I'm not a citizen of the U.S. so maybe I'm missing something. Why is he not just switching to the Republican party? What's this nonsense about his ideals being more in line with the democrats? I thought the Republicans were all about the founding fathers and making sure the United States are not ruled by the old-rich?
Lessig is a member of the liberal elite. He's a Harvard professor with multiple advanced degrees, writes books and gives speeches with big words in them for academic audiences, advocates pro-consumer anti-business IP policy, and endorsed Obama.
That is emphatically not a recipe for being taken seriously by the Republican party. A successful Republican candidate is the kind of guy a redneck feels he could have a beer with, bonding over frothing hatred for Obama, who is definitely a Muslim and probably not an American. Higher education is a bed of liberal snakes, waiting to corrupt our youth and rob them of their good Christian family values. Science is to be distrusted, if not outright rejected. Job creators are the true American heroes and should be given as much power as possible and taxed as little as possible: they've earned it, through superior intellect and hard work. If anyone needs to be disenfranchised in political discourse, it's not the rich, it's the welfare queens and the unions.
You have a point: there are many similarities between Lessig's views and idealized conservatism, particularly libertarianism. But the mainstream Republican base is going to hate him personally, and after that, nothing else matters.
And yet the second place Republican candidate is an extremely well educated and successful neurosurgeon? Sounds like rednecks aren't the ones with frothing hatered
Democrats and Republicans are more similar than different. They both represent the financial elite to the detriment of those with less power. Sure, they may trade off from year to year on issues of little relevance (which party did Andrew Jackson belong to again? Abe Lincoln?), but in the end they're in lock step when it comes to who owns whom and what.
Who keeps Wall St in control of our banking regs? The popular answer is Republicans - the party of big business. The actual answer is that 4 of Hillary Clinton's top 5 all time donors are Wall St banks. In return Clinton talks tough about wall st - but only be saying we ought to "enhance" the volker rule. You can guess who will come up with that "enhancement" as well as I can. Ask a small bank what they think of Dodd-Frank (named after two Democrats, btw - and vocal "opposition" to Wall St excess). So much for the party of the little guy. You can go on and on like this for both parties. The only constant is that they support the rich.
Contrary to the other reply, the Democratic and Republican parties are extremely different. It's very unusual for someone to feel comfortable just switching from one to the other suddenly.
And don't confuse rhetoric with reality. The Republican Party is pro-business and, more importantly, anti-government - almost anarchists these days. Lessig's dreams of regulating campaign spending by corporations and the wealthy fly directly in the face of what the GOP really cares about these days.
> The Republican Party is pro-business and, more importantly, anti-government
That's the theory, but often not the practice. The Republican Party often favors bigger government, they just disagree about what to spend it on. Neither party is particularly small-government anymore.
Yeah, I can agree with that. I think it's a matter of interpretation. While they latch on to big-government things, the language is a phrasing of hostility, and the governing is borderline sabotage and hostage-taking. The shutdown crises suck.
Yeah, they sortof suck, but we're 20T in the hole and 9% of the federal budget goes to debt service. That sucks more!
When do the rabble on the right who instigate these debt showdowns get to be the righteous good guys instead of demons? Do we really need to spiral down to some catastrophe before we wake up and make a change here? It's the banksters accumulating most of the power with this debt here. I suspect the left will do the opposite of what should be done and install more growth-slowing policies and spend even more rapidly than the establishment republicans have.
Because a debt showdown would do FAR more damage to the economy than debt servicing. Default due to petulance is NOT appropriate behavior for the most important currency in the world. The showdowns aren't policy, they're grandstanding. I don't like politicians playing chicken with the global economy because they find some things distasteful. If they cared that much about debt, they could actually, you know, raise taxes.
I never know if responses like yours are the political party-line machined outrage response or what you truly believe. If you're just spouting some party line, then happily ignore the following and get back to sleep - outrage successful.
But your last sentence makes me think you actually believe, so I'm going to burn some time on you and perhaps get past the emotion here.
Like you said, just tax everyone more! A 100% tax on earnings is reasonable in some cases; Norway does it, just tax like madmen until the debt is paid.
