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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • The infrastructure for a national strike does not exist in America. You need a lot of labor to be organized, and it just isn’t. We can barely get individual facilities to go on strike, let alone an entire country. We used to, and that’s how we pressured politicians into the New Deal, but organized labor has been dismantled since then.

    As for why we’re not more like the French, a lot of it comes down to this: They have more unionized workers, as a fraction of the working population, than we do.

    Perhaps we forget, here on our islands of leftist beliefs, but the average American is not a radical Socialist, Communist, or Anarchist. They are not tuned-in closely to politics, they are not media literate, they are not part of any active organization besides maybe a local church. They’re not going to upend their lives over something they don’t understand, without any way to plan with their coworkers.

















  • The point of the Senate is that it’s a more deliberative body, representing larger numbers of people, which serves to moderate the power of the House. Mind you, Congress as a whole was more powerful when the nation was founded; they’ve handed off power to the executive over the years, for better or worse (really, a bit of both). The House was also intended to grow with the population, and if we’d followed the general guidelines for growth the Founders suggested, we’d have a House with more than 600 members. The number of seats was capped ~90 years ago, because Congress didn’t want to fund another renovation of the capitol building to fit more people. Also keep in mind that the States had a more uniform population distribution when the country was founded. You didn’t have California and Nebraska sitting with orders of magnitude of difference between them, so the difference in representation in the Senate was not nearly as significant as it is today.

    Wether we need a secondary deliberative body in the legislature or not is a matter of debate and opinion. I can see why you’d want one, but I can also understand why people would think it’s not useful anymore.


  • There are other proposals to solve the Senate’s disproportionate nature, such as apportioning Senate seats by state population. Most proposals I’ve seen for that would leave the Senate with a little more than a hundred seats (with a minimum of 1 seat per state), which would (mostly) solve the problem and make it closer to the house in terms of proportionality. Of course, it all depends on the exact implementation.