CDZ Overcoming of "democracy" as precondition of stable future

[Bleipriester]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

 

[task0778]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

I cannot fathom what kind of gov't other than some form of a republican democracy is going to result in what you want. You got a better idea, please share it.

See, here's the problem: any gov't is going to be comprised of people and people are subject to the same human failings and will make the same mistakes no matter what form of gov't is in place. No question that we can and should be doing better, but the system we got now could be run more efficiently and effectively than it is. The tools are there, we just aren't using them to the best advantage.

 

[Bleipriester]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

I cannot fathom what kind of gov't other than some form of a republican democracy is going to result in what you want. You got a better idea, please share it.

See, here's the problem: any gov't is going to be comprised of people and people are subject to the same human failings and will make the same mistakes no matter what form of gov't is in place. No question that we can and should be doing better, but the system we got now could be run more efficiently and effectively than it is. The tools are there, we just aren't using them to the best advantage.

A long period of up wind is behind us and it was easy for the politicians. Problems solved themselves or were replaced by new ones. Unaccomplished things and failures are blamed on the opposition or succeeding governments.
The time has changed and we have a down wind. Now, who´s there to tell us this and that is no longer affordable, we can´t go on like this? Take Greece for example. When it collapsed the leftist party was elected as their table of presents was still well set. They had to fool the people, though, because there was no money and they had to go with the austerity plan, instead. In case of the USA, Germany, or France there would be no pool large enough to bail them out, though.

 

[task0778]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

I cannot fathom what kind of gov't other than some form of a republican democracy is going to result in what you want. You got a better idea, please share it.

See, here's the problem: any gov't is going to be comprised of people and people are subject to the same human failings and will make the same mistakes no matter what form of gov't is in place. No question that we can and should be doing better, but the system we got now could be run more efficiently and effectively than it is. The tools are there, we just aren't using them to the best advantage.

A long period of up wind is behind us and it was easy for the politicians. Problems solved themselves or were replaced by new ones. Unaccomplished things and failures are blamed on the opposition or succeeding governments.
The time has changed and we have a down wind. Now, who´s there to tell us this and that is no longer affordable, we can´t go on like this? Take Greece for example. When it collapsed the leftist party was elected as their table of presents was still well set. They had to fool the people, though, because there was no money and they had to go with the austerity plan, instead. In case of the USA, Germany, or France there would be no pool large enough to bail them out, though.

There are still a number of conservatives around who have been and still are telling everybody that the path we're on is fiscally unsustainable, which BTW is the god's truth. But you seem to be confusing mismanagement of gov't as a function of the form of gov't we now have. I cannot understand how 'overcoming' democracy with anything else would be a step in the right direction; what's the alternative? Socialism? Dictatorship?

 

[Bleipriester]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

I cannot fathom what kind of gov't other than some form of a republican democracy is going to result in what you want. You got a better idea, please share it.

See, here's the problem: any gov't is going to be comprised of people and people are subject to the same human failings and will make the same mistakes no matter what form of gov't is in place. No question that we can and should be doing better, but the system we got now could be run more efficiently and effectively than it is. The tools are there, we just aren't using them to the best advantage.

A long period of up wind is behind us and it was easy for the politicians. Problems solved themselves or were replaced by new ones. Unaccomplished things and failures are blamed on the opposition or succeeding governments.
The time has changed and we have a down wind. Now, who´s there to tell us this and that is no longer affordable, we can´t go on like this? Take Greece for example. When it collapsed the leftist party was elected as their table of presents was still well set. They had to fool the people, though, because there was no money and they had to go with the austerity plan, instead. In case of the USA, Germany, or France there would be no pool large enough to bail them out, though.

There are still a number of conservatives around who have been and still are telling everybody that the path we're on is fiscally unsustainable, which BTW is the god's truth. But you seem to be confusing mismanagement of gov't as a function of the form of gov't we now have. I cannot understand how 'overcoming' democracy with anything else would be a step in the right direction; what's the alternative? Socialism? Dictatorship?

Electing a President every for years is not equal to democracy. This means a move towards dictatorship would only be a move towards more honesty. An alternative to "democracy" should be compiled.

 

[usmbguest5318]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

Why did you scare quote "democracy" rather than "menace?" I'm not certain what meaning to take from your having done, particularly vis a vis the rest of your remarks which indicate that neither word should have been scare quoted.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.

Parties:

1. Politics is nothing more than the marketing of public policy ideas.
2. Parties are but organizations that develop and market public policy ideas.
3. Politicians are, in effect, the salespersons of some, most or all of a party's ideas.
4. As with anything one might promote and sell, money and power accrue to the organizations and individuals who sell them.

So just ask yourself: When have you ever seen a consumer marketer [1], during the selling process, do anything other than air the positive attributes of their product and, in response to any and all objections, utter whatever ameliorating rebuttals -- bunkum, pablum, etc. -- they can conceive, regardless of whether their rebuttal holds water?


Note:

1. The consumer aspect cannot be overestimated. B2B marketing is very different because, for the most part, business customers know as much about the product and surrounding factors of it as do the sellers of the product. The same is not so for many consumer goods and services, and it's certainly not so that most voters' know and understand of the breadth of factors relevant to most major public policy matters.
   
   To see what I mean, ask your friends and acquaintances two topically current questions that anyone having a solid mastery of very basic economics -- as in 10th grade basic -- can answer quickly, accurately and briefly (it should take 5 seconds or less to answer both not each question).
   
   -- Do you thing the price elasticity demand (PED) for of raw steel is predominantly elastic or inelastic?
   -- Assuming the PED is inelastic, who will bear the burden of a tariff on raw steel?
   
   Now, I don't know you or your friends and acquaintances, but I suspect like most Americans, they won't knowingly answer either question accurately. (For the first one, they at least have a 50/50 shot of guessing correctly, which is the raison d'etre for the second question -- to know whether they were guessing on the first one.)

Politicians:
The electoral fear you describe is a failing intrinsic to the individual politician, not a failing or menacing feature intrinsic to democracy, or even the U.S. version thereof. That failing derives from two key drivers:

• Politician's unwillingness to subordinate their personal political fortunes and self-interest to the greater good they are emplaced to serve, that is to say, the fortunes of the nation as a whole. Sure, on occasion politicians may act for the greater good of the nation, and that's great. The problem is that they are seated to always do so, not merely sometimes. Think about that....
  
  When corporate execs don't always act in the best interest of the firm they're entrusted to manage on stockholder's behalf, what happens? Among other things, the negligent exec is sent packing. When a parent doesn't always act in their kids' best interest what happens? The children are removed from their negligent parents and the parents may also be prosecuted and incarcerated. What happens to politicians who don't subordinate their electoral interest(s) to the better interest of the nation? For the most part, they get re-elected.
• The notion that being a politician is a career unto itself. Nobody who signed the Constitution imagined that elected office holders would have made a career out of being a politician. Why did they think that? Because serving as federal elected official originally paid only a per diem, not a per annum (salary) and because it was expected that elected officials had means of their own to support their needs -- social activities, entertainment, shopping, tourist activities, etc. -- aside from the cost of meals, lodging in and transportation to/from the District when Congress was in session. (Indeed, during the Articles period, members of Congress were paid by their states, not by the federal government. If the state was displeased with its representatives, it stopped paying them. That approach was abandoned because it was seen as giving states too much power over federal affairs.)

- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.

??? A key deign principle of our democracy is that opposition, as it were, be used as a safeguard against imprudence and excess. "Anything" isn't supposed to "get done." Things that have intrinsic merit and urgency are all that's supposed to "get done." The rest is supposed to fall by the wayside.

- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.

These two are really the same concept approached from different vantages.

- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

???

In a democratic republic, having a vote necessarily makes not be not voiceless. If one wants a voice in every stinking policy decision, one needs to be in a direct democracy. It's fine if that's what one wants, but the U.S. isn't such a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.

there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums.

Yes, that is the provision our republic offers so that direct democratic policy decision making can, when enough folks desire so, happen.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a direct role in the design and implementation approach of every major legislative policy. I'm good with letting elected legislators and appointed officials, availed of subject matter experts input that they in turn share with the public, to craft legislative policy, inform the public of the policy and the SME input about the pros and cons of the policy and then vote on enacting it or not.

Aside:

The gap, if you will, in the process described above it that presently, we "mere" citizens are obliged to seek out subject matter input, and doing that aptly requires time and and a certain skill and baseline knowledge level, one or the other which many folks don't have. To wit, there is tons of original and methodologically sound research that shows unequivocally -- both in narrative and via "the math" -- what to expect as the outcomes of tariffs.

That's all well and good, but if one hasn't at least mastered calculus (quite often, one needs also to have mastered linear algebra too), one can't read and understand the material that shows what that impact will be and why, and if one hasn't mastered the workings of the scientific method and statistics, one can't evaluate the methodology used in any of those studies. That leaves such folks at the material disadvantage -- one has no ability to check the theory (science sense) and no ability to check the application of the theory -- of having little alternative but to trust what someone else tells them. Well, at that point, one's own assessment will necessarily become tied to the motivations of the person who provides the explanation/analysis, and more often than not, their claims notwithstanding, the people most vocally doing that have some interest in mind other than one's own or that of the nation as a whole.

Now in the 1700s and 1800s, one didn't need to have the same level of mastery in various disciplines that one today must. The main reason one didn't is because much of what we know today about matters of science (social and natural) simply wasn't then known. Now, however, it is known, but too many people who can vote don't have the tools needed to consume that knowledge and, in turn, aptly avail themselves of it when considering complex matters of public policy.​

 

[Bleipriester]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

Why did you scare quote "democracy" rather than "menace?" I'm not certain what meaning to take from your having done, particularly vis a vis the rest of your remarks which indicate that neither word should have been scare quoted.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.

Parties:

1. Politics is nothing more than the marketing of public policy ideas.
2. Parties are but organizations that develop and market public policy ideas.
3. Politicians are, in effect, the salespersons of some, most or all of a party's ideas.
4. As with anything one might promote and sell, money and power accrue to the organizations and individuals who sell them.

So just ask yourself: When have you ever seen a consumer marketer [1], during the selling process, do anything other than air the positive attributes of their product and, in response to any and all objections, utter whatever ameliorating rebuttals -- bunkum, pablum, etc. -- they can conceive, regardless of whether their rebuttal holds water?


Note:

1. The consumer aspect cannot be overestimated. B2B marketing is very different because, for the most part, business customers know as much about the product and surrounding factors of it as do the sellers of the product. The same is not so for many consumer goods and services, and it's certainly not so that most voters' know and understand of the breadth of factors relevant to most major public policy matters.
   
   To see what I mean, ask your friends and acquaintances two topically current questions that anyone having a solid mastery of very basic economics -- as in 10th grade basic -- can answer quickly, accurately and briefly (it should take 5 seconds or less to answer both not each question).
   
   -- Do you thing the price elasticity demand (PED) for of raw steel is predominantly elastic or inelastic?
   -- Assuming the PED is inelastic, who will bear the burden of a tariff on raw steel?
   
