[alexfromapex]

People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government. Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off, there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them.

[tankenmate]

Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.

And before everyone gets upset, tax serves two purposes; 1) control inflation (it in effect burns money that was issued when the govt previously paid for things), 2) disincentivises selected behaviours. and one side effect, when the govt runs a tax deficit it increases inflation, and of course the contrapositive is also true.

[jlhawn]

> control inflation

I think you are confusing cost inflation with an increase in the money supply. The way the US government funds deficit spending is not by increasing money supply (though it could) but by issuing debt in the form of US Treasury bonds. That is a transfer of money from bond investors to the government. No new money is made. This is distinct from the way that banks issue loans which is by creating new money in the form of credit (but that credit money gets "burned" as loan principal is paid back). So federal taxes do not actually control inflation in the way you are describing. Since federal deficit spending is not financed by increasing the money supply, it can only cause price inflation if it increases aggregate demand over the current productive capacity of the economy. An example would be paying more for healthcare subsidies when there's a shortage of doctors. Or subsidizing demand for housing with more mortgage subsidies when there's a housing shortage. Taxes could also increase inflation if they have the effect of reducing supply of some goods or services (like tariffs do).

Edit: I want to mention that the Federal Reserve can and does increase money supply by buying US Treasury Bonds from banks (converting the asset into cash reserves). There are various reasons why they do this but overall it's done with their dual mandate in mind: control inflation and minimize unemployment.

[Terr_]

> Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.

1. No, it's not "easier" because it's hard-if-not-impossible to accurately and objectively judge the present-value of many types of assets. Even the case most-familiar to working-class folks, property taxes, nobody really likes/trusts the outcome.

2. We don't tax work, we tax income, because actual transactions between people with "skin in the game" are harder to fake. The extent to which wages are preferred as a subset of income is separate from the wealth-vs-income split.

[redleader55]

It would be so nice of that tax was actually "burned"(similar to proof of stake), instead of being used to fund even greater inflation. This comes in the form of a huge administration, which gets payed for providing, many times, negative value. Alternatively, it is used to pay social benefits for the sole purpose of keeping the current political party in power.

[nine_k]

With wealth concentrated in so few hands, it's already not that easy to walk it back :-/

[ghurtado]

> Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands?

Except for the fact that, without first solving the problem you responded to, yours is impossible to solve

[AlexandrB]

This is overly simplistic. Most economic activity is not related to the government at all. Taxation can slow economic growth and inflation, but the government running at a deficit or surplus is neither a cause or a solution for inflation but rather a byproduct of multiple aspects of government policy.

[chongli]

Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work.

Those tax dollars just go back to the wealthy in the form of interest payments on government bonds, which they own.

[mcnnowak]

Wealth tax will just create an industry around hiding wealth for the rich

[PlatoIsADisease]

This wouldn't stop the AMA from controlling medicine.

[fud3748]

Sure, it’s easy to tax “wealth”. Except most wealth today is of the type where Alice owns 10 million Y and Bob decided to pay $1000 for one Y. Alice cannot possibly sell her Y for near that price, but now she will be taxed on “wealth” of $10 billion.

[Saline9515]

Wealthy people own assets, not money. Stealing their assets doesn't reduce the money supply. Elon Musk is "rich" mainly in paper wealth.

Taxes raise inflation as they increase the production costs. If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave, and take their capital away to invest it elsewhere. This as a result will lead to inflation due to lack of available capital for production.

[simplify]

Since when has raising taxes actually solved any major problem? We have enough taxes, the issue is the corrupt politicians swindling it to themselves and their cronies.

[fennecbutt]

>People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government.

Hard disagree.

I fully believe that we are collectively responsible for all of our problems because we are a shitfuck tragically tribal species who, in a world of ever expanding tribe sizes, desperately cling onto tribe sizes that our tiny brains can handle, hence becoming tribal about a myriad of trivial and pointless things like sports, racism, which bathroom someone uses or which policy on immigrants one supports. Dunbar's number.

And we're so tied up in these micro tribal problems that we completely ignore the macro tribal problems that affect every single one of us. We're shit out of luck we literally evolved to act like this and there's nothing we can do to stop the behaviour; it's innate.

Global temperatures are still rising and will continue to do so. We can try to stop it but we won't be able to.

