Does america have a government?

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fakename

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According to what I’ve read in The Politics, (by Aristotle) a state has to have a single view of the common good (that is, a single view of justice); an alliance for common interests does not suffice to make a country.

But it doesn’t seem like america has a single view of the common good, rather it has a pluralistic view that the everyone should have their own particular good (liberty). And again, in America, there are differing views of what justice is; Is it islamic, Catholic, buddhist, etc. or is it none of these?

So is america a country with a government or is it just an alliance for convenience?
 
We are certainly a house divided against itself, but we do have a government.
 
We hold these truths…the Declaration of Independence clearly spells out what the Founding Fathers believed. The Constitution limits the governments power- individual freedom for the citizens-the new rulers want to change the Constitution to say what the government has to do for you- see RB Ginsberg speach to the South African congress-Don’t use the US constitution for a template because it doesn’t include what the governmet should do for you.
The travesties of the Constitution

the ammendment that made Senators elected rather than appointed by the state legislature- used to be Senators were beholden to their state- but now every Senate campaign is a national election.

Ammendmant that authorized the income tax- originally only on the top 5% but over time the progressives have expanded it to include everyone who actually is productive in order to give it to the unproductive who will vote them in.
 
We hold these truths…the Declaration of Independence clearly spells out what the Founding Fathers believed.
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I understand that perhaps america’s view of the common good could be “right to life, liberty , and the pursuit of happiness” but are these rights essentially the same as particular rights and therefore, not really a view of the common good? I think libertarians or individualist anarchists would say so.

But the common good should be something separate from all the individual goods per se and incidentally connected with them: for instance the right to property as a common good or goal can only be achieved by some act which applies to the whole state, like establishing the safety of contracts and not by particular acts encouraged by the state like giving licenses to one individual insofar as he is merely a singular individual and not an object of the common good or justice.

I’m not sure if the right to liberty for instance, is so neatly delineated from purely individual concerns; legal habits can be changed by one purely individual consideration like how some people, despite general custom, are pro-pedophilia because the present arrangement denies them their rights, and so they try to change legal customs to suit their completely private ends. The law however, should not be perverted towards private gain.
 
The Constitution is pretty specific in LIMITING the governments hold over you. It is all about FREEDOM to do as you please as long as it does not injure another. It leaves the question of what to do with those who can’t survive on their own to the States. It was to be a crucible(?spelling) in which the States could do whatever they thought best and sort it out amongst them as to the best place to live.
 
**Ammendmant that authorized the income tax- originally only on the top 5% but over time the progressives have expanded it to include everyone who actually is productive in order to give it to the unproductive who will vote them in. **

You’re not going to hear me doing much defending of the “progressives,” because they are the ones promoting abortion, sodomy-marriages, legal porno, and every other moral abomination, but this answer about income taxes is grossly oversimplistic.
That answer above would mean that 95% of yours and my income taxes are given to lazy people who won’t even look for work. Do the math, that is absolutely false.
The 8.3% unemployment figure is false, so let’s up it by about 5 points nationwide
(( 8.3% is derived from the unmentioned fact that millions of people’s unemployment insurance coverage extensions have run out, but THEY have not been able to find jobs, but are dropped from the official list of the unemployed, so the 8.3% is very deceptive )).
So even with 13 or 14% unemployment, MOST of that unemployment is NOT DELIBERATE, so if “the lazy bums” are all accounted for, they make up no more than about 5% of the population. No way are all, or most, of our income taxes, going to finance the American-Dream lives of lazy bums who won’t even try to hold down a job.
Not so. And the AMOUNT they give even a poor person is deeply humiliating and comparatively quite small (although there are some clever welfare queens and kings who manage to drag in hundreds, thousands a month in un-needed benefits by means of lying like crazy, habitually, on their forms about how much or how little money they have coming in. THESE FOLKS, who do THAT stuff, ARE robbing the taxpayers).
Yes, WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much is spent on bureaucracy and waste,
but 95% of your taxes are NOT going to support people who will not work.
They are used to support many other areas of the common good, including infrastructure, national defense, science research, and a host of other necessary things.
The “progressives” certainly have their serious flaws, some of which are extremely wicked, but doling out hundreds of billions to those who will not look for a job, is a gross exxaggeration.
 