   Now, I don't know you or your friends and acquaintances, but I suspect like most Americans, they won't knowingly answer either question accurately. (For the first one, they at least have a 50/50 shot of guessing correctly, which is the raison d'etre for the second question -- to know whether they were guessing on the first one.)

Politicians:
The electoral fear you describe is a failing intrinsic to the individual politician, not a failing or menacing feature intrinsic to democracy, or even the U.S. version thereof. That failing derives from two key drivers:

• Politician's unwillingness to subordinate their personal political fortunes and self-interest to the greater good they are emplaced to serve, that is to say, the fortunes of the nation as a whole. Sure, on occasion politicians may act for the greater good of the nation, and that's great. The problem is that they are seated to always do so, not merely sometimes. Think about that....
  
  When corporate execs don't always act in the best interest of the firm they're entrusted to manage on stockholder's behalf, what happens? Among other things, the negligent exec is sent packing. When a parent doesn't always act in their kids' best interest what happens? The children are removed from their negligent parents and the parents may also be prosecuted and incarcerated. What happens to politicians who don't subordinate their electoral interest(s) to the better interest of the nation? For the most part, they get re-elected.
• The notion that being a politician is a career unto itself. Nobody who signed the Constitution imagined that elected office holders would have made a career out of being a politician. Why did they think that? Because serving as federal elected official originally paid only a per diem, not a per annum (salary) and because it was expected that elected officials had means of their own to support their needs -- social activities, entertainment, shopping, tourist activities, etc. -- aside from the cost of meals, lodging in and transportation to/from the District when Congress was in session. (Indeed, during the Articles period, members of Congress were paid by their states, not by the federal government. If the state was displeased with its representatives, it stopped paying them. That approach was abandoned because it was seen as giving states too much power over federal affairs.)

- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.

??? A key deign principle of our democracy is that opposition, as it were, be used as a safeguard against imprudence and excess. "Anything" isn't supposed to "get done." Things that have intrinsic merit and urgency are all that's supposed to "get done." The rest is supposed to fall by the wayside.

- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.

These two are really the same concept approached from different vantages.

- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

???

In a democratic republic, having a vote necessarily makes not be not voiceless. If one wants a voice in every stinking policy decision, one needs to be in a direct democracy. It's fine if that's what one wants, but the U.S. isn't such a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.

there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums.

Yes, that is the provision our republic offers so that direct democratic policy decision making can, when enough folks desire so, happen.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a direct role in the design and implementation approach of every major legislative policy. I'm good with letting elected legislators and appointed officials, availed of subject matter experts input that they in turn share with the public, to craft legislative policy, inform the public of the policy and the SME input about the pros and cons of the policy and then vote on enacting it or not.

Aside:

The gap, if you will, in the process described above it that presently, we "mere" citizens are obliged to seek out subject matter input, and doing that aptly requires time and and a certain skill and baseline knowledge level, one or the other which many folks don't have. To wit, there is tons of original and methodologically sound research that shows unequivocally -- both in narrative and via "the math" -- what to expect as the outcomes of tariffs.

That's all well and good, but if one hasn't at least mastered calculus (quite often, one needs also to have mastered linear algebra too), one can't read and understand the material that shows what that impact will be and why, and if one hasn't mastered the workings of the scientific method and statistics, one can't evaluate the methodology used in any of those studies. That leaves such folks at the material disadvantage -- one has no ability to check the theory (science sense) and no ability to check the application of the theory -- of having little alternative but to trust what someone else tells them. Well, at that point, one's own assessment will necessarily become tied to the motivations of the person who provides the explanation/analysis, and more often than not, their claims notwithstanding, the people most vocally doing that have some interest in mind other than one's own or that of the nation as a whole.

Now in the 1700s and 1800s, one didn't need to have the same level of mastery in various disciplines that one today must. The main reason one didn't is because much of what we know today about matters of science (social and natural) simply wasn't then known. Now, however, it is known, but too many people who can vote don't have the tools needed to consume that knowledge and, in turn, aptly avail themselves of it when considering complex matters of public policy.​

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

You can read here, how our Merkel-gov comes to its debt-free household. Similar to Slick Willy´s debt-reduction, the stop for new debts in Germany on federal level costs the others big time. Cities drown in debts and social welfare, pensions and more get robbed for it.

Google Übersetzer

And the politicians celebrate themselves and don´t give a damn about the future because others will have to explain what happened, then.

 

[Picaro]

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

You can read here, how our Merkel-gov comes to its debt-free household. Similar to Slick Willy´s debt-reduction, the stop for new debts in Germany on federal level costs the others big time. Cities drown in debts and social welfare, pensions and more get robbed for it.

Google Übersetzer

And the politicians celebrate themselves and don´t give a damn about the future because others will have to explain what happened, then.

I happen to agree with much of this, since it's just as true about the U.S. and those idiotically named ' free trade' deals Trump wants to renegotiate. As for voting, it's simple enough to require basic civics tests and weed out those that are just puppets and fashion victims in order to register to vote, in the case of the U.S. Neither Party wants smarter more informed voters, though, and most people aren't in the least interested in being even slightly inconvenienced by such rubbish as actual citizenship and doing their jobs and responsibilities. So, the govts, state and local, do indeed very much reflect the people they govern in our case. there are no legitimate complaints to be taken seriously here about govt. and what it does.

 

[jwoodie]

The Founding Fathers already figured out that decentralized representative government was the best defense against the competing forces of tyranny and anarchy. Unfortunately, unscrupulous politicians have used temporary crises as excuses for permanent abrogations of this principle.

 

[Brian Blackwell]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

I cannot fathom what kind of gov't other than some form of a republican democracy is going to result in what you want. You got a better idea, please share it.

See, here's the problem: any gov't is going to be comprised of people and people are subject to the same human failings and will make the same mistakes no matter what form of gov't is in place. No question that we can and should be doing better, but the system we got now could be run more efficiently and effectively than it is. The tools are there, we just aren't using them to the best advantage.

You highlighted the problem perfectly. Humanity’s moral inconsistency (the very justification for man’s law) will inevitably doom any government to failure. So let’s take this acknowledgement to its logical conclusion...

If the created seat of power will always be susceptible to corruption, then how could we be better off supporting it than we would be without it? All we’ve done is create an inequality whereby the worst among us could gain the upper hand.

Given the basic moral character of the overwhelming majority (reasonably good people outnumber evil scoundrels by a tremendous margin), wouldn’t we be better off levelling the playing field so that aberrations would be relegated to their naturally inferior position? Isn’t it the seat of power itself that magnifies the problem, rather than any specific group of individuals who occupy it?

 

[usmbguest5318]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

Why did you scare quote "democracy" rather than "menace?" I'm not certain what meaning to take from your having done, particularly vis a vis the rest of your remarks which indicate that neither word should have been scare quoted.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.

Parties:

1. Politics is nothing more than the marketing of public policy ideas.
2. Parties are but organizations that develop and market public policy ideas.
3. Politicians are, in effect, the salespersons of some, most or all of a party's ideas.
4. As with anything one might promote and sell, money and power accrue to the organizations and individuals who sell them.

So just ask yourself: When have you ever seen a consumer marketer [1], during the selling process, do anything other than air the positive attributes of their product and, in response to any and all objections, utter whatever ameliorating rebuttals -- bunkum, pablum, etc. -- they can conceive, regardless of whether their rebuttal holds water?


Note:

1. The consumer aspect cannot be overestimated. B2B marketing is very different because, for the most part, business customers know as much about the product and surrounding factors of it as do the sellers of the product. The same is not so for many consumer goods and services, and it's certainly not so that most voters' know and understand of the breadth of factors relevant to most major public policy matters.
   
   To see what I mean, ask your friends and acquaintances two topically current questions that anyone having a solid mastery of very basic economics -- as in 10th grade basic -- can answer quickly, accurately and briefly (it should take 5 seconds or less to answer both not each question).
   
   -- Do you thing the price elasticity demand (PED) for of raw steel is predominantly elastic or inelastic?
   -- Assuming the PED is inelastic, who will bear the burden of a tariff on raw steel?
   
   Now, I don't know you or your friends and acquaintances, but I suspect like most Americans, they won't knowingly answer either question accurately. (For the first one, they at least have a 50/50 shot of guessing correctly, which is the raison d'etre for the second question -- to know whether they were guessing on the first one.)

Politicians:
The electoral fear you describe is a failing intrinsic to the individual politician, not a failing or menacing feature intrinsic to democracy, or even the U.S. version thereof. That failing derives from two key drivers:

• Politician's unwillingness to subordinate their personal political fortunes and self-interest to the greater good they are emplaced to serve, that is to say, the fortunes of the nation as a whole. Sure, on occasion politicians may act for the greater good of the nation, and that's great. The problem is that they are seated to always do so, not merely sometimes. Think about that....
  
  When corporate execs don't always act in the best interest of the firm they're entrusted to manage on stockholder's behalf, what happens? Among other things, the negligent exec is sent packing. When a parent doesn't always act in their kids' best interest what happens? The children are removed from their negligent parents and the parents may also be prosecuted and incarcerated. What happens to politicians who don't subordinate their electoral interest(s) to the better interest of the nation? For the most part, they get re-elected.
• The notion that being a politician is a career unto itself. Nobody who signed the Constitution imagined that elected office holders would have made a career out of being a politician. Why did they think that? Because serving as federal elected official originally paid only a per diem, not a per annum (salary) and because it was expected that elected officials had means of their own to support their needs -- social activities, entertainment, shopping, tourist activities, etc. -- aside from the cost of meals, lodging in and transportation to/from the District when Congress was in session. (Indeed, during the Articles period, members of Congress were paid by their states, not by the federal government. If the state was displeased with its representatives, it stopped paying them. That approach was abandoned because it was seen as giving states too much power over federal affairs.)

- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.

??? A key deign principle of our democracy is that opposition, as it were, be used as a safeguard against imprudence and excess. "Anything" isn't supposed to "get done." Things that have intrinsic merit and urgency are all that's supposed to "get done." The rest is supposed to fall by the wayside.

- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.

These two are really the same concept approached from different vantages.

- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

???

In a democratic republic, having a vote necessarily makes not be not voiceless. If one wants a voice in every stinking policy decision, one needs to be in a direct democracy. It's fine if that's what one wants, but the U.S. isn't such a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.

there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums.

Yes, that is the provision our republic offers so that direct democratic policy decision making can, when enough folks desire so, happen.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a direct role in the design and implementation approach of every major legislative policy. I'm good with letting elected legislators and appointed officials, availed of subject matter experts input that they in turn share with the public, to craft legislative policy, inform the public of the policy and the SME input about the pros and cons of the policy and then vote on enacting it or not.

Aside:

The gap, if you will, in the process described above it that presently, we "mere" citizens are obliged to seek out subject matter input, and doing that aptly requires time and and a certain skill and baseline knowledge level, one or the other which many folks don't have. To wit, there is tons of original and methodologically sound research that shows unequivocally -- both in narrative and via "the math" -- what to expect as the outcomes of tariffs.

