What is your ideal political structure?

[breakingcontact]

I've spent about 20 years now, trying to figure out where I REALLY stand politically.

I don't fit in well amongst progressives (at all) but I don't fit in amongst conservatives either once we get past the first level of "small gov, low taxes" talk.

In college, I was pretty intrigued by the "crunchy con" movement. (Conservatives that care about the environment etc). I also read a lot of Pat Buchanan during this time, thinking myself to be a paleocon...but what exactly are we conserving at this point?

Ron/Rand Paul made a lot of sense to me with some of the libertarian arguments, although amongst hardcore libertarians...they viewed me as too conservative (I'm like...kind of against people murdering their unborn children you know).

Once I came to saving faith, I started exploring theonomy/theocracy but didn't really fall cleanly into any of those camps either.

What I have resolved...we shouldn't all be voting equally, that much I'm sure of. I'm 100% against pure unfiltered democracy.

What I'm left with is kind of oscillating between a sort of republican monarchy and a Christian libertarianism. (yeah I know)

Your thoughts?

 

[Vodnik4]

I’m not bright enough to know what’s the best type of government, but…

Mixing religion and government is never a good idea — government corrupts, and it would just sully the Church. See the excess of the RCC during its heyday of the Holy Roman Empire, and Luther’s justified rebellion against it. Or the Orthodox Church being tied by the foot to the Russian monarchy, and where that went.

Just recently I talked to one of the smartest people I know, and he described how our initial idea of Republic has been degraded by universal vote and degradation into democracy. When people who own nothing can vote themselves money at the expense of others, the state goes down.

I still need to ponder on this a bit, but it would seem that our Founding Fathers did have the answer to the question you posed. Did it change too much and is it right for here and now? IDK. Of course one system was perfect for a sparsely populated agrarian base , and our economy and population changed quite a bit.

 

[The Bubba Effect]

I want the same kind of deal that the Amish have on the settlement.
They don't have to participate in a lot of the .Gov nonsense and if they don't call the cops, the cops don't come.

I assume that they have problems like any other community and I assume they take care of those problems internally.

 

[BigRed]

I want the same kind of deal that the Amish have on the settlement.
They don't have to participate in a lot of the .Gov nonsense and if they don't call the cops, the cops don't come.

I assume that they have problems like any other community and I assume they take care of those problems internally.

Indeed.

 

[BigRed]

I've spent about 20 years now, trying to figure out where I REALLY stand politically.

I don't fit in well amongst progressives (at all) but I don't fit in amongst conservatives either once we get past the first level of "small gov, low taxes" talk.

In college, I was pretty intrigued by the "crunchy con" movement. (Conservatives that care about the environment etc). I also read a lot of Pat Buchanan during this time, thinking myself to be a paleocon...but what exactly are we conserving at this point?

Ron/Rand Paul made a lot of sense to me with some of the libertarian arguments, although amongst hardcore libertarians...they viewed me as too conservative (I'm like...kind of against people murdering their unborn children you know).

Once I came to saving faith, I started exploring theonomy/theocracy but didn't really fall cleanly into any of those camps either.

What I have resolved...we shouldn't all be voting equally, that much I'm sure of. I'm 100% against pure unfiltered democracy.

What I'm left with is kind of oscillating between a sort of republican monarchy and a Christian libertarianism. (yeah I know)

Your thoughts?

My thoughts would not state the matter better than Jefferson.



"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,"


Well woth understanding.

 

[Dean C.]

"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

FAREWELL ADDRESS | SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1796​

George Washington

This could have avoided a lot of it , the founding fathers probably could not have envisioned the levels of corruption the stock market and super PACS have inflicted on our system as well.

Representatives should be compensated very well, that being said they should be barred from trading stock, have term limits and after their term limit is up not be able to participate in the government in any way for at least a decade.

I would want national referendums added to the general federal ballot as well so we can avoid this crap where politicians hold popular bills hostage.

Then create some sort of limits to what the SCOTUS can and cannot do, let's be very real here that court has effected more social change good or bad in the last 70 years than congress has.

I do not want to replace the system just fix what is wrong with our great experiment.

That all being said, this country becomes a theocracy in any way shape or form congratulations I am going out my door with my rifle mad as hell.

 

[phylodog]

It's time for the two party system to go. It's nothing more than a back and forth on who gets to screw the American people for a couple if years at a time.

I don't think there is a better system out there as it was designed to be. Unfortunately that hasn't existed in any of our lifetimes. The constitutional republic is a brilliant approach but the founders could have never predicted how vile our elected and appointed officials would behave.

