(BTW, I wish we had more truly partisan lefties on here to argue with. I miss TCBF)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... crats.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;How Liberals Are The New Autocrats
Progressives may preach the joys of localism, but the trend in government is all the other way in everything from climate change to the economic complexion of your neighborhood.
The End of Localism
This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders—the super-rich, their pet non-profits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat—gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.
For many of the world’s leading countries—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—such top down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won’t have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.
The will to power is unmistakable. California Governor Jerry Brown, now posturing as the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the “coercive power of the state” to make people live properly by his lights. California’s high electricity prices, regulation driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States may be a bane for middle and working class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters.........................
Some leading progressives, like Nation contributor and Bay Area activist Zelda Bronstein, attack the growth of regional governments, designated to force compliance with state and federal mandates, as fundamentally undemocratic, embracing “insular, peremptory style of decision making.” Even millennials, who have tended to the left, are skeptical about over-centralized government. A recent National Journal poll, showed that they, like most Americans, are not enamored of top-down solutions: less than a third favor federal over locally-based solutions.
Simply put, there is no huge appetite for ever expanding federal power among the majority of the populace. What is missing, outside of nihilistic opposition to all government, is a strong movement advocating for more authority in the hands of local communities, families, and volunteer organization. This does not necessarily mean a decline in environmental standards, since most people care most about the places where they and their families reside. Even with climate change, a carbon tax could be approved without adopting the California formula of ever more mega-regulations covering virtually every aspect of life.
As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, the genius of this republic lies not in its central state, but in its dispersion, voluntary association, and ideological diversity. If we undermine the legacy of our federal structure to something more akin to that, say, of France or Russia, the United States could no longer play its historic role as a rare beacon of independence and self-government in a world increasingly dominated by various manifestations of centralized tyranny.
See oligarchies, monopolies, there's a shit ton of examples.
I saw that to and thought "da fuck?"
