Wednesday--American Revolution Quiz

1. During the period leading to the Revolutionary War, England was attempting to extract revenues from its American colonies in order to

a.	subsidize the East India Company.
b.	pay for providing military protection.
c.	supplement the low salaries in the House of Commons.
d.	compensate for travel expenses of colonial representatives to Parliament.

B, we were in much the same position in comparison to Britain as we often accuse our allies in of being in in relation to us—sponging off their defense expenditures.

2. For years, the imperial center in London had left its American colonists to enjoy an immense amount of local control and home rule because the British empire was

a.	being ruled by an inattentive king.
b.	preoccupied by a war with France.
c.	in the midst of quelling the Irish rebellion.
d.	pursuing a deliberate laissez-faire policy toward its territorial possessions.

B

3. The British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre were defended by a pillar of Boston society and future president of the United States,

a.	John Adams.
b.	James Madison.
c.	Thomas Jefferson.
d.	George Washington.

A. the authors use this fact to illustrate the conservatism and upper-class loyalties of the Founders, but I argue it is more an illustration of Adam’s character—a belief in order and a willingness to take up unpopular causes. In Adam’s case, we have unusually good evidence of his motivations because of the extensive and intellectually serious correspondence he had with his wife, Abigail.

Adams’ willingness to take on unpopular causes followed him and his descendents. His presidency ended in one term, mainly because of his unpopular decision to head off war with France. His son, JQA, who was President from 1824 to 1828 was similarly universally admired and universally disliked. He is depicted in the largely accurate movie Amistad (spelling?) defending mutinous slaves. His grandson, Henry, was a diplomat and famous contrarian. His memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, is included in the University of Chicago’s Great books series of the 100 or so greatest books of all time. I don’t know if it is that good but he is a great writer. The Adams family still lives in the same place. They are independently wealthy but still, as a family, have a sense of duty. His 7^th generation grandson volunteered to join the Army as a helicopter pilot. He was killed there last year.

4. The Declaration of Independence was written by

a.	James Madison.
b.	Thomas Jefferson.
c.	George Washington.
d.	Alexander Hamilton.

B. BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB! Who does not know this? No one misses this. No one misses this in Kyrgyzstan!

5. The relationship between Congress and the states under the Articles of Confederation was much like the contemporary relationship between the

a.	state of Louisiana and its parishes.
b.	United Nations and its member states.
c.	General Motors and its subdivisions such as Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Cadillac.
d.	Disney Corporation and its media networks, production companies, and resorts.

B. Keep this in mind. In fact, the UN is somewhat stronger institutionally than the Articles of Confederation, something to think about, for better or worse.

6. During the winter of 178687, John Adams of Massachusetts was sent to negotiate a new treaty with the British to cover disputes left over from the war. The British government responded that it would

a.	set a blockade around Boston Harbor.
b.	relinquish control over the lands to the west.
c.	negotiate with each of the thirteen states separately.
d.	require war reparations before signing any new treaty.

This is a key point. The theory of democracy tells you that the majority rules, but majority of what? Democratic theory has no answer for the question “of what?” There are always people that aren’t included in the group that could be added and subsets of the group where you can find a different majority.

7. Between 1783 and 1785, the Rhode Island legislature, dominated by representatives of small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, frightened businessmen and property owners throughout the country by instituting

a.	free trade policies.
b.	economic policies including drastic currency inflation.
c.	generous agricultural subsidies and severely protective tariffs.
d.	eminent domain activities for an extensive statewide park system.

B. “Free trade” is an idea that wasn’t yet common, even though it had already received its classic statement in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The government wasn’t sufficiently well organized to offer agricultural subsidies even if it had wanted to at that time. It is the idea of printing money and inflating the currency that is really the problem at this point in history. Think about whose interests are affected and how by such a policy.

Revolution

Ok, now we start our first substantive chapter on the American Revolution. Try to actually have an opinion in what you write this week. Don't feel you just have to tell me what you read, make a comment on what you read.

This week

This week we wrap up the principles of politics and start looking at actual cases, in particular, the American Revolution. Before we do that, we have one day of Tocqueville, and an introduction to the alternative to the rational actor model, bounded rationality, or, as Lindbloom calls it in his famous article, "the science of muddling through."

Both of these authors are great to read and I hope they both, in particular Tocqueville, become life-long friends.

Quiz Results

The class average on the quiz was 59%. Actually, that is better than the first quiz usually is.

