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0 pointscookiecaper7y ago0 comments

We have a system that operates at the pace of 1776. That served us well for a long time, but since the post-war proliferation of mass media, it's hard to argue that it's adequate anymore.

You're right that people don't understand the way the separation of powers works, but the system badly needs to be revised. The world has totally transformed in the last 75 years and it's much smaller now. Political and legal feedback loops need to become much more responsive. One can see how it all worked when it would take weeks or months to get news of things like national election results, and when most people lived mostly self-sufficient agrarian lifestyles, but we don't live in that world anymore.

Our entire political system, including the functional ability for normal private individuals to seek and obtain useful legal relief, has ground to a halt over the last several decades. Technology has made the old methods increasingly bad fits for the modern era.

It'd be great if we could renovate the system before we fully convince the populace that the elements of good governance, like separation of powers and an independent judiciary, are necessarily linked to stunning and clear deprivations of fairness (of which binding arbitration is just one good example).

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bhups7y ago

> We have a system that operates at the pace of 1776. That served us well for a long time, but since the post-war proliferation of mass media, it's hard to argue that it's adequate anymore.

I'd argue the exact opposite. The pace of our system is just a reflection of the current ideological polarization. Enacting Federal law requires a strong consensus (to prevent abuse), and the more polarized we are, the more difficult it becomes to shove Federal laws down the throat of a narrow minority.

If we can't gather this consensus at the Federal level, we have the levers of state legislatures to pass those same laws at a more local level.

Liberal states have the political will, the systems, and (if we're being frank) the majority of businesses that would be affected by Federal law anyway. They just need to have the will to compromise and pass their desired law at the state level until such a time that there's Federal consensus for that law.

TheCoelacanth7y ago

> Liberal states have the political will, the systems, and (if we're being frank) the majority of businesses that would be affected by Federal law anyway. They just need to have the will to compromise and pass their desired law at the state level until such a time that there's Federal consensus for that law.

That's a nice theory, but no. Federal law preempts state law in this scenario[1] so states are completely unable to do anything to reign in arbitration.

[1] https://www.drinkerbiddle.com/insights/publications/2017/05/...

makomk7y ago

Which, effectively, means that state goverments cannot pass any kind of meaningful consumer protection law or worker protection law, because of how fundamentally structurally biased towards the bigger side forced arbitration is. It's doubtful that Congress ever intended to preempt state laws in this way or that the FAA would've made it through Congress if it attempted to do so; this was entirely the creation of the Supreme Court, with none of that pesky horsetrading and strong consensus that would be required to pass an actual law.

cookiecaperOP7y ago

There is definitely something to be said for requiring broad consensus. I think many would argue that the systems were intentionally designed to be slow and convoluted because it meant that only the most important things would survive and get implemented, at least at the federal level. I don't necessarily disagree with that in principle, but "slow and convoluted" by 19th century standards is "worthless and disastrous" by 21st century standards.

Technology has brought us all much closer, and it requires us to re-evaluate many of our old ideas. Maybe it was easier to say "each state will handle things on its own" in the 1800s, when it could take days or weeks of walking just to get to the state line. Now, many of us would be able to get to our state's border and back over the course of a long lunch break -- to say nothing of boarding an airplane and traversing the entire continent in a single evening.

In the old days, the saying was that a lie can get around the world before the truth can pull its boots on. Now, massive knots of information, too intermingled to classify definitively as either truth or error, traverse the earth literally at the speed of light. Unfiltered recordings of many important events are now available across the planet a few seconds after they occur. When our political processes were designed, it would take months for highly-diluted summaries of information to percolate to the masses.

As a species, we are still coming to terms with our ridiculous new powers of instantaneous global mobility and communication, but it seems patently silly to me to insist that systems designed for the much slower and bigger world of the past will map onto today's world essentially without modification.

bhups7y ago

I don't think that this is a technology problem - it's a polarization problem. No amount of technology traveling at the speed of light will solve the simple problem that you belong to an ideological sub-group that ferociously disagrees with another sub-group about how things should be run. Indeed, we're a nation of 330 million people, this is to be expected. I'm amazed we've been able to get away with this level of centralization for this long.

This isn't all that different from the EU, a similar union of states with a similar population (500 million), where the vast majority of laws and regulations are passed at the member-state level and not at the EU level. Any American that argues "each state will handle things on its own" is just making the same argument that a European might make when saying "we should enact this healthcare system X, or that pension system Y, or that policy Z in Germany".

This was always the Framers' intent, Hamilton himself was well aware of the perils of the Tyranny of the Majority[1]. The prescription for this was to apply the subsidiarity principle and use concurrent majorities (i.e. "let the states decide"). Federalism was never about the logistics of walking to state lines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

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gowld7y ago

We must occasionally remind ourselves that the Supreme Court ruled to uphold slavery, so injustice under law is not a recent phenomenon.

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bhups7y ago

> We have a system that operates at the pace of 1776. That served us well for a long time, but since the post-war proliferation of mass media, it's hard to argue that it's adequate anymore.

If we can't gather this consensus at the Federal level, we have the levers of state legislatures to pass those same laws at a more local level.

TheCoelacanth7y ago

That's a nice theory, but no. Federal law preempts state law in this scenario[1] so states are completely unable to do anything to reign in arbitration.

[1] https://www.drinkerbiddle.com/insights/publications/2017/05/...

makomk7y ago

cookiecaperOP7y ago

bhups7y ago

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

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gowld7y ago

We must occasionally remind ourselves that the Supreme Court ruled to uphold slavery, so injustice under law is not a recent phenomenon.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse