I'm Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream

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Couldn’t agree more, both “sides” are really trying to gain the same goal which is profit, and are run by the same forces behind them which is big money and power. They both try to bend opinion in their own direction, and sweep whatever they can under the carpet to hide it when it’s not aligned with their declared “direction”. They both profit by keeping populace distracted by pushing hot issues to the forefront, then while they are distracted keep making money off their sources, which all tend to end up being everyone not in the “ruling class” i.e. those not driving this agenda forward.

I’m not convinced it hasn’t always been this way, people have been greedy since the beginning of recorded history. The thing that is different is this used to be done behind closed doors, and while you might have suspected it, you never really had any real introduction to it face to face. News travelled slowly, there were no emails to hack, no quick way to release information worldwide. Now with the Internet, it’s all out there, in near real-time for you to see in all it’s ugly truth.

Take health care as an example. Neither party really wants to face the real issue which is that in the US we pay a lot more, and get a lot less than any other peer country we have. Why is this, because we still allow insurance companies to profit off of health care. I’m not convinced that the whole point of ACA wasn’t just to get more people insured, it was to show the actual cost of health care that has been hidden to so many for so long. We spend on average over $9000 per person in the US every year to cover our health care costs. Much of this is either tax funded through Medicare and other programs, but much is also privately funded. But the average citizen didn’t see this cost, they either rolled the dice and hoped they would be bailed out if they really needed more than their poor insurance could handle, or their employer hid most of the costs. So now it’s out there, health care is really expensive. But is either party really pushing to get the profit out of health care? Not really, they both still are willing to allow statements like, “competition gets us better health care”, and other lies that really aren’t true. They both allow things like drug companies to spend as much on advertising as they do on R&D, how annoying it is to see a drug commercial during every television break? Where do we think that money comes from? All example of where a very rich, powerful insurance and drug company industry can lobby to keep their profits as long as they pay both parties the correct amount in contributions. And they do, look and you’ll see both parties take money from big business, it’s where they get their millions/billions to drive their agendas. So it’s a runway cycle, big money pays to protect it’s interests, and both sides keep us distracted with other issues while it keeps running.

So someone will say, “President Trump isn’t beholding to those big companies and lobbies”. And while that may be true to some degree, we can’t forget that at the same time he IS a big company and also lobbies for what he wants. And if he wanted to convince everyone he wasn’t “status quo” he probably could have done a lot better with his cabinet than to choose big business executives and party donors (i.e. Betsy DeVos) to fill the seats. I know that President Trump can play the big business game, he claims he knows how, and I believe him; contributions to get his golf club projects approved, building permits approved, etc. In the end he may punish some industries, but at what cost? I’m not saying he might not make some changes that may be positive, just that we as a people need to be careful it’s not yet another slight of hand trick where he’s showing us how he’s closing down one industry loophole and is at the same time doing the same creating a new one for himself.

Somehow when I see the photos and read the stories about how people like President Trump invited the Clintons to his wedding I get the feeling that they are both laughing at us every day. In the end the wealthy tend to stick with the wealthy, they live in their own little private world and will protect that before anything else.

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Hello Lazy Dev,

I appreciate your thoughtful response instead of a personal attacks. This is a very difficult subject.

Planned Parenthood receives over $500 million in federal funds through Medicaid. Link. Planned Parenthood does very little pertaining to prenatal care it’s almost all related to abortion. Link

I agree it’s difficult to agree on what our tax dollars should go to. That’s why I believe in limited government. The government should not be providing services that the private sector could and should do. I have a problem with people demanding these services be provided to them as if it was a right. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights. The baby has the right to life and that’s how I can jive that against the “choice” of abortion.

Maybe compromise can come when like minded private citizens can get together and provide these services for each other without government involvement.

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Mustapic,

To complain about Trump’s overreach while being silent with Obama’s is completely inconsistent.

If you don’t know Obama’s overreach, your head is in the sand.

My family is from Cuba and it frightens me to see Americans falling for the cradle of government. It ends in disaster.

