Why do we need a PRESIDENT?

[fromderinside]

Never underestimate inability to find appropriate decision makers.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Part of the job of the American president is to ally fears. Make people feel good enough to believe in tomorrow.

Maybe, but then we don't need him to make decisions. Let him give his speeches and make us feel good. While a committee makes the decisions.

JFK used his charisma to inspire us.

That's OK. But he blew the Bay of Pigs invasion. That should have been left to a committee. Let the President give his inspiring speeches, while a committee makes the decisions.

Hitler used his for personal power.

You're making my point. Had Hitler only given speeches while a committee made the decisions, the outcome would probably have been much better.

Gorbachev credited Ronald Reagan's personality and how he came across with Russia agreeing to the detente. They believed Reagan could be trusted. His American nickname was 'the great communicator'. It was a skill he developed over time. He was paid by GE to travel and make speeches.

A president is essential.

Maybe just to give speeches and radiate good vibes, as you're proving with your examples. But not to make the decisions. A committee would do better.

He or she is supposed to reelect our values to the world. Trump obviously is horrible and has done serious damage international.

A committee would have done better.

Trump's lack of leadership skill is reflected in the lack of action in congress on key issues. He is unable to form a consensus. He does not know how.

A committee would form the needed consensus.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

I've heard that cliché before, but what does it mean? Or, WHY is one individual a better decision-maker than a committee or a "machine"?

The only explanation I've heard for that is the cliché that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Which is a bad argument because if you need to travel 100 miles through the desert, the camel is superior.

The short answer is it all depends on the people and situations.

Trump represents the kind of business leader not uncommon up through the late 70s. Arbitrary and autocratic. Makes decisions and others clean it up. Does not take inputs and is surrounded with sycophants. .Henry Ford a prime example.

The technology business cycle became too fast for that kind of management.

When I rowed at Intel project teams generally worked by consensus by design. It worked because the engineers were all motivated and general of like mind. Disputes were generally resolved without management getting involved.

On the other had I worked as a contractor at a technology company. Multiple meetings with much debate and apparent consensus, yet after the meetings no one world take responsibility for actual doing something. There was no leader.

Let the committee make the decision what's to be done. Then appoint the one to do it. Probably one of the committee members, appointed specifically to do what was decided. That's a better system than having one top dog demagogue "president" make the decisions.

People went off and did what they felt like often at cross purpose. No one would take risk and responsibility for enacting a decision. Drove me crazy.

That wouldn't happen if the committee decides exactly what is to be done and appoints one person to do it. Or appoints one person to do this thing and another to do that. Tell each appointee what s/he is to do. Each appointee is responsible to enact what was assigned to him/her.

In an interview the founder of Sun said they they put prole in leadership situations and select the ones who can do it. There was no apparent criteria.

Leadership IMO is a learned skill involving failure. Trump's problem is he has never stood up to his failures.

The tech world in the 80s moved from a top down to a bottom up structure. The saying became do not bring me problems bring me solutions.

The committee should decide the solutions.

Solve problems at the lowest level. Trump represents the opposite. 'I' say what it is and your job is to do it.

A good leader has to be able to delegate and trust.

The committee would do that better than one demagogue president like the system we have now.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

First elected presidents aren't usually charismatic characters, entertainment stars maybe, but charismatic, naw. The top attribute of a president is perception by people she can make decisions in the national interest.

And more often a FALSE perception.

That's part of what "charismatic" means. It's someone who is good at deceiving people, giving them a false perception, making them believe that s/he can make good decisions. Instilling that false impression in people is a big part of what "charismatic" means.

A "president" gets elected by giving good speeches which persuade listeners that s/he has all the answers and is appointed by God to lead our Country to the Promised Land.

It doesn't necessarily mean the charisma of a Martin Luther King or Billy Graham, etc. That kind of charisma has a different function than that of a political candidate charisma. The President/political candidate transmits vibes of being fully in control and strong and powerful and omnipotent. This is a dangerous kind of charisma.

It's the Donald Trump -- Barrack Obama -- Ronald Reagan MESSIAH/HERO kind of charisma to lead us to the Promised Land. A committee is less dramatic, less entertaining, less thrilling. But it would make better decisions, and would not be able to perpetrate the deception of the charismatic speech-maker demagogues we are getting and will get more of.