 

[wtburnette]

It's time for the two party system to go. It's nothing more than a back and forth on who gets to screw the American people for a couple if years at a time.

I don't think there is a better system out there as it was designed to be. Unfortunately that hasn't existed in any of our lifetimes. The constitutional republic is a brilliant approach but the founders could have never predicted how vile our elected and appointed officials would behave.

Agreed. Go back to what was intended. Get rid of ALL of the bureaucracies. Follow the Constitution strictly. Shoot traitors. Install needed tweaks like term limits and abolish the federal income tax in favor of some sort of flat tax. Limit bills to one topic and set strict spending limits. That would be a fantastic start.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

I've spent about 20 years now, trying to figure out where I REALLY stand politically.

I don't fit in well amongst progressives (at all) but I don't fit in amongst conservatives either once we get past the first level of "small gov, low taxes" talk.

In college, I was pretty intrigued by the "crunchy con" movement. (Conservatives that care about the environment etc). I also read a lot of Pat Buchanan during this time, thinking myself to be a paleocon...but what exactly are we conserving at this point?

Ron/Rand Paul made a lot of sense to me with some of the libertarian arguments, although amongst hardcore libertarians...they viewed me as too conservative (I'm like...kind of against people murdering their unborn children you know).

Once I came to saving faith, I started exploring theonomy/theocracy but didn't really fall cleanly into any of those camps either.

What I have resolved...we shouldn't all be voting equally, that much I'm sure of. I'm 100% against pure unfiltered democracy.

What I'm left with is kind of oscillating between a sort of republican monarchy and a Christian libertarianism. (yeah I know)

Your thoughts?

I may be extrapolating too much from just one post, but it sounds like I would hold very similar political ideas to yours, more so than even most conservatives I've talked to.

But as for what the ideal political system is, I feel like I have more questions than answers. In fact, one of the disagreements I tend to have with more traditional conservatives is regarding the emphasis they often place on our form of government as the answer to our problems. In my belief, our problems stem from a lack of virtue among the citizenry. A well-designed form of government can provide a damper against those issues, but if you want to really have a well-functioning society, you need to first have a virtuous populace, then you can put a good system of government in place and hope that it will help things stay that way.

It seems like the one thing that most Americans of all political stripes have traditionally agreed upon is that any sort of monarchy or theocracy is the absolute epitome of evil (along with Hitler and Nazis.) But if you go back and study history in any detail, you'll find that, despite the stereotypes, Christian theocracies during the middle ages often did a surprisingly good job of providing justice and security for their citizens, especially compared to the pagan empires that came before. I think this leads to a line of thinking where one discovers that limited Christian monarchy really wasn't that bad of a system compared to how it's usually portrayed, and therefore one starts to think that maybe it's actually a good system of government to pursue. However, I still think it has too many flaws as a system, particularly with how easily it lends itself to corruption, and I don't think trying to go back in that direction is wise. Though, it would be quite the grand experiment in the post-industrial revolution era, and I'd consider myself open-minded on the subject.

At this point, though, I honestly don't think there's any saving the American experiment. I still admire our founding fathers, and agree with most of the principles of our constitution, as originally intended, but by this point our founding documents have become so misunderstood, and their meaning so twisted and corrupted by our politicians, that I think to have any hope of a just government we would need to start anew with some other form of government, perhaps based on the same principles, but phrased and put into place a new way that will bring us back to where we ought to be. Sadly, I think we will see much suffering and a much deeper unravelling of our society before we can get to that point, though.

 

[jake blue]

Modern Whig sums up my political alignment pretty well. They're not big enough to crack the entrenchment of the two-party system though.

 

[luvall]

The Kingdom of God where Jesus reigns over the entire sinless creation. As long as sinful people rule there is no ideal anything, just versions of selfishness.

 

[Shadow01]

I like the form of government we have now with one caveat, you volunteer for the office and we vote quarterly to either keep you or vote you out. Being voted out means that you will be hanged the following Sunday after church on the federal building steps. To avoid being hanged you can resign ahead of the quarterly vote.

 

[Jeepster48439]

I like the form of government that we were given in 1789. Unfortunately, that is not the form we have today.

 

[Ingomike]

I like the form of government that we were given in 1789. Unfortunately, that is not the form we have today.

This!

The popular election of senators changed the balance of power. We now have a super President and 100 mini Presidents.