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This is precisely right. It is precisely because we cannot agree on where our tax dollars should go that government should be as small as possible. Government by definition is coercion, and should be minimized.

And I think people like Jeff are waking up to the fact that big government might not be a great idea if your guy is not the one in charge. In addition, the bigger the government, the more critical become elections. It is paradoxical, but low voter turnout and lack of engagement in politics is often actually a sign of a healthy, small government. When the government affects and is involved in every aspect of life - elections take on huge importance, and pit citizens against one another in ways that would never happen with small, limited government.

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Beware. In Brazil voting is mandatory, and failure to do so carry fines backed by inability to obtain any government-produced document. Absentee vote is low, and even invalid votes are that high. Presidents are elected by majority vote, directly, and with a second voting round taking place between the two front runners if a simple majority isn’t obtained by any candidate on the first round.

And, yet, as a brazilian presently residing in America, I must say even the present situation here is superior to what is found there.

As far as I can tell, democracy isn’t so much about laws, as it is about engagement and the right to do so.

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There is a network effect here holding us hostage; I don’t think a third party is a viable solution as long as the Republicans and Democrats dominate American politics with their partisan war.

@codinghorror @giorgiog and Narciblog I am curious what you think of this essay:

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It is so true what you have written. This change of the government that happened in Poland over a year ago is a blessing for the Polish nation.

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So maybe our first goal should be to decide what government, federal, state, and local should be providing. And I guess that our answer once we dug into this as a populace might be slightly different than the countries forefathers who wrote the Constitution was. We all need to recognize that times have changed. Their concept of “interstate commerce” was very different in a day of horse drawn wagons than today where many things cross borders without any regard to the arbitrary state line. And I’d also say that our forefathers didn’t have any idea of how health care might be handled, or how to ensure stability for an aging population, back then you got old and died, or lived with your children who inherited your home or farm until you died. But that was also a time when having half a dozen children was considered good for the country, so surely one of more of them could look after you in old age. Today we don’t necessarily need to expand our population at that rate any more, so maybe the solutions of the past just don’t work as well now. These are issues that were brought on by changes in society and even technology, and solutions will need to be formed around them not just looking back but looking forward.

I think most would agree in principle that in a free society government should provide the minimum services required for the common good. For example I don’t think anyone disagrees (or a very small number) that we need a common military to provide for security of the country. We might disagree on how large that military needs to be, and how we direct it when it’s outside our borders (i.e are we the world police force or not, do we protect our “interests” overseas), but we don’t disagree that the service that it provides is a needed shared service provided to all citizens.

We need to look at other shared services that we’d like to have uniform across the country, and charge the federal government to manage those. And then whatever can be handled efficiently at a lower level can be done that way. But remember, due to technology some things may have economy of scale to be national, even if they could be handled at a state or local level. For example (and this is only an example, not necessarily a well thought through idea), today we let each state set up their own voting system, etc., but would it be more efficient (and cost us all less) if we consolidated into a national election framework that state and local voting districts could use? Would it be less prone to fraud, or other concerns, real or just perceived? This is just an example, but to blindly say, “we’ve always done it that way” isn’t really valid any more. There are many advancements that could easily nullify the way we’ve always done things and provide a better outcome. So to put this in software terms, we need some user stories, then we can build tasks and assign them out :).

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What excellent points!

It seems that Democrats are for illegal immigration mostly because they believe that the demographics will shift in their favour if these people are eventually granted citizenship. For example, they might have figured these people are more likely to want welfare, which makes them natural Democrats. There’s room for miscalculation here. For example, most Mexicans and South Americans are Catholic. On issues like abortion, they’d go for the Republicans. Democrats are also just for it from an ideological, emotional point of view. As far as they’re concerned, sneaking into America and taking advantage of the system is somehow heroic and automatically makes you a true American. By that logic, if I caught a plane to San Francisco as a tourist, decided I wanted to stay and just never went home, I’d be as American as any other American citizen. You can’t run a country like that in the long run. The whole world would move to America and go on welfare if they could, or work cash jobs and pay no tax. Obviously that’s not sustainable.