[cucumber3732842]

I don't even think it's the tribalism. Society used to be racist AF and it worked ok. Heck, you could play a pretty amusing "guess the race/nationality" game with spicy quotes from 1880-1920.

I think the problem is that by making everything objective, systemic, numerically tracked, quantified, etc, etc. we've actively selected for evil people. The people who get ahead in those systems, the groups who's interests get served, are not the good ones. They are the evil ones who have no qualms about exploiting the vulnerabilities and oversights of the system. In our quest to optimized everything, we have optimized for the prioritization of dishonest people and bad causes that attract dishonest people and it shows at every level.

Ted K would probably have something to say about this.

[deaux]

There is, it's eugenics. We can absolutely select against psychopath traits and select for altruistic, greater good, communal self-sacrificial traits. We have the science.

[WillAdams]

My solution for this is to rate-limit political contributions --- they may only be made in an amount equal to what a minimum-wage worker might reasonably be expected to donate from a week's wages (say 10% of hourly min. wage * 40), as a physically written out check or money order physically signed by hand (at least an "X" mark) and mailed in a first-class envelope with at least a similarly signed cover letter explaining the reason for the donation.

If this causes the extinction of the political lobbyist, I'm fine with that.

[malfist]

Most of the money in politics isn't direct contribution to candidates, it's PACs.

PACs are just groups that do advocacy of some sort. Some do things like advise congress people on legislation they'd like passed, some run ads to campaign for positions or candidates, some advocate for movements.

What they're not supposed to be doing is directly coordinating with a candidate, or running ads just for a candidate. But that's a line that has been continually fuzzed.

An example of a good PAC might be something like the HRC (human rights commission) that campaigns for LGBTQ rights.

[ashleyn]

This is the central problem with Citizens United. The supreme court tends to be unusually deferential with 1A cases and ruled that infinite money can go into formally unaffiliated PACs. Undoing this would require activist judges or a constitutional amendment.

[jmcgough]

PACs and dark money have been a disaster for this country

[Gigachad]

These days instead of paying out politicians you just buy social media bots or even the whole platform to push propaganda to the general public so they start agreeing with you.

[Ray20]

Private money in politics is one of the counterbalances to the emergence of a totalitarian state. The government gains a huge advantage over the opposition due to the fact that it is the government and receives free media coverage.

[root_axis]

What's to prevent them from just ignoring those restrictions?

[CGMthrowaway]

Bundling would get around that to some extent

[psychoslave]

You can't find that because any concentration of power means the corruption forces have only very limited surface to pressure, and all the more that surface is actually easy to swap with one molded for even more corruption convenience.

People ever rule through direct decisions or are enslaved into alien agendas on which they have no agency.

[nicoburns]

In countries like the US and UK with FPTP voting systems, proportional representation would help a lot. As it would make it a lot more viable for candidates outside of the main two parties to stand (and actually have a chance of winning).

(although in a UK context, it's looking highly likely that we'll have a "changing of the guard" in the next election with both Reform and Green party making significant inroads at the expense of the more established Conservative and Labour parties)

[drdaeman]

It’s easy to solve concentration of power, just distribute it more. Nowadays we can have quite large distributed systems.

It’s nigh impossible to invent a system that truly formalizes collective will with the goal of optimizing for everyone’s best long-term interests, minimizing unhappiness.

[9dev]

Which is exactly why we need a strong federation, and broad participation in democratic process across the bank. Many people can't even be bothered to vote, much less participate in their local, municipal governments. That must change.

[riddlemethat]

In capitalism, the rich get powerful; in socialism, the powerful get rich.

[root_axis]

The issue isn't representation, it's division. The party that won is being well represented with respect to the values of their constituents, whereas the opposition views it as a daily nightmare. These two visions of the world cannot be reconciled.

[anon7000]

Representation needs to be less about black/white political ideology and more about the specific needs of various people. Farmers need representation, white color workers need representation, small business owners need representation, but their needs are all different, and don’t really boil down to left/right politics. The government isn’t treated as a forum to collaborate on solving problems, but as a playground for the powerful to create boogeymen that get people riled up.

[antonymoose]

I agree while also disagreeing. It feels to me like the Democrats seemingly always get their way while in power while Republican presidents with a congressional majority get little to nothing done.

