What's Wrong with America

I just got done reading a length article on the "decline" of America.  Very interesting but quite long.  I'll try to summarize here and then provide some analysis.

The article's main points:

• America has been thought to be in decline at many times throughout it's history and America continues to respond with resilience, flexibility and rebirth to drive it forward into growth and vitality while people continue to lament the impending doom of the country.
• America has specific and significant advantages over other countries around the world:  Attracting talent, our University system, and resources.
• Our infrastructure is getting older and is hardly sufficient for the needs of today, much less the needs of future generations.
• Our government system is old, inflexible, and cannot accomplish significant projects.  He also mentions specific problems with the system such as the fact that California has 69 times more representatives in the House than Wyoming yet they both have the same power in the Senate.
• Everything can be fixed if all decisions are made by thinking about that decision as if you would wake up tomorrow and it would be 75 years later.

The sections on the constant doom and gloom and how America responds to it is interesting.  One thing I noticed from my own life is that people in my company seem to have this same view of how the company is doing.  Yet the company keeps getting stronger.  Maybe my company, and possibly many others out there are microcosms of the entire American culture.

On declining infrastructure:  It may be true that our current systems need maintenance, but I believe in some cases, a collapsing infrastructure might give us a good opportunity or possibly motivation to invent something better, more efficient, less expensive, or easier to maintain.

He never really makes a good point about how the House and Senate are setup.  I believe they were setup with the balance as it is for a reason, and it still seems to make sense to me.  You want higher populations to get more say, but not to be able to dictate the course of this country.  It seems like a good setup.  In addition, he talks about states containing 12 percent of the population having enough votes in the Senate to block a bill.  However, the states are mostly irrelevant since the important affiliation is whether those Senators are Democrats or Republicans.  I'm not sure I've ever hear anyone discuss the possibility of Wyoming and Montana gathering a few more states together to block a specific bill.  It seems to always be a party vote.

My Solution:  I think technology is opening up some new avenues for Democracy that could be interesting.  One example is the idea that we could involve far more people in the process using the internet without increasing the costs a lot.  This would be a good step toward a real Democracy instead of a Representative Democracy.  Even if getting everyone to perform all the functions of legislators is too big a task to start with, it could be fun to build a system where many people could collaborate to write better bills to be presented to the legislature that come from the people.  Imagine a bill authored and edited by 1000 people scattered across the country making it into the House for a vote.  To extend that idea, what if we created a new pseudo branch of government made up of all the people in this country who had the ability to vote on a bill and send it to the White House, or to amend, or block a bill.  I know, there are lots of details to work out there, but I think the details could be worked out.  If I get much response on that I may expand on it in future postings.