Is American Government Good or Bad?

VanceInWA · Jun 20, 2022

The B said:
the government is neither good nor bad. just like guns are neither good nor bad. theyre both tools that can be used to do things that are harmful or beneficial to different people or peoples

There is some logic in that statement, but there is also a massive difference. Guns are inanimate objects. They can only be used for "good" or "bad" purposes based on human control of that object. However, government is a social construct borne of human design. Consequently, it can originate into existence for "good" or "bad" purposes, and that is only how it originates. As human constructs all governments continually evolve for "good" or "bad" purposes. You are correct, however, that the extent to which government is "good" or "bad" is in the eye of the beholder/beneficiary, reflecting the intended elicitation of perspectives in this thread.

CLT65 · Jun 20, 2022

Any human institution is only as good as the humans running it. That includes governments (democracies, monarchies, dictatorships, etc.), as well as court systems, police departments, libraries, churches…

Government is necessary and important. The degree to which it should control and order society is the question.

Bam · Jun 20, 2022

In its current state, American government is a joke. Big government is bad and we let our government get too big. Government is supposed to be transparent, instead we have a government that intrudes into every aspect of our lives, everything from freedom of speech and the second amendment.

The current President of the United States of America is an incoherent senile dementia patient and the Vice President is a genuine idiot who cannot speak without uncontrollable laughter. Neither can read prepared statements without failure. Our government under democrat leadership has done and is doing everything they can to destroy the American way of life.

Our country's greatest mistake was not enacting term limits early on, this should have been done when we put limits on the Presidency. Instead we have worthless career politicians that only enrich themselves while doing nothing for the American people. Changing the constitution now would be too dangerous and open the door for the wrong people to meddle where they should not.

VanceInWA · Jun 21, 2022

CLT65 said:
Government is necessary and important. The degree to which it should control and order society is the question.

I intuitively sense that CLT65 is on the right track. The general purpose of government is twofold, to secure a people against external threats, and to internally exert control over its own citizens in order to achieve order in society. For the people, that internal control takes the form of rewards for conforming to established rules, and punishments for deviant behavior. This is generally good for a functioning society, and more commonly that internal control is achieved indirectly through social norms as opposed to at the point of a gun. The problem is when the exertion of social control becomes oppressive such that previously "normal" activities get defined as deviant behavior, and that almost always results in a loss of liberty. That kind of oppression means more reliance on the point of the gun to exert control over the people. We are seeing this in real time as Leftists work feverishly to classify gun ownership and usage into deviant behavior, with consequent punishments (at the point of a gun) to follow. It is incumbent upon us, the American people, to absolutely resist and prevent the Left from succeeding in that oppression.

loadzz · Jun 22, 2022

Lazyfaire said:
Don't be one of them.

Be John Galt !!

That book sucked.

The American government is a force of world historical levels of evil, but for none of the reasons being presented or discussed in this thread. And for all the constitutional originalists who love to whine about extra amendments, I'm sure you're smart enough to know that those were all added to make capitalism more efficient? correct? The country was nearly toppled by a peasant rebellion right after its founding because the idealist founding fathers didn't actually know how political economy worked.

monkeybutler · Jun 22, 2022

loadzz said:
The American government is a force of world historical levels of evil, but for none of the reasons being presented or discussed in this thread.

Okay. Enlighten us.

loadzz · Jun 22, 2022

monkeybutler said:
Okay. Enlighten us.

The entire premise of the United States was as a social pressure relief valve for old world emigrants who either couldn't or wouldn't hack it in a Europe where arable land was largely spoken for. Providing these people with land involved the wholesale slaughter of a native populace not even considered human by the enlightened founding fathers. To this day the descendants of those same natives live on blighted lands allotted to them by a government that seldom respects the treaties they forced them to sign at gun point.

The United States maintained (in the south and southwest) a system of chattel slavery long after it had become inefficient to do so. Worried that they one day might have to do actual work, southern aristocrats and politicians started a treasonous war of aggression to head off the expansion of northern capital that resulted in 600000 men, mostly poor and working class, losing their lives. As punishment for this, these same aristocrats and politicians were given a leveraged buyout. Receiving public money as recompense for their lost "property", had their lands restored, and continued to blight American politics through themselves and their descendants forever after.

From the steam engine onward, the US began a series of blood drenched colonial adventures done at the behest of the moneyed classes for cheaper and more abundant raw material inputs. From the Philippine-American war to our many adventures in being the private army of the Dole and United Fruit Company corporations, our footprint in central and South America/the South Pacific during this time is not as a benevolent bestower of democracy, but as the jackboot of authoritarian and social Darwinist imperialism that kept large swathes of the population of the Western Hemisphere immiserated.

Post World War Two, in the name of fighting "communism" (read: social democracy) we trained and installed governments and regimes who killed untold millions in the names of anti communism. Suharto's Indonesia, NGO Dinh-Diems South Vietnam, Syngman Rhee's South Korea, Pinochet's Chile, The House Of Saud, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Rafael Trujillo, Fulgencio Batista, the list goes on and on and on and on.

But this isn't even ancient history! The US continued to arm the Contras even when it became obvious they were better at raping and beheading children and nuns than they were at fighting the barely organized Sandinista government. We invaded Grenada when it looked like the New Jewel government was going to try to run the country on terms favorable to native grenadans. Our imposition of economic shock therapy on the former Soviet Union resulted in a calamitous collapse in living conditions, spurring a life expectancy drop greater than the Second World War had caused. We embargoed Iraq until an entire generation of Iraqi children died of malnutrition and preventable disease. We invaded Iraq (illegally) a second time to create a makework plantation for government contractors for the low low cost of 1 million dead Iraqis. We invaded afghanistan after our wily CIA asset masterminded a bombing of the world trade centers and occupied it for 20 years.

-line break-

On our way out in ignominious defeat we imposed upon afghanistan crippling sanctions that are starving the people of that country to death. We are currently aiding and abetting a genocide in Yemen, funding and arming Islamic extremists in western China, and giving all our shiny new military toys to neo nazi paramilitaries in the Ukraine.

It is harder to flip to a date in modern US history and find a day where we weren't interfering in democratic processes or shedding blood in the name of cheap goods than it would be to find one where we weren't. But here's the rub. All of this is done in the name of keeping you and me fat and happy. You could critique the government for its many foreign excesses but knowing about those is harder than just complaining that it's tyranny you can no longer dump bug spray into aquifers.

Critiquing the government for any of this means also that you're inherently critiquing capitalism, since all the tyrannical measure adopted since the original constitutional convention have been adopted in the name of capital flowing freely and enriching that same set of northeastern aristocrats who constituted the founding fathers.