That's all well and good, but if one hasn't at least mastered calculus (quite often, one needs also to have mastered linear algebra too), one can't read and understand the material that shows what that impact will be and why, and if one hasn't mastered the workings of the scientific method and statistics, one can't evaluate the methodology used in any of those studies. That leaves such folks at the material disadvantage -- one has no ability to check the theory (science sense) and no ability to check the application of the theory -- of having little alternative but to trust what someone else tells them. Well, at that point, one's own assessment will necessarily become tied to the motivations of the person who provides the explanation/analysis, and more often than not, their claims notwithstanding, the people most vocally doing that have some interest in mind other than one's own or that of the nation as a whole.

Now in the 1700s and 1800s, one didn't need to have the same level of mastery in various disciplines that one today must. The main reason one didn't is because much of what we know today about matters of science (social and natural) simply wasn't then known. Now, however, it is known, but too many people who can vote don't have the tools needed to consume that knowledge and, in turn, aptly avail themselves of it when considering complex matters of public policy.​

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

You can read here, how our Merkel-gov comes to its debt-free household. Similar to Slick Willy´s debt-reduction, the stop for new debts in Germany on federal level costs the others big time. Cities drown in debts and social welfare, pensions and more get robbed for it.

Google Übersetzer

And the politicians celebrate themselves and don´t give a damn about the future because others will have to explain what happened, then.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Do you understand what company managers are charged with doing? They are hired and paid to increase a firm's profits. If that means availing the firm of lower wage rates in foreign locales, well, provided the cost-benefit calculus shows that tactic as offering greater profits, it just does and that's what the firm's managers should do.

It'd be different, perhaps, were we talking about hand fabrication and other human factors that contribute to individual product quality, but such aren't relevant factors. In the 21st century, most manufacturing happens by individuals operating machines that do the actual fabrication and assembly work. As for the design work, the work that pays higher wages, most firms perform those functions in their home country.

It's also different for luxury goods. Such goods are purchased by people who are comparatively and notably less price sensitive (exhibit price elasticities of demand as near perfectly inelastic as a consumer goods seller/maker could hope for). Companies that produce luxury goods tend to keep substantively all of their productive operations in their home countries and merely increase their prices as needed.

To wit, in the garment industry, an industry in which nearly entirely all mass market manufacturing has been offshored, yet firms like Allen Edmonds, RGM, Southwick, Bespoke Edge, and Gitman Brothers, for example, produce highest quality goods and have not. [1] (There are others, but most of them range from expensive to very expensive, or at least I imagine that's what an average American would say of them.) Likewise, Blue Star, Wolf, Viking, and Sub Zero make kitchen appliances in America.

The thing is that none of those firms offer anything one might call moderately priced goods. Now I've seen and heard Americans assert that they wouldn't mind paying more for high quality made in America goods. I take them at their word because I have no choice but to do so. All the same, when one is talking about high quality Made in the USA goods, one's talking about very expensive products. To see what I mean compare the price of a Blue Star basic range and that of any mass market (not to be confused with popular/well-known brand names) range.

• Blue Star basic gas range
• GE basic gas range

I guess in a nutshell, as someone who almost exclusively buys only high quality stuff, including a good deal of American made items, I strongly doubt that most consumers are willing to spend the kind of money it takes to buy high quality American made goods. I think most folks are quite content with and prefer to pay notable less than that costs and are okay with "good enough," which, abstractly speaking really isn't high quality at all, but it'll do just fine for a brief period of time.

Note:

1. To be sure, high end garment makers construct their garments, particularly shirtmakers and cobblers, make their garments with the assumption that their owners will use the markedly hard-on-clothes and shoes services of commercial maintenance purveyors -- dry cleaners and airport/hotel shoe shiners -- all the while expecting their garments to be serviceable for longer spans of time than will the owners body still fit properly in them. That's especially so for men's clothing. At less exacting levels on the quality scale, producers assume a far greater degree of and tolerance for disposability.
   
   Designer garments are a different animal altogether, so don't confuse "designer" with "highest quality." Sometimes "designer" and "highest quality" are synonymous and sometimes they're not. John Varvatos' goods, for example, have average construction quality. Ditto Versace. Hermes, Brioni, Paul and Shark, and Louis Vuitton, on the other hand, are first rate on build quality, and though they cost a ton more (double or more) than will a Gitman Bros. or Robert Talbot shirt, they are made to the same construction quality and material grade (not entirely the same thing as quality) standards.

 

[Bleipriester]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

Why did you scare quote "democracy" rather than "menace?" I'm not certain what meaning to take from your having done, particularly vis a vis the rest of your remarks which indicate that neither word should have been scare quoted.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.

Parties:

1. Politics is nothing more than the marketing of public policy ideas.
2. Parties are but organizations that develop and market public policy ideas.
3. Politicians are, in effect, the salespersons of some, most or all of a party's ideas.
4. As with anything one might promote and sell, money and power accrue to the organizations and individuals who sell them.

So just ask yourself: When have you ever seen a consumer marketer [1], during the selling process, do anything other than air the positive attributes of their product and, in response to any and all objections, utter whatever ameliorating rebuttals -- bunkum, pablum, etc. -- they can conceive, regardless of whether their rebuttal holds water?


Note:

1. The consumer aspect cannot be overestimated. B2B marketing is very different because, for the most part, business customers know as much about the product and surrounding factors of it as do the sellers of the product. The same is not so for many consumer goods and services, and it's certainly not so that most voters' know and understand of the breadth of factors relevant to most major public policy matters.
   
   To see what I mean, ask your friends and acquaintances two topically current questions that anyone having a solid mastery of very basic economics -- as in 10th grade basic -- can answer quickly, accurately and briefly (it should take 5 seconds or less to answer both not each question).
   
   -- Do you thing the price elasticity demand (PED) for of raw steel is predominantly elastic or inelastic?
   -- Assuming the PED is inelastic, who will bear the burden of a tariff on raw steel?
   
   Now, I don't know you or your friends and acquaintances, but I suspect like most Americans, they won't knowingly answer either question accurately. (For the first one, they at least have a 50/50 shot of guessing correctly, which is the raison d'etre for the second question -- to know whether they were guessing on the first one.)

Politicians:
The electoral fear you describe is a failing intrinsic to the individual politician, not a failing or menacing feature intrinsic to democracy, or even the U.S. version thereof. That failing derives from two key drivers:

• Politician's unwillingness to subordinate their personal political fortunes and self-interest to the greater good they are emplaced to serve, that is to say, the fortunes of the nation as a whole. Sure, on occasion politicians may act for the greater good of the nation, and that's great. The problem is that they are seated to always do so, not merely sometimes. Think about that....
  
  When corporate execs don't always act in the best interest of the firm they're entrusted to manage on stockholder's behalf, what happens? Among other things, the negligent exec is sent packing. When a parent doesn't always act in their kids' best interest what happens? The children are removed from their negligent parents and the parents may also be prosecuted and incarcerated. What happens to politicians who don't subordinate their electoral interest(s) to the better interest of the nation? For the most part, they get re-elected.
• The notion that being a politician is a career unto itself. Nobody who signed the Constitution imagined that elected office holders would have made a career out of being a politician. Why did they think that? Because serving as federal elected official originally paid only a per diem, not a per annum (salary) and because it was expected that elected officials had means of their own to support their needs -- social activities, entertainment, shopping, tourist activities, etc. -- aside from the cost of meals, lodging in and transportation to/from the District when Congress was in session. (Indeed, during the Articles period, members of Congress were paid by their states, not by the federal government. If the state was displeased with its representatives, it stopped paying them. That approach was abandoned because it was seen as giving states too much power over federal affairs.)

- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.

??? A key deign principle of our democracy is that opposition, as it were, be used as a safeguard against imprudence and excess. "Anything" isn't supposed to "get done." Things that have intrinsic merit and urgency are all that's supposed to "get done." The rest is supposed to fall by the wayside.

- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.

These two are really the same concept approached from different vantages.

- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

???

In a democratic republic, having a vote necessarily makes not be not voiceless. If one wants a voice in every stinking policy decision, one needs to be in a direct democracy. It's fine if that's what one wants, but the U.S. isn't such a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.

there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums.

Yes, that is the provision our republic offers so that direct democratic policy decision making can, when enough folks desire so, happen.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a direct role in the design and implementation approach of every major legislative policy. I'm good with letting elected legislators and appointed officials, availed of subject matter experts input that they in turn share with the public, to craft legislative policy, inform the public of the policy and the SME input about the pros and cons of the policy and then vote on enacting it or not.

Aside:

The gap, if you will, in the process described above it that presently, we "mere" citizens are obliged to seek out subject matter input, and doing that aptly requires time and and a certain skill and baseline knowledge level, one or the other which many folks don't have. To wit, there is tons of original and methodologically sound research that shows unequivocally -- both in narrative and via "the math" -- what to expect as the outcomes of tariffs.

That's all well and good, but if one hasn't at least mastered calculus (quite often, one needs also to have mastered linear algebra too), one can't read and understand the material that shows what that impact will be and why, and if one hasn't mastered the workings of the scientific method and statistics, one can't evaluate the methodology used in any of those studies. That leaves such folks at the material disadvantage -- one has no ability to check the theory (science sense) and no ability to check the application of the theory -- of having little alternative but to trust what someone else tells them. Well, at that point, one's own assessment will necessarily become tied to the motivations of the person who provides the explanation/analysis, and more often than not, their claims notwithstanding, the people most vocally doing that have some interest in mind other than one's own or that of the nation as a whole.

Now in the 1700s and 1800s, one didn't need to have the same level of mastery in various disciplines that one today must. The main reason one didn't is because much of what we know today about matters of science (social and natural) simply wasn't then known. Now, however, it is known, but too many people who can vote don't have the tools needed to consume that knowledge and, in turn, aptly avail themselves of it when considering complex matters of public policy.​

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

You can read here, how our Merkel-gov comes to its debt-free household. Similar to Slick Willy´s debt-reduction, the stop for new debts in Germany on federal level costs the others big time. Cities drown in debts and social welfare, pensions and more get robbed for it.

Google Übersetzer

And the politicians celebrate themselves and don´t give a damn about the future because others will have to explain what happened, then.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Do you understand what company managers are charged with doing? They are hired and paid to increase a firm's profits. If that means availing the firm of lower wage rates in foreign locales, well, provided the cost-benefit calculus shows that tactic as offering greater profits, it just does and that's what the firm's managers should do.

It'd be different, perhaps, were we talking about hand fabrication and other human factors that contribute to individual product quality, but such aren't relevant factors. In the 21st century, most manufacturing happens by individuals operating machines that do the actual fabrication and assembly work. As for the design work, the work that pays higher wages, most firms perform those functions in their home country.

It's also different for luxury goods. Such goods are purchased by people who are comparatively and notably less price sensitive (exhibit price elasticities of demand as near perfectly inelastic as a consumer goods seller/maker could hope for). Companies that produce luxury goods tend to keep substantively all of their productive operations in their home countries and merely increase their prices as needed.

To wit, in the garment industry, an industry in which nearly entirely all mass market manufacturing has been offshored, yet firms like Allen Edmonds, RGM, Southwick, Bespoke Edge, and Gitman Brothers, for example, produce highest quality goods and have not. [1] (There are others, but most of them range from expensive to very expensive, or at least I imagine that's what an average American would say of them.) Likewise, Blue Star, Wolf, Viking, and Sub Zero make kitchen appliances in America.

