
E.g. "Your customers randomly decide to not pay you. That's also OK."
Answer: Have an escrow organization that both parties trust. Rebuttal: "Your escrow organization decides it doesn't like a certain legitimate business and won't accept your trade." Or "Your escrow organization's owner is buddy-buddy with your customer and he decides to not keep their part of the bargain". Okay - "contracts", followed with "but who will enforce the contracts", etc etc.
As a side note: A lot of the time libertarians and anarcho-capitalists don't "pick" lack of regulation out of practicality, but rather out of plain moral principle. A lot of what is considered "regulation" and "rule of law", when stripped of it's noble/protective aura, is just authoritarianism and bully-like behavior.
Without a monopoly of violence, you have 3 alternatives:
a) Multiple entities keeping each other in check, in perpetual competition...
b) One faction becomes more powerful than the rest and eventually assimilates the rest or turn them into vassals.
c) Factions decide to ally up and either assimilate the rest and make vassals out of them.
Basically, smaller fish gets eaten by larger fish. The world is just like a large prison where you have to either become a large entity or belong to a large alliance otherwise you're fucked.
We have had and currently have A, B and C, we just don't "see it" because it has an aura of "Democracy" and "will of the people". If we truly had freedom, it would be part of society, every government, the UN and considered a fundamental Human Right for individual groups of people to voluntarily group together and decide to "leave" their state/nation/entity/vassal/government/faction, and form their own "monopoly of violence" within their geographic area.
But we don't have that. We belong and are forced under subjugation to our individual governments without any say in the matter other than "voting" and "community participation". We can dress it up any which way we want, but we're forced into a relationship by virtue of birth and we have no option to leave.
You’re only looking at one side. Regulations can also encourage corruption - if I can’t even open my doors unless I get a permit, well, that’s plenty of incentive for whoever control that permit to ask for something to “sweeten the pie”.
Is that form of corruption a systemic problem here in the U.S.? I don’t think that it is.
On the other hand, campaign contributions are common, legal, and involve large sums of money (especially to PACs).
Systemic corruption of elected officials, resulting in de-regulation in order to benefit wealthy shareholders at the expense of the public, is more concerning to me than the possibility of low-level officials seeking bribes.
Your logic only makes sense if you equate legal fundraising to back room, illegal corruption.
To me, someone funding raising through a legal, transparent PAC might not be desirable, but it’s far less insidious than backroom dealings that pervert the rule of law.
I’m suspicious of any large transfer of wealth from an individual or organization to a politician, whether that’s through campaign donations or some other means.
It seems strange not to take the next logical step and conclude that there were some backroom dealings, especially if the politician later takes an action that is favorable to the donor.
Many scandalous issues are raised by outlets like ProPublica - this is a good thing, but only half of the process. If there are no consequences for the culprits, followed by systemic change to prevent this from occurring again, then this is essentially shouting into the wind.
Parent is making the point that due to the one-party system, the latter outcomes will never happen.
> The sad part is that CA remains a one party state
A duopoly is a fraternal monopoly, marked by common self-serving behavior.
Both parties trade law and power for campaign funds on a massive scale - every day of the year. It's unclear why one flavor of that might be preferable.
I've got my signature form to recall the governor printed out, but what is holding me back from mailing it in is the fear that we could end up with someone even worse in charge if the recall succeeds.
Drew Davis was recalled when he refused to pay $80B in enbezzled utility costs, and started an investigation of the embezzling. Arnold had the state just pay the $80B.
I don't recall the $80 billion being a major factor in Gray Davis's recall. I remember the rolling blackouts, high power bills, and high car registration fees being more important. Those were having a real impact on voters, and there was a general sense that he was unable to solve those problems.
I also remember the campaign to replace him devolving into a total zoo with all kinds of kooks on the ballot.
You wouldn't; they of course didn't say why they were really trying to recall him.
The rolling blackouts were an integral part of the embezzlement scheme; getting people to blame Davis for them was clever marketing. So was the zoo: when people are confused enough, they vote for a familiar name, and there was Arnold.
The prospect of $80 billion, free and clear, buys a lot of clever marketing.
In a one-party system (e.g.: China), you can only vote for candidates from one party. CA is not a one-party system.
If you constantly criticize the state and their elected officials, or do something unpopular like pissing off 38% of the state population (Hispanics/Latinos), do not expect your party to achieve anything significant in this state.
I don’t think Republican opposition is the answer, as they’re demonstrably just as corrupt and self-serving. But California could certainly benefit from some primary challenges from the left. LA is seeing this happen with the election of Nithya Raman and George Gascón (who were vehemently opposed by mainstream Democrats). Interested to see how they might shift the terrain.
Democrats getting defeated in primaries from the left only results in Democrats being replaced by other Democrats. We would still have one party in charge of the state, with a veto-proof majority in the legislature.
One-party rule is bad no matter which party you like. Even if the party you like is the one that is in charge, you will see them become complacent and corrupt when no-one else is able to hold them to account.
