“All of us who live in coastal Washington—Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative—have more in common with each other, economically, than we have with people living on Mercer Island or Queen Anne Hill. Urban voters know it. And they’re eating our lunch, in terms of development and growth.”This is an OpEd from a local newspaper in Aberdeen, WA.
I live a helluvalot closer to Seattle -- and Olympia -- than Aberdeen -- hell I'm in the middle of the Seattle/Olympia urban sprawl! -- but I concur.
I want to subscribe to Mr. Walsh's newsletter.
As I alluded to in my previous post, our legiscritters in Olympia don't seem to give a damn what the voters want or think. This has been going on for years. We've passed several initiatives requiring a two-thirds majority to raise taxes, for example, but they keep finding ways to ignore them.
As I mentioned in a post the other day, we voted overwhelmingly against tax funding for commercial sports stadiums in Seattle, but somehow we wound up funding one or two. (Even while the old un-paid for Kingdome turned out to be pretty damned sturdy, and a larger challenge for the demolitions crew than expected...)
Daniel Hannan and Nigel Farage can complain, justifiably, that the European Overgovernment is made up of a faceless, unaccountable appointed bureaucracy that is answerable only to itself, like our own massive Executive Branch apparatus.
But our own "elected" officials increasingly meet that description.
1 comment:
Only now, at the end...do you understand.
I can just hear Alexander Hamilton chuckling in his grave.
Perhaps we needed to go though the Federalist phase before acquiring sufficient strength as a nation to create the standard of living we and some significant portion of the world enjoys. In any case, the flow of power got reversed and now we have the weight of the pyramid crushing us from above.
I'm not sure there is a fix for this. A few counties around Puget Sound wag the whole state. If you live east of the Cascades you really have no voice. If like me you live on the peninsula where the biggest towns are full of people who believe they're entitled to other peoples money, then you don't have much of a voice either.
Local control, power from the bottom up is really the only way I can see a Republic or democracy working in the long run. Don't like the way the big city you live in is taxing the crap out of you, find one that doesn't or get out of the city. If control is local, if the restrictions on government get progressively tighter as you move further from home; then people who live elsewhere - typcially in cities (79% or more) can't kill the economies of rural areas by voting for crap that makes them feel better, or caters to their interests.
Sadly I see no way to get there from here that doesn't involve a complete collapse of the existing system. Perhaps more sadly - I don't think that's a hypothetical possibility anymore.
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