As for our “Government,” what we have here now, frankly, is a Dictatorship. This dictatorship has been brought about by the use of RULE BY DECREE by the President, by-passing the House and Senate, to enact what he wants to enact.
This rule by decree, this Dictatorship, has been brought about by the use
of EXECUTIVE ORDERs. This, use of Executive Orders and thereby bypassing the Checks and Balances of our Federal, Judicial, and Legislative branches,
is the very essence of Dictatorship. Much as I loved him, I remember President Reagan being the first to use Executive Orders, then Bush I used them, then Clinton used LOTS of them, and Bush II used quite a lot of them, and President Obama has been using them like they were pieces of penny candy.

Don’t anyone object, “BUT THESE MEN WERE ELECTED!!!”
Yes, they were.
So was Anastasio Somoza-Debayle of Nicaragua, too, in 1974.
He was elected in 1974 with a HUGE, legitimate MAJORITY of the vote, too, because his Nationalist Liberal Party was by far the LARGEST single political party in Nicaragua at the time, with over 700,000 registered members.
And Nicaragua had a Congress, too, but when the Presidente wanted something done, and their congress wouldn’t do it, he just up and did it, hence, dictatorship.
That is happening here, now, continuously,
through the use of Executive Orders.
THIS needs to be STOPPED.
 
the ammendment that made Senators elected rather than appointed by the state legislature- used to be Senators were beholden to their state- but now every Senate campaign is a national election.

The amendment which made senators elected directly by voters was an attack on our constitution, by the way, and the system of checks and balances.

The SENATE was modelled, in theory, after the Roman Senate.
It was, ideally, to be chosen by the representaives of the respective states.
Each state was to look at a slate of potential senators, choosing them
from among the best, brightest, most noble, and most-well-educated of all
the possible candidates. It was to be a SENATE, a body of wise persons, genuinely
wise persons, that is why it was not up for direct, popular vote, like the House of Reps was supposed to be.

Changing it to direct, popular vote makes senators no different from the members of the “people’s House,” the House of Representatives, in practice. EVEN WORSE,
now any nitwit can become a senator if he or she raises enough money or has enough rich and powerful interests backing him or her with gobs of big bucks. Not at all what the fathers intended
for the U.S. Senate.
 
Jaypeeto4 said:
**Ammendmant that authorized the income tax- originally only on the top 5% but over time the progressives have expanded it to include everyone who actually is productive in order to give it to the unproductive who will vote them in. **

You’re not going to hear me doing much defending of the “progressives,” because they are the ones promoting abortion, sodomy-marriages, legal porno, and every other moral abomination, but this answer about income taxes is grossly oversimplistic.
That answer above would mean that 95% of yours and my income taxes are given to lazy people who won’t even look for work. Do the math, that is absolutely false.
The 8.3% unemployment figure is false, so let’s up it by about 5 points nationwide
(( 8.3% is derived from the unmentioned fact that millions of people’s unemployment insurance coverage extensions have run out, but THEY have not been able to find jobs, but are dropped from the official list of the unemployed, so the 8.3% is very deceptive )).
So even with 13 or 14% unemployment, MOST of that unemployment is NOT DELIBERATE, so if “the lazy bums” are all accounted for, they make up no more than about 5% of the population. No way are all, or most, of our income taxes, going to finance the American-Dream lives of lazy bums who won’t even try to hold down a job.
Not so. And the AMOUNT they give even a poor person is deeply humiliating and comparatively quite small (although there are some clever welfare queens and kings who manage to drag in hundreds, thousands a month in un-needed benefits by means of lying like crazy, habitually, on their forms about how much or how little money they have coming in. THESE FOLKS, who do THAT stuff, ARE robbing the taxpayers).
Yes, WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much is spent on bureaucracy and waste,
but 95% of your taxes are NOT going to support people who will not work.
They are used to support many other areas of the common good, including infrastructure, national defense, science research, and a host of other necessary things.
The “progressives” certainly have their serious flaws, some of which are extremely wicked, but doling out hundreds of billions to those who will not look for a job, is a gross exxaggeration.
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Socialist Platform of 1928

