political debate between my room-mate and I in the blogosphere

You can find the original political post by my room-mate Powers who is a total wierdo and undercover literary genius who looks like a fresh-faced alterboy but thinks like satan at his blog:

http://mattpowers26.blogspot.com/





<-------inter-blog political correspondant Matt Powers





This is my response, as copied from it's original locale in the comments section:


Very interesting, Powers. I'm with you on a lot of this stuff, but diverge on one point that I think is important, pertaining to your last statement about the federal govt. I think one of the great fallacies of government in general, and American federal government specifically, is the tendency people have to endow non-monarchies with the personal charecteristics historically associated with monarchs- the government is Good or Evil- it is Inspiring or Uninspiring, it is a despot or an ineffective pansy. The reality is that modern governments should never be viewed in this way. The federal government is a system by which revenue is distributed (ideally) to support the common security and the common good. Examples of the necessity of this system are real physical infrastructure, national defense, education and social welfare. This is not exciting or inspiring and is incredibly imperfect much of the time, but it is absolutely necessary and must be continually improved (i.e the human elements increasingly regulated until robots can take over) if we are not to neglect our moral obligations to one another as human beings (Americans are human beings who happen to contribute revenue to the same historically designated system). The best thing the federal, state, county and municipal governments could possibly do, which might alleviate some of the other issues you raise about an uniformed electorate and mindless political polarization, is start funding and facilitating real education (I define real education primarily as the structured encouragment, reward, and provision of tools for critical thinking and autonomous investigative pursuits).Much of the crisis of our partisan, simplistic. 24-7 media shitstorm is actually the crisis that people haven't been prepared to confront it critically.
lastly, I think it is a welcome sign that the number of independants in the US is growing- choosing not to register with one of the two major political parties is a signal that more people agree with you that the Issues are what matter.