The thing is that none of those firms offer anything one might call moderately priced goods. Now I've seen and heard Americans assert that they wouldn't mind paying more for high quality made in America goods. I take them at their word because I have no choice but to do so. All the same, when one is talking about high quality Made in the USA goods, one's talking about very expensive products. To see what I mean compare the price of a Blue Star basic range and that of any mass market (not to be confused with popular/well-known brand names) range.

• Blue Star basic gas range
• GE basic gas range

I guess in a nutshell, as someone who almost exclusively buys only high quality stuff, including a good deal of American made items, I strongly doubt that most consumers are willing to spend the kind of money it takes to buy high quality American made goods. I think most folks are quite content with and prefer to pay notable less than that costs and are okay with "good enough," which, abstractly speaking really isn't high quality at all, but it'll do just fine for a brief period of time.

Note:

1. To be sure, high end garment makers construct their garments, particularly shirtmakers and cobblers, make their garments with the assumption that their owners will use the markedly hard-on-clothes and shoes services of commercial maintenance purveyors -- dry cleaners and airport/hotel shoe shiners -- all the while expecting their garments to be serviceable for longer spans of time than will the owners body still fit properly in them. That's especially so for men's clothing. At less exacting levels on the quality scale, producers assume a far greater degree of and tolerance for disposability.
   
   Designer garments are a different animal altogether, so don't confuse "designer" with "highest quality." Sometimes "designer" and "highest quality" are synonymous and sometimes they're not. John Varvatos' goods, for example, have average construction quality. Ditto Versace. Hermes, Brioni, Paul and Shark, and Louis Vuitton, on the other hand, are first rate on build quality, and though they cost a ton more (double or more) than will a Gitman Bros. or Robert Talbot shirt, they are made to the same construction quality and material grade (not entirely the same thing as quality) standards.

The long term consequences for that companies are severe when the self-made competition takes over.

 

[usmbguest5318]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

Why did you scare quote "democracy" rather than "menace?" I'm not certain what meaning to take from your having done, particularly vis a vis the rest of your remarks which indicate that neither word should have been scare quoted.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.

Parties:

1. Politics is nothing more than the marketing of public policy ideas.
2. Parties are but organizations that develop and market public policy ideas.
3. Politicians are, in effect, the salespersons of some, most or all of a party's ideas.
4. As with anything one might promote and sell, money and power accrue to the organizations and individuals who sell them.

So just ask yourself: When have you ever seen a consumer marketer [1], during the selling process, do anything other than air the positive attributes of their product and, in response to any and all objections, utter whatever ameliorating rebuttals -- bunkum, pablum, etc. -- they can conceive, regardless of whether their rebuttal holds water?


Note:

1. The consumer aspect cannot be overestimated. B2B marketing is very different because, for the most part, business customers know as much about the product and surrounding factors of it as do the sellers of the product. The same is not so for many consumer goods and services, and it's certainly not so that most voters' know and understand of the breadth of factors relevant to most major public policy matters.
   
   To see what I mean, ask your friends and acquaintances two topically current questions that anyone having a solid mastery of very basic economics -- as in 10th grade basic -- can answer quickly, accurately and briefly (it should take 5 seconds or less to answer both not each question).
   
   -- Do you thing the price elasticity demand (PED) for of raw steel is predominantly elastic or inelastic?
   -- Assuming the PED is inelastic, who will bear the burden of a tariff on raw steel?
   
   Now, I don't know you or your friends and acquaintances, but I suspect like most Americans, they won't knowingly answer either question accurately. (For the first one, they at least have a 50/50 shot of guessing correctly, which is the raison d'etre for the second question -- to know whether they were guessing on the first one.)

Politicians:
The electoral fear you describe is a failing intrinsic to the individual politician, not a failing or menacing feature intrinsic to democracy, or even the U.S. version thereof. That failing derives from two key drivers:

• Politician's unwillingness to subordinate their personal political fortunes and self-interest to the greater good they are emplaced to serve, that is to say, the fortunes of the nation as a whole. Sure, on occasion politicians may act for the greater good of the nation, and that's great. The problem is that they are seated to always do so, not merely sometimes. Think about that....
  
  When corporate execs don't always act in the best interest of the firm they're entrusted to manage on stockholder's behalf, what happens? Among other things, the negligent exec is sent packing. When a parent doesn't always act in their kids' best interest what happens? The children are removed from their negligent parents and the parents may also be prosecuted and incarcerated. What happens to politicians who don't subordinate their electoral interest(s) to the better interest of the nation? For the most part, they get re-elected.
• The notion that being a politician is a career unto itself. Nobody who signed the Constitution imagined that elected office holders would have made a career out of being a politician. Why did they think that? Because serving as federal elected official originally paid only a per diem, not a per annum (salary) and because it was expected that elected officials had means of their own to support their needs -- social activities, entertainment, shopping, tourist activities, etc. -- aside from the cost of meals, lodging in and transportation to/from the District when Congress was in session. (Indeed, during the Articles period, members of Congress were paid by their states, not by the federal government. If the state was displeased with its representatives, it stopped paying them. That approach was abandoned because it was seen as giving states too much power over federal affairs.)

- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.

??? A key deign principle of our democracy is that opposition, as it were, be used as a safeguard against imprudence and excess. "Anything" isn't supposed to "get done." Things that have intrinsic merit and urgency are all that's supposed to "get done." The rest is supposed to fall by the wayside.

- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.

These two are really the same concept approached from different vantages.

- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

???

In a democratic republic, having a vote necessarily makes not be not voiceless. If one wants a voice in every stinking policy decision, one needs to be in a direct democracy. It's fine if that's what one wants, but the U.S. isn't such a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.

there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums.

Yes, that is the provision our republic offers so that direct democratic policy decision making can, when enough folks desire so, happen.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a direct role in the design and implementation approach of every major legislative policy. I'm good with letting elected legislators and appointed officials, availed of subject matter experts input that they in turn share with the public, to craft legislative policy, inform the public of the policy and the SME input about the pros and cons of the policy and then vote on enacting it or not.

Aside:

The gap, if you will, in the process described above it that presently, we "mere" citizens are obliged to seek out subject matter input, and doing that aptly requires time and and a certain skill and baseline knowledge level, one or the other which many folks don't have. To wit, there is tons of original and methodologically sound research that shows unequivocally -- both in narrative and via "the math" -- what to expect as the outcomes of tariffs.

That's all well and good, but if one hasn't at least mastered calculus (quite often, one needs also to have mastered linear algebra too), one can't read and understand the material that shows what that impact will be and why, and if one hasn't mastered the workings of the scientific method and statistics, one can't evaluate the methodology used in any of those studies. That leaves such folks at the material disadvantage -- one has no ability to check the theory (science sense) and no ability to check the application of the theory -- of having little alternative but to trust what someone else tells them. Well, at that point, one's own assessment will necessarily become tied to the motivations of the person who provides the explanation/analysis, and more often than not, their claims notwithstanding, the people most vocally doing that have some interest in mind other than one's own or that of the nation as a whole.

Now in the 1700s and 1800s, one didn't need to have the same level of mastery in various disciplines that one today must. The main reason one didn't is because much of what we know today about matters of science (social and natural) simply wasn't then known. Now, however, it is known, but too many people who can vote don't have the tools needed to consume that knowledge and, in turn, aptly avail themselves of it when considering complex matters of public policy.​

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

You can read here, how our Merkel-gov comes to its debt-free household. Similar to Slick Willy´s debt-reduction, the stop for new debts in Germany on federal level costs the others big time. Cities drown in debts and social welfare, pensions and more get robbed for it.

Google Übersetzer

And the politicians celebrate themselves and don´t give a damn about the future because others will have to explain what happened, then.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Do you understand what company managers are charged with doing? They are hired and paid to increase a firm's profits. If that means availing the firm of lower wage rates in foreign locales, well, provided the cost-benefit calculus shows that tactic as offering greater profits, it just does and that's what the firm's managers should do.

It'd be different, perhaps, were we talking about hand fabrication and other human factors that contribute to individual product quality, but such aren't relevant factors. In the 21st century, most manufacturing happens by individuals operating machines that do the actual fabrication and assembly work. As for the design work, the work that pays higher wages, most firms perform those functions in their home country.

It's also different for luxury goods. Such goods are purchased by people who are comparatively and notably less price sensitive (exhibit price elasticities of demand as near perfectly inelastic as a consumer goods seller/maker could hope for). Companies that produce luxury goods tend to keep substantively all of their productive operations in their home countries and merely increase their prices as needed.

To wit, in the garment industry, an industry in which nearly entirely all mass market manufacturing has been offshored, yet firms like Allen Edmonds, RGM, Southwick, Bespoke Edge, and Gitman Brothers, for example, produce highest quality goods and have not. [1] (There are others, but most of them range from expensive to very expensive, or at least I imagine that's what an average American would say of them.) Likewise, Blue Star, Wolf, Viking, and Sub Zero make kitchen appliances in America.

The thing is that none of those firms offer anything one might call moderately priced goods. Now I've seen and heard Americans assert that they wouldn't mind paying more for high quality made in America goods. I take them at their word because I have no choice but to do so. All the same, when one is talking about high quality Made in the USA goods, one's talking about very expensive products. To see what I mean compare the price of a Blue Star basic range and that of any mass market (not to be confused with popular/well-known brand names) range.

• Blue Star basic gas range
• GE basic gas range

I guess in a nutshell, as someone who almost exclusively buys only high quality stuff, including a good deal of American made items, I strongly doubt that most consumers are willing to spend the kind of money it takes to buy high quality American made goods. I think most folks are quite content with and prefer to pay notable less than that costs and are okay with "good enough," which, abstractly speaking really isn't high quality at all, but it'll do just fine for a brief period of time.

Note:

1. To be sure, high end garment makers construct their garments, particularly shirtmakers and cobblers, make their garments with the assumption that their owners will use the markedly hard-on-clothes and shoes services of commercial maintenance purveyors -- dry cleaners and airport/hotel shoe shiners -- all the while expecting their garments to be serviceable for longer spans of time than will the owners body still fit properly in them. That's especially so for men's clothing. At less exacting levels on the quality scale, producers assume a far greater degree of and tolerance for disposability.
   
   Designer garments are a different animal altogether, so don't confuse "designer" with "highest quality." Sometimes "designer" and "highest quality" are synonymous and sometimes they're not. John Varvatos' goods, for example, have average construction quality. Ditto Versace. Hermes, Brioni, Paul and Shark, and Louis Vuitton, on the other hand, are first rate on build quality, and though they cost a ton more (double or more) than will a Gitman Bros. or Robert Talbot shirt, they are made to the same construction quality and material grade (not entirely the same thing as quality) standards.

The long term consequences for that companies are severe when the self-made competition takes over.

That's certainly possible, but it's not probable, but neither is it so not probable as to call it improbable. It really depends on how well managed existing firms are, that is, whether they do a good job performing competitive analysis. If they do, they'll notice the start-ups and act to either adjust/counter, squash or consume them. If they take none of those three actions, yes, what you described can happen.