As an aside to our discussion today, we mentioned Aristotle’s classifications of government. Here it is in full:

Aristotle's Typology of Government
Rule by	Good	Bad
One	Monarchy	Tyranny
Few	Aristocracy	Oligarchy
Many	Polity	Democracy

First, note that “autocracy” is not there. The reason is that Aristotle had a two dimensional classification scheme. The first dimension is just the size of the ruling class. The second dimension is whether it rules in the interests of all or of only itself.

This latter distinction is foreign to contemporary political scientists. Recall that we like to keep normative judgments, judgments about good and bad, right and wrong, out of science. Aristotle, though he was very interested in getting the objective, observable facts (empirical investigation), had no trouble with making normative judgments.

So instead of his “Monarchy/Tyranny” distinction, we have boiled it down to the one observable fact they have in common: the fact that there is only one person in charge: autocracy.

Notice, also, that democracy was in Aristotle’s Bad list, what he called the degenerate forms. Aristotle didn’t think that rule by the many was necessarily bad, but even if it started out good (Polity—recall that poly means many) it would generally go bad (democracy).

Though the founders didn’t use Aristotle’s terminology in the same way, they certainly shared his concerns, as we shall soon see.

Syllabus and Updates

I have updated the Syllabus up to the midterm. I want to leave open the possibility of changing course once we see how things go.

Let me apologize for all the fumbling around I did in class looking for quotes. I took the wrong volume of Orwell with me this morning.

It is important to note that Orwell’s point isn’t that Gandhi’s methods are ineffective, simply that they might not work with a power less liberal than Great Britain:

“It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?”

The other main point is that being “human” and being a saint are two different and, ultimately, incompatible things. Here is the passage from the essay on Gandhi I was looking for:

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”


Let’s also keep in mind the distinction that we drew in class discussion between rationality in the economist’s sense of choosing the means most likely to achieve a given set of ends, and rationality in the sense of having reasonable ends (or goals) in the first place. This is a key concept in the textbook and one that that lies behind most all of the authors' analysis of politics.

As we begin reading the book, keep in mind that even though this is a textbook, we want to read it critically. That is to say, we don’t want to take their word for anything. They won’t lie, but they may not tell us the whole truth, and what they may sincerely believe to be true might not be so.

Our text has a very specific take on political science, not so much in the sense of being liberal or conservative (though I suspect you will catch which side of that divide they are on soon enough), but in the methodolocial sense. They are writing from the point of view of the dominant school of thought in American political science which is commonly known as “Rational Choice.” It is an attempt to apply the sort of reasoning that grows out of economics to politics, particularly in the sense of “means-ends” rationality that we discussed today in class. Keep this in mind as you are reading.

Feel free to focus on whatever strikes a chord with you in the reading in your reflection papers. Remember that I want one per week from each of you. You can post for any day you please, but it must be posted by 6:00 to count. Also, try to read what your classmates write as well.

Finally, make sure your name is on your posting. The computer only puts up your email name.

A New Semester Has Begun!

Ok, so we didn’t have time to get to this in class discussion, but here is what I wanted to say about the theories that we came up with.

All of the theories that we came up with had one common feature: they talked about us and them.

This is the way we usually think about politics. We assume that there is this group, and this group has goals and objectives. The group makes choices about the best way to achieve its goals. The group is affected by the world. “We” are so powerful that we ignore the world, or “they” have a religion that commands them to sacrifice themselves in freeing “their” land from infidels.

Now, as Michael recognized in his comment about our interventions into foreign civil wars, “they” are not always as homogeneous, as unified, as we might assume. But in general, we think of large groups as if they were individuals writ large. A group has feelings, like envy and anger, and the group makes decisions about the best way to achieve its goals. It has a mind that can be distracted and not pay attention to things like how much anger and envy it might have excited.

All of this is perfectly normal. It falls under the first of our 5 principles of politics—rationality. When we assume that the decisions and actions of a group can be explained by the group’s purposes and goals, we are assuming that there is a unified group, that the group is a sort of individual writ large.

We can often explain a lot by thinking in this way. There are many cases where a group of people are so unified (such as a democracy that has just been attacked) or they are under a such a tight system of command (such as a nation under a totalitarian dictatorship) that we can think of the nation or the group as one thing with goals and intentions. And we can explain the group’s behavior, whether that group is a country or members of a religion, as deriving from the group’s goals and choices about how to meet those goals.

