| I'm afraid that this risks sounding terribly terribly condescending and I don't want it to, but I truly intend the following to be helpful... > that thinks too-logically about politics There is a reason Justice Oliver Wendell Homes said "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Humans are complex and if you try to define a set of axioms (or special forms) and build up and understanding from that, it is all too easy to follow your line of thought past massively lethal flaws. In your case, there are very good reasons why we don't give the president all of the powers that are currently allocated to congress. It is very very tempting to lay out specific ones for you. Other commenters will surely do that. However, I think that would not help you learn a better way to approach thinking about human power structures and the ways that they can fail. You should start by reading (or listening to audiobooks of) more history. Read broadly, enough that you start to experience the phenomenon described here: http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html If you want some easy-to-digest things to start with, this list of resources videos is pretty good, but has the flaw that it is all from one source:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yocja_N5s1I&list=PLBDA2E52FB...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E9WU9TGrec&index=1&list=PL8...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyzi9GNZFMU&index=1&list=PL8... For understanding the law, these are a good start:
- http://lawcomic.net/guide/?page_id=5
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/ As an exercise, reading both of these and weighing them is a good one.
- http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/libertarianism.html
- http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html
- http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/18/book-review-the-machine... But I really can't actually drop a list of sources on you and give you what you need to have the instinct of thinking "What are the ways that this simplified view of things could go terribly terribly wrong." I'm possibly just giving you my biases. I really do hope you go out and read more stories of where things about how humans work, both in real life and in fiction. This applies to many human institutions beyond the federal government. https://xkcd.com/592/ |