 

[Bleipriester]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

Why did you scare quote "democracy" rather than "menace?" I'm not certain what meaning to take from your having done, particularly vis a vis the rest of your remarks which indicate that neither word should have been scare quoted.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.

Parties:

1. Politics is nothing more than the marketing of public policy ideas.
2. Parties are but organizations that develop and market public policy ideas.
3. Politicians are, in effect, the salespersons of some, most or all of a party's ideas.
4. As with anything one might promote and sell, money and power accrue to the organizations and individuals who sell them.

So just ask yourself: When have you ever seen a consumer marketer [1], during the selling process, do anything other than air the positive attributes of their product and, in response to any and all objections, utter whatever ameliorating rebuttals -- bunkum, pablum, etc. -- they can conceive, regardless of whether their rebuttal holds water?


Note:

1. The consumer aspect cannot be overestimated. B2B marketing is very different because, for the most part, business customers know as much about the product and surrounding factors of it as do the sellers of the product. The same is not so for many consumer goods and services, and it's certainly not so that most voters' know and understand of the breadth of factors relevant to most major public policy matters.
   
   To see what I mean, ask your friends and acquaintances two topically current questions that anyone having a solid mastery of very basic economics -- as in 10th grade basic -- can answer quickly, accurately and briefly (it should take 5 seconds or less to answer both not each question).
   
   -- Do you thing the price elasticity demand (PED) for of raw steel is predominantly elastic or inelastic?
   -- Assuming the PED is inelastic, who will bear the burden of a tariff on raw steel?
   
   Now, I don't know you or your friends and acquaintances, but I suspect like most Americans, they won't knowingly answer either question accurately. (For the first one, they at least have a 50/50 shot of guessing correctly, which is the raison d'etre for the second question -- to know whether they were guessing on the first one.)

Politicians:
The electoral fear you describe is a failing intrinsic to the individual politician, not a failing or menacing feature intrinsic to democracy, or even the U.S. version thereof. That failing derives from two key drivers:

• Politician's unwillingness to subordinate their personal political fortunes and self-interest to the greater good they are emplaced to serve, that is to say, the fortunes of the nation as a whole. Sure, on occasion politicians may act for the greater good of the nation, and that's great. The problem is that they are seated to always do so, not merely sometimes. Think about that....
  
  When corporate execs don't always act in the best interest of the firm they're entrusted to manage on stockholder's behalf, what happens? Among other things, the negligent exec is sent packing. When a parent doesn't always act in their kids' best interest what happens? The children are removed from their negligent parents and the parents may also be prosecuted and incarcerated. What happens to politicians who don't subordinate their electoral interest(s) to the better interest of the nation? For the most part, they get re-elected.
• The notion that being a politician is a career unto itself. Nobody who signed the Constitution imagined that elected office holders would have made a career out of being a politician. Why did they think that? Because serving as federal elected official originally paid only a per diem, not a per annum (salary) and because it was expected that elected officials had means of their own to support their needs -- social activities, entertainment, shopping, tourist activities, etc. -- aside from the cost of meals, lodging in and transportation to/from the District when Congress was in session. (Indeed, during the Articles period, members of Congress were paid by their states, not by the federal government. If the state was displeased with its representatives, it stopped paying them. That approach was abandoned because it was seen as giving states too much power over federal affairs.)

- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.

??? A key deign principle of our democracy is that opposition, as it were, be used as a safeguard against imprudence and excess. "Anything" isn't supposed to "get done." Things that have intrinsic merit and urgency are all that's supposed to "get done." The rest is supposed to fall by the wayside.

- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.

These two are really the same concept approached from different vantages.

- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

???

In a democratic republic, having a vote necessarily makes not be not voiceless. If one wants a voice in every stinking policy decision, one needs to be in a direct democracy. It's fine if that's what one wants, but the U.S. isn't such a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.

there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums.

Yes, that is the provision our republic offers so that direct democratic policy decision making can, when enough folks desire so, happen.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a direct role in the design and implementation approach of every major legislative policy. I'm good with letting elected legislators and appointed officials, availed of subject matter experts input that they in turn share with the public, to craft legislative policy, inform the public of the policy and the SME input about the pros and cons of the policy and then vote on enacting it or not.

Aside:

The gap, if you will, in the process described above it that presently, we "mere" citizens are obliged to seek out subject matter input, and doing that aptly requires time and and a certain skill and baseline knowledge level, one or the other which many folks don't have. To wit, there is tons of original and methodologically sound research that shows unequivocally -- both in narrative and via "the math" -- what to expect as the outcomes of tariffs.

That's all well and good, but if one hasn't at least mastered calculus (quite often, one needs also to have mastered linear algebra too), one can't read and understand the material that shows what that impact will be and why, and if one hasn't mastered the workings of the scientific method and statistics, one can't evaluate the methodology used in any of those studies. That leaves such folks at the material disadvantage -- one has no ability to check the theory (science sense) and no ability to check the application of the theory -- of having little alternative but to trust what someone else tells them. Well, at that point, one's own assessment will necessarily become tied to the motivations of the person who provides the explanation/analysis, and more often than not, their claims notwithstanding, the people most vocally doing that have some interest in mind other than one's own or that of the nation as a whole.

Now in the 1700s and 1800s, one didn't need to have the same level of mastery in various disciplines that one today must. The main reason one didn't is because much of what we know today about matters of science (social and natural) simply wasn't then known. Now, however, it is known, but too many people who can vote don't have the tools needed to consume that knowledge and, in turn, aptly avail themselves of it when considering complex matters of public policy.​

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

You can read here, how our Merkel-gov comes to its debt-free household. Similar to Slick Willy´s debt-reduction, the stop for new debts in Germany on federal level costs the others big time. Cities drown in debts and social welfare, pensions and more get robbed for it.

Google Übersetzer

And the politicians celebrate themselves and don´t give a damn about the future because others will have to explain what happened, then.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Do you understand what company managers are charged with doing? They are hired and paid to increase a firm's profits. If that means availing the firm of lower wage rates in foreign locales, well, provided the cost-benefit calculus shows that tactic as offering greater profits, it just does and that's what the firm's managers should do.

It'd be different, perhaps, were we talking about hand fabrication and other human factors that contribute to individual product quality, but such aren't relevant factors. In the 21st century, most manufacturing happens by individuals operating machines that do the actual fabrication and assembly work. As for the design work, the work that pays higher wages, most firms perform those functions in their home country.

It's also different for luxury goods. Such goods are purchased by people who are comparatively and notably less price sensitive (exhibit price elasticities of demand as near perfectly inelastic as a consumer goods seller/maker could hope for). Companies that produce luxury goods tend to keep substantively all of their productive operations in their home countries and merely increase their prices as needed.

To wit, in the garment industry, an industry in which nearly entirely all mass market manufacturing has been offshored, yet firms like Allen Edmonds, RGM, Southwick, Bespoke Edge, and Gitman Brothers, for example, produce highest quality goods and have not. [1] (There are others, but most of them range from expensive to very expensive, or at least I imagine that's what an average American would say of them.) Likewise, Blue Star, Wolf, Viking, and Sub Zero make kitchen appliances in America.

The thing is that none of those firms offer anything one might call moderately priced goods. Now I've seen and heard Americans assert that they wouldn't mind paying more for high quality made in America goods. I take them at their word because I have no choice but to do so. All the same, when one is talking about high quality Made in the USA goods, one's talking about very expensive products. To see what I mean compare the price of a Blue Star basic range and that of any mass market (not to be confused with popular/well-known brand names) range.

• Blue Star basic gas range
• GE basic gas range

I guess in a nutshell, as someone who almost exclusively buys only high quality stuff, including a good deal of American made items, I strongly doubt that most consumers are willing to spend the kind of money it takes to buy high quality American made goods. I think most folks are quite content with and prefer to pay notable less than that costs and are okay with "good enough," which, abstractly speaking really isn't high quality at all, but it'll do just fine for a brief period of time.

Note:

1. To be sure, high end garment makers construct their garments, particularly shirtmakers and cobblers, make their garments with the assumption that their owners will use the markedly hard-on-clothes and shoes services of commercial maintenance purveyors -- dry cleaners and airport/hotel shoe shiners -- all the while expecting their garments to be serviceable for longer spans of time than will the owners body still fit properly in them. That's especially so for men's clothing. At less exacting levels on the quality scale, producers assume a far greater degree of and tolerance for disposability.
   
   Designer garments are a different animal altogether, so don't confuse "designer" with "highest quality." Sometimes "designer" and "highest quality" are synonymous and sometimes they're not. John Varvatos' goods, for example, have average construction quality. Ditto Versace. Hermes, Brioni, Paul and Shark, and Louis Vuitton, on the other hand, are first rate on build quality, and though they cost a ton more (double or more) than will a Gitman Bros. or Robert Talbot shirt, they are made to the same construction quality and material grade (not entirely the same thing as quality) standards.

The long term consequences for that companies are severe when the self-made competition takes over.

That's certainly possible, but it's not probable, but neither is it so not probable as to call it improbable. It really depends on how well managed existing firms are, that is, whether they do a good job performing competitive analysis. If they do, they'll notice the start-ups and act to either adjust/counter, squash or consume them. If they take none of those three actions, yes, what you described can happen.

This is not about start-ups. Western companies do normally not own a compound in China. They make a joint-venture with a Chinese company on their compound. And all the Western know-how is being transferred to those Chinese companies. A matter of time until the Chinese will storm the Western markets on a large scale.

 

[usmbguest5318]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

Why did you scare quote "democracy" rather than "menace?" I'm not certain what meaning to take from your having done, particularly vis a vis the rest of your remarks which indicate that neither word should have been scare quoted.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.

Parties:

1. Politics is nothing more than the marketing of public policy ideas.
2. Parties are but organizations that develop and market public policy ideas.
3. Politicians are, in effect, the salespersons of some, most or all of a party's ideas.
4. As with anything one might promote and sell, money and power accrue to the organizations and individuals who sell them.

So just ask yourself: When have you ever seen a consumer marketer [1], during the selling process, do anything other than air the positive attributes of their product and, in response to any and all objections, utter whatever ameliorating rebuttals -- bunkum, pablum, etc. -- they can conceive, regardless of whether their rebuttal holds water?


Note:

1. The consumer aspect cannot be overestimated. B2B marketing is very different because, for the most part, business customers know as much about the product and surrounding factors of it as do the sellers of the product. The same is not so for many consumer goods and services, and it's certainly not so that most voters' know and understand of the breadth of factors relevant to most major public policy matters.
   
   To see what I mean, ask your friends and acquaintances two topically current questions that anyone having a solid mastery of very basic economics -- as in 10th grade basic -- can answer quickly, accurately and briefly (it should take 5 seconds or less to answer both not each question).
   
   -- Do you thing the price elasticity demand (PED) for of raw steel is predominantly elastic or inelastic?
   -- Assuming the PED is inelastic, who will bear the burden of a tariff on raw steel?
   