Charismatic is "exercising a compelling charm which inspires devotion in others". There is nothing to do with deceiving since it is the charmed who embody the word.

"embody the word"?

The charmed are the ones deceived by the leader/demagogue's charm. I.e., those who hear the "brilliant" speeches and are inspired to vote for the speech-maker who is good at lying to them in order to manipulate them to vote for him/her. That's the primary talent of the good speech-maker leader president demagogue. I.e., to manipulate the listeners to vote for him/her, whatever s/he has to say to accomplish this.

And there's no reason to think that those talented at giving such speeches would be good decision-makers. The talent to manipulate masses of voters is a totally different talent than that of making good decisions.

 

[fromderinside]

Charismatic is "exercising a compelling charm which inspires devotion in others". There is nothing to do with deceiving since it is the charmed who embody the word.

"embody the word"?

The charmed are the ones deceived by the leader/demagogue's charm. I.e., those who hear the "brilliant" speeches and are inspired to vote for the speech-maker who is good at lying to them in order to manipulate them to vote for him/her. That's the primary talent of the good speech-maker leader president demagogue. I.e., to manipulate the listeners to vote for him/her, whatever s/he has to say to accomplish this.

And there's no reason to think that those talented at giving such speeches would be good decision-makers. The talent to manipulate masses of voters is a totally different talent than that of making good decisions.

There you go. You shift from measurement outcomes of material evidence as explanation to cause and effect for what is seen as explanation.

 

[steve_bank]

The founders could not have foreseen the scope and complexity of today.

I would have to disagree. Human nature and human interactions have not changed since the days of ancient Greece. Differences in technology does not change that. The only change is the number of people in the groups interacting. Where there was once tens or hundreds of thousands in the groups, now there are tens or hundreds of millions in those groups.

Then I would say we have reached the human nature limit of coping with complexity at the federal level. Congress has failed. Congress is too large and the problems too complex for congress to be effective. Beyond human capacity to compromise coupled with the vernal lack of experience solving complex problems. Look at the new progressives, totally inexperienced. Compromise is a learned skill.

The level of foreign and domestic issues occurring simultaneously is beyond the capacity of a democratic process. We all have a limit to capacity to cope.

Jefferson was a pastoralist. He envisioned a nation of gene man farmers.

The speed and complexity of issues is far beyond anything imaginable 200 years ago.

Smaller countries without foreign entanglements like Denmark are functional. China's rabid development was possible only with an authoritarian system. It would be ungovernable by a western style system. They get things done and got could at developing and executing a series of 5 year plans. While they are consuming a lot of coal they are also push solar and wind at the national level. Not possible in our system.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Why do we need a DEMAGOGUE-IN-CHIEF blowhard pundit to "inspire" us? or decide what the "facts" are?

^ ^ ^
Yes. The really, really tough decisions are those needed to resolve some really dire and threatening situation within the constraints of current laws or regulations when it would be easily resolved by ignoring approved procedures or the law. Lower echelons can decide how to resolve problems by following procedures. Going beyond normal approved procedures requires higher authority.

Why can't the higher authority be a committee rather than one demagogue speech-maker pundit whose only talent is an ability to manipulate idiots to vote for him?

Short answer people are more comfortable with identifiable characters.

OK, something like that. But the point is: the reason demagogue speech-maker pundits end up having power is not that they're good at making decisions. They are no better at decision-making than the average commoner. Probably even worse than most ordinary persons without charisma. But there are psychological factors which give the demagogue speech-makers a high profile and drive them upward into positions of power where they end up making the important decisions. This makes people more "comfortable" but not better off in terms of getting better performance from the characters put into power.

And the President is the most obvious example of this, of someone who has ability to manipulate people with speeches and thus to seize power and set much of the public policy, even though ordinary people would do just as well. We could just as easily choose someone at random, through drawing lots, and get an equally good or better decision-maker to serve in the highest office.

Or the executive functions would be better performed by a committee than by one person alone whose only superiority is his ability to make speeches and convince voters with his personality, rather than any merit or better talent to make good decisions for society.

I'm sure we all remember Ted Sorensen President Kennedy's speechwriter right? "Ask not ...."

So what grade did you skip to miss the great man theory? I don't think committees inspire peoples.

