What's wrong with our Government?

With all the stuff going on lately in our country and around the world a lot of people are asking, what's wrong with our government?  Did they skip economics classes during high school and college?  What about history classes?  Are the people in our government stupid?  Is this any better than the last 8 years?  The big question is, do any of the people we have voted into office really matter?  Well, I do think a lot of our politicians skipped economics, but the answer to the big question is, No... not really.  

I'm not disillusioned by Democracy.  I think it's great and amazing.  But as many of you have heard me say before, the two party system has outlived its usefulness and I see it more than ever right now.  Step outside of the mindset that your side is right for a moment, and look at this from an outsiders perspective.  You have two opposing sides.  There are a lot of people who have differing opinions but our style of government forces you to join one of these parties in order to be heard.  Even our voting requires this, most states you can only vote in a primary if you are the member of that party.  If you register independent, you don't get input into whom either of the two likely candidates for president will be.

This will continue until things eventually get bad enough that people revolt, forcing a change in government.  This is risky, it risks your safety, your security of not only yourself and your family and your finances, but the country and the government which would come out of such a revolution.  Things have to be really bad for people to take this sort of risk.  But until then we are on a set path of which the course cannot be changed beyond a nudge from one extreme to the other.  More on that later.  

All of this is nothing new, I've been talking about this for years, although I don't know if anyone cares or listens.  But it is in fact a truth.  This government is an antiquated system that was adapted as a way to deal with a massive voting public when, quite frankly, the ability to deal with the numbers of votes in a direct way was impossible.  Well, technology makes it possible now.  It can be done, we can support multiple parties, we can make every vote equally important.  But it won't happen, because those in power would lose their ability to stay in power, or to place those they support in a position to gain power.  Thus, the necessity for revolution if the system is ever to change.  It requires a massive investment to create a real multiple party system, or even to move away from parties altogether.  But again, this is nothing new.

What is new, what I realized today watching everything take place in our country today, is that our path is inevitable.  With the current system, there is little opportunity to change anything.  The fact of the matter is that one party will be (mostly) in power, if they do a decent job they will likely remain in power for 8 years.  If they are doing an exceptional job, they may even win again with a new candidate and their basic agenda will continue.  The other option is to suck and piss people off causing the perception to switch to the opposing party.  Most of the time, the latter will take place, because it is much easier to find fault than it is to be impressed by a person or group.  So, the balance of power will bounce back and forth with a mostly regular pattern.  This will inevitably cause constant investment to move in one direction, the investment to move back, which will ultimately leave us somewhere in the middle.  The problem is, it is the middle of two groups, not the middle of what the people as a whole want.

 

We had a long period of great prosperity which was allowed to happen by a lack of oversight.  We allowed the free market to rule, and instead of oversight our government contributed to inflating businesses in a way that is akin to steroids, which only lead to a larger fall when our financial muscles grew to an unsustainable mass.  So, now we have to jump in the most opposite direction possible.  But none of it matters, because now we cry socialism and if these policies are anything short of miraculous, we will once again cry for change and in the end be at the same place we started; a functioning country in constant flux that can't agree on a direction for an entire decade to save our life.  

Until there is a way to express our opinion outside of these two poles, nothing can change.  And as long as there are two accepted opposing opinions that have the power to keep any third parties down and out of the picture, that opinion cannot be heard beyond the complaints of our citizens.  No third party will become a player, because nobody believes it can... and they are right.  The system is created so that no other group can become a player, and culture and tradition only perpetuate this.  This has turned a great compromise that made Democracy work on a huge scale into a facade based on an ideal that is no longer really in place.

So, if you are glad to be moving away from the Texas gunslinger mentality in Washington, great.  Bask in it while it lasts.  If you are crying over the pending socialist movements in our country, don't worry... people will get tired of it sooner or later.  Perhaps this is in some ways the one advantage to this system, that having two directly opposing forces will avoid any major change to a negative extreme.  But that safety also prevents any real improvements from being made.