   Now, I don't know you or your friends and acquaintances, but I suspect like most Americans, they won't knowingly answer either question accurately. (For the first one, they at least have a 50/50 shot of guessing correctly, which is the raison d'etre for the second question -- to know whether they were guessing on the first one.)

Politicians:
The electoral fear you describe is a failing intrinsic to the individual politician, not a failing or menacing feature intrinsic to democracy, or even the U.S. version thereof. That failing derives from two key drivers:

• Politician's unwillingness to subordinate their personal political fortunes and self-interest to the greater good they are emplaced to serve, that is to say, the fortunes of the nation as a whole. Sure, on occasion politicians may act for the greater good of the nation, and that's great. The problem is that they are seated to always do so, not merely sometimes. Think about that....
  
  When corporate execs don't always act in the best interest of the firm they're entrusted to manage on stockholder's behalf, what happens? Among other things, the negligent exec is sent packing. When a parent doesn't always act in their kids' best interest what happens? The children are removed from their negligent parents and the parents may also be prosecuted and incarcerated. What happens to politicians who don't subordinate their electoral interest(s) to the better interest of the nation? For the most part, they get re-elected.
• The notion that being a politician is a career unto itself. Nobody who signed the Constitution imagined that elected office holders would have made a career out of being a politician. Why did they think that? Because serving as federal elected official originally paid only a per diem, not a per annum (salary) and because it was expected that elected officials had means of their own to support their needs -- social activities, entertainment, shopping, tourist activities, etc. -- aside from the cost of meals, lodging in and transportation to/from the District when Congress was in session. (Indeed, during the Articles period, members of Congress were paid by their states, not by the federal government. If the state was displeased with its representatives, it stopped paying them. That approach was abandoned because it was seen as giving states too much power over federal affairs.)

- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.

??? A key deign principle of our democracy is that opposition, as it were, be used as a safeguard against imprudence and excess. "Anything" isn't supposed to "get done." Things that have intrinsic merit and urgency are all that's supposed to "get done." The rest is supposed to fall by the wayside.

- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.

These two are really the same concept approached from different vantages.

- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

???

In a democratic republic, having a vote necessarily makes not be not voiceless. If one wants a voice in every stinking policy decision, one needs to be in a direct democracy. It's fine if that's what one wants, but the U.S. isn't such a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.

there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums.

Yes, that is the provision our republic offers so that direct democratic policy decision making can, when enough folks desire so, happen.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a direct role in the design and implementation approach of every major legislative policy. I'm good with letting elected legislators and appointed officials, availed of subject matter experts input that they in turn share with the public, to craft legislative policy, inform the public of the policy and the SME input about the pros and cons of the policy and then vote on enacting it or not.

Aside:

The gap, if you will, in the process described above it that presently, we "mere" citizens are obliged to seek out subject matter input, and doing that aptly requires time and and a certain skill and baseline knowledge level, one or the other which many folks don't have. To wit, there is tons of original and methodologically sound research that shows unequivocally -- both in narrative and via "the math" -- what to expect as the outcomes of tariffs.

That's all well and good, but if one hasn't at least mastered calculus (quite often, one needs also to have mastered linear algebra too), one can't read and understand the material that shows what that impact will be and why, and if one hasn't mastered the workings of the scientific method and statistics, one can't evaluate the methodology used in any of those studies. That leaves such folks at the material disadvantage -- one has no ability to check the theory (science sense) and no ability to check the application of the theory -- of having little alternative but to trust what someone else tells them. Well, at that point, one's own assessment will necessarily become tied to the motivations of the person who provides the explanation/analysis, and more often than not, their claims notwithstanding, the people most vocally doing that have some interest in mind other than one's own or that of the nation as a whole.

Now in the 1700s and 1800s, one didn't need to have the same level of mastery in various disciplines that one today must. The main reason one didn't is because much of what we know today about matters of science (social and natural) simply wasn't then known. Now, however, it is known, but too many people who can vote don't have the tools needed to consume that knowledge and, in turn, aptly avail themselves of it when considering complex matters of public policy.​

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

You can read here, how our Merkel-gov comes to its debt-free household. Similar to Slick Willy´s debt-reduction, the stop for new debts in Germany on federal level costs the others big time. Cities drown in debts and social welfare, pensions and more get robbed for it.

Google Übersetzer

And the politicians celebrate themselves and don´t give a damn about the future because others will have to explain what happened, then.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Do you understand what company managers are charged with doing? They are hired and paid to increase a firm's profits. If that means availing the firm of lower wage rates in foreign locales, well, provided the cost-benefit calculus shows that tactic as offering greater profits, it just does and that's what the firm's managers should do.

It'd be different, perhaps, were we talking about hand fabrication and other human factors that contribute to individual product quality, but such aren't relevant factors. In the 21st century, most manufacturing happens by individuals operating machines that do the actual fabrication and assembly work. As for the design work, the work that pays higher wages, most firms perform those functions in their home country.

It's also different for luxury goods. Such goods are purchased by people who are comparatively and notably less price sensitive (exhibit price elasticities of demand as near perfectly inelastic as a consumer goods seller/maker could hope for). Companies that produce luxury goods tend to keep substantively all of their productive operations in their home countries and merely increase their prices as needed.

To wit, in the garment industry, an industry in which nearly entirely all mass market manufacturing has been offshored, yet firms like Allen Edmonds, RGM, Southwick, Bespoke Edge, and Gitman Brothers, for example, produce highest quality goods and have not. [1] (There are others, but most of them range from expensive to very expensive, or at least I imagine that's what an average American would say of them.) Likewise, Blue Star, Wolf, Viking, and Sub Zero make kitchen appliances in America.

The thing is that none of those firms offer anything one might call moderately priced goods. Now I've seen and heard Americans assert that they wouldn't mind paying more for high quality made in America goods. I take them at their word because I have no choice but to do so. All the same, when one is talking about high quality Made in the USA goods, one's talking about very expensive products. To see what I mean compare the price of a Blue Star basic range and that of any mass market (not to be confused with popular/well-known brand names) range.

• Blue Star basic gas range
• GE basic gas range

I guess in a nutshell, as someone who almost exclusively buys only high quality stuff, including a good deal of American made items, I strongly doubt that most consumers are willing to spend the kind of money it takes to buy high quality American made goods. I think most folks are quite content with and prefer to pay notable less than that costs and are okay with "good enough," which, abstractly speaking really isn't high quality at all, but it'll do just fine for a brief period of time.

Note:

1. To be sure, high end garment makers construct their garments, particularly shirtmakers and cobblers, make their garments with the assumption that their owners will use the markedly hard-on-clothes and shoes services of commercial maintenance purveyors -- dry cleaners and airport/hotel shoe shiners -- all the while expecting their garments to be serviceable for longer spans of time than will the owners body still fit properly in them. That's especially so for men's clothing. At less exacting levels on the quality scale, producers assume a far greater degree of and tolerance for disposability.
   
   Designer garments are a different animal altogether, so don't confuse "designer" with "highest quality." Sometimes "designer" and "highest quality" are synonymous and sometimes they're not. John Varvatos' goods, for example, have average construction quality. Ditto Versace. Hermes, Brioni, Paul and Shark, and Louis Vuitton, on the other hand, are first rate on build quality, and though they cost a ton more (double or more) than will a Gitman Bros. or Robert Talbot shirt, they are made to the same construction quality and material grade (not entirely the same thing as quality) standards.

The long term consequences for that companies are severe when the self-made competition takes over.

That's certainly possible, but it's not probable, but neither is it so not probable as to call it improbable. It really depends on how well managed existing firms are, that is, whether they do a good job performing competitive analysis. If they do, they'll notice the start-ups and act to either adjust/counter, squash or consume them. If they take none of those three actions, yes, what you described can happen.

This is not about start-ups. Western companies do normally not own a compound in China. They make a joint-venture with a Chinese company on their compound. And all the Western know-how is being transferred to those Chinese companies. A matter of time until the Chinese will storm the Western markets on a large scale.

I think you think that information is far less available than it is or that Chinese people are just stupid, but perhaps instead I don't understand what you mean. What exactly is the nature of know-how that you think the Chinese are obtaining from Americans that they could/would not otherwise obtain elsewhere and/or figure out on their own?

• Do you think the Chinese (or any other nationality) can't purchase a product, reverse engineer it, improve upon it, and commence to produce the thus improved item themselves?
• Do you think the manufacturing equipment that any firm uses is so unique that no other firm, Chinese or otherwise, can't use them too?
• Do you think business process optimization theory and practice are inaccessible to anyone?
• Do you think Chinese workers cannot be taught to use the equipment and tools that everyone else uses?
• Do you think that Chinese business managers can't perform apt business and situational analysis and thereby implement sound business strategy?
• Do you think China doesn't have mathematicians, physicists, chemists, economists, psychologists, biologists, etc?
• Do you not realize that China has a population of nearly two billion people and what having that many people portends re: the probability of eventually outpacing the rest of the world in every way? Do you not realize that's going to happen regardless of whether U.S./Western firms do or don't partner with the Chinese? Are you aware that the cultural ethos of the Chinese as goes their global ascendancy is more "turtle" than "hare?" They're not in a hurry because with two billion people, they know they don't have to rush things.

 

[Bleipriester]

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.
- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.
- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.
- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

The future model of a working government includes a fixed government that creates its agendas in compliance with the people´s interest. For example, there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums. Most things that are not obvious necessities can be subjected to such plans that can also include citizens´ suggestions. This liberates the politics from temporary influences and opens the path for a comprehensive, reasonable and durable governing.

The menace of "democracy" is already infesting our countries with false values and malicious tendencies.

Why did you scare quote "democracy" rather than "menace?" I'm not certain what meaning to take from your having done, particularly vis a vis the rest of your remarks which indicate that neither word should have been scare quoted.

- During "elections" the parties do not appeal to our sanity but our individual advantages. Politicians avoid addressing unpopular issues in fear of the next election.

Parties:

1. Politics is nothing more than the marketing of public policy ideas.
2. Parties are but organizations that develop and market public policy ideas.
3. Politicians are, in effect, the salespersons of some, most or all of a party's ideas.
4. As with anything one might promote and sell, money and power accrue to the organizations and individuals who sell them.

So just ask yourself: When have you ever seen a consumer marketer [1], during the selling process, do anything other than air the positive attributes of their product and, in response to any and all objections, utter whatever ameliorating rebuttals -- bunkum, pablum, etc. -- they can conceive, regardless of whether their rebuttal holds water?


Note:

1. The consumer aspect cannot be overestimated. B2B marketing is very different because, for the most part, business customers know as much about the product and surrounding factors of it as do the sellers of the product. The same is not so for many consumer goods and services, and it's certainly not so that most voters' know and understand of the breadth of factors relevant to most major public policy matters.
   
   To see what I mean, ask your friends and acquaintances two topically current questions that anyone having a solid mastery of very basic economics -- as in 10th grade basic -- can answer quickly, accurately and briefly (it should take 5 seconds or less to answer both not each question).
   
   -- Do you thing the price elasticity demand (PED) for of raw steel is predominantly elastic or inelastic?
   -- Assuming the PED is inelastic, who will bear the burden of a tariff on raw steel?
   
