[rafale]

The US is a republic, not a democracy. And for good reasons. Otherwise, politicians will try to one-up each other with promises of freebies. It's easy to win elections when you promise free healthcare, free education, free childcare,... The average person will vote in their immediate interest and not worry about the big picture. The big picture: nothing is free.

[kergonath]

> The US is a republic, not a democracy.

This pops up every now and then and is complete bullshit. A republic is a system of government with a parliament and an elected head of state. Being a republic and being a democracy are completely unrelated. There are republics that are oligarchies, dictatorships, or democracies. Similarly, there are monarchies that are oligarchies, dictatorships, or democracies.

You can discuss about legitimacy and the fact that the US is a federation of states instead of a government of citizens, but “it’s a republic not a democracy” is stupid. Using it as a way of justifying blatant undemocratic aspects of the way the US work is doubly so.

[Ekaros]

Republic simply means there is no monarch. Dictatorships are kinda interesting, but if they are elected, it still falls on side of republic.

[kergonath]

Russia and China are examples of that (republics that are also dictatorships).

[garmaine]

China has a President-for-life. That’s not a republic by any measure.

[kergonath]

Right, China is interesting. Still, it does not have a monarch, it has a parliament that elects a president (for all intent and purposes) who is the head of state. The legitimacy of the president comes from the community, and he does not own the state or the land. Citizens are not subjects.

It’s a bit blurred because of its single-party nature, but it has all of the attributes of a republic.

[Ekaros]

In general Chinese system is quite different from Western one. First being single party and second being layered, with population only having vote on lowest layer which then subsequently votes upwards until the top.

For all intents and purposes it is republic. After all republic is quite meaningless term, specially when we consider some constitutional monarchies or dictatorial leaders that don't have hereditary power.

[Ekaros]

It is not a hereditary position. One could even argue that USA isn't republic as there was two people elected from same family as head of state.

[thghtihadanacct]

I dont remember seeing the word 'free' in the posted article anywhere related to the paying for this bill. In fact, it clearly states the cost will come from taxes on the wealthy ... whom Manchin represents.

[garmaine]

West Virginia is wealthy?

[thghtihadanacct]

LoL, are you saying WV is the only people that pay Manchin? His top donations this cycle are from businesses that stand to gain by this measure not passing (see OpenSecrets.org, etc). Edit: This isnt to say the measure not passing is all his fault. Im way tired of all bill passing on party lines, however, its disingenuous to pretend Manchins motives are mostly for the people actually picking the coal out of the ground for him.

[DennisAleynikov]

those damn wealthy... and their... running the country into the ground... darn Manchin can't get his hands out of the coffers long enough to see the people suffering outside!!!

[thghtihadanacct]

Indeed, Im under the impression WV is one of the most heavily subsidized by the fed.

[klarstrup]

curious to know where you were going with this comment

[DennisAleynikov]

the people in Manchins district are reliant on coal and other non democratic agenda aligned perspectives, him acting the way he does isn't as simple as him catering to the rich....

[klarstrup]

why are the people in Manchins district are reliant on coal

[thghtihadanacct]

Because bills like this aren't passed to help raise them out of poverty.

[defaultname]

The US is a democratic republic. Canada, the UK and a number of others are parliamentary democracy.

They are ALL democracies, and I'm unaware of a single country on the planet that is a pure democracy. All are representative in some way.

This bizarre "not a democracy" (for the oldest ongoing democracy) is not based in reality at all, but someone read it somewhere and just mindlessly repeats it.

> It's easy to win elections when you promise free healthcare, free education, free childcare,... The average person will vote in their immediate interest and not worry about the big picture

In reality the "average person" votes against their own interest -- both short and long term -- at virtually every turn.

I feel like I've been trolled.

[akmarinov]

The UK is a monarchy. All power comes from the Queen, not the people, she’s the sovereign.

At least on paper.

[ryrymcfly]

Wait till you hear about the magna Carta....

The queen has no more control over the country than a hood ornament has over the direction of a car.

[rafale]

Wait until you hear about the reserve powers :P

[kgwxd]

> Nothing is free

That's what taxes are supposed to be for. What's the different if I pay 10k a year to an insurance company or the government for my family to have affordable access to healthcare? With the current system, I'm not even getting that, my entire family has never exceeded our crazy high deductibles. We have some form of control over who gets to run our government programs, no matter how small that form of control is, it's better than the zero control we have over the practices of private companies or the terrible choices private companies make about what insurance we get to even have in the first place.

[rafale]

There are differences. The biggest one imo is that the government is a package deal, it doesn't have a lot of granularity. Whether with private spending, you can chose/change/leave your service provider, giving the latter an incentive to perform. And giving you more options than 1. At least in theory, when the free markets operates well.