But often we can’t. In fact, quite often we can’t. There may be some goal that all the members of the group agree on but that they can’t work together achieve because of communication difficulties or not having a way to structure incentives effectively. We call these Collective Action Problems. They may mostly agree on a policy but their decision making procedures lead to a minority’s views getting undue weight in the decision making process. Such phenomena fall under the Policy Principle. They may have formed a mental habit that they don’t re-examine critically in light of new information, leading them to get blind-sided by new developments. Or, they may have delegated a task to a sub-group, an organization, that, overtime, becomes like a living being itself with its own goals and interests, and its own distinctive way of looking at the word. This is a Principle-Agent problem. These sorts of accounts also fall under what political scientists often call the Institutional Principle. Finally, they a group may not evaluate all the options open to it because some event or choice they made in the past has closed off some options or made others more prominent than they should be on the rationality principle. We group these under the rubric or Path Dependency or, as our book calls it, History Matters.

The point of throwing all these new words at you is to help you start to explore new possibilities for explaining the actions of groups, whether they are nations, religions or loose associations of the like-minded. Over the next week we will go over what these terms mean in detail. The goal is to help you build a mental check-list, a set of possible explanations that you can bring to any new situation that you are trying to explain. None of these ideas are really new to you, but by describing them with abstract, technical terms we will help you to apply these ideas to wider sets of phenomena.

Before we do that I would like us to read two short pieces of writing by George Orwell. I have emailed you links to these articles.

In the first, Orwell talks about problems in the way the English language is used in politics and what to do about it. See if you can find one of our principles of politics in his account.

In the second he talks about Mahatma Gandhi, and in particular discusses Gandhi’s recommendation for how his principle of non-violence might have applied to the Jews of Germany in the period leading up to WWII. Would you consider his advice Rational?

Wilson Chapter

I am afraid these files are too large to go by email so I am posting them. Here is the chapter from Wilson on public opinion:



Wilson 1



Wilson 2

Representative Foley

Foley Framing

Some quotes that seemed apropos...

"High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."

-Oscar Wilde

"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."

"One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

-Bertrand Russell

Congress Quiz

Congress Quiz: Answer Key

In recent years, the rate of re-election for representatives seeking to return to service in the U.S. House of Representatives is about
a. 35 percent.
b. 55 percent.
c. 75 percent.
d. 95 percent.


ANS: D; REF: Page 177

This is a key feature of Congress and a major difference between the House and the Senate. House members can in effect “choose” their voters, rather than the other way around. More importantly, House elections are about local issues and what the member has done for the district. Because turnout is so low in House elections and voters chose on the basis of purely local issues, a member can usually put together a stable, winning coalition just on the basis of a district specific spending projects and helping people solve minor problems with the Federal Bureaucracy, like your Grandmother’s social security check. That is why House members devote 2/3 of their staff to constituency service.


A bill's opponents generally prefer that the Rules Committee decide to use
a. an open rule.
b. a closed rule.
c. a termination rule.
d. a commencement rule.


ANS: A; REF: Page 197

This follows from the discussion of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem we worked through in class Friday. An “open rule” would mean that someone could always propose a new alternative, a new bill to vote on (by introducing a new bill or, more commonly, amending the current one) and create a new winning coalition. Almost all the important, i.e., money bills in the House are introduced under a closed rule.


A rule allowing a three-fifths majority of U.S. Senators to set a time limit on debate over a given bill is called
a. Cloture
b. preemption.
c. a closed rule.
d. legislative veto.


ANS: A; REF: Page 198

i.e., providing “closure” to the debate. The word cloture is just the fancier sounding Latin version of the word.


A congressional representative’s statement to his or her legislative colleague that “I’ll support your bill if you’ll support mine” is an example of
a. whipping.
b. logrolling.
c. distributive tendency.
d. interest group bargaining.


ANS: B; REF: Page 210

Note how this often grows out of members having radically different concerns, the member from one district cares about farm products, the member from another wants a parking garage downtown. A coalition is a group of people that want to do the same thing for different reasons.

Reforms that may make Congress better able to act, such as strong central leadership, reduction of the number of committees and subcommittees, and retention of members with seniority and experience, should also make Congress much more representative.

ANS: F; REF: Page 168

Again, follows from the logic of the impossibility theorem and Principle 4. The group that can make a decision ends up having a dictator.



Among the most fervent supporters of creating districts in which members of racial minorities have decisive majorities were white Republicans.

ANS: T; REF: Page 182

Almost no one got this. The court decided that having more minority representatives was the goal of policy. This is best accomplished by having “majority-minority” districts, i.e., districts where a majority of the voters are minority members. Drawing districts this way insures that there are a good number of African American House members (around 10%, as opposed to only one African American in the Senate), most of whom win their districts by huge margins, but it also insures that there are more Republicans overall in the House than there would otherwise be.