   Now, I don't know you or your friends and acquaintances, but I suspect like most Americans, they won't knowingly answer either question accurately. (For the first one, they at least have a 50/50 shot of guessing correctly, which is the raison d'etre for the second question -- to know whether they were guessing on the first one.)

Politicians:
The electoral fear you describe is a failing intrinsic to the individual politician, not a failing or menacing feature intrinsic to democracy, or even the U.S. version thereof. That failing derives from two key drivers:

• Politician's unwillingness to subordinate their personal political fortunes and self-interest to the greater good they are emplaced to serve, that is to say, the fortunes of the nation as a whole. Sure, on occasion politicians may act for the greater good of the nation, and that's great. The problem is that they are seated to always do so, not merely sometimes. Think about that....
  
  When corporate execs don't always act in the best interest of the firm they're entrusted to manage on stockholder's behalf, what happens? Among other things, the negligent exec is sent packing. When a parent doesn't always act in their kids' best interest what happens? The children are removed from their negligent parents and the parents may also be prosecuted and incarcerated. What happens to politicians who don't subordinate their electoral interest(s) to the better interest of the nation? For the most part, they get re-elected.
• The notion that being a politician is a career unto itself. Nobody who signed the Constitution imagined that elected office holders would have made a career out of being a politician. Why did they think that? Because serving as federal elected official originally paid only a per diem, not a per annum (salary) and because it was expected that elected officials had means of their own to support their needs -- social activities, entertainment, shopping, tourist activities, etc. -- aside from the cost of meals, lodging in and transportation to/from the District when Congress was in session. (Indeed, during the Articles period, members of Congress were paid by their states, not by the federal government. If the state was displeased with its representatives, it stopped paying them. That approach was abandoned because it was seen as giving states too much power over federal affairs.)

- "Opposition" won´t allow the gov to do right. Everything is wrong. You simply cannot get anything done.

??? A key deign principle of our democracy is that opposition, as it were, be used as a safeguard against imprudence and excess. "Anything" isn't supposed to "get done." Things that have intrinsic merit and urgency are all that's supposed to "get done." The rest is supposed to fall by the wayside.

- Long term projects won´t survive to their completion. The rotation of governments will bring several agendas, that won´t allow to finish long term projects.
- Wasting billions. Billions are wasted for elections campaigns, party funding and projects that will be canceled anyway.

These two are really the same concept approached from different vantages.

- The voiceless citizen´s only tool is his vote. He is not involved in any actual governing, be it through referendums or contact to the leadership.

???

In a democratic republic, having a vote necessarily makes not be not voiceless. If one wants a voice in every stinking policy decision, one needs to be in a direct democracy. It's fine if that's what one wants, but the U.S. isn't such a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.

there could be 10 or 20 years plans based on referendums.

Yes, that is the provision our republic offers so that direct democratic policy decision making can, when enough folks desire so, happen.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a direct role in the design and implementation approach of every major legislative policy. I'm good with letting elected legislators and appointed officials, availed of subject matter experts input that they in turn share with the public, to craft legislative policy, inform the public of the policy and the SME input about the pros and cons of the policy and then vote on enacting it or not.

Aside:

The gap, if you will, in the process described above it that presently, we "mere" citizens are obliged to seek out subject matter input, and doing that aptly requires time and and a certain skill and baseline knowledge level, one or the other which many folks don't have. To wit, there is tons of original and methodologically sound research that shows unequivocally -- both in narrative and via "the math" -- what to expect as the outcomes of tariffs.

That's all well and good, but if one hasn't at least mastered calculus (quite often, one needs also to have mastered linear algebra too), one can't read and understand the material that shows what that impact will be and why, and if one hasn't mastered the workings of the scientific method and statistics, one can't evaluate the methodology used in any of those studies. That leaves such folks at the material disadvantage -- one has no ability to check the theory (science sense) and no ability to check the application of the theory -- of having little alternative but to trust what someone else tells them. Well, at that point, one's own assessment will necessarily become tied to the motivations of the person who provides the explanation/analysis, and more often than not, their claims notwithstanding, the people most vocally doing that have some interest in mind other than one's own or that of the nation as a whole.

Now in the 1700s and 1800s, one didn't need to have the same level of mastery in various disciplines that one today must. The main reason one didn't is because much of what we know today about matters of science (social and natural) simply wasn't then known. Now, however, it is known, but too many people who can vote don't have the tools needed to consume that knowledge and, in turn, aptly avail themselves of it when considering complex matters of public policy.​

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

You can read here, how our Merkel-gov comes to its debt-free household. Similar to Slick Willy´s debt-reduction, the stop for new debts in Germany on federal level costs the others big time. Cities drown in debts and social welfare, pensions and more get robbed for it.

Google Übersetzer

And the politicians celebrate themselves and don´t give a damn about the future because others will have to explain what happened, then.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Do you understand what company managers are charged with doing? They are hired and paid to increase a firm's profits. If that means availing the firm of lower wage rates in foreign locales, well, provided the cost-benefit calculus shows that tactic as offering greater profits, it just does and that's what the firm's managers should do.

It'd be different, perhaps, were we talking about hand fabrication and other human factors that contribute to individual product quality, but such aren't relevant factors. In the 21st century, most manufacturing happens by individuals operating machines that do the actual fabrication and assembly work. As for the design work, the work that pays higher wages, most firms perform those functions in their home country.

It's also different for luxury goods. Such goods are purchased by people who are comparatively and notably less price sensitive (exhibit price elasticities of demand as near perfectly inelastic as a consumer goods seller/maker could hope for). Companies that produce luxury goods tend to keep substantively all of their productive operations in their home countries and merely increase their prices as needed.

To wit, in the garment industry, an industry in which nearly entirely all mass market manufacturing has been offshored, yet firms like Allen Edmonds, RGM, Southwick, Bespoke Edge, and Gitman Brothers, for example, produce highest quality goods and have not. [1] (There are others, but most of them range from expensive to very expensive, or at least I imagine that's what an average American would say of them.) Likewise, Blue Star, Wolf, Viking, and Sub Zero make kitchen appliances in America.

The thing is that none of those firms offer anything one might call moderately priced goods. Now I've seen and heard Americans assert that they wouldn't mind paying more for high quality made in America goods. I take them at their word because I have no choice but to do so. All the same, when one is talking about high quality Made in the USA goods, one's talking about very expensive products. To see what I mean compare the price of a Blue Star basic range and that of any mass market (not to be confused with popular/well-known brand names) range.

• Blue Star basic gas range
• GE basic gas range

I guess in a nutshell, as someone who almost exclusively buys only high quality stuff, including a good deal of American made items, I strongly doubt that most consumers are willing to spend the kind of money it takes to buy high quality American made goods. I think most folks are quite content with and prefer to pay notable less than that costs and are okay with "good enough," which, abstractly speaking really isn't high quality at all, but it'll do just fine for a brief period of time.

Note:

1. To be sure, high end garment makers construct their garments, particularly shirtmakers and cobblers, make their garments with the assumption that their owners will use the markedly hard-on-clothes and shoes services of commercial maintenance purveyors -- dry cleaners and airport/hotel shoe shiners -- all the while expecting their garments to be serviceable for longer spans of time than will the owners body still fit properly in them. That's especially so for men's clothing. At less exacting levels on the quality scale, producers assume a far greater degree of and tolerance for disposability.
   
   Designer garments are a different animal altogether, so don't confuse "designer" with "highest quality." Sometimes "designer" and "highest quality" are synonymous and sometimes they're not. John Varvatos' goods, for example, have average construction quality. Ditto Versace. Hermes, Brioni, Paul and Shark, and Louis Vuitton, on the other hand, are first rate on build quality, and though they cost a ton more (double or more) than will a Gitman Bros. or Robert Talbot shirt, they are made to the same construction quality and material grade (not entirely the same thing as quality) standards.

The long term consequences for that companies are severe when the self-made competition takes over.

That's certainly possible, but it's not probable, but neither is it so not probable as to call it improbable. It really depends on how well managed existing firms are, that is, whether they do a good job performing competitive analysis. If they do, they'll notice the start-ups and act to either adjust/counter, squash or consume them. If they take none of those three actions, yes, what you described can happen.

This is not about start-ups. Western companies do normally not own a compound in China. They make a joint-venture with a Chinese company on their compound. And all the Western know-how is being transferred to those Chinese companies. A matter of time until the Chinese will storm the Western markets on a large scale.

I think you think that information is far less available than it is or that Chinese people are just stupid, but perhaps instead I don't understand what you mean. What exactly is the nature of know-how that you think the Chinese are obtaining from Americans that they could/would not otherwise obtain elsewhere and/or figure out on their own?

• Do you think the Chinese (or any other nationality) can't purchase a product, reverse engineer it, improve upon it, and commence to produce the thus improved item themselves?
• Do you think the manufacturing equipment that any firm uses is so unique that no other firm, Chinese or otherwise, can't use them too?
• Do you think business process optimization theory and practice are inaccessible to anyone?
• Do you think Chinese workers cannot be taught to use the equipment and tools that everyone else uses?
• Do you think that Chinese business managers can't perform apt business and situational analysis and thereby implement sound business strategy?
• Do you think China doesn't have mathematicians, physicists, chemists, economists, psychologists, biologists, etc?
• Do you not realize that China has a population of nearly two billion people and what having that many people portends re: the probability of eventually outpacing the rest of the world in every way? Do you not realize that's going to happen regardless of whether U.S./Western firms do or don't partner with the Chinese? Are you aware that the cultural ethos of the Chinese as goes their global ascendancy is more "turtle" than "hare?" They're not in a hurry because with two billion people, they know they don't have to rush things.

I don´t know why you are raging this way now but it remains the truth. Chinese companies gain Western companies´ know-how legally. This means you will share your patents with the specific Chinese company and they will make their own stuff with it sooner or later. Chinas has 1,3 billion people, by the way, and not 2 billion. You claim China is ahead of Europe or America technologically?

Read here:
"Many European companies are keen to enter the China market and develop long-term partnerships in China. In order to achieve this, they are often willing to transfer their latest technology to Chinese subsidiaries of European firms and joint-venture partners. Such technology transfers must be carefully planned out, as it can unwillingly result in loss of competitiveness and market share in the mid to long-term otherwise."

More: Technology Transfer to China: Guide for EU SMEs --- China Intellectual Property

 

[usmbguest5318]

Why did you scare quote "democracy" rather than "menace?" I'm not certain what meaning to take from your having done, particularly vis a vis the rest of your remarks which indicate that neither word should have been scare quoted.

Parties:

1. Politics is nothing more than the marketing of public policy ideas.
2. Parties are but organizations that develop and market public policy ideas.
3. Politicians are, in effect, the salespersons of some, most or all of a party's ideas.
4. As with anything one might promote and sell, money and power accrue to the organizations and individuals who sell them.

So just ask yourself: When have you ever seen a consumer marketer [1], during the selling process, do anything other than air the positive attributes of their product and, in response to any and all objections, utter whatever ameliorating rebuttals -- bunkum, pablum, etc. -- they can conceive, regardless of whether their rebuttal holds water?