Congress must vote on the actual bill, not pass a bill and delegate details to a bureaucratic division.

Tax day is the day before the elections, and NO withholding, EVERYBODY pays their own taxes.

These will go a long way to clean up things…

 

[wtburnette]

This!

The popular election of senators changed the balance of power. We now have a super President and 100 mini Presidents.

Congress must vote on the actual bill, not pass a bill and delegate details to a bureaucratic division.

Tax day is the day before the elections, and NO withholding, EVERYBODY pays their own taxes.

These will go a long way to clean up things…

Taxes should also not be deducted from paychecks. They should be due all at once, the day before the election. Talk about changing things...

 

[JEBland]

This is a bit long, and I don't have time to do drafts. Here're some thoughts.



I'm not entirely sure what you mean by political structure. You mean governmental structure? Evolution of the laws and enforcement within that structure?

The libertarians seem to be split between "taxation is theft" nonsense and a more reasonable "we want minimal governmental structure and oversight." One Youtuber said that he views libertarianism as an ideal or philosophy, but not as a political platform - this is a notion I can get behind. I'm of the belief that the constitution is not a set of laws. The constitution is a restriction on a set of laws to establish the government and delegate the powers (which restricts the types of laws that can be made).

Often, the debate is about what is fair or unfair (and what does that mean). This debate is crucial and fundamental. In general, I learn towards frustrated quasi-static forms of changing things. Our entire system is designed to be a competition, making that a frustrated system to level the playing field of competition while also ensuring that the people's will is preserved is the whole game, and the answer isn't even close to unique once we rule out majority takes it all.

Some thoughts of mine on moving towards the "ideal" governmental structure and societal contributions.

General voting:
- I like the notion of ranked-choice voting. More competition, fewer compromises in who to vote for.
- Reform or just downright pressure media outlets to allow for more parties at the debates. If we have ranked-voice voting.

In terms of Congress:
Just as there is libertarian-esque nonsense, there is also socialist nonsense talking about how it's unfair that CA and RI have the same number of senators - the entire point is to establish a frustration between the House and the Senate. Our founders were pretty smart in that the legislative body is made up of two sub-bodies whose representative powers are chosen in two different ways. When having a competition between equal representation on the state-level and by the population size level, we've naturally set up a frustrated, quasi-static system. Scalia viewed this frustrated system as a feature, not a bug, and I'm inclined to agree with his view (on that).

Executive elections:
I think this is a place where we can improve. I was talking to a German researcher at a conference about how the EU selects its representative power of countries. Basically, if we assume every vote is independent, and the choice always comes down to two candidates (we can institute ranked-choice voting to make that the case), then weighing regions by the square root of the population serves as a balance between sparse locations and dense locations (I discussed this briefly a while back). Having executive power be concentrated is a good thing (even when it produces a Nixon), and the limitations of that executive power to be balanced by the other branches means we can resolve this in the political sphere with the next election (also, thanks for Chevron deference, Scalia). This takes power away from cities, which would make for political suicide for most politicians to propose.

Gerrymandering:
Some people make an argument in favor of gerrymandering that goes something along the lines of "We have this subpopulace that typically has this classification. So, in order for them to surely have representation, we've made it so they have their own district." The people who make this genuinely believe it (I think). One counter-argument goes more like "Wouldn't making those voters the 'swing votes' of their districts give them more political power by forcing both parties towards their desired outcomes?" I'm firmly in the second camp, and also to take the "human equation" out by introducing a variational method the minimize the total perimeter of districts while maintaining county lines/city limits as constraints. We can mathematically eliminate gerrymandering - This is, of course, not absolute in the send that one could choose a different function to minimize besides the total perimeter, but that's maybe enough for a whole 'nother thread.

"Independent" councils:
I typically oppose these. We (fine, I) don't want unelected people or people elected with all the care that the local school board is typically given to make major decisions. I am okay with independent parties producing documents for the public to freely read to better hold their elected officials accountable.

Some policy ideas I would like to see:

• Ranked-choice voting
• sqrt(N) weighting performed for executive positions
• Variational approach to remove gerrymandering and encourage public debate
• A searchable database for budget expenses for the government. I don't want to petition the governemtn to see the books, I want a website where I stick my zip code in and I can see public school budgets, administrative salaries, and where the money we give in taxes goes.
• Removal of holding states hostage to fed policies for unrelated tax allotments (no making education or road funs dependent on sale of alcohol age restrictions, etc).
• Removing the notion that the government can be racist as long as it's the good kind of racism. See, for example, Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.