36. Under Senate rules, members have a virtually unlimited ability to propose amendments to a pending bill.

ANS: T; REF: Page 198

This is why running the Senate is like “Herding Cats,” in Senator Lott’s memorable phrase.

Lecture Notes

Since I did not get through everything I wanted to talk about I am posting my lecture notes. If they don't make sense in this form feel free to ask me about them in class or in an email.

Congress:

What we want you to do is learn to ask questions like a political scientist. To do that you have to first decide that something is worth explaining.

In the case of the revolution and constitution chapter we had the fact that the richest and lowest taxed people in the world revolted over taxes so they could increase taxes on themselves. Notice that the RA model that the authors push does not do that great a job explaining it. Maybe we need another model.

We looked at the courts. The thing that needed to be explained there was the power of the courts. Why? Because the courts seem to defy the logic of a majoritarian system that would vest power in the median voter and instead gives power to a particular institution. Because it had no precedent in the British system or the world. Because it wasn’t written in the text of the constitution or envisioned by its authors. Because it seems to defy our normal understanding of R/D power in that the courts don’t have an army or anything they can take away from the political branches unless the political branches agree to it. The RA explanation model offered a good story of the short-sightedness of Madison in taking Marshall’s offer of letting him make appointments in exchange for letting Marshall interpret the constitution. But Tocqueville offers a different explanation.

Now we are at the Center of American government, the Congress. What needs to be explained here? What is different or odd about it? Well, the question can be posed as a number of comparisons, a number of things that one might reasonably expect the Congress to be similar to but in fact is not similar to.

Britain. Our Congress was designed by Englishmen who were almost all members of congresses that were patterned on the British Parliament. They have the same culture, language and legal tradition.

Other former colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zeland) are basically like the Mother country instead of us.

Other Congress/President (as opposed to Parliamentary systems) such as in most of Latin America and, well, not that many other places. The Countries of South America have Congresses but they are much weaker than ours; most of the power lies with the President. Other places that have Presidents are really parliamentary systems with a ceremonial head of state, just as the Queen of England is now mainly ceremonial (though she in fact has a lot of powers if she ever feels like using them).

The ideals of Classical Republicanism. The debate, deliberation and group decision making that one might have expected from people that patterned themselves after the ancients. Moreover, the equality that one would have expected has been replaced by hierarchical bureaucracy, that has no place in the Greek ideal or the text of the Constitution. There is little of the open debate that actually determined events in Greece (Themestocles and the Spartan Admiral).

The formal document: the powers given the Congress in the Constitution seem to be much more formidable than the body we see today. Externally it seems to have less power. At the same time, the formal document gives no hint of the internal hierarchy that determines most decision making in Congress.

The founders’ (Federalists) scheme: they thought that the house would be the most vulnerable to popular pressure and therefore closest to the median voter and the quickest to respond to changes in popular opinion. Accordingly they expected it to be the Congress to have the highest turnover and the most popularity. In fact, it has the lowest turnover and is profoundly unpopular.


History: at one time the Congress was what the Founders expected. It ran the country, it declared war and actually conducted them (though not very well—ask Jimmy Madison). It governed, making appointments. Lincoln’s speeches.

The expectations of resource dependency power theory (or, ‘the golden rule’): you would expect the institution that has discretion over almost all key resources would be the most powerful (which it may be) and seen as such (which it almost never is). This is the key question in American Government. Congress is filled with people that point the finger and run the investigations, but is it the real power? Does it just pretend to be powerless so it can do a Claude Raines? (I’m shocked! Shocked to find construction money not being spent on levees, torture, NSA spying). Is it just maintaining plausible deniability?

What causes all this? Demands of information? Demands of decision theory? Collective action’s effects on interest group politics? Human psychology? Institutional Competition in the face of historical contingency? (growth, war).


Do interest groups buy votes?

Why do House members have higher re-election rates than Senators? Why is Barak Obama different from Cynthia McKinney?

Why do Americans love to hate Congress? Tocqueville’s answer (Hibbing and These-Morris)?

Why is the Congress more afraid of used car sales men and funeral directors than millionaires?