Note:

1. The consumer aspect cannot be overestimated. B2B marketing is very different because, for the most part, business customers know as much about the product and surrounding factors of it as do the sellers of the product. The same is not so for many consumer goods and services, and it's certainly not so that most voters' know and understand of the breadth of factors relevant to most major public policy matters.
   
   To see what I mean, ask your friends and acquaintances two topically current questions that anyone having a solid mastery of very basic economics -- as in 10th grade basic -- can answer quickly, accurately and briefly (it should take 5 seconds or less to answer both not each question).
   
   -- Do you thing the price elasticity demand (PED) for of raw steel is predominantly elastic or inelastic?
   -- Assuming the PED is inelastic, who will bear the burden of a tariff on raw steel?
   
   Now, I don't know you or your friends and acquaintances, but I suspect like most Americans, they won't knowingly answer either question accurately. (For the first one, they at least have a 50/50 shot of guessing correctly, which is the raison d'etre for the second question -- to know whether they were guessing on the first one.)

Politicians:
The electoral fear you describe is a failing intrinsic to the individual politician, not a failing or menacing feature intrinsic to democracy, or even the U.S. version thereof. That failing derives from two key drivers:

• Politician's unwillingness to subordinate their personal political fortunes and self-interest to the greater good they are emplaced to serve, that is to say, the fortunes of the nation as a whole. Sure, on occasion politicians may act for the greater good of the nation, and that's great. The problem is that they are seated to always do so, not merely sometimes. Think about that....
  
  When corporate execs don't always act in the best interest of the firm they're entrusted to manage on stockholder's behalf, what happens? Among other things, the negligent exec is sent packing. When a parent doesn't always act in their kids' best interest what happens? The children are removed from their negligent parents and the parents may also be prosecuted and incarcerated. What happens to politicians who don't subordinate their electoral interest(s) to the better interest of the nation? For the most part, they get re-elected.
• The notion that being a politician is a career unto itself. Nobody who signed the Constitution imagined that elected office holders would have made a career out of being a politician. Why did they think that? Because serving as federal elected official originally paid only a per diem, not a per annum (salary) and because it was expected that elected officials had means of their own to support their needs -- social activities, entertainment, shopping, tourist activities, etc. -- aside from the cost of meals, lodging in and transportation to/from the District when Congress was in session. (Indeed, during the Articles period, members of Congress were paid by their states, not by the federal government. If the state was displeased with its representatives, it stopped paying them. That approach was abandoned because it was seen as giving states too much power over federal affairs.)

??? A key deign principle of our democracy is that opposition, as it were, be used as a safeguard against imprudence and excess. "Anything" isn't supposed to "get done." Things that have intrinsic merit and urgency are all that's supposed to "get done." The rest is supposed to fall by the wayside.

These two are really the same concept approached from different vantages.

???

In a democratic republic, having a vote necessarily makes not be not voiceless. If one wants a voice in every stinking policy decision, one needs to be in a direct democracy. It's fine if that's what one wants, but the U.S. isn't such a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.

Yes, that is the provision our republic offers so that direct democratic policy decision making can, when enough folks desire so, happen.

I don't know about you, but I don't want a direct role in the design and implementation approach of every major legislative policy. I'm good with letting elected legislators and appointed officials, availed of subject matter experts input that they in turn share with the public, to craft legislative policy, inform the public of the policy and the SME input about the pros and cons of the policy and then vote on enacting it or not.

Aside:

The gap, if you will, in the process described above it that presently, we "mere" citizens are obliged to seek out subject matter input, and doing that aptly requires time and and a certain skill and baseline knowledge level, one or the other which many folks don't have. To wit, there is tons of original and methodologically sound research that shows unequivocally -- both in narrative and via "the math" -- what to expect as the outcomes of tariffs.

That's all well and good, but if one hasn't at least mastered calculus (quite often, one needs also to have mastered linear algebra too), one can't read and understand the material that shows what that impact will be and why, and if one hasn't mastered the workings of the scientific method and statistics, one can't evaluate the methodology used in any of those studies. That leaves such folks at the material disadvantage -- one has no ability to check the theory (science sense) and no ability to check the application of the theory -- of having little alternative but to trust what someone else tells them. Well, at that point, one's own assessment will necessarily become tied to the motivations of the person who provides the explanation/analysis, and more often than not, their claims notwithstanding, the people most vocally doing that have some interest in mind other than one's own or that of the nation as a whole.

Now in the 1700s and 1800s, one didn't need to have the same level of mastery in various disciplines that one today must. The main reason one didn't is because much of what we know today about matters of science (social and natural) simply wasn't then known. Now, however, it is known, but too many people who can vote don't have the tools needed to consume that knowledge and, in turn, aptly avail themselves of it when considering complex matters of public policy.​

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

You can read here, how our Merkel-gov comes to its debt-free household. Similar to Slick Willy´s debt-reduction, the stop for new debts in Germany on federal level costs the others big time. Cities drown in debts and social welfare, pensions and more get robbed for it.

Google Übersetzer

And the politicians celebrate themselves and don´t give a damn about the future because others will have to explain what happened, then.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Company managers are a good example. They sell their entire company know-how to the Chinese in exchange for cheap labor. And they get rewarded big time for every employee they have fired and replaced with a Chinese one. The company will ultimately fail as it has created its own Chinese competition. But it is short time successes that bring the big benefits for the managers.

Do you understand what company managers are charged with doing? They are hired and paid to increase a firm's profits. If that means availing the firm of lower wage rates in foreign locales, well, provided the cost-benefit calculus shows that tactic as offering greater profits, it just does and that's what the firm's managers should do.

It'd be different, perhaps, were we talking about hand fabrication and other human factors that contribute to individual product quality, but such aren't relevant factors. In the 21st century, most manufacturing happens by individuals operating machines that do the actual fabrication and assembly work. As for the design work, the work that pays higher wages, most firms perform those functions in their home country.

It's also different for luxury goods. Such goods are purchased by people who are comparatively and notably less price sensitive (exhibit price elasticities of demand as near perfectly inelastic as a consumer goods seller/maker could hope for). Companies that produce luxury goods tend to keep substantively all of their productive operations in their home countries and merely increase their prices as needed.

To wit, in the garment industry, an industry in which nearly entirely all mass market manufacturing has been offshored, yet firms like Allen Edmonds, RGM, Southwick, Bespoke Edge, and Gitman Brothers, for example, produce highest quality goods and have not. [1] (There are others, but most of them range from expensive to very expensive, or at least I imagine that's what an average American would say of them.) Likewise, Blue Star, Wolf, Viking, and Sub Zero make kitchen appliances in America.

The thing is that none of those firms offer anything one might call moderately priced goods. Now I've seen and heard Americans assert that they wouldn't mind paying more for high quality made in America goods. I take them at their word because I have no choice but to do so. All the same, when one is talking about high quality Made in the USA goods, one's talking about very expensive products. To see what I mean compare the price of a Blue Star basic range and that of any mass market (not to be confused with popular/well-known brand names) range.

• Blue Star basic gas range
• GE basic gas range

I guess in a nutshell, as someone who almost exclusively buys only high quality stuff, including a good deal of American made items, I strongly doubt that most consumers are willing to spend the kind of money it takes to buy high quality American made goods. I think most folks are quite content with and prefer to pay notable less than that costs and are okay with "good enough," which, abstractly speaking really isn't high quality at all, but it'll do just fine for a brief period of time.

Note:

1. To be sure, high end garment makers construct their garments, particularly shirtmakers and cobblers, make their garments with the assumption that their owners will use the markedly hard-on-clothes and shoes services of commercial maintenance purveyors -- dry cleaners and airport/hotel shoe shiners -- all the while expecting their garments to be serviceable for longer spans of time than will the owners body still fit properly in them. That's especially so for men's clothing. At less exacting levels on the quality scale, producers assume a far greater degree of and tolerance for disposability.
   
   Designer garments are a different animal altogether, so don't confuse "designer" with "highest quality." Sometimes "designer" and "highest quality" are synonymous and sometimes they're not. John Varvatos' goods, for example, have average construction quality. Ditto Versace. Hermes, Brioni, Paul and Shark, and Louis Vuitton, on the other hand, are first rate on build quality, and though they cost a ton more (double or more) than will a Gitman Bros. or Robert Talbot shirt, they are made to the same construction quality and material grade (not entirely the same thing as quality) standards.

The long term consequences for that companies are severe when the self-made competition takes over.

That's certainly possible, but it's not probable, but neither is it so not probable as to call it improbable. It really depends on how well managed existing firms are, that is, whether they do a good job performing competitive analysis. If they do, they'll notice the start-ups and act to either adjust/counter, squash or consume them. If they take none of those three actions, yes, what you described can happen.

This is not about start-ups. Western companies do normally not own a compound in China. They make a joint-venture with a Chinese company on their compound. And all the Western know-how is being transferred to those Chinese companies. A matter of time until the Chinese will storm the Western markets on a large scale.

I think you think that information is far less available than it is or that Chinese people are just stupid, but perhaps instead I don't understand what you mean. What exactly is the nature of know-how that you think the Chinese are obtaining from Americans that they could/would not otherwise obtain elsewhere and/or figure out on their own?

• Do you think the Chinese (or any other nationality) can't purchase a product, reverse engineer it, improve upon it, and commence to produce the thus improved item themselves?
• Do you think the manufacturing equipment that any firm uses is so unique that no other firm, Chinese or otherwise, can't use them too?
• Do you think business process optimization theory and practice are inaccessible to anyone?
• Do you think Chinese workers cannot be taught to use the equipment and tools that everyone else uses?
• Do you think that Chinese business managers can't perform apt business and situational analysis and thereby implement sound business strategy?
• Do you think China doesn't have mathematicians, physicists, chemists, economists, psychologists, biologists, etc?
• Do you not realize that China has a population of nearly two billion people and what having that many people portends re: the probability of eventually outpacing the rest of the world in every way? Do you not realize that's going to happen regardless of whether U.S./Western firms do or don't partner with the Chinese? Are you aware that the cultural ethos of the Chinese as goes their global ascendancy is more "turtle" than "hare?" They're not in a hurry because with two billion people, they know they don't have to rush things.

I don´t know why you are raging this way now but it remains the truth. Chinese companies gain Western companies´ know-how legally. This means you will share your patents with the specific Chinese company and they will make their own stuff with it sooner or later. Chinas has 1,3 billion people, by the way, and not 2 billion. You claim China is ahead of Europe or America technologically?

Read here:
"Many European companies are keen to enter the China market and develop long-term partnerships in China. In order to achieve this, they are often willing to transfer their latest technology to Chinese subsidiaries of European firms and joint-venture partners. Such technology transfers must be carefully planned out, as it can unwillingly result in loss of competitiveness and market share in the mid to long-term otherwise."

More: Technology Transfer to China: Guide for EU SMEs --- China Intellectual Property

I don´t know why you are raging this way now but it remains the truth.

The why isn't the thing about which you should concern yourself because it's now clear to me that "what" I was objecting to in your remarks (explicit and implicit) is also something you don't know. Realizing that informs me to move on to other things.

 

[Bleipriester]