The Republicans have mostly ignored and tolerated illegal immigration because of cheap, cash-under-the-table labour. The Democrats also. As you point out, false documentation seems to be a problem, and it seems to fairly easy and cheap to buy. You should have better electronic records and systems, as you point out. Hopefully Trump will cut the bureaucracy of the government and make it more efficient and modern and implement these kinds of systems.

It’s true that illegal immigrants sometimes do dirty and dangerous work that middle and upper class Americans (and we software developers) would never dream of doing. But America doesn’t have a welfare system as generous as other first-world countries. For many poverty-stricken American citizens, any job is better than no job, even if they have to breathe paint fumes. What about sympathy for them when they lose their job to an illegal immigrant who gets paid half as much? How are they supposed to feed their families? It’s tragic. Liberals have utterly and callously ignored these people. Doesn’t charity begin at home? Yes, you pay a little more for landscaping. But what about your fellow Americans?

Simple numerical example: an employer pays a dollar to an American worker. He gets replaced by an illegal immigrant, whom he pays 50 cents. The worker’s loss is the employers gain, but the net loss to American incomes is 50 cents. And the government probably just missed out on some tax revenue.

Yes, the workers come to America for jobs. Continuing to let them flood in and then trying to enforce the labour laws with a pool of 10 million illegal immigrant workers already on tap just is not a good strategy. Australia constantly patrols it’s northern waters and turns back boats. They don’t wait for them to land and then blame businesses for hiring them. So as much as liberals despise the concept, you do need a wall. New Zealand has one. It’s called the ocean. We have serious problems with Indian and Asian migrant labour being exploited. But imagine how much larger the problem would be if these workers were washing ashore on rafts. Probably several orders of magnitude.

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Don’t worry, liberalism wants that, too. Great combo, am I right?

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One of the most disappointing things about this post and Jeff’s subsequent comments is that it contains not a trace of independent thinking – it appears Mr. Atwood is a garden variety leftist progressive. Despite his protestations that he “does not consider himself a Democrat or a Republican”, it is clear he has never voted for a conservative or a Republican, supports every left-wing cause of the day, and has little to no knowledge of or exposure to conservative, libertarian or classical liberal thought.

Aside from the obvious (the list of left-wing causes and organizations he pledges to support) one clear indication of this is the apotheosis of democracy over liberty, the rule of law, and the protection of unalienable rights and private property. Democracy is a means to an end. It is not the end. The fact that many or even a majority of citizens do not exercise their franchise is no indication of the political health of a country. Communist countries with no property rights, no civil rights and no rule of law have notoriously high voter participation. Furthermore, as others have noted, America is explicitly a republic not a direct democracy.

Another indication is the inchoate call for a 3rd party with no notion of how this party would differ from the Democrat party (or even the Republican party.) Would it be different than a Democrat party lead by Bernie Sanders?

Writing the phrase “speaking truth to power” without sarcasm is also a sure sign of conventional leftism. (And Evan McMullin? His position on virtually everything is antithetical to Atwood’s – he is pretty much an establishment Republican – much more Republican than Trump!)

The biggest red flag, however, is the obviously false claim to non-partisanship. What does it mean to vote based on “leadership, above all, for leadership?” What this means is that Mr. Attwood has no principles. By this I don’t mean that he is not an honest person, not faithful and devoted to his wife and kids, and not an exceptionally good business partner. What this means is that he has no principles upon which he can fall back on to argue for or against a policy position.

Let us take the issue of immigration. What would be the immigration policy platform of Atwood’s proposed 3rd party? Open borders? Unlimited legal immigration? If not unlimited, under what principle would he limit it? A big change from the two existing parties or a minor tweak? At this point the caterwauling over Trump verses Obama on immigration is like whining about a 35% top tax rate verses a 36% top tax rate
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Or take Mr. Atwood’s support of “universal health care”. By what principle does he support universal health care but not universal housing, universal organic food, or universal i-phones? What principles support the nationalization of the health care industry but not the nationalization of the tech industry?

