RE: Adsactly Education - Have We Lost Capitalism and Democracy?
Everything that you have said is true in pretty much every country ... not just in the USA. Centralization works up to a point. Why is it that certain countries do well in the Olympics while only having a population of a few million while some countries with 100s of millions do less well. Norway (population roughly 5 million) has 169 members of parliament; Canada (population roughly 36 million) has 338 members of parliament; USA (roughly 325 million) has 435 members of the house of representatives.
For each of the countries to have the same amount of representation as Iceland (population roughly 334 thousand) has 63 members of the Alþingi:
Norway: 943 representatives
Canada: 6,790 representatives
USA: 61,302 representatives
Why do we have governments at all? Historically a group of people would get together and send a single person in their midst to represent them in another group of people who represent them in another group of people. In Canada's early legislative history there were a couple of parties but it was overwhelmed by a group of "loose fish" ... people who had been elected as independents ... truly representing the position of their groups.
Today this is changed. Every person in Canada goes to the government at least once per year when they file their taxes. Why do we need a small group of people decide how we want to spend our money. I am sure that Amazon can teach them how to create a shopping cart. I want to spend a certain amount of infrastructure (roads, bridges etc.), I want to spend a certain amount on education, healthcare and as far as the military goes I am more interested in spending money in areas of rescue especially since they tend to get called out during blizzards and floods. As far as spending 6 million dollars for the salary of the head of a special interest group I have no interest in ... I would probably nix that.
I recognize that there are some laws that need to be made ... but I am willing that a random sample of 100 people or even 1000 people could be drawn from the general population (like jury duty) and sequestered in video conferencing rooms. Interested parties could step forward and put forward their perspectives and each "jury member" could decide based on the arguments put forth.
As far as minority rights, there needs to be a recognition of equity. In Canada there was a bill passed Bill C-16 which propelled Jordan Peterson to the forefront. Not only is it compelled speech (it is against the law... hate speech to call a person by one pronoun if they want to be called something else). According to some interpretations I have broken the law just by writing this paragraph. If I am carted away, some of the pronouns that I want to be referred to include "Oh God, Oh God, Oh God ... master of the universe ... best in bed" and another one requires a lot of body language and full frontal nudity.
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A couple of things here that I really like. I really, really like the idea of random selection. I'm not so sure it transfers well to national issues, but at a state level, certainly. I think it would work just fine, so long as selection was truly random.
Hate speech? We have tipped completely over trying to satisfy everyone. The minorities MUST be protected, but in all actuality, so must the majority. I believe this issue will ultimately settle itself, but the interim could be gruesome.
Possibly the problem is that the USA has too few people in control of certain aspects of the economy and legislation. I believe that one way to deal with this is for each municipality to issue its own cryptocurrency. This is an incentive for local businesses and less so for large corporation such as Walmart which tend to siphon equity out of regions. If a currency can only be spent locally it will have a high velocity of money.
As far as minorities, they shouldn't have any rights superior to individuals (the smallest minority). Instead of having affirmative action enabling specific minorities to have precedence in attaining higher education, enough seats should be available to allow everyone to go to school. If poor people cannot afford it, the prices should be subsidized for everyone. For instance it costs around $13,000 CAD ($10,000 USD) for a Canadian student to go to school. This covers everything including housing, food, tuition etc. This is almost attainable for all people. Meanwhile our provincial government has been running a pilot project to introduce universal basic income. It would probably be about $1000 per person. Immediately this puts university education within the grasp of everyone. Even the poorest should be able to earn enough during the summer semester to cover any shortfall.
As I said, satisfying the rights of the individual is a far equitable solution than a specific group.