BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

Hahahaha. ldrews just came out in favour of making it harder for minorities to vote.

Why are all Trump supporters in this forum so eager to reveal their deplorable side? Onex would think they don't enjoy proving Hillary right.

The law of the jungle is fine if you want to live like an animal. If not...

I find the libertarian viewpoint closely aligned to other magical thinking beliefs - to me it smacks of a romanticism with wild west movies and Ayn Rand novels, exciting when 15 but ridiculous and unrealistic at 45.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” James Madison Federalist No. 51.

First of all, it not your drinking water, it is the public's drinking water. Which to me is part of the problem. If it were indeed your drinking water you could sue the hell out of whoever is polluting it. Each person suffering damage to their drinking water could do the same. The entity polluting the drinking water would soon be out of business.

Second, why is the school providing your children's food? Isn't that your responsibility as a parent? Aren't you responsible for monitoring your child's environment for dangers? Have you totally abdicated your responsibilities?

Third, any time you give your money to someone else to manage you have the responsibility to monitor their performance. It is your money. Have you also abdicated your responsibilities in this area?

Anytime we pass a law or regulation limiting public behavior we lessen our freedom. Some of it is required in order to live together peacefully, but, in my opinion, we have taken it much too far to point of creating a "nanny" state.

And I agree that my freedom stops where it begins to infringe on your right to life, liberty, and property. We just have a disagreement on what is included in those categories.

How can I sue people for polluting the water, when polluting the water is legal? Even if I could do this, I have to wait until I get sick or die before I have evidence of harm -- wouldn't it be better to prevent the harm in the first place? And even if I could reasonably sue, consider my resources relative to those of a big coal company; how can I win? Maybe I could try a class action suit, but the Trump administration is working to make those more difficult as well.

In this country we do not believe in punishing the children for the crimes of their parents. Just because the parents are poor providers doesn't mean the children ought to starve to death, or fall ill to easily preventable diseases. It is very strange that the folks who don't believe a woman should be allowed to remove a fetus from her body (because the fetus has "rights") seem to forget about the rights of actual children, and have no problem with parents effectively killing their children by not feeding them, not vaccinating them, not allowing them a proper education, etc.

As far as money management goes, if I know enough about finance that I can figure out which investments are best for me, which are best for my fund manager, and then get the data to determine that he is working against my interest and in favor of his own... I ought to just be investing my own money! None of us knows everything; it is always necessary at some point that we trust the diagnosis of an expert. If the expert is wrong, that is a risk we take. If the expert is intentionally lying to us in order to line his own pocket, we ought to have legal recourse. It's the same situation as a doctor who prescribes an unnecessary drug because he gets kickbacks from the pharmaceutical company, or an auto mechanic who tells me the car needs an expensive repair when a simple oil change will do.

THE HAGUE — The far-right politician Geert Wilders fell short of expectations in Dutch elections on Wednesday, gaining seats but failing to persuade a decisive portion of voters to back his extreme positions on barring Muslim immigrants and jettisoning the European Union, according to early results and exit polls.

The results were immediately cheered by pro-European politicians who hoped that they could help stall some of the momentum of the populist, anti-European Union and anti-Muslim forces Mr. Wilders has come to symbolize, and which have threatened to fracture the bloc.

Voters, who turned out in record numbers, nonetheless rewarded right and center-right parties that had co-opted parts of his hard-line message, including that of the incumbent prime minister, Mark Rutte. Some parties that challenged the establishment from the left made significant gains.

The Dutch vote was closely watched as a harbinger of potential trends in a year of important European elections, including in France in just weeks, and later in Germany and possibly Italy. Many of the Dutch parties that prevailed favor the European Union — a rare glimmer of hope at a time when populist forces have created an existential crisis for the bloc and Britain prepares for its withdrawal, or “Brexit.”

“The Netherlands, after Brexit, after the American elections, said ‘Whoa’ to the wrong kind of populism,” Mr. Rutte told a wildly enthusiastic crowd, excited that his party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, had come in first among the parties and lost fewer seats than it had feared.

“Today was a celebration of democracy, we saw rows of people queuing to cast their vote, all over the Netherlands — how long has it been since we’ve seen that?” Mr. Rutte said.

Alexander Pechtold, the leader of Democrats 66, which appeared to have won the most votes of any left-leaning party, struck a similar note underscoring the vote as a victory against a populist extremist.

“During this election campaign, the whole world was watching us,” Mr. Pechtold said. “They were looking at Europe to see if this continent would follow the call of the populists, but it has now become clear that call stopped here in the Netherlands.”

If someone damages your private property or interferes with its use, you are already damaged. You don't have to wait for human damage. And trying to prevent potential damage to your property without interfering with others' use of their property would be very difficult indeed. How can one prove that their actions are potentially damaging unless actual damage is done? Otherwise I could prevent you from driving a car because you could potentially damage me.

Your viewpoint toward incompetent parents and the effects on their children is very humanitarian but is not anything mandated by the Constitution. And forcing other people to pay taxes to support your humanitarian inclinations is just an indirect form of robbery. Citizens and children have rights against actions of government or other people, they do not have rights to have the government make up for their shortcomings. There is no objection to you and your associates banding together to voluntarily do so, but plenty of objection to using the government as a vehicle to do so.

And the fact that you do not know enough to properly manage your money does not impose an obligation on anyone else to do so for you. To protect you against fraud and deceptive advertising yes, to protect you against bad choices of managers no.

In my opinion, government is not our nanny and should not be. You obviously have a brain. Use it!

From Geert Wilders Falls Short as Wary Dutch Scatter Their Votes


Huzzah!

Whomever has the majority dictates to the minority with little if any protections. ... Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny.

So basically:

1. You see no value in common resources. I should buy my own water and air, and if someone pollutes it I can sue. If I can't afford this (or can't afford to beat a giant corporation in court), then I deserve to die.
2. If I'm a child whose parents are poor or neglectful and don't provide food or medical care or me, then I deserve to die. At least you have no problem with this.
3. If someone lies to me and convinces me to give them money, it is all my fault. The people who do the thieving are smart and ought to run things (see: Trump, Donald); the people who couldn't see it coming deserve to be poor and probably die.

Nice vision of society you have there. If that's where we're headed, I'm happy to be moving to a more sensible country!

ldrews is the gift that keeps on giving.

After about 50 posts proclaiming "We had an election. We won, you lost. Get over it, and let us do what the winner wanted to do" ldrews warns us of...



It's democracy in action when the winner of the election agrees with ldrews. It's tyranny of the majority when she doesn't. Priceless.

Excuse me, what are you smoking? I have not come out in favor of making it harder for minorities to vote, I have come out in favor of not making it easier for minorities or anyone else to vote. Your approach is inherently profiling/racist. Why would you elevate any group over the over groups?

No one is asking to elevate any group. The problem is that the GOP tries to implement voting requirements that they know many minority group members can't meet. These requirements are not necessary on their own (supporters claim that they're to protect against voter fraud, but there's no credible, significant threat of this), they only exist to disenfranchise these demographics, which just happen to vote mostly Democratic.

The general progress in the US has been toward fewer impediments to voting. When the country was founded, only property-owning white men could vote. 4 amendments to the Constitution addressed extending voting rights, prohibiting discrimination based on race, sex, or failure to pay tax, and lowering the voting age to 18.

https://en.wikipedia...e_United_States

Adding restrictions such as requiring a driver's license are counter to the general direction we've been moving.

I would like to see all legal voters enfranchised. I also would like some assurances that illegal voting and voting fraud are avoided as much as possible. Do you have any suggestions on how we might achieve both goals?

As you point out the demographic most affected by voter ID requirements happens to vote mostly Democratic. It is the demographic that is also suspected of harboring illegal voters (in California illegal immigrants are issued drivers licenses and are automatically registered to vote).

COLUMBUS, Ohio — In recent months, I’ve frequently found myself in places hit hard by manufacturing job losses, speaking to people affected in various ways. Sometimes, the conversation turns to the conflict people feel between the love of their home and the desire to leave in search of better work.

It’s a conflict I know well: I left my home state, Ohio, for the Marine Corps when I was 19. And while I’ve returned home for months or even years at a time, job opportunities often pull me away.

Experts have warned for years now that our rates of geographic mobility have fallen to troubling lows. Given that some areas have unemployment rates around 2 percent and others many times that, this lack of movement may mean joblessness for those who could otherwise work.