Or look at Atwood’s views on taxes and corporations:

“If you are equating corporations to people, which … doesn’t make sense. I do agree that corporations get away with paying too little taxes in general.”

What principles might underlie this? Let us say that a Mr. Atwood and a Mr. Spolsky are each sole proprietors and the government comes and confiscates their property and fines them for speaking out politically on their respective blogs. Their rights have been violated. Now let’s say they join forces and create a corporation and the government comes along and confiscates the assets of the corporation and fines the corporation for speaking out politically. We may say “the corporation’s rights have been violated” but what really is happening is that Jeff’s and Joel’s rights have been violated. The only reason a corporation has rights is because it is made up of people. Corporations are indeed just groups of people, and one does not lose one’s rights by joining. Of course what Jeff is really saying above is that the people who happen to own corporations get away with paying too little in taxes.

As other commenters have ably pointed out, Mr. Atwood is in an echo chamber. This post is written to virtue signal – to accept the plaudits of like-minded people. There is virtually no chance that Mr. Atwood’s social standing will be hurt by this post. Other than his racist father*, does Mr. Atwood know a single individual who voted for Trump? Does he break bread with anyone who holds deep conservative opinions? (Not that Trump is a conservative.)

*This is actually not Mr. Atwood’s first political post. In a previous post he took on racism and same-sex marriage and the benighted opinions of the elderly, even going so far as to publicly shame his own father as a racist. That post made the virtue signaling in this one look mild by comparison.

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Nice “manifesto” if I may call it that. I especially like the line, [quote]This provides a very high motivation for fraud, gerrymandering, and disenfranchisement in order to seize power[/quote] since this is a big root of what I feel is my own personal dissatisfaction today. I’d accept our voting outcomes a lot better if I didn’t live in a state that I don’t tend to agree with the majority on many issues, which means that for me my votes feel like they are worthless, especially in a national election. Even local elections are this way due to the way we set up our districts that I can’t get my vote to do much in state elections, they’ve carved just enough people like myself into each district to ensure we can’t get together and get number needed to win much of anything, even though overall we are about 35% of the state, we don’t have 35% of the seats anywhere. And Senators are elected across the state, so all you need is 51% and you can hold both seats forever. So while I can call my elected officials, but they dismiss me knowing that 65%+ of the state will solidly disagree with me. So what can I do, move to a state that is more leaning toward my overall views? Seems a bit harsh, and it would only contribute to what we see now, red and blue, and nothing in between. Isn’t it better to keep different views distributed as much as possible so we can learn from each other? Why should a state line define thoughts of groups of people and be used to divide people apart? Why should a voting district be drawn so that we can isolate voters of one view or the other into tighter areas in order to maximize our “win” one way or the other?

So I’d agree, our voting districts need to seriously be re-thought, and allow for flexibility in ways that neither party (and I mean neither we have today, or any in the future) can get an advantage just because of the concentration of views in particular geographic regions. It’s fine that views are regional, but it’s not fine that you cut those up into arbitrary regions to keep them from getting to critical mass.

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I’ve benefited enormously from a welfare system, so I’ve thought this through pretty carefully. Overly-generous welfare provides a disincentive to work. Some people are just workers. They’ll always work, no matter what. But the reality is that many aren’t. Give them a living wage and they won’t work. That’s why universal basic income isn’t going to be good for society. Americans have always had to work hard and be self-reliant. Maybe that’s why it’s so enormously successful and the bastion of capitalism, growth, and progress? There absolutely has to be a safety net to catch the most poor and vulnerable in society. But it should be a hand-up, not a hand-out. When everyone in the society works hard and pays their taxes, public health systems aren’t terrible. But consider that you’re 60 and you’ve paid taxes all your life. You now have health problems. You expected the government to look after you. The government has let in too many immigrants in the last 10 years to keep the economy pumped, straining the public health system and effectively breaking the social contract. You need a scan. You’re told that you can’t have one because the waiting list is too long. Your scan goes to someone who needs it more, but who’s only been in the country a year, is old, and has never paid taxes. You’re out of luck and just have to suffer. That’s the situation in New Zealand. So yea, it’s not perfect.

