Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

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For any non-Americans reading this, note that saying "x% of Americans support [vaguely progressive policy] (i.e. universal healthcare, wealth tax, $15/hour minimum wage, mandatory paid family leave) is basically irrelevant to whether the policy will actually get passed. The US system of government is is intentionally and explicitly designed so politicians are not accountable to private opinion, and so the representatives of a small percentage of the population can stop legislation that is popular with the majority from getting passed.

The result of this design can be found in studies like https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th... :

> When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

It doesn't mean it will get passed, but it does mean you can campaign on it. If a majority of voters want something, and can be persuaded to vote for a candidate who is against that, it says rather a lot about the power of money.

In every country the poor are less likely to vote. Bending democracy in their favour is what rich people do.

What I'm saying is that if you read about the history and creation of the US Constitution, the people who created it clearly and unambiguously expressed their distrust in giving too much political influence to the general public, and made limiting popular influence one of their main goals. Some examples of this are the way the Senate is apportioned and the 6-year Senate term, the Electoral College and the way that it's apportioned, how difficult it is to amend the Constitution, and the lifetime tenure of federal judges. If you're interested, there's a good paper going over the motivation behind the Constitution, how it was created, and how it was ratified: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3370359

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