To me they have the classic problem as with non-profits: “If we solve the problem we cease to have a cause to exist.”

Taking a look at what’s been accomplished this past year, it’s a lot of token Executive Orders on renaming things, a token deportation effort, no material change on mass legal immigration, nothing happening on the voter ID front.

It’s just theater until they lose out in the midterms and they to rally their base again in 2028 to “Save America” or “Keep It Great” or whatever hokum.

Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.

[conception]

I would say one side is being told that they should believe it a daily nightmare, e.g. people on the right really disliking obamacare but loving the aca.

[reddozen]

The problem in America is that more than half the country does not live in a shared factual reality. Like:

* Jan 6 was a fedsurrection, and also simultaneously all innocent people that needed pardoning (Pardoning the feds?)

* World Liberty Financial receiving billions selling out American interests worldwide? Never heard of this but Burisma was worse!

* The Raffensperger call was no big deal there were attorneys on that call. Trump's personal (now disbarred) attorneys, of course, not there to represent America's interests but how's that the big deal?

* Also who's Raffensperger? But did you see those boxes under the table! What do you mean the clip is longer than 6 seconds that's all I saw on the infinity scrolling apps.

[patrickmay]

Power will always attract the corrupt and corruptible. The problem is the power. Reducing the size and scope of the federal government and devolving power to the states, communities, and individuals is the only way to minimize the negative effects of humans with too much authority.

[simplify]

Power is not the problem, because power exists regardless of who owns it.

We the people actually have a relatively high amount of power in our states and communities. We just don't use it. The real solution is to convince the masses to pay attention, which is harder today than it ever was.

[AppleAtCha]

This assumes that govt and individual families are the only players in the game. Now as in other historical periods large corporations hold arguably more power than either of those groups and reining in govt leaves little obstacle to them consolidating even more power and wielding it globally.

[ranger_danger]

Reducing the size of the government just makes it where billionaires and corporations control everything instead, which we're already seeing now. You'd need a way to reign in their power/wealth as well.

[worik]

Abolishing private property is another way of defanging power

[colechristensen]

You can't have truly representative government if the people voting don't understand or care that they're not being represented particularly well.

It is apparently not much of a risk to your seat if you don't represent the interests of your people because the people have become tribal and it is only their tribe they vote for with very little effective criticism of the leaders in their tribe. (it's not that complaints are nonexistent, they just don't result in anything)

[recroad]

It's a representative government, it just represents Israel via AIPAC.

[johnnyanmac]

That's a lot of work to do. It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged.

Corruption is happening out in the open and there's still so many people shrugging in response. One good push back from everyone all at once would fix a lot of things quickly. But that implies the people are united and not instead driven into manufactured conflict by said interested parties. It's basically enough that we're in a post truth era as of now. I don't know how we come back from that

Anyways, repealing Citizens United would be a good first step.

[0_____0]

[warning/apology - this comment regards USpol specifically]

Our media landscape has people focusing on basically everything except what we need to be. I am not sure that liberal democracy will survive the information age. So much effort goes into the process of argument, we aren't as a whole really thinking about how to solve our very real problems.

China's technocratic rule, after some, shall we say, growing pains (hunger pains? Is it fair to say that when millions of people starved to death?), seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power.

One of my great fears is that democracy was the right model in the past decades and centuries, but that it won't keep up with the laser focused technocratic rule that a competent bureaucracy can potentially muster.

[michaelt]

> It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged.

That, and the fact winning a senate seat costs on average $26.53 million [1]

You can't self-fund, that's 152 years of your $174,000 salary.

Where do you suppose the money comes from, and what do you suppose motivates the donors?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...

[yieldcrv]

The US should have direct referendums at the national level, just like most of us have at the state level

Most - maybe all - hot button issues have much more moderate takes than any party national committee positions, in the bluest of blue states and reddest of red states the actual individuals have much more consensus on every issue

Whatever the founder’s initial reasoning or lack of inspiration for national referendums for federal law passage doesn’t seem to be relevant today

[wwweston]

You either win big enough under the current system, with its system problems, or you never win to improve it.

Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of xkcd’s nerd sniping.