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Ok, I’ll bite:

The 2016 elections in the United States and subsequent events have threatened American democracy

Ok, we can’t have a reasoned discussion as long as we say things like this without facts to back them up. What has the Trump administration done to threaten American democracy? Has he broken any laws?

the President-Elect as a narcissistic bully, spouting empty rhetoric and innuendo, with no experience holding public office, exemplifying the extreme elements of the Republican Party

You can just call him an asshole, it’s OK. You say he has no experience holding public office as if it’s a bad thing, but based on your own description our existing politicians are greedy, corrupt, self-serving and out of touch:

  • The Democratic Party as a bunch of weak socialist liberals who want a more intrusive and more expensive government and who are out of touch with American social values

and

  • The Republican Party as a bunch of greedy rabid wolves supporting individual achievement at the expense of the less fortunate, and providing a haven for various groups such as white supremacists, Wall Street tycoons, the religious right, climate change deniers, NRA fanatics, and so on

A large and enthusiastic group of citizens can not only pull towards the center in their intentions, but can provide significant financial support, when they see an attempt to represent them fairly and honestly.

Sorry, but Bernie Sanders lived in his own fantasy world and promised his constituents a lifetime supply of everything for free. I’m exaggerating here, but he was selling young, naive people a utopia he would never be able to deliver: Issues | Bernie Sanders Official Website

He may have been honest in his intentions, but he would failed to deliver nonetheless. Are democrats sorry they didn’t nominate him? Absolutely. He would have kicked Trump’s ass in the general election. I believe most people would prefer an ineffective president over a wildcard president. Democrats can thank the DNC for shoving Hillary down their throats.

The only way to counteract this harmful polarization, this useless gridlock, this damaging tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats, is for a significant fraction of the American voting public to pull in a different direction, and the only direction that is likely to gain sufficient support is toward the center.

I think people in the middle did pull in a different direction. They picked someone outside the system. It just so happens they picked someone outside the system that came through the republican system. Trump is a RINO. I’m not calling him a democrat, he’s…something else.

I want my elected officials to serve all their constituents, not just the ones who voted for them
I want my elected officials to stop pandering to a handful of vocal extremists and lobbyists
I want my elected officials to pursue bipartisan legislation that suits their constituency
I want my elected officials to act the way they think is right, not just by following the commands of their party

And I would like to live forever with the body of a 20 year old. :wink: Politics is about power, gaining it, keeping it. It’s not about serving the people. Until money is out of politics and people stop affiliating with these parties, there’s little we can do.

The first thing we can do en-masse is drop our political affiliations with the GOP & Democratic party. It’s the only way to start starving the beasts.

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One thing I’ve heard from a source I’d probably trust (though I don’t have it at my finger tips right now) is that in the US illegal immigration from our southern border has slowed to almost nothing. Most of our illegal immigrants are now from other countries, and usually arrive on valid visas and just never leave. Mexico has been working hard in building up their own economy to where it’s not necessary to come to the US for opportunities. Maybe it’s all the factory jobs that were moved to Mexico, but that’s a different topic… So my perspective is a wall for billions of dollars will never really be cost effective, it’s theatre, just like the way we conduct our airport TSA screening which are often pointless, but it makes many who really don’t look at it very hard feel better and “safer”.

