Watching the news today sometimes makes it seem as if the United States is about to collapse, China is going to take over, and democracy is going to die. America has stood as the guardian of liberal democracies and capitalism for most of the last century. But to understand the current state of affairs, we need to head further back into American history.
Last November, I wrote an article titled "Gerrymandering and Partisanship" that explored the basics of gerrymandering. Recently, I read an article in the Washington Post about a computer programmer who devised an algorithm that could potentially fix gerrymandering. Considering that gerrymandering is the root cause of many of the problems we see in Congress, this programmer may be onto something.
Recently, I read a very interesting article Foreign Policy called, "Ctrl + Alt + Delete. Resetting America's Military" which explored a possible way to totally revamp the organization of the military. It got me thinking: what happens if you could hit a reset button and rebuild the entire government from scratch? Would it have all three branches of government with the same authorities? Would it have the same programs? Would those programs be distributed in a similar way between federal, state, and local governments? What would happen if we hit the reset button?
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