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Maybe it's just me, but I've been getting this vibe (it's strong here, but I'm feeling it elsewhere too) that there are folks who would like to see our entire society come crashing down.
Perhaps they think we can build something better, and like the Phoenix, emerge from the ashes, strong and vibrant.
And I guess I can see the attraction. Our government has been co-opted by the monied interests, our waking lives seem to be either being tracked by corporations or one government agency or another, the same monied interests seem determined to depress wages to keep us docile and hungry for the resources we need to keep ourselves and our families alive. And on and on. It's as if our society has been taken over by greedy, corrupt and amoral scumbags.
And to an extent, all of this is true. Which begs the question: What can/should we do about it?
There is one thing most of us can agree upon: That those elected to administer our governmental systems aren't acting in the best interests of the greater populace. Rather, they seem to be taking their marching orders from those with the resources to command their attention, their wallets and their votes.
There's quite a bit of agreement about that. The problem is that there are large groups of people on various sides of this question with different prescriptions for solving these problems:
Some think we need to strip the Federal government of most of its power and leave things to the states/counties/municipalities.
Some think we need to reform our existing political systems to reduce the influence of money on our elected officials (at all levels of government).
Some think it's just a lost cause and we need to just tear it all down and start over.
The biggest issue, IMHO, is that those same folks who are controlling our political systems for their own benefit use these differences of opinion to divide us. This keeps us from putting aside our differences so we can work together to create the kind of society of which we can all be proud.
Which brings me to the folks who want to tear our system down. With what shall we replace it?
Destroying one of the bulwarks of our society seems like we're creating change. But what are the consequences of doing so, intended or otherwise?
History (cf. all the infighting and problems with the Articles of Confederation) tells us that a strong central government was necessary back in the late 18th century, and (again, IMHO) is even more important today.
Could government be more distributed than it is? Possibly. Should there be stronger controls on how the central government treats its citizens? Almost certainly.
But if we destroy the "beast in DC" to punish those who have so egregiously abused it, who will pay the price when chaos ensues.
Just some semi-random thoughts.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 22 2016, @04:18AM
I agree that it is a huge waste of human potential, but that's exactly what's driving this now. Everybody can feel the fury building, even the 1%. They're building bunkers and buying remote islands as fast as they can, thinking they can take the money and run.
We ought to return to the philosophy of Checks & Balances. Money has utterly captured every lever of society because there is no check on it. And people who place money above the commonweal are by definition, sociopaths. So any successor system must be engineered to block regulatory capture by wealth, and prevent sociopaths from gaining office.
In the American legal provenance, a really great start to the former would be to abolish corporate personhood. Corporations are not people. For the latter, we need tests (bran scans? comprehensive psych evals?) to disqualify sociopaths from positions of authority.
Further, strict term limits and transparency laws must be anchored to the bedrock of the Constitution to eliminate the entrenched political class. Backstop that with the death penalty for official corruption, and we could have a republic that could run well for another 500 years.