So, what is your position on how government investment in new energy technologies should be allocated? How should conflict of interest rules be changed in light of the subprime mortgage interest debacle? Are safety regulations for coal miners currently sufficient, and should hard rock miners be subject to the same standards? Do you believe the President budget contains the right amount of discretionary spending, and if not, where should additional money be added or cut?
Those are all real questions before the government today. I’ll eat my hat if the average citizen can make intelligent decisions about all of those issues and hundreds more that government deals with on a daily basis. Even if one wanted to be active and informed, there’s simply not time enough in the day for people to be conversant in all the subjects that bear upon running the country in a decent manner.
So when the Founding Fathers say that the people are too ill-informed to run a government themselves, I don’t really think that means that people are too stupid to make decisions. I think it means that there’s no way people can be well-informed on all these matters if it isn’t their full time job.
It describes itself as a republic. It has a president and a legislative assembly which is popularly elected (although under the president’s thumb, in a de facto one-party state). It has a constitution, and it lacks a monarchy.
Yes, but I’d say that the main thing in your list that shows Cuba is a republic is the fact it lacks a monarchy. Canada, in comparison, has a popularly elected parliament and a constitution, but since it is a monarchy it cannot be a republic. Today “republic” basically means “not a monarchy”.
Well, sure, as long as we’re using your personal definitions of those words.
But most people don’t.
You’re defining yourself into a classic logical fallacy, the fallacy of the excluded middle. You’re placing before us the argument that the United States is either a republic or it is a democracy, and by the definitions you have constructed, it is the former and not the latter, and the latter is preferable.
However, according to the definitions most people in the Western world use, the United States is in fact a mixture of both, and indeed any large, complex country with a legitimate democratic process is a mixture of both. (I realize that legally, Canada and the UK are not republics; according to justanoldvet’s limited definition in use here, however, they are, since a political elite makes the final decisions.) You are claiming that “the ruling class” get to make “The real choices,” whereas in a democracy, “Everyone (eligible) gets an equal say,” and implying that the two conditions are mutually exclusive. But in fact, in the USA and every other industrialized nation, BOTH statements are true; everyone DOES get an equal say, and a small group are making the final decisions. That is the case in all modern democracies, so far as I am aware.
You cannot take a nation-state of 300 million people and say “It’s a republic” and leave it at that. You just can’t state it that simplistically.
That seems like a poor definition of a republic: “not a monarchy” and I don’t think that is correct. Under that definition, Nazi Germany in WWII would be considered a Republic.
If I describe myself as an elephant, does that make me an elephant?
And just because it goes through the pretense of elections with only one candidate on the ballot and severe penalties for dissent, doesn’t mean that they really have elections.
In no way is this the people through their own FREE WILL placing a trust in their elected representatives.
Maybe you’re thinking about something that isn’t “middle class”. I’ve never seen it defined by gender roles-- only by family income. Can you give us a cite that “middle class” is defined that way?
Keep in mind that the days of women wanting (or being told to want) that lifestyle are gone. With divorce being as easy and common as it is these days, a woman takes a huge risk by removing herself from the workforce in order to be a stay-at-home mom.
I think you’re pining for the proverbial good-old-days, which weren’t as good as our selective memory leads us to believe.
Except we live in a 930 sq.ft. condo, the cheapest housing we could find in the area; drive the next-to-bottom model of Kia (the Spectra), never eat out, conserve energy by only heating one room at night, etc., etc., etc. Living within our means would basically mean living a very poor lifestyle. I am saying that 50 years ago, a person with my job and my experience would be able to live much better on a single income. Now, our only way of surviving financially is to leave the US again (which we will probably do) or put our 3-year-old daughter in child care for 10 hours a day while my wife goes back to work (not a fucking chance). Not that we could afford full-time child care anyhow.
This is what I was trying to convey. You need to earn twice the money to have the same standard of living. Jobs don’t pay any more, so this means two incomes.
I think **RickJay ** nailed it in post #41. As a person who is an expert in precisely 2 things, I know just how much time and effort it takes to become an expert who is capable of making informed policy decisions. Even one person who does nothing else cannot be sufficiently informed to make informed decisions on all the policy issues confronting a government. Partly for this reason, legislators have staff members who brief them on the issues. And to be honest with you, since most US voters are too lazy even to make the modest effort of voting, much less educating themselves about the positions of the various people they are voting for, I think it is way beyond their scope to govern themselves. Call it elitist, if you want; I call it realistic. Specialized jobs–like performing surgeries, rebuilding transmissions, installing computer networks, and running the most powerful country on earth–should be done by specialists.
OK, without getting too personal here (I don’t want to ask for your income), it sounds like you are not a typical college professor. Are you still paying off student loans, or just getting started in your career?
I don’t know that college professors starting out 50 years ago lived all that well, btw. Can we have a cite that the average wages for that profession is lower now than it was 50 years ago (inflation adjusted, of course).