A last comment on structure: Monarchy is bad, even when it's good. Freedom is good, even when it's dangerous. We're not doing enough to separate out where the line is based on actually statistical levels of danger - all measurable truths are statistical, and it'd be nice if people understood some of the basics (I ain't an expert in stats, but we can go pretty far with the basics).

On the society...

Education:
We spend more per student than any other country on public education, and have dreadful results. We need a complete audit of how we're spending our education tax dollars on every level. Throwing money at it doesn't actually fix everything - there are underlying cultural issues. We can provide resources for self-improvement to allow those born into less affluence an opportunity to improve their station in life. This supply of opportunity is a good investment/charity for our society. I'm wholeheartedly against cancelling student debt without service like what is being proposed now. I lean towards states being able to set tuition limits for public colleges and making the colleges do whatever they have to in order to meet the mark - Don't want to be restricted? Don't take gov handouts. The American people dug their own ditch in the college debt issue - they need to climb out themselves.

Political funding:
Unpopular take, I think Citizens United was the right decision. Why shouldn't I be allowed to use my resources to advertise a candidate I believe in. If we distrust big money, big tech, etc, then disregard what they have to say or what they give a platform to.

Consensus:
The notion that consensus rules all is nonsense. A mass of people can be deluded out of social momentum. The idea that we can or even worst, should, "shut down" arguments because of the people saying them is absurd - We, including me, are all guilty of this, but we should fight that urge.

Conservatives aren't politically active enough:
I view myself as a conservative (I've been called alt-right and center-right by people at college, a Democrat by at least one relative, and a gov spy on INGO... whatever all of that means when taken together). More specifically, I've labeled myself as a progressive conservative, by which I mean we can attempt to make minimally intrusive laws while also providing opportunities for change. I'm a conservative in the sense that I don't think we should make changes without reason, but progressive in the sense that when we know we have issues, we can make a change. Too often, conservatism is taken to mean taxes bad, poor people bad, and the only solution is to do nothing. I'm not on board with that brand of conservatism, and I'd rather not be labeled that way. I think our investments in change can be data-driven and constitutionally-conscious. Conservatives have not been voting enough, and they have not done enough to rebrand in the eyes of the youth. Part of this is that young people have squishy brains, but part of it is that the ideals that are competing against ours prey on their emotions. We have a lot of work to fight the fight that's worth fighting. We need to be more engaged with people. Even socially, this can be somewhat exhausting. I'm known as the conservative grad student in the program, and it seems like my last few months that all evening social events eventually turn into me debating people. It's a bit draining, but I don't see it changing before graduating. We have to engage, and we have to do our best to indicate that contrary viewpoints doesn't make the other people evil or a [whatever]ist.

On individual values, we can often get bogged down by biases or unconvincing arguments. And there will always be a place for reasonable people to disagree. People have different estimations as to the weight of a given assumption in the mental (or detailed) calculations.

• For an example, we can take gay marriage (it's not going away, people). I've yet to hear a good reason why a religious institution should be required to union any couple they don't wish to marry, but I don't see any reason why two people can't chose their de facto insurance beneficiaries or family hospitalization rights arbitrarily. But the argument wasn't framed that way in my younger days, so I wasn't particularly receptive towards it. If we're talking about legal rights (insurance, special visitation), then that should be the framing of the argument. If there's a competition of rights (should an insurance institution be required to provide that coverage, etc), then there should be a careful discussion as to where that line is.

Because individual values vary, we should strive to make any governmental intervention as minimal as possible. The government always claims to make the minimal intrusion... They lie; it's our responsibility to push back.

 

[breakingcontact]

I like the form of government we have now with one caveat, you volunteer for the office and we vote quarterly to either keep you or vote you out. Being voted out means that you will be hanged the following Sunday after church on the federal building steps. To avoid being hanged you can resign ahead of the quarterly vote.

You had me in the first half! I'm not big on turning folks over to the mob if they aren't happy.

 

[Jeepster48439]

The twelfth amendment should be repealed. It changed the way the President and Vice-President were chosen. I don't necessarily see having them from different parties as a bad thing.

 

[Twangbanger]

I'd vote for this:

• A searchable database for budget expenses for the government. I don't want to petition the governemtn to see the books, I want a website where I stick my zip code in and I can see public school budgets, administrative salaries, and where the money we give in taxes goes...

 

[Shadow01]

You had me in the first half! I'm not big on turning folks over to the mob if they aren't happy.

They can always resign to avoid the mob