If you need inspiration from someone, why not just pick your own personal favorite inspirational guru? Why does a vast population need to all choose one guru only to inspire the entire population with one single mystical experience?

Why not instead have one system with good decision-makers as needed to serve the whole population, while at the same time individuals in the population can each choose their own separate gurus to give them inspiration?

Plus, not everyone necessarily needs an entity to "inspire" him/her.

What I remember is leaders like Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Napoleon, Caesar, Genghis Khan ... Never a committee unless . . .

That's the point. If instead those decisions had been made by committees rather than by "leaders"/dictators, the results would have been better. In each case a committee would have made better decisions.

. . . unless it's something bad like CABAL which is actually five people or The Central Committee led by Stalin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev ....

Yes, the selection of who serves on the committee is important. It can't be a "Central Committee led by" some dictator who chose the other members of the committee. The committee members have to be separate persons independent of each other, representing separate interests, not chosen by one Party in Power. Maybe they'd each be equal, and any mistakes by one committee member would be corrected by other members.

As for products how about the SR 71 and Kelly Johnson, Nuclear submarine force and Admiral Rickover, Forty minutes over Tokyo and Dolittle ....

It's getting to be like you're entitled to your own facts.

You're not.

That's why we need a committee to make the decisions instead of one "Leader" dictator who makes up his own "facts" and can't be corrected because he has absolute power to impose his "truth" onto everyone else.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

^ ^ ^
Yes. The really, really tough decisions are those needed to resolve some really dire and threatening situation within the constraints of current laws or regulations when it would be easily resolved by ignoring approved procedures or the law. Lower echelons can decide how to resolve problems by following procedures. Going beyond normal approved procedures requires higher authority.

Why can't the higher authority be a committee rather than one demagogue speech-maker pundit whose only talent is an ability to manipulate idiots to vote for him?

A committee of 535 (our House and Senate) demagogue speech maker pundits whose only talent is an ability to manipulate idiots to vote for them take forever to make a decision even when a delay would be disastrous.

"committee" does not mean hundreds, or dozens.

3, 4, 5, 6, 7 members of the committee.

The "committee" would be something like a jury, for a trial to determine guilt or innocence.

But a small jury of 6 would be a closer ideal than 12.

For some crucial emergency decisions it might be necessary for the number to be only 3. Executive power by "committee" is something which would require experimentation to determine what is the appropriate number of members.


How could Executive Power by "committee" ever evolve from our present system?

There's no way this could come about by the Constitutional Amendment process.

What would need to happen is that a presidential candidate would offer to submit to a "committee" system in which he would not choose the other committee members.

And eventually there would be a process for choosing the committee members, with perhaps the elected president being one of them. Probably the "committee" system would evolve slowly over many years.

 

[fromderinside]

Short answer people are more comfortable with identifiable characters.

....

That's why we need a committee to make the decisions instead of one "Leader" dictator who makes up his own "facts" and can't be corrected because he has absolute power to impose his "truth" onto everyone else.

Your problem is that you are talking to your talking points rather than responding to my comments. Your above answer was in response to:

As for products how about the SR 71 and Kelly Johnson, Nuclear submarine force and Admiral Rickover, Forty minutes over Tokyo and Dolittle ....

It's getting to be like you're entitled to your own facts.

You're not.

Johnson, Rickover and Dolittle were geniuses and experts in the fields which they shone as well as leaders in those fields.

My point being that often great men become leaders.

That should have lead us to a discussion about how one, by committee, can assure great men are members of committees. You ducked. You even missed my shot about committees being incapable of leading. My comments about the necessity of combining emotional and operational in the job of leading was avoided studiously by you.

Bottom line you miss the fact that humans need inspiration as well as quality decisions to move forward. Committees are incapable of providing both - at least neither of us provided an example of a committee that generated faith and progress in leadership - whilst individuals sometimes do provide both.

My point is not your point. I cited competent persons not charismatic persons as examples. You immediately switched on your charisma blinders and plowed forward. Not good for individuals, lethal for committees. For instance the German hero leading Germany in early thirties was in dotage. So he listened to cautious committees which avoided decisions by finger point. Thus through inactivity lost power to aggressive Hitler. It turns out that quickness of decision usually swamps slower arrived at good decision.