For your information

The question of who bought Alaska came up in class a few days ago for some reason and an enterprising student went to the trouble to look it up:

For your enjoyment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska#History

U.S. Secretary of State William Seward thus urged, and the United States Senate thus approved, the treaty authorizing the purchase of Alaska from Imperial Russia for US$7,200,000 on April 9, 1867. The United States took possession and the American flag was raised over Alaska on October 18, which is commemorated as Alaska Day.

Russia still used the Julian Calendar in 1867, and the world had not yet been divided into standard time zones; thus, there was no international date line, and the day began in the morning instead of starting at midnight. So, while the American day now ends with sunset in western Alaska, the Russian day then started with sunrise in "eastern" Alaska. Thus, Friday, October 6, 1867, the day before the physical transfer of ownership, was followed by Friday, October 18, 1867 - which was Saturday, October 7, 1867 in Russia. The change in date was due to America bringing the Gregorian Calendar to Alaska, while the lack of change in day resulted from Alaska's shift from being the starting point of the Russian day to being the ending point of the American day.

The purchase was unpopular in the United States, where it became known as "Seward's Folly" or "Seward's Icebox." Alaska celebrates the purchase each year on the last Monday of March, calling it Seward's Day.

Congressional Races

Here is an interesting post on Congressional Races from Larry Sabato, the best predictor of election outcomes in the business.

Larry Sabato on Congressional Races

remember the website

www.wwnorton.com/lowi/

Are we going to discuss ABC's movie in class?

I think the writers, producers, and directors of the movie have extremely biased backgrounds. If they had been people who worked in the entertainment industry WITHOUT an agenda, I don't think there would be so much fuss. It's just a movie, after all. But when you start throwing any kind of "radical" or "extreme" activists into the production mix of a nationally broadcast "docudrama" about an issue as divisive as 9/11, lots of red flags go up.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/path_to_911

9/11 movie

Here is an interesting website that compares the edited and unedited versions of the ABC docu-drama about 9/11:





http://hotair.com/archives/2006/09/10/video-path-to-911/

Millsaps Introduction to American Politics: Continuation of our discussion

Koppel: The Price of Security tonight on the discovery channel at i believe 8pm, if anyone is interested

Continuation of our discussion

I wanted to add a few thoughts on what we discussed in class today:

Collective action problems, externalities, path dependence and free riding are closely related concepts. As analytic tools they can help us to understand the decision of whether to provide a good through the market or through the government. It also gives us an alternative way of understanding what people in a society do. Specifically, it gives us a way to explain why people may do something that does not seem to be in their interest, in other words, engage in behavior that does not seem rational.

What we want in science is a set of concepts and models that will explain a wide range of behavior and cover a wide range of situations.

Collective action problems. Suppose:

• Everyone agrees that the foreign car is better, but being the only person with a foreign car means that you can’t get your car repaired.
• Everyone agrees that waiting in line is a better system than just piling on but being the only person that waits in line for the bus in Kyrgyzstan means that you get on the bus last.
• Everyone agrees that Linux is a better operating system than Microsoft, but being the only guy to use Linux instead of Microsoft means you get no help from the help desk.
• Everyone agrees that having a strong central government is better than the system of having a bunch of warlords but being the only guy to pay the central government instead of the warlord gets you killed.

All of these situations are very different but they have in common the same structure. What we would do if we could act as one, as a group, is different from what we would do if we had to act individually, that is, be the first guy to act. What we seem to prefer as a group is different from we seem to prefer as individuals. The choice that makes us better off as a group makes us worse off as individuals. This is a collective action problem.

Collective action problems are a major reason we have government. Even if we all think we would be better off as a group paying taxes to have a national defense, we have an incentive as individuals not to pay taxes for national defense. Paying for a defense is a case where what makes the same people better off at the group level makes them worse off at the individual level.

National defense is a collective action problem because we get the benefit of a national defense just from being in the country, whether we have contributed to it or not. That is how collective action problems are related to another important concept in modern political science: public goods. They are non-excludable. You get the benefit of what the larger group is doing—paying for national defense in this case—whether you contribute or not. That is what gives you an incentive not to contribute, or free ride.

Now letting people act individually is just another way of saying leaving things to the market. If we let people decide whether to pay for national defense on their own the way we let them decide whether or not to pay for meals in restaurants we would end up with a lot less national defense than we would prefer as a group.