But from the community’s perspective, mobility can be a problem. The economist Matthew Kahn has shown that in Appalachia, for instance, the highly skilled are much likelier to leave not just their hometowns but also the region as a whole. This is the classic “brain drain” problem: Those who are able to leave very often do.

The brain drain also encourages a uniquely modern form of cultural detachment. Eventually, the young people who’ve moved out marry — typically to partners with similar economic prospects. They raise children in increasingly segregated neighborhoods, giving rise to something the conservative scholar Charles Murray calls “super ZIPs.” These super ZIPs are veritable bastions of opportunity and optimism, places where divorce and joblessness are rare.

As one of my college professors recently told me about higher education, “The sociological role we play is to suck talent out of small towns and redistribute it to big cities.” There have always been regional and class inequalities in our society, but the data tells us that we’re living through a unique period of segregation.

This has consequences beyond the purely material. Jesse Sussell and James A. Thomson of the RAND Corporation argue that this geographic sorting has heightened the polarization that now animates politics. This polarization reflects itself not just in our voting patterns, but also in our political culture: Not long before the election, a friend forwarded me a conspiracy theory about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in a pedophilia ring and asked me whether it was true.

It’s easy to dismiss these questions as the ramblings of “fake news” consumers. But the more difficult truth is that people naturally trust the people they know — their friend sharing a story on Facebook — more than strangers who work for faraway institutions. And when we’re surrounded by polarized, ideologically homogeneous crowds, whether online or off, it becomes easier to believe bizarre things about them. This problem runs in both directions: I’ve heard ugly words uttered about “flyover country” and some of its inhabitants from well-educated, generally well-meaning people.

I’ve long worried whether I’ve become a part of this problem. For two years, I’d lived in Silicon Valley, surrounded by other highly educated transplants with seemingly perfect lives. It’s jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse. And I’ve suspected that this optimism blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country. So I decided to move home, to Ohio.

It wasn’t an easy choice. I scaled back my commitments to a job I love because of the relocation. My wife and I worry about the quality of local public schools, and whether she (a San Diego native) could stand the unpredictable weather.

But there were practical reasons to move: I’m founding an organization to combat Ohio’s opioid epidemic. We chose Columbus because I travel a lot, and I need to be centrally located in the state and close to an airport. And the truth is that not every motivation is rational: Part of me loves Ohio simply because it’s home.

I recently asked a friend, Ami Vitori Kimener, how she thought about her own return home. A Georgetown graduate, Ami left a successful career in Washington to start new businesses in Middletown, Ohio. Middletown is in some ways a classic Midwestern city: Once thriving, it was hit hard by the decline of the region’s manufacturing base in recent decades. But the

Talking with Ami, I realized that we often frame civic responsibility in terms of government taxes and transfer payments, so that our society’s least fortunate families are able to provide basic necessities. But this focus can miss something important: that what many communities need most is not just financial support, but talent and energy and committed citizens to build viable businesses and other civic institutions.

Of course, not every town can or should be saved. Many people should leave struggling places in search of economic opportunity, and many of them won’t be able to return. Some people will move back to their hometowns; others, like me, will move back to their home state. The calculation will undoubtedly differ for each person, as it should. But those of us who are lucky enough to choose where we live would do well to ask ourselves, as part of that calculation, whether the choices we make for ourselves are necessarily the best for our home communities — and for the country.

ldrews is the gift that keeps on giving.

After about 50 posts proclaiming "We had an election. We won, you lost. Get over it, and let us do what the winner wanted to do" ldrews warns us of...



It's democracy in action when the winner of the election agrees with ldrews. It's tyranny of the majority when she doesn't. Priceless.

And you seem to prefer the law of tyranny and gang rule. Whomever has the majority dictates to the minority with little if any protections. Or whomever has the biggest gang and most firepower must be right. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny.

As a libertarian I attempt to live by a moral code: No initiation of violence or coercion in my relationships, directly or indirectly. My relationships tend to be voluntary: all parties enter into the relationship voluntarily because they see a benefit to doing so.

Do you have a moral code and do you live by it?

For sake of discussion lets call the Netherlands a more sensible country.
At the very least hopefully posters will agree it is a welfare state a truly welfare state for sake of discussion and comparison. A country the Dutch are proud to be called a welfare state. The goal being to redistribute wealth and equalize chances for everyone. Many would argue it works amazingly well. Even so called extreme right wing parties are socialist.