The Two Party Swindle | Hacker News Reader

The Two Party Swindle

lesswrong.com

35 pointsbeerglass4 comments

(2008)

The problem isn't that people trust politicians too much - trust in the government in the US is at very low levels [1]. Calls for further disillusionment without any actionable points is likely to just cause people to disengage all together, which works out just fine for the people currently in power.

There are achievable goals to work towards, like non-FPTP voting [2] and more proportional representation. The single biggest problem with the US political system today is wasted votes and the spoiler effect. Allowing credible threats from third parties would immediately force the parties closer to the actual voter positions and remove the incentive to nudge voters towards increasingly extreme positions to keep them on "your" half of the board.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/04/11/public-trust...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24943441

The basic idea of this essay is that politicians are liars. Republicans say "smaller government", yet the government doesn't shrink. Democrats say "out of Iraq", yet the troops are still there.

I actually think by and large politicians try to deliver on their promises. Democrats: healthcare, gay (and minority) rights, increased social safety net. Republicans: less immigration, lower taxes, less regulation. Overall, Democrats tend to reduce military spending (or keep it below the trend for the rest of the budget), while Republicans tend to increase it.

It is true that none of the parties is making a serious effort to balance the budget. But that's a genuinely hard thing to do from a political standpoint.

I agree, but I also think that voters have contradictory desires. Fulfilling the promise of smaller government is hard when even your own red-team voters won’t support you on the particulars. Want to abolish the dept of housing and urban development (as many republicans want to)? The problem is that at the state and local level, even in red states, public housing is considered a necessary evil and getting federal money for it is preferable to having dirty homeless people urinating on the sidewalk. Want to spend even more money on public housing? Everyone, even democrats, fear the bond markets and their opinion of govt debt, so you’re stuck raising taxes, which a broad majority of voters are against. Moreover, public housing is deeply unpopular with a majority of voters who live in suburbs and don’t want to live near poor people. Voters SAY they want smaller government but what they want is lower taxes and fewer government services for other people. Voters SAY they want visible minorities to be safe from discrimination, but they want those minorities to live far away from them in different neighborhoods.

No law in nature dictate any of the made up structure we submit ourselves to. They only work because people trust them. Trust lost, system down.

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