Governments regularly do this. One of the greatest losses for privacy advocates over the last generation is this brand of nihilism making the issue electorally useless.
Nihilism and expressions of futility are not the same thing, fyi. In this case, if the original poster were nihilistic, they would not care one way or another about privacy. It would be meaningless, like everything else.
And the original poster remains correct about power. Power is never willingly given up by an institution (it can, however, be given up by individuals, when they decide that there is something more important than power). That is why we (assuming USA, here) have divided government, so power cannot ever be concentrated in any one branch. In this case, the hearing on 702 is being held by one branch, congress, to decide whether to limit or expand the power of another branch, the executive. It’s an important distinction; without that separation there really would be no hope to restore basic privacy.
> It's a generalization, there's always occasional exception to the rule
The point is it’s not a rule. It’s a meme that results from misunderstanding the bureaucratic imperative and oversimplifying into a monolith the complexity of politics and power competition.
The only time it slowed has been during brief gov shutdowns. As this report explains this includes plenty of non rules and administrative stuff and does count repeals but anyone who has followed Congress knows that the bulk of those bills is new spending and new rules imposed on civilians/business. It's rarely ever reducing the scale of gov.
And to repeat another post I made recently, the staffing and funding for US federal regulatory agencies has grown near exponentially since the 1970s (edit: or more accurately a consistent upward trendline)
I was expecting to find that federal employment has grown faster than the US population, but it looks like that's not the case. Since 2000, the federal workforce seems to have grown about 14%, while the overall population increased by about 20%.
If you go back further it’s even more stark - there are 5% fewer Federal employees than there were when Clinton took office, overall population is up 30% and real GDP is up like 120%:
I wouldn’t imagine a government needs to scale proportionally to the population much like a business shouldn’t need to scale proportionally to its customer base. Most businesses should be able to handle twice as many customers with fewer than twice as many employees.
I can’t believe this argument is being made in good faith, but just in case: do you not realize that the number of laws need not scale with the size of the population? Especially when that growth is less than an order of magnitude?
They should be minimal in their powers over the people and the bureaucratic waste they produce, but that doesn't mean they are shrinking. They can grow their administration workforce to accommodate the growing population and economy without adding new powers and while gaining efficiencies. Plus, the federal government should be very minimal, while not infringing on state's rights, which isn't the case any longer, unfortunately.
It defines a proscribed set of powers but doesn't say the use of those must be minimized. On top of all of that all the powers currently used have either been ruled constitutional, are untested extensions of tested uses of powers, or haven't been challenged/are currently being challenged, we can all have our own opinions about what the Constitution does and doesn't allow but within the system defined the only opinion that directly matters is the Supreme Court's. Everyone else's only gets filtered through their selection and ... optional shall we say extra-constitutional means?
Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect, their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into some imaginary form of what precisely they would or wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine. Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders original vision are cherry picking their favorite version of the founders and their ideas.
[0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention was even convened for.
I agree that it is our country and we get to shape it as we wish. But we should build on what came before. The Constitution is pretty damn good but obviously not perfect. I believe that the identifying feature of the Constitution isn't so much the words on the page but the underlying message. The whole of the Constitution espouses an idea that we, as a people, and individuals will agree to live under laws of the defined government IF the government stays in the bounds defined in the Constitution. If the government breaks their end of the deal all bets are off. In that sense SCOTUS constitutionality rulings are meaningless. If ruled constitutionality is different than the people's understanding of the Constitution it creates a sense of tyranny. If there are too many rulings that people feel are unconstitutional they will not tolerate it. The Constitution says it is the right of the people to replace their government. It doesn't say it has to be peaceful.
I would much rather see people participate in their own governance and take back control of the government peacefully before it is intolerable. However, history makes me fearful of a possible violent upheaval.
We are building on what came before, the decision for a more powerful federal government isn't particularly new. Pooling the resources of the many states has a lot of benefits (and the states traditionally opposed to that benefit the most from federal dollars).
> If the government breaks their end of the deal all bets are off. etc etc
Those are all explicitly extra constitutional and the ones I euphemistically referred to. The methods for changing the constitution systematically within it's own rules are through Convention or Amendment.
> If ruled constitutionality is different than the people's understanding of the Constitution it creates a sense of tyranny
I'd be more charitable to the devolution of powers if the expressed preferred outcomes of that devolution of power didn't so often tend towards the repression of various groups. There's the OG slavery, segregation, voting rights, and the modern day antitrans/gay panics and to gut things like the voting rights act to prop up gerrymandered governments... but now we're tending towards topics that wind up [dead] due to flame wars.
One of those powers is to rely on interpretations of the Constitution by SCOTUS and to pick SCOTUS’s interpretation when it comes to conflict with an HN commentators’ interpretation.
So this is still just putting the cart before the horse.
