The Second Ammendment Lobby and Police Safety

[TheCurmudgeon]

The best example of that I can give is something I read about the length of the official US Government manual for the establishment of an airport, just a little country airport. The current edition is about 900 pages long. The previous edition was, I read, about 90. Anyway you cut it, that is less free. And that I think is happening everywhere.

Carl,

I don' think that is anything new. Reagan bemoaned it back before the end of the Cold War. It is also not unique to the US. I think the British have complained about bureaucracy for much longer and far more than we do.

What seems to be uniquely American is how we react to it. Perhaps that is a because of our national mythology of the rugged individual. Perhaps, as 120 has also noted, the complexity and centralization of the federal government acts to create the impression of powerlessness. We are a big country. It is not easy to go to Washington and complain in person, even if you could figure out who to complain to.

But this problem has found a political voice in the Libertarian movement. So it would seem like the normal release valve for tensions around the issue of a complex and unresponsive federal system is either not working or is not truly keying in on the problem.

A scarier thought is that electoral democracy, as practiced in the United States, is no longer functioning. This is not the government of the founding fathers. They had a healthy distrust of both the common people and those in power. Originally, neither Senators nor the President were directly elected by the people. The checks on power of the President, like having to go to Congress to get permission to take the country to war, have been eroded in the name of expediency. But if that is the case, I am not hearing any arguments about what to replace the system with. The Libertarians want less government but not a different one. We seem to know what we don’t want more than we know what we want.