This is obvious in the case of national defense but it is partially the case in a lot of situations and goods where it is not nearly as obvious. Take the case of roads. Even if we paid through all roads with tolls so that people were able to ‘buy’ just as much roadway as they needed, we would have less roadway than we prefer as a group. This is because a lot of the benefit of roadway systems goes to people whether they are driving on the roads or not. All of the goods and services that come to me come to me partially by way of roads. To the extent there are people that don’t use the roads very much, under a toll road system they would be getting benefits that they don’t pay for. They are getting an externality (a positive externality in this case), a benefit from a transaction that they themselves are not a part of. Under such conditions we would expect less than the optimum amount of roads to be built, or, what economists call "underprovision."

That is why we see the government getting people to pay for things through taxes rather than through transactions in the market place. When there are benefits to third parties we often provide the goods through the government rather than through the market.

Notice how path dependence can come into this. Path dependence is when events in the past affect what choices we can make in the future. This is most interesting when what would make more sense today is somehow closed off by past events.

The Microsoft example is a good example of path dependence. If we were starting over today we would probably all be better off with a different operating system, say, Linux, but we don’t want to be the first to switch individually now that we are in a world where everyone else uses Microsoft’s operating system. An event in the past—the fact that Microsoft was used on IBM’s personal computers—has effected the choice we make today. In this case, the path dependent nature of technology adoption has set us up for a collective action problem. In this case, it is one that we have not solved.

So we can’t conclude from the fact that everyone in Afghanistan pays money to warlords instead of paying their taxes to the central government that they think warlords are better than having a central government anymore more than we can conclude from the fact that people pay money to Microsoft instead of using Linux (which is free) that they think Microsoft is a better operating system. In both cases they may be facing a collective action problem.

One last point. Notice how collective action comes in with the ancient republics and the problem of war. At the battle of Thermopylae, Xerxes had to use whips to get his men to fight. He needed an army behind his army to make it fight. Not so the Spartans. The ancient republics could solve the collective action problem of war—getting men to do what was in the interests of the group rather than what was in their individual best interests—through social solidarity, thinking of yourself as part of the group before thinking of oneself as an individual. This sense of doing what is in the group’s interest instead of your personal interest is the essence of what the founders meant by ‘republican virtue,’ and they thought it was far more important than voting procedures or individual freedom of conscience in the survival of the republic. They relied on social solidarity to solve collective action problems.

What do we rely on?

Major Concern in American Govt.

I believe that one major concern right now is the ever-present controversy of nuclear war. As of recent times, we have learned of countries maintaining nuclear weapons and these are not being controlled by the United Nations. The fact is that there are many unaccounted nuclear weapons in the hands of hostile countries that are refusing to submit and surrender set weapons to authorities. With the new threat from North Korea being a nuclear power, the united states should be leery of any activity from nations hostile to us. We should take any necessary precautions in order to secure the safety of our country and the safety of the entire free world. With North Korea’s refusal of disarmament, we as a country need to pursue the termination of their weapons in order to ensure that they are not hostile. Although North Korea insists that they have no weapons that are to be used in a hostile manner, I don’t think we can overlook the fact that we are not in good relations with North Korea and there is a threat of a catastrophe. The reason why the September eleventh attacks were not prevented was because we weren’t proactive with the warning signs of such an attack. I believe that if we take first action to provoke the United Nations to shut down their operation, then we will benefit greatly from such action. With the institution of the NPT, we must take control of undocumented weapons of mass destruction. The threat of a disaster is always something to be concerned with and the last thing that the US needs right now is another attack and another war, but in order to secure the safety of our citizens, I feel as if we should be proactive and immediately take action.

Problems with American Politics

Brady Jackson Jackson 1
Political Science
Dr. Reinhard
8-31-06
Problems with today’s politics
American politics in this day and time has a major problem; greed. The politicians that we elect today often turn into corrupt individuals, because they are taking illegal money from someone as a bribe to help the other party out. A politician’s greed these days can have a negative effect on our country by only allowing the wealthy people to benefit. I truly feel that a man who is willing to accept bribery from someone is not the type of individual that I would want calling the shots for our country. The American politics used to be a glorious title in the days of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who had the best interest of our country first and foremost. Now our politicians are known for having sticky fingers and lying to the American people, the same people that put him into office. All because he wants to have more than he has now, but he is not willing to work for it.
The reason for all of the greed in politics today is the feeling that they are above the law and can do as they please. It becomes easy for a politician to be overtaken by greed once they see the opportunities they have at making a few extra bucks on the side. The main influence on a politician is when someone who has helped out with their campaign comes up and they need a little favor that only that person can do for them. Then if the politician refuses, well then that’s when the money becomes an issue. That’s where it all begins. Once this happens and they start thinking that they can do as they wish, they become completely consumed with greed.