You may be assuming there isn't a connection there. Could it be that our society and economy are growing more complex because the government continues to grow?
More government agencies and employees create more rules. More rules almost certainly play into the growing complexity of both our society and economy.
Population growth is nothing new, its only the last 60-80 years that we've really cranked up the size of our government.
I am absolutely confident that our society and economy aren’t growing more complex exclusively due to government growth. The whole virtue of capitalism is that it finds increasingly niche ways and outright novel ways to change the world, that’s by definition net new complexity. I’m comfortable attributing the vast majority of complexity growth to that.
Not only is the population growing exponentially but one would reasonably expect the complexity of the overall economy would go up exponentially even with linear additions to the population (each new person is N new possible economic relations).
I absolutely agree that the U.S. government has gotten more powerful since WWII almost monotonously. The times of honest reduction were in the 1990s and, potentially, now.
That said, I would be careful about conflating the volume of rules and staffing with power. The bureaucratic imperative will drive a bureaucracy to expand. But it also does that to others, the net effect being a lot of intragovernmental arguing that diminishes the state’s actual power.
That doesn’t make the bureaucracy less annoying. Just less powerful. In fact, part of the present problem stems from it being easier for politicians to create blocking bureaucracies than to liquidate the ones they don’t like.
> what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make the rule-maker more powerful
You've got to be kidding me. Here's one: coordination. Everyone drive on the right. That wasn't done to make anyone more powerful; it was done to prevent stupid crashes.
Here's another rule: don't fly you plane past its spec. That isn't to oppress the pilot. It's because the plane wasn't designed to be flown harder.
It's a real shame. Legislating isn't a full-time job naturally, but we've made it so by turning it into one of the most lucrative careers. We judge congress perversely by output of new laws.
And before someone points out the "ancillary" financial benefits to being a legislator: (a) most of those are illegal if discovered & (b) typically the big money is made after retiring or losing office, by leveraging connections.
One can explain the phenomenon and understand the history yet it's not wrong to say governments (or any other large org really) rarely give up power and only ever do so under coercion.
Why are you LARPing based on first principles? Just give examples:
* Trump's First Step Act. E.g., title III-- can no longer use restraints on prisoners during pregnancy-- and IV-- reducing mandatory minimums for drug felony convictions
* Trump's Affordable Clean Energy rule which removed caps on emissions
* Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back in 1999
* Carter's Airline Deregulation Act back in the late 70s
* the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963
If I searched my memory for five minutes a day I'd have a list of hundreds by the end of a week.
I get that domain expertise doesn't magically apply outside a domain. But how is HN this special level of asinine when it comes to the simple history of legislation in the U.S.?
Reading the thread with your interlocutor is like reading someone claim that C only has global scope. What could they possibly have read to convince them of such a thing?
The Patriot Act (2001), The Homeland Security Act (2002), The Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) (2002), The National Defense Authorization Act, The Affordable Care Act (2010),The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) (2015), The Real ID Act (2005),The USA Freedom Act (2015), The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (2021), The Economic Stabilization Act (2008), The Executive Order on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (2013), The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (1978), The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) (1994), The Bank Secrecy Act (1970), The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008), The Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis (2021), The Executive Order on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (2013)
> The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (1978),
FISA is an example of what you are arguing against, unless you are arguing that is a net increase in power because the restrictions on government power came packaged with a government power to prosecute government agents who violated the new limits, which is kind of silly.
(You may be confusing the 1978 act with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the War on Terror act undercutting the FISA limits, which is kind of like confusing the 18th and 21st Amendments.)
Nobody claimed governments never expand their powers. The contested statement was "government will never willingly give up power." Examples of governments curtailing their powers were provided. That they also increase their powers is unremarkable, uncontested and frankly obvious given you can't decrease something that was never increased.
> what are some recent examples of governments giving up power?
I’ll pick a negative one: antitrust. Government retreated from its enforcement duty and powers for a few decades. In the vacuum, private interests asserted themselves.
Great example. Another one is state governments joining a union or federal system, such as US states joining the Union or European states joining the EU, and becoming bound by federal/EU law.
That's an interesting way to look at it; governments merging into even larger entities is them giving up power?
The "government" isn't a unified mind. It's a group of individuals looking to further their career and (rarely) pursue a cause they care about. If two governments merge their law-sets into one, they aren't losing anything - the people involved are simply being promoted and gaining a broader peer influence with more vertical growth opportunities.
Or lets the local government or whatever party say "ohhh how wouldn't we have increased your well-being if not for them darn Europeans so just elect us one more time then we'll show them for good". And this line works so well, regardless if the respective party did or tried anything on the European level or not. It's the cultivated helplessness in some circles, that EU was some remote and abstract place where "things" happen and no one, not even your own representatives there, can move an inch. Same whether you're German or Luxembourgeois, it's the ideal material for promoting your own party and keeping the voters dumbed down.