Well, you could do that, you could even seize everyone's property to pay down the debt, (and I don't see why that isn't a reasonable proposal either.)
The problem with that plan is, even if you did those things, the growth in social security and Medicare is too fast for even asset seizure to catch. All these trust funds "running out of money" you hear about are simply the growth of those programs outstripping the IOU's owed AND the amount congress allocates extra for additional growth. You'll get to a point where the growth spirals as lives are extended, etc
Debt is the place that you can start to install some controls. That is why our media and congress always describe it as a "showdown" or "battle". The battle is quite lopsided because the vast majority of politicians in all parties don't want to touch this and hate any boat rocking, and there's a lot of lobbyists to pay back.
Can you honestly tell me what the spending priorities are for congress? There are none! Everything is important, and all budgets for every department may only grow based on their rules for baseline budgeting in the face of increasing divides between parties and people in government - in other words, the stalemate we've seen over the past 18 years results in budgets each year that are simply last year's budget + 5% with occasional huge jumps in new spending whenever a crisis arises and everyone temporarily agrees to authorize new spending.
As I said, debt is the place to begin the place to begin debate about our spending priorities. Why? Because any new debt must be _authorized_, hence voted on. It's annoying to confront tough issues! Hence all the acrimony.
Okay, so just look at your life, your security. You think the system we have here is stable? Its so fragile and full of corruption, look at what happened in 07-08 with the fraudulent loan scams the big banks were running. And congress is the flashpoint for these crises every time. So, I'm agreeing with you that there is potential for damage if we try to rein in the spending and get some priorities.
What's the alternative that you are suggesting? Don't deal with it, let the instabilities grow, and eventually have an unmanaged collapse. Do you disagree?
If one party says 2+2=4 and the other says 2+2=17, then yes, I'm spouting party line. The GOP absolutely Will. Not. Budge. on raising taxes as a revenue generator. Therefore, they are not truly serious about the deficit. They will cut spending - only in places they don't like - but they won't increase revenue. So all this stuff about the debt ceiling? That's just playing to the cheap seats. It's grandstanding, and it's irresponsible.
That said, there's nothing inherently wrong with running a deficit, as long as the debt can be serviced without breakdown (which is currently and has always been the case). Moreover, there's a strong argument that the federal government must run a deficit, for the sake of the stability of capital markets. In times of crisis, investors need to be able to shift their capital into low-risk securities, and US treasury bonds are the lowest risk reasonably liquid investment there is. Otherwise, everyone would be stuck during whatever the next crisis is, whether it's real estate or the stock market or whatever.
Social Security and Medicare are not endlessly growing monsters that engulf the universe. They represent a certain percentage of the population (retirees), and no more than that. As long as the working population can generate enough revenue to keep them going (and they can), it will work forever.
For not being a citizen you have some strong opinions about his alignment being "nonsense." Basically, republicans have utilized the increasingly deregulated campaign financing (via Super PACs) to a much later extent than Democrats. The key figure on this page[1] is on the unlimited donations category, which largely comes from the rich, old or not. I think this article[2] describing the upwards redistribution of wealth by the right might also surprise you.
EDIT: Also, even more to the point, it's been a conservative court than has unspooled campaign finance regulation to the point where Lessig felt obligated to step in.
> I'm not a citizen of the U.S. so maybe I'm missing something.
Quite a bit.
> Why is he not just switching to the Republican party? What's this nonsense about his ideals being more in line with the democrats?
The "nonsense" is the truth; there's actually considerable overlap between the positions Lessig took on issues and those taken by other notable Democrats, including Democratic candidates (most particularly, on Lessig's central issues, Sen. Sanders), with differences largely in the relative priority between issues rather than the positions on major issues. You don't see the same overlap between Lessig's positions and Republican positions (this became even more clear after he adopted a more full platform.)
> thought the Republicans were all about the founding fathers and making sure the United States are not ruled by the old-rich?
You need to look beyond the surface rhetoric at substantive policy positions to even begin to understand where the parties lie and why Lessig might feel more comfortable with the Democrats.