I have been teaching since 1998, and am an associate professor, but in the humanities, so my pay sucks ($56,900 per annum, right, I notice, at the low median associate professor mark from your link). Our monthly, after-tax-retirement-health insurance income is around $3100. Subtract $1700 for mortgage, taxes and condo fees, $300 for car payment, $400 for the loan we took out to cover our daughter’s adoption expenses, $600 to have our daughter in Montessori for 3 hours a day so she can get socialized and learn to play with other kids. Then subtract gas, electricity, water, clothing, groceries, medication and doctor copays, activities for our daughter (tumbling, etc.), etc., etc., all the other stuff I’ve forgotten. We have a $600 dollar computer, I don’t even buy books for myself, much less electronic gadgets or electronic toys. Our stereo system is probably 20 years old; we inherited it from my grandmother when she died several years ago. We don’t have satellite or dish tv, or anything like that. We don’t go on trips. We don’t eat out. The stats tell me I’m middle class; my lifestyle tells me I’m anything but.
I live in the greater Boston area as well and I have sympathy for you. I have run the numbers myself many times and I don’t see how anyone can call themselves middle class here if they make less than 100K. The numbers simply don’t work for a single earner household especially with kids. I applaud you for finding a way to make things work. I know many people that earn a salary in your range and seem to have more material things than you do and it makes zero sense to me. I guess that is where the whole subprime scandal comes into play.
However, have you considered living in a cheaper area of the country? You could easily do what you are trying to accomplish in Mississippi, Alabama, Kansas, or North Dakota. There are plenty of good schools in weird places that would allow you to be much more comfortable financially.
I’ve thought about it. There are two problems: (1) Cheaper areas of the country are cheaper, as a general rule, because nobody wants to live there. Okay, that is an offensive overgeneralization, but we’re not too keen on living in the US in the first place, and so if you move us to a cheaper (generally more rural) area, we would be even less happy, though presumably more financially solvent. (2) Jobs in my field are incredibly hard to find. My department chair told me, after I was hired, that there were 300 applicants for my job. So in academics, unless you are really a superstar, you have to go where the jobs are. In my case, that turned out to be Massachusetts.
This is part of why we are seriously looking abroad for next year. Teaching abroad offers the same salary, vanishingly small taxes, much lower cost of living, and in general all the things you need to live on a single income and not leave your kid in child care all day. Besides, I am addicted to the expat lifestyle; I am here more or less through force majeure.
ETA–And thanks for your commiseration, Shagnasty. I could use some sympathy!
Sorry this got into a discussion about the details of your personal financial situation. One key difference between today and 50 years ago is if you told someone you had to send your pre-school daughter to private school in order to ensure that she socialized with other children, you’d get some pretty funny looks-- even from many rich people. I applaud you for putting her welfare at such a high priority, but that is still an unusual move to make even today.
But, as you noted, you aren’t a typical example of your profession (being at the low end of the pay scale), and you live in one of the most expensive parts of the country. I think it would be a mistake to draw broad conclusions from your rather unusual circumstances.
I’ll drop this line of discussion unless you want to take it away from your personal situation and talk about trends and averages for the country as a whole. That was what brought out my original comment, anyway.
True, but it’s tough, especially around here. Most couples we know are two-income families; the kids are in school or daycare all day. There’s not the constant flow of kids and out of our house that there was in Beirut, because the demographic is so different. So for our daughter to spend significant time with other kids her age, we really don’t see any alternative but to pay to send her to school for a few hours per day.
It doesn’t really bother me; I’m just a username to people here, so it’s not like it’s really *personal * information in the full sense of the word. But I am becoming the hijack king in GD, either by directly causing or by aiding and abetting, so maybe I should re-examine my posting methods. But like I said, I really don’t have the expertise to talk about economic trends, so I probably shouldn’t even try.
Frankly, I find this discussion a lot more interesting than the semantic quibble that the OP raises. Yeah, we’re not a pure democracy. I think I had (and finished) that argument in Jr. High School.
Maybe I’m still misunderstanding you, but making a first cut does not mean you see things in black and white. It is simply a convenient way to group things so you have names for everything you’re talking about. Some people really seem to have a problem with that idea, mainly, I think, because they don’t realize that I realize that everything gets fuzzy around the edges.
I think it does. I think the problems with electronic voting in the system we have demonstrates that Direct Democracy would be so difficult to establish it would preclude all other business of government for too long.
The alternative is to take a second full-time job: Monitoring the government and voting on every bill that could affect you. A retired person or a young person could manage, and obviously the very rich and the unemployed poor could, but the middle-aged middle class and working poor would be up a creek. That is another reason Direct Democracy can’t work.
That is the hallmark of a Federal system, which a Republic (and certainly a Democracy) need not be. The flip side is that the Federal government can force businesses to adopt child labor laws and OSHA and end slavery. (Our current rather strong Federal model was born out of the Civil War and the Great Depression.) That said, I don’t like it very much either most of the time.
And here I disagree with the definition, and note that you are moving into slippery concepts without any real point of reference to reality.