And the biggest challenge to representative government might well be that most people are terrible at engaging it productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people don’t vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some significant portion of those that do vote can’t correctly draw a line between policies they’d like and candidates who intend to work on delivering, and that’s before we get to the portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a concept.

The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree of fidelity to the input from the electorate.

If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those who want representative government is to change enough of the electorate first.

[titzer]

The only thing that changes behavior is consequences.

If there is no justice system enforcing the law and its requisite consequences, then there is no justice. I don't think those in power understand the anarchy that their intentional dismantling of the justice system has and will cause, and how the blowback from that anarchy will be visited upon them.

[jfengel]

If that were true, people would be unhappy with their representatives. For the most part they seem pleased with them. They think everyone else's representatives are corrupt, but in fact they are also doing what their constituents have told them to do.

The corrupt ones are us, the voters. We hate each other and send our Congresspeople to do as much damage as they can to the others.

[jimbokun]

Post Citizens United, that’s going to require a Constitutional amendment.

And the corrupt, bought politicians are the ones who would need to ratify it.

[asdff]

Let's not act like they weren't corrupt and bought before Citizens United

[Affric]

What is interesting is that, as demonstrated by mass media and social media’s influences over our politics in the last century we can be motivated, but we have let power become too concentrated in the wrong hands.

China’s qualifications for influencers thing is interesting by fundamentally doesn't address the power of social media publishers.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I think this is entirely the wrong way to think about this. While better elected representatives and officials would always be a nice thing, what we need is to ensure that we design systems around them that mitigate their corruption and double standards. We were even (collectively, across humanity) doing better and better at that until not that long ago.

[bsenftner]

We need regulations on the politicians because, clearly, their "public good use" far exceeds their contribution back.

[leptons]

>Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off

The US elected a convicted fellon, the corruption is a feature.

[mcmcmc]

Sometimes I wish we’d bring back tarring and feathering. “People should not be afraid of their governments …” and all that

[asdff]

>there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them

The hard part is this has been true going all the way back to the stone age ever since we elevated the first person arbitrarily to chief. There has been no model of government developed since that is immune to this. I really don't know how to get around this and it depresses me that we will always be held back by the slimiest who abuse systems.

[einpoklum]

> lack of truly representative government.

There is no such thing as (truly) representative government. To the limited extent that groups of people can at all be represented (which is a whole other questions) - governments are generally not about doing that. Yes, many world states have electoral systems where people can vote for one of several (lists of) candidates or parties, but the claim that in the normal and uncorrupted scenario, the elected properly represent the populace/citizenry - does not, I believe, stand scrutiny.

Which is to say, don't try to "find a way in which candidates aren't corrupt and bought off"; that is in the core of democracies in money/capital-based economies. At best, the elected will act according to some balance of influences by different social forces, some being more popular and some being powerful and moneyed elites or individuals. If you want that to change, the change needs to be structural and quite deep, undermining state sovereignty and exchange-based economy.

[beloch]

Implement campaign spending limits, regulate or ban PAC's, and commit to an ongoing effort to stomp whatever new methods big-money comes up with to influence politics.

We do most of this in Canada and our leaders seem to be less influenced by big money. (Nevermind that we recently elected a billionaire PM...) The vast expense of running a U.S. style election campaign virtually guarantees that U.S. politicians are all bought and paid for.

[willhslade]

Carney isn't a billionaire, right? He's been a bureaucrat, not a plutocrat.

[chr15m]

Bring back sortition, within elected parties.

[netbioserror]

Colossally awful take. Corruption is an intractable problem in human history. Power is a magnet for the worst people, and every system we invent can be exploited in innumerable ways. The only variable is how long the people of any individual society can remain free and prosperous before their decline. Temporary recoveries have only happened by lopping off massive chunks of empire, implementing extreme monetary reforms, and/or a switch to full autocracy. Every other outcome is terminal decline.

[octoberfranklin]

Term limits for congress.

[vunderba]

Same for the Supreme Court. 20 years. A lifetime appointment is no different than a king.

[tremon]

And age limits for congress.

[dyauspitr]

No, our problems are much bigger in that we have a populace easily led by tribal sensibilities. Theses scumbags aren’t coming from nowhere, we’re electing them to these positions.

[dbspin]

Sortation.

[RealityVoid]

Sortition?