I'll just leave you with a thought shared by my advisor when I was in school leading our team in CCUN in conference held in San Diego in '61: "The UN is a place where good ideas go to die in committee" ... and yes, the students from UCLA as the US paired with students from NYU as the USSR to quashed our petition as students from Central Washington representing Greece claiming from The students from Eastern Michigan as Albania reparations for the of stealing Greece's beautiful children in WWII. Problem still hasn't been resolved in 2019 which should tell you something about how people hold grudges even after the problem becomes moot because there are no remaining persons needing that claim.

Nuff sed.

 

[fromderinside]

oops

 

[lpetrich]

 Democracy Index,  List of countries by system of government

The highest-rated nations are those with a parliamentary or Westminster system of government. In it, the president or monarch is a figurehead, ceremonial leader, and the legislature picks the heads of the major government departments or ministries. The legislature also picks an overall head, the Prime Minister, who is the de facto leader.

Though several nations with this system of government have monarchs, they nevertheless function as republics in most things, thus being monarchies in name only, crowned republics, or monarchical republics.

The top ten are Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, Canada, Finland, Australia, and Switzerland.

The highest non-Westminster nation is Switzerland, at #10. It does not have a separate leader, but a 7-member executive committee chosen by the legislature.

The highest nation with an independent activist, executive leader is Uruguay, at #15. The US, with this sort of system, is at #25, behind Costa Rica at #20, South Korea at #21, and Chile tied at #23.

The highest nation with a semi-presidential system, like the Westminster system but with an activist leader, is Cape Verde, at #26. The best-known example is France, at #29, with Portugal before it at #27. The highest monarchy with this system is Bhutan, at #94.

Absolute monarchies and one-party states are all very low. The highest absolute monarchy is Qatar, at #133, and the highest one-party state is Communist China, at #130.

 

[lpetrich]

So the best system of government invented so far is a Westminster-style democracy.

The next question is: republic or monarchy? An elected leader or a hereditary leader?

I vote for a republic, since the monarchies among Westminster democracies are relics of past centuries. They survive by avoiding being on the losing side of political fights, and a good way of doing that is to avoid getting involved in political fights.

Then how the legislature is to be elected. The highest-rated systems use proportional representation, and the most common form of that is the party-list system. Each political party gets a number of seats in proportion to how many votes it had received, and there is a tradition in such systems for each party to publish a list of candidates that it wants seated. Thus, party list.

Proportional systems allow for multiple parties to be represented in a legislature. The two main US ones are rather awkward coalitions that would likely split into several parties under a proportional system.

What if America had 6 political parties? explores what parties the US might contain, with the two main parties each containing three parties.

 

[PyramidHead]

So the best system of government invented so far is a Westminster-style democracy.

lol According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a UK-based corporation. You're just channeling capitalist first-world propaganda as if it's neutral an unbiased.

EDIT: measures such as these also push the lie that the way to choose a system of government is to look at all the systems as they are practiced throughout the world and pick the one with the best outcomes, as if all countries started from the same place and had the same material conditions, with the only difference being their way of counting votes and deciding on leaders. As if no system exploits anybody else, and can be judged purely on its merits within its own borders. It puts the issue forward as an engineering problem with fixed inputs and outputs rather than a dialectical problem that takes history and culture into account.

 

[lpetrich]

So the best system of government invented so far is a Westminster-style democracy.

lol According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a UK-based corporation. You're just channeling capitalist first-world propaganda as if it's neutral an unbiased.

Do you have any better ideas?

EDIT: measures such as these also push the lie that the way to choose a system of government is to look at all the systems as they are practiced throughout the world and pick the one with the best outcomes, as if all countries started from the same place and had the same material conditions, with the only difference being their way of counting votes and deciding on leaders. As if no system exploits anybody else, and can be judged purely on its merits within its own borders. It puts the issue forward as an engineering problem with fixed inputs and outputs rather than a dialectical problem that takes history and culture into account.

Why don't you do the work of demonstrating that that is the case?

I do concede some path dependence, like Westminster-system monarchies vs. republics. Can you demonstrate some additional path dependence?

 

[PyramidHead]

Do you have any better ideas?

