>>>>>There's a simpler way: ban SUVs and home trucks, or at least revoke the tax incentives for them and tax them like large cars, which they basically are. Want to have a truck? Prove that you are doing business with it that can't be served by a car, or pay lots of taxes. Want to have a home tank? Prove that you're an army.
>>>>
>>>>Great... let's regulate something else in this country.
>>>>
>>>>The Chatter forum is starting to turn me into a Republican very quickly.
>>>
>>>That's because of the way laws are made in this country - no system at all, unless you count making it as complicated and as riddled with exceptions as possible. Your regular law here doesn't apply across the board, it has to define the set it applies to, which then means it needs a set of criteria to decide whether it applies to a particular case, then it has to define who will do the checking etc etc. Instead of "any x who does y will ...", where x is a common thing defined in one of the basic laws, not a category reinvented each time.
>>>
>>>The latest example I remember is the federal law banning payday loans - to military personnel. I beg your pardon? If it's bad, and should be banned, how is it somehow bad for military people only, and still quite legal for everybody else?
>>>
>>>If you are incapable of making the laws short and simple, then of course you think less law is better - which is a GOP thing, they do want all our base to belong to big corp.
>>>
>>>Once when gas is $10/gal, and milk is $12/gal (just think how much oil/ethanol is needed to grow the corn), read this thread again.
>>
>>
>>Your comments put me in mind of Churchill's observation that democracy is the worst system, except for all the rest.
>>
>>What do you suggest? That we take Eastern Europe as our model?
>
>You suggest that you (U.S.) have a "democracy". Why?... Because you get to vote every n years?
>John Edwards has it pretty well nailed but he gets very little press.
>
>Yours is a "democracy" in name only, really being an oligarchy in disguise.
>Every now and then the ruling class thorws THE PEOPLE a bone, just to keep them quiet and under the illusion that there's democracy in operation there.

When did you embrace Marxism, Jim? ;-)

There has never been a true democracy. Not unless you go back to the ancient Greeks, with everyone gathering on a hillside and voting. And I'm sure not even then; did women, for instance, have a vote in Greece? There has always been a ruling class, as you put it, that has outsized influence. This has been true in all societies and all countries.

John Edwards? Puh-leeze. Not only is he the biggest phony in the field, he's grouchy. I guess I'd be grouchy, too, if I had been out of work for four years and was getting killed in the polls.