Comment by perihelions
1 year ago
- "To Address the National Emergency"
A fast-moving emergency that can't be fixed by normal constitutional lawmaking processes, and must resort, exceptionally, to executive-branch emergency decrees—for expedience. Nevermind the executive order it's drawing authority from was written three years ago. It was a fast-moving emergency then, too, I suppose.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/25/2021-01... ("Taking Additional Steps To Address the National Emergency [sic] With Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities" (2021))
We're in a permanent emergency now. Which is no surprise - if a mere voluntary act of declaring emergency lets the government do what they otherwise can't - why not declare it over and over?
Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
In the US we have 42 (!) ongoing national emergencies. The oldest dating back to 1979. I think most of US-based HN readers never lived in non-emergency US.
That’d be September 1978 – November 1979 and before then during the roaring twenties if I read this right.
Maybe POTUS should declare an emergency to reduce the number of emergencies?
Looks like that's exactly how they got a full non-emergency year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_of_the_Special_Committe...
Of course, it didn't last long - as soon as the focus moved on, emergencies started popping back up.
They are declared in an emergency (most of them are sanctions to freeze money and freedoms of foreigners). That does not mean you live in an emergency. That they are still active means only that the Parlament was too lazy or too blocked to put them in a law.
Legally, it means exactly that - the government wasn't allowed to do X, but they said the magic word "emergency", and now they are allowed to do X as much as they want, until they decide they are done. Of course, this means they were always allowed to do X, it's just that the public will eat it more easily if instead of saying "the government can take your freedoms anytime" they'd say "the government can't take you freedom ever - except if there's a real dangerous emergency". Functionally, those are exactly the same, but the latter sounds much more "reasonable".
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Fun fact: we've got active national emergencies dating back to 1979! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
They're mostly sanctions regimes though it looks like which the Executive can largely implement on it's own (under current constitutional interpretations). It probably included other things that have since been ended and the sanctions are the only thing really left.
Geez … those are some long emerging occurrences.
So national security trumps democracy and freedom? What do you have left to protect when you give it all up? Might as well just elect a king and be done with it.
Freedom has been on a steady decline since the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 when established banking dynasties seized control over the currency of the country. The symbolic destruction of the constitution occurred on 9/11/2001 when the modern police state went into full force.
We established the Fed (and later, the FDIC) because people were sick and tired of bankers controlling monetary policy and wiping out their life savings. How the Fed turned into the ancap Boogeyman is the real destructive force in our society.
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You elect a executive branch to protect you. Sometimes that includes executive orders. And if these survive the check and balances, maybe it is for the greater good.
If you do not want that, the country has to work on a functional Parlament and switch away from a presidential system.
This level of lack of understanding the basics of our system of government is why we used to have civics classes.
If someone is using infomercial level logic/details/understanding to get you riled up, step one is to step back and get a better understanding, not to grab a pitchfork and get bitter.
An post highlighting that the government is soliciting comments shows we don't actually have a king that can do whatever they want. You personally can comment on this proposal, and if you have a compelling argument, can stop it or in the future force your comment to be addressed. Remember the standard is that the Federal government's actions can not be arbitrary and capricious.
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Why elect a king when you already have a private group of bankers running the show
Systems run the show, not people.
"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?": I believe that nobody is running the show. The systems we have created are more complex than we understand. I think a few people individually understand a few aspects of the different systems (we are not at the complete mercy to these systems).
I also believe that we have a psycological need to know our social heirachies therefore we create stories about who we think is in control. That need creates conspiracy theories! That need creates narratives that certain people are running the world (but when you look closy at those people they are not running things - they don't understand how everything works even though they put much effort into trying to).
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Its long been this way. Even in the 1950s the were fed justices commenting that if a nuclear bomb were to be stolen, its retrieval would be a reasonable predicate justifying suspension of the bill of rights until the warhead's retrieval.
Ironically enough, we’d already lost one by then: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-missing...
Don't worry--we seem to be actively working on this one, too.
And lose the profits on electoral show every 2 years? Do you know how much money can one make on an election? That's be silly to give up all that.
There's an argument to be made that we would be far better off with a benevolent monarchy than whatever this is.
Dynastic monarchies have one advantage over liberal democracies: If you want your bloodline to stay in power, you are incentivised to leave the country off better than you inherited it - if you act out too much, there's a good chance your offspring will follow you not on the throne, but on the guillotine. This immediately makes 'fuck you, I got mine' style politics unfeasable.
There is no such thing as a benevolent monarchy, if that monarchy exists as anything more than a figurehead. No position of absolute and uncheckable power, least of all derived from a claim of divine right or racial purity, can be considered benevolent.
Yes, an argument can be made. And such an argument can and should be quickly discarded with a glance at the last thousand years or so of human history. We tried it. Rolling the dice that the next king or tsar or emperor to own the people will at least treat them kindly. And we decided that being owned by a government in which we have no franchise is a bad idea. A very bad idea.
In a monarchy at least there's a chance of getting a good ruler by the genetic lottery. In a political system almost inevitably the people who get to the top are the best liars and manipulators, not good people.
If we ever could find a Superman who would agree to be a benevolent monarch, sure. The only problem is that Superman is actually a work of fiction (and even a fictional one would refuse the role) and real people have, let's say, not so stellar record of being benevolent. It's one of those nice ideal arguments that works very well as long as you are allowed to assume magical entities that can't actually exist in the real world.