EDIT: measures such as these also push the lie that the way to choose a system of government is to look at all the systems as they are practiced throughout the world and pick the one with the best outcomes, as if all countries started from the same place and had the same material conditions, with the only difference being their way of counting votes and deciding on leaders. As if no system exploits anybody else, and can be judged purely on its merits within its own borders. It puts the issue forward as an engineering problem with fixed inputs and outputs rather than a dialectical problem that takes history and culture into account.

Why don't you do the work of demonstrating that that is the case?

I do concede some path dependence, like Westminster-system monarchies vs. republics. Can you demonstrate some additional path dependence?

It should be obvious that comparing the statistics of colonized nations to those of the nations doing the colonizing is not going to be very informative, except as a way of showing that imperialism makes some countries rich and prosperous at the expense of others. This is doubly true in the case of nations that have undergone popular revolutions, because the revolutionary government is immediately vulnerable to counter-revolution by the previous one, or by their allies elsewhere in the world.

Dialectical materialist analysis would call the entire operation fruitless from the start, since nothing exists in a pure, unadulterated form. Systems of government are always in flux, and they emerge from whatever gave rise to them, while the prior one is still in existence. There is no representative snapshot that could allow one to evaluate a system in an atemporal, apolitical, ashistorical way, as separate from its real application in specific contexts.

 

[fromderinside]

How does comparison of governing systems lead to a determination of whether there need be a president for us. It doesn't even lead to whether there be a specific system for us.

Nice seeing someone is trying to find lists applicable to the topic though. Maybe in another life I'd have used them in determining procedures for degraded airplane control.

Nailed it - again.

 

[Jokodo]

How does comparison of governing systems lead to a determination of whether there need be a president for us. It doesn't even lead to whether there be a specific system for us.

It doesn't. It does however belie the narcissistic notion many American seem to harbour - that their is one and only one right form of governance, and it's the one the divinely inspired founding fathers set out.

 

[lpetrich]

 List of electoral systems by country

Lists how leaders and legislatures are elected. If a legislature has two houses, then those two houses are listed separately. A single house is treated as the lower house of a two-house system.

Let's see who uses what in the lower house. Party list is the most commonly-used scheme among high scorers, including the top one, Norway. Going down the list, the first non-party-list scheme is mixed member. 4 New Zealand, 13 Germany, and then 56 Lesotho and 58 Hungary. First past the post is next, at 6 Canada, 14 UK, 25 US, 28 Botswana. Single transferable vote is used by 7 Ireland, 18 Malta, and not many others. Instant runoff voting is used by 9 Australia. Bloc vote is used by 17 Mauritius. Parallel voting is used by 21 South Korea, 22 Japan, 32 Taiwan, 37 Lithuania, 53 Philippines, and others. Runoffs are used by 29 France.

What's what:

• First past the post: whoever gets the most votes wins.
• Bloc vote: multiseat, where one votes for as many candidates as seats.
• Runoffs (two-ballot or top-two): whoever does first and second in the first vote goes on to a second vote.
• Instant runoff voting or single-seat ranked-choice voting: One ranks candidates by preference. Whoever gets a majority of top votes wins. If no majority, then whoever gets the least top votes drops out and the votes are recounted without them. Repeat until someone gets a majority.
• Single transferable vote or multiseat ranked-choice voting: like the single-seat version, but with winners also dropping out, with victory being more than a certain victory quota. The quota number of votes then drop out, with the extra ones being reused.
• Parallel voting: single-member districts and party-list voting side by side.
• Mixed member: like parallel voting, but with the districts and the list seats made proportional together.

 

[fromderinside]

How does comparison of governing systems lead to a determination of whether there need be a president for us. It doesn't even lead to whether there be a specific system for us.

It doesn't. It does however belie the narcissistic notion many American seem to harbour - that their is one and only one right form of governance, and it's the one the divinely inspired founding fathers set out.

Oh. Like religious order. Divine is the stye in eye of the beholder brother. .... be a believer, be blinded by the light (sing song)

 

[Jokodo]

How does comparison of governing systems lead to a determination of whether there need be a president for us. It doesn't even lead to whether there be a specific system for us.

It doesn't. It does however belie the narcissistic notion many American seem to harbour - that their is one and only one right form of governance, and it's the one the divinely inspired founding fathers set out.

Oh. Like religious order. Divine is the stye in eye of the beholder brother. .... be a believer, be blinded by the light (sing song)

It's hardly my fault you guys get all religious about your constitution.