Safety, the one area that seems to be some real political capital in current times. First you start by playing up all the ways terrible things can happen to them, no matter how isolated or unlikely they are. Ensure that the case of an illegal immigrant being a murder is highlighted, find example of people doing terrible things in the name of some religion, the theme is always the same, fine a “bad guy” or group and play it up. Then you can claim to have a solution to make them “safer”. It sells nicely, and both sides sell this, one the fear you will be killed in your bed by an enraged crazy illegal immigrant, the other side by your neighbor who owns an arsenal of guns and ammo for when “the world comes to an end”. Both are selling gloom and doom of their own brand, and the solution to it all by just following their “team”. But we don’t even consider real safety issues, our #1 accidental way to die in the US is in a auto accident, we kill thousands a year that way, and the list goes on and on of ways you are likely to die, both accidental and medical, often self inflicted, i.e. you smoked all your life and die of the side effects of it… But humans are terrible with numbers, so instead they fear getting in the ocean that they will be eaten by a shark, but their most dangerous part of their trip was driving the to the airport, not flying to a distant beach, and certainly not being eaten by a shark while swimming. But we are blind to the real risks, look how many people are overweight, and or, completely out of shape who will be worried every day about an illegal immigrant breaking down their door and killing them in a frenzy, but miss that their own lifestyle is much more likely to kill them way before any home invader. From a logical point of view the whole thing is laughable. It would be interesting to have AI that can look out at the world and tell us how illogical we all are, almost like aliens from another planet who’ve observed and seen how we all pretend to be on different sides of everything, but are really all as illogical as the next.

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When you say ‘democrats’ are you talking about the organization, or the party members? I think it’s important to distinguish between the two because the party’s position is not necessarily the party members’ position. And if you’re talking about the party members, I don’t think you should generalize something like this.

Here’s an example:

I lean towards the republican ideology with respect to fiscal responsibility, smaller gov’t, etc. What I am absolutely against is this nonsense that it’s the government’s job to tell you who you can marry, what you can do with your body (elective abortions, etc.)

And by the way that’s why I’m not a registered republican.

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I completely agree. But illegal immigration over the southern, mostly unprotected border will continue as long as America is wealthier and provides more opportunities than Mexico and South America. Even if the wall costs $20 billion, the net present value of the project is probably positive.

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A problem we are also facing in the US is the mass of retirees who were brought up with a few things that they were sold: 1) You can treat my body like shit and will be healthy forever, 2) You don’t need to really worry about retirement, the government is going to be there for me.

I don’t blame anyone in this situation, it’s what they were being sold 40 and 50 years ago. And they bought it, and so yes, we have a social contract to now deal with it. We often pay for the problems our ancestors put in place. I personally think we should have taxed the shit out of the tobacco companies as soon as we realized it was going to cause health issues, if nothing but to pay for the health issues are now dealing with. I have a relative, smoked all their life until a few years ago, they’ve developed COPD now, cost to the government, over $15,000 per year for medication and treatments. The tobacco companies profited all those years, now the tax payers take it on the cuff to deal with the results of their profits. Where is the outrage in this, someone originally told them smoking wasn’t harmful, and they bought it. Maybe they should have quit when they were told otherwise, but it’s called addiction, it’s not always that easy. But that’s all behind us now, we have millions just like this, retired, terrible health, costing many hundreds of billion a year to deal with. And we still let people smoke, tax them a bit, but continue to escrow their health problems into the future for another generation to deal with. We don’t invest that money to deal with their eventual health problems, we spend it on daily expenses and leave the issue to the next generation to deal with…

Second issue, they didn’t save much for retirement. That’s a shift we need to get people to realize now, and I think many of us have, that while you may be paying in, you better put some away for yourself, the government may not have as much as you’d like when the times comes to get it back. Sure, some would say, and I couldn’t disagree this is at least partly because our politicians have “borrowed” too much from the funds, but it’s also because we just didn’t save enough for them all along, back when they started the program, they didn’t account for people living as long as they do now, and having the health problems they do. We also did it in a time of continued population growth, so more people were paying in that were taking out, we aren’t there any more, so the numbers don’t work like they did in the past. You’d think some brilliant economist could have seen that our population growth would slow even 50 years or more ago, but again, they probably did, but our political system is good at pushing problems to the next administration.

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With your body you say? Nazi thinking.

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Good point. People shouldn’t just staunchly back the party line. They should think for themselves. But America is a two-party system. For example, I highly doubt Trump suddenly just became pro-life. But if I needed to unite the Republicans, I would have lied just as he probably did. You pick the party you agree with most.

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