> In the South, do they generally consider themselves as forced to re-join the Union, rather than having been forcefully prevented from leaving?
I don't think it is revisionism and maybe I am wrong on this, but wasn't it the Confederacy who attacked the Union at Fort Sumter which kicked off the US Civil War?
It's my understanding the Union was more or less ambivalent to the Confederacy and figured they'd let things lie then the Confederacy attacked.
I don't know enough history to say whether the Confederacy was forced to re-join or whether the states asked to rejoin in light of their government collapsing (Davis fleeing Richmond, etc). My guess would be that it was more of a failed state situation where the US had dibs on propping it back up.
Does revoking a previous ruling really count as giving up power? The government had the power to say this is banned. They still have the power to say this isnt banned. It doesnt seem like any power has been lost. They just decided to use it in another way. They could change the decision tomorrow. That wouldnt be any more or less power. They are still using it to enforce their rulings.
They gave up the power to forcibly allow abortions. The "government" doesn't operate as a monolith, the executive branch now cannot universally do pro-choice related things.
Boy, they got you good! There's no such thing as "deregulation." There's only rearranging regulation to protect the incumbents against competitors which would try to arise in an actual capitalistic system.
It sounds like you’re joking, but I can’t tell. Of course, there is such a thing as deregulation, it has a definition and history that doesn’t match your operative word choice of “rearranging”.
To your point, I have no doubt that some deregulation has been spin for regulatory capture and/or anti-competitive behavior. Unfortunately, perhaps especially for the environment, that’s not an accurate summary of all deregulation, nor of the US conservative party’s official stance on regulation.
Didn’t you see the Portland Oregon thread earlier? Oregon has done a ton to legalize drugs, muzzle the police (can’t pull people over for ghetto cars anymore as one small example), and generally reduce the amount of power that the government has over your day to day life. Ron wyden tries every day to reduce mass surveillance and similar risks for Oregonians
You do get governments willing to give up power if you elect progressive democrats or libertarians. Republicans lie hardcore about wanting to do this though. Republicans used to be the party of federalism, now they’re the party of “unitary executive theory”
Anyone with the idea that governments never give up power is so pathetically unobservant that I honestly don’t want them voting in our elections.
Interesting that you have a carve out for progressive democrats but all Republicans are bad. There are "unitary executive theory" camps in both parties. Seems to be a more dominant idea in the Democrat party than Republican from my view. Democrats vote as a block on almost every bill in congress. Democrats have also been behind most expansions to executive power in the last 100 years.
Weed legalization is just trading of one authority for another. The government expects to be able to exercise their revenue collection authority over it in exchange for their authority to ban it.
3 month old account pushing unproductive defeatist nihilism. If you pay attention you'll see this in every thread about the US and users somehow think it's worth upvoting.
That’s clever wording but I think it isn’t right? I thought American Exceptionalism was the belief that the US is an exception to the rules.
Actually, the idea that being an exception to the rules and having the ability to make an exception to the rules are the same, or one implies the other, is pretty interesting and might be worth elaborating on.
Power is generally defined by the ability to make exception to the rules. Anyone can make a rule, but are you above being punished for breaking it?
Important Americans are protected from being tried for war crimes. We have the Hague invasion act. We said out loud "we will kill you if you try to hold us accountable for our actions." If the United States was a moral country that would not do war crimes on purpose, this law wouldn't exist.
Only because we have been boiled to be ok with it.
It used to just be x-ray and a bag scan. Now it is a backscatter plus a pat-down if required plus a bag scan. If you get flagged on either, your hands get swabbed down as well. The tech and number of searches is only going to increase over time as more contracts get in on the TSA grift.
I have zero doubts at some point they will also begin domestic device scans ("just plug the handy USB-C into your device and hang tight for a few while we ~~download all its contents~~ search for terrorism!) like they already apparently do for international flights under the guise of national security and making sure you aren't plotting something.
The self-service TSA booths are to save money on their minimum wage security staff, not to relax security. It increases the amount of surveillance they can pack in by putting you individually through a chokepoint.
Think of what you could do if you could lock people into a booth by themselves as they do tasks to be let out. I am being a bit hyperbolic but singling out a person in a potentially enclosed box opens the door massively to techniques such as strip searches (you don't even have to move rooms, how convenient, thanks TSA!) and illegal searches (ugh, really, just let us do it. It'll take 3 minutes and besides, no one will ever believe you that we asked because it's just us here), etc.
Then you get into the fun tech that is opened up by having a person isolated such as bomb detection through analyzing residue in the air, far more cameras that can be analyzed by AI/ML ("your left eye twitched 27% more than average: TERRORIST") and analysts at scale, mandatory facial recognition and other biometrics collection (a big issue with facial rec is making sure no one interferes, it's very easy to detect a face when there is only one in the room and you can have the perfect solid color background)
