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Peter Orzag, lately Chief of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote an article for New Republic, the regressive journal. 

 

"Too Much of a Good Thing, Why we need less democracy.

 

In an 1814 letter to John Taylor, John Adams wrote that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” That may read today like an overstatement, but it is certainly true that our democracy finds itself facing a deep challenge: During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country’s political polarization was growing worse—harming Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. If you need confirmation of this, look no further than the recent debt-limit debacle, which clearly showed that we are becoming two nations governed by a single Congress—and that paralyzing gridlock is the result.

 

So what to do? To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

 

I know that such ideas carry risks. And I have arrived at these proposals reluctantly: They come more from frustration than from inspiration. But we need to confront the fact that a polarized, gridlocked government is doing real harm to our country. And we have to find some way around it.


POLARIZATION—the divergence of voting patterns in Congress—was historically low following World War II. But it started rising rapidly in the 1970s, and it’s now at historic highs. To grasp why such bold measures are needed to circumvent polarization, we first need to understand that it cannot be easily fixed and that it is therefore not going away."

 

More at: http://www.tnr.com/article/pol...amp;utm_medium=email

 

of course, the US is not a democracy, but a republic.  What Orzag actually means is that the common folk should have less say about how they are governed.  This is a regressive meme, on both sides of the Atlantic, for the last 100 years.  The commoners should leave the important decisions to their "betters."

 

As I pointed out in a number of posts, the EU is just such an organization.  The representatives elected to  represent their nations at the EU are little more than functionaries.  An unelected apparat, to use the old soviet term (which seem appropriate), are the real governors of the EU.  The result is a government that is only slightly less corrupt than the UN.  And, powerless to end even the most terrible happening within their own borders.  Who would have believed genocide in Europe in the late 20th century as it happened in the lands that once made up Yugoslavia.  I will give Clinton for bringing that to an end.     

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