This is the taxation plank of the Socialist party platform of 1928:
Code: 
“Increase of taxation on high income levels, of corporation taxes and inheritance taxes, the proceeds to be used for old age pensions and other forms of social insurance.”
According to Milton Friedman, the highest personal income tax rate in 1928 was 28%. In 1978 it was 70%. Perhaps if tax rates were the same as 1928 people would not cheat on their taxes.

This country was not founded on income taxes. Income taxes were unconstitutional until Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment

The socialist governments of the world are a failure. The socialists created a world without God. That world is failing and it will pass away. We will not replace the culture of death. God will destroy this evil culture that worships the love of money, instead of God.
 
Jim Kalb’s “The Tyranny of Liberalism” is worth a read here. He argues in part that a nation cannot be founded meaningfully on procedural principles but needs to have substantive ones. He thus implicitly suggests that modern liberalism is a mutation of classical liberalism, which transformed its neutral, procedural principles into substantive ones: mandated freedom, forced equality, in every and all respects.

I have no idea where you get the idea, fakename, that not having a substantive vision of the good qualifies a govenrment as a nongovernment, instead of just, you know, a bad government. Very likely this is what Aristotle himself said.
 
user "sw85":
Jim Kalb’s “The Tyranny of Liberalism” is worth a read here. He argues in part that a nation cannot be founded meaningfully on procedural principles but needs to have substantive ones. He thus implicitly suggests that modern liberalism is a mutation of classical liberalism, which transformed its neutral, procedural principles into substantive ones: mandated freedom, forced equality, in every and all respects.

I have no idea where you get the idea, fakename, that not having a substantive vision of the good qualifies a govenrment as a nongovernment, instead of just, you know, a bad government. Very likely this is what Aristotle himself said.
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it’s a tough question:

basically in Politics Books 1-3, aristotle says that military or economic alliances are not gov. or states. But america (in my opinion) was founded as an alliance because it depended on the consent of the different states and was contingent on that consent and because many people seemed to have been of that opinion (for instance, there was popular support for secession in NE and S. Carolina and if the senate stopped supporting the gov. obviously the national gov. could not exist).

but also, the two reasons for building the US was economic and military, for the national gov. was est. to mediate trade disputes b/t states and to discharge their debts, but it was also est. to provide for common defense. So the question turns on my opinion that america was an alliance.

So do you think America was/is an alliance? why or why not? And to what extent is a bad gov. a gov. at all, for all gov. provides for the common good such that if a gov. were to go against this good, then by modus tollens, wouldn’t that gov. be a non-gov?
 
fakename said:
it’s a tough question:

basically in Politics Books 1-3, aristotle says that military or economic alliances are not gov. or states. But america (in my opinion) was founded as an alliance because it depended on the consent of the different states and was contingent on that consent and because many people seemed to have been of that opinion (for instance, there was popular support for secession in NE and S. Carolina and if the senate stopped supporting the gov. obviously the national gov. could not exist).

but also, the two reasons for building the US was economic and military, for the national gov. was est. to mediate trade disputes b/t states and to discharge their debts, but it was also est. to provide for common defense. So the question turns on my opinion that america was an alliance.

So do you think America was/is an alliance? why or why not? And to what extent is a bad gov. a gov. at all, for all gov. provides for the common good such that if a gov. were to go against this good, then by modus tollens, wouldn’t that gov. be a non-gov?
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It started as an alliance, but became a state without anyone noticing. (Unless you count the war of southern succession, but that is another can of worms.):eek:
 
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