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Comment by sremani | Hacker News Reader

people are not perfect and that is why we need a government made up of people accountable to all people.

So that they can imperfectly be held accountable by all imperfect people. Now let us find a nice foundation of sand to build a castle on.

I could rip a piece of paper with my bare hands. Give me 300 million pieces of paper sandwiched together and I couldn't.

But they burn quite good.

Actually stacks, sheets, or bindings of paper are extremely difficult to burn compared to individual sheets.

Stacks burn, but not as energetically as a single sheet with a high surface area to volume ratio. The stack might just smolder for 229 years, because the flame resistant treatment turned out to only be flame retardant. Something something Alien and Sedition Acts... this metaphor cannot be tortured any further.

If you're going to debate this, at least read Federalist 51.

The whole point of checks and balances is to get good results from imperfect people. You can use the ambitions of one individual or group to hold the ambitions of another group in check.

I feel like you're just trying to be snarky and or gratuitously negative though.

Reasonable results that allowed most people to go about their lives unmolested from imperfect people. I don't think they imagined "good results".

Oh I remember my highschool civics lessons, but I then went on to study game theory. Consider the incentive imbalance: if it costs me 10k hours to legislatively get one penny from every citizen, and the same number of hours are required to frustrate my attempt - guess who has the greater incentive.

Checks and balances are fine in theory. In practice, the executive and judiciary are overpowered. Judicial review quickly becomes judicial activism. Executive orders are a unilateral get-out-of-checks-and-balances-free card in many cases, lamentations of scholars notwithstanding. Additionally, there is no proper "federalism" so to speak of. It's a marble cake federalism of various entangled relationships and procurements between federal, state and private institutions with disparate enforcement and contractual obligations.

Americans have deified their Founding Fathers to such an absurd extent that they seem to be unable to think critically. That maybe Hamilton and Madison were engaging in wishful thinking. That maybe the anti-federalists were right. That maybe Henry Clay's American System and his antecedent in Hamilton largely botched the ideal separation-of-powers republic from the beginning.

And congress isn't overpowered because it just makes laws and authorizes spending?

<quote> Executive orders are a unilateral get-out-of-checks-and-balances-free card in many cases</quote> If congress wants to, they can overturn most of the executive orders by passing a law. It's not like those are magical powers.

Assuming they can get past the veto-2/3 majority dance. It also strongly depends on the nature of the EO. Major economic restructurings have been struck down before, though usually by judicial review. Military deployments, most infamously WWII-era internment, are less likely to be challenged - especially if they're perceived as "ephemeral" irrespective of consequences.

> The whole point of checks and balances is to get good results from imperfect people.

Granted, it uses an imperfect system of consensus to "do" this right now.

airbubbles + manstrength: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3yvxuMGwCg

Well, better throw that Von Neumann architecture in the TRASH then.

Unfortunately all we have is sand.

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