lhopki01

Probably not even objectively. My neighborhood has less than half the population of had 30 years ago because it's all retired people in single family homes where 30 years ago it was all families. They've even closed down the school because of it.

A trivial look at the Panama canal will show that it is a not a connection to a lake but rather it goes through a lake. Bypassing the lake would require digging a length of canal longer than the existing canal. So you would be dumping salt water into a freshwater lake.

What makes you think the Republicans are trying to protect the borders? From what I can see they're not trying to do that. They're just trying to make a permanent underclass of scare workers who they can pay poverty wages to. I only really see raids in cities and not the farms or countryside abattoirs that hire lots of illegal immigrants. If they really cared about illegal immigration then just remove the pull factor. Go after the employers of illegal immigrants. Make it a requirement for them to confirm immigration status before hiring anyone. Actual consequences for hiring illegal immigrants would rapidly remove the pull factors.

How are you measuring that? There are plenty of developed countries with a higher immigrant share like Switzerland and Australia. If you're taking about visible minorities then Canada has a higher proportion of the population.

What happens when no one is willing to be a police officer to enforce your negative liberty at the going rate?

>Bureaucracies have diseconomies of scale. There is a point past which "larger" is no longer getting you significantly better amortization of fixed costs and is instead just increasing communication costs, adding layers of middle management, exacerbating the principal-agent problem and making you a more attractive target for corruption.

You write this as a self evident truth but it isn't. In what way is having a single trucking standard for the entire country less efficient than having 50? In what way is having a single currency across the entire country less efficient than having 50? In what way is having a single standard for approval of medication less efficient than having 50?

The US's advantage is precisely because of it's scale. It provides a massive addressable market allowing companies to scale rapidly.

I can understand your point in terms of negative liberty but I tend to hold positive liberty to be just as important. It is not sufficient to me that there is no law preventing me from having healthcare, I expect that the government should ensure I have the ability to have a healthy life.

The 10th amendment isn't clear. Too many areas are dual responsibility. That's never going to be clear.

The issues are intertwined. The Constitution is sacred so therefor the system of government it's setup is sacred and so on.

There are plenty of examples from history and now of better governed countries. I don't know how anyone can look at the US and think it's success is because of constitution and not from being the 3rd largest country on earth with a land empire full of abundant resources that it's never given up and successfully assimilated via imported populations.

It's quite different. The House of Lords was much more powerful well into the 19th century. The monarch was hardly a powerless figure in those times. The Bill of Rights 1689 probably shifted the power more towards Parliament than before but the monarch was still very powerful. The UK system continues to evolve with notable precedents being set very recently like requiring a consultation of Parliament before embarking on military action and the limitation of prorogation powers.

The setup isn't the problem. The refusal to evolve is the problem.

I'd argue that it wasn't really the system in place. The system in place was one of states governing themselves. Before independence the states didn't really deal much with each other.

Yes I understand it was designed that way 250 years ago. What I don't understand is why so many Americans think that it was perfect. Why aren't Americans open to the idea that their system of "separation of powers" is fundamentally flawed. I went to an American school and separation of powers is talked about is as if it's the only possible right answer.

The US quickly realized that the loose federation wasn't going to work and centralized a lot of power. It should continue to evolve it's system.

It's worth noting that even the US doesn't think it's system is a good idea. When it imposes a new government on countries (like Iraq) it chooses a parliamentary system.

It's just another thing that means people don't face the consequences of their own actions. If the extremeness of the elected party is blocked by the filibuster then people are angry at things not changing and so go even more extreme.

A similar problem in the United States is the excessive amount of law making by the Judiciary. In most countries the Judicary doesn't' make law it just tells Parliament that they need to change the law. This again means the consequences of who you voted for are not faced.

The pressure builds till there's a breaking point.

Any system designed for gridlock will lead to increasing anger and pressure that will eventually break out in bad ways. If people see the results of their own actions then they are not going to end up so extreme.

I'm not sure why Americans think that the creation of agencies is the problem when other well governed countries do the same. The idea that a legislative body could possible create appropriate regulation in a modern complex world is crazy. That's what a parliamentary system solves. It keeps the executive accountable to the legislative at all times.

Almost every country ranked for having the least corruption is a parliamentary system. Actually proportional parliamentary seem to be even better in terms of little corruption.

The reasonable set of ground rules seem to favor states over the will of the majority of the population. It is possible to change the constitution with states representing only 25% of the population. And remember you'd only need a majority in each of those states so could be way less of the population.

Overall the system seems flawed in that instead of having clearly delegated areas of responsibility to states and then doing the federal system as based on the population of the whole country it muddled areas and then made a federal system that couldn't respond to the population.

I'm not sure why Americans are so certain that their system of separation of powers is the right one. Most countries don't separate the executive and legislative like that. The executive is whoever can command the support of the legislative. If you think about the US system it makes no sense. An executive can just ignore the rules created by the legislative by just not enforcing it and the only means to stop that is a 2/3 majority in a body that by it's nature is not representative of the population but rather of States.

As far as I can tell the US system is designed for gridlock. Things like filibuster, lower house elections every two years, state elected upper body, electorate system are all designed to create girdlock.

While Americans as a whole are to blame for some of this they are working in a completely broken system. In tech we try not to blame a person when something goes wrong so we look at what process allowed this to happen. I think many of the US problems are explained by their underlying system which is basically a copy of the English one at the time of Independence with a monarch and a parliament. Unlike the English system though it barely evolved since then.