Private healthcare in the US has a lot of government intervention and regulation that makes it a farce.

[Ekaros]

It is democracy, but it also federal republic. Important qualifier is the federal. There are also lot of non-federal republics.

[synergy20]

Exactly right. "Rural, low population states have far too much power in the present system. This is not sustainable" is wrong in that, pure democracy leads to pure majority rule, which causes stability issues in no time, history tells a lot of those stories.

[kergonath]

Come on, there are plenty of healthy democracies in which all votes have the same weight, it’s trivial to demonstrate how wrong you are.

“One person, one vote” might have been radical 300 years ago, but it really should not be controversial in the 21st century.

[Turing_Machine]

The French are on their fifth attempt at a republic. Some of them ended...badly.

The Germans are on their second or third (depending on how you count... I don't consider DDR to have been a real republic). The first one ended...badly.

The United States is still on its first republic. If it weren't for some degree of independence for the individual states the United States would never have been formed in the first place, and, if it had been, there would likely have been many civil wars, not just one.

It's almost like a bunch of highly educated and intelligent individuals spent several years studying the failure modes of previous republics and then designing a system that would be robust against those failure modes.

[kergonath]

Europe has been under stresses that are not really comparable with what the US underwent in 2 centuries. The only really existential crisis was the civil war, whereas most European countries have been invaded a couple of times, and almost all of them had battles on their soil.

It is true that some compromises were needed because of its federalist character. In this it is much closer to Germany than to France.

> It's almost like a bunch of highly educated and intelligent individuals spent several years studying the failure modes of previous republics and then designing a system that would be robust against those failure modes.

I am not really disagreeing with you here, but what makes you think that this was not the case in other countries? Were there no highly educated and intelligent people in Europe for 2 centuries?

There was a lot of cross-pollination between France and the US at the time of the revolution, several people were involved in both. The American constitution is built on enlightenment values that were quite widely shared and Europe was not short in political thinkers either. A lot of them also benefitted from the American example.

What ended most of the French republics were coups d’états and wars. As in “the enemy is a 2 hours drive away from the capital”, not “let’s bomb another country on the other side of the world”. It’s not because of its immutable constitution that these things did not happen in the US.

In short, I think smugness is unwarranted, and the US is not immune to coups d’états, even if its geography precludes almost any wartime occupation. Also, philosophers in the 18th century were not super-human. Their work is not perfect. The lack of evolution leads to fossilisation and a shift of power towards the Supreme Court. This is a serious threat to the separation of powers, and should be taken seriously.

There are other failure modes that have been made clear in the last 2 centuries, Americans would be wise not to dismiss them and learn from others, as other learnt from them.

[Turing_Machine]

> Were there no highly educated and intelligent people in Europe for 2 centuries?

Their mistake was generally adding Rousseau and Marx into the mix, rather than stopping with Locke.

> As in “the enemy is a 2 hours drive away from the capital”, not “let’s bomb another country on the other side of the world”. It’s not because of its immutable constitution that these things did not happen in the US.

Err... before Canada became quasi-independent, the United States had a very long border with the British Empire, which was (in)famous for its penchant for grabbing territory. They even burned Washington DC at one point.

The story was the same with Mexico. In the early years of the United States, Mexico was part of the Spanish Empire, another entity noted for wars of conquest on the grand scale. And yes, after Mexican independence, the United States launched a war of conquest of its own across that border. But it could have gone the other way in the early days.

The French (another colonial power) also had massive holdings in North America.

Sorry, the "United States didn't have any war-like neighbors" theory doesn't hold.

[ryrymcfly]

I feel like the failure avoidance systems have been eroding steadily now for almost 5 decades.

Just pick a criteria on which to judge a societal system and you'll find the us near the middle bottom of the pack.

[synergy20]

Tax and Law and Republic are the three to hold the society in order with enough individual rights for the long run.

The only way I can agree on pure majority vote is that you need to qualify for it, e.g. only those who contributed to the society(taxpayers,social works, housewives raising kids,etc) can vote(disabled can vote no matter what). Voting right should be earned.

[kergonath]

> Voting right should be earned.

The problem you run into is that someone has to define how it should be earned. Several criteria have been tried (wealth, tax paid, military service, etc), and all of them have been found inadequate in one or several respects.

Several revolutions have been fought over this. Still, assuming that a perfect criterion would exist, what would be yours?

[ryrymcfly]

Mine would be qualified service to society. 2 years of public service, with no option to bypass. Service being tailored for your particular skills and abilities.

[kergonath]

This is already much more sensible than paying above a threshold in taxes, or owning a certain surface area of land, or coming from the right families. We'd have to define "public service" in such a way that absolutely everyone could perform it, including for example disabled people. Otherwise, it's just a requirement to have been fit (and male, in most cases) at some point in your life.