Factions In Action
- The great thing about a primo, melt-in-your-mouth Union is that it's really good at cutting down the influence of factions.
- Factions are bad news to a just government. They end up causing instability, injustice, and confusion.
- Lots of governments have fallen to one group gaining too much power over the whole.
- Sadly, America also has factions. Try not to panic.
- People are worried that the common good is being ignored in favor of the conflicts between rival factions.
- Not only that, but also the rights of the minor party are getting steamrolled by the power of the majority.
- But what are factions, anyways?
- They're a group of citizens, however big or small, who are united by a specific interest that puts them against another group of citizens and their specific interests.
- There are two ways to stop factions: Remove its causes, or control its effects.
- The downside to the first thing is that factions are a by-product of having opinions in general and the freedom to express them.
- You can't go into someone's brain and get rid of their opinions—in 3789 maybe, but at least not in 1789—and getting rid of people's freedom of expression kind of flies in the face of the whole democracy thing.
- It would be like launching your house into space to put out a fire. Fire can't burn without that pesky oxygen (pesky freedom, in this analogy), but you also need oxygen to breathe.
- What gets even worse is that everyone has an interest. A creditor and a debtor would have vastly different opinions about the economy, and so would a farmer versus a manufacturer.
- People also tend to support things that benefit themselves, and in a democracy there's nothing really stopping the biggest faction from calling the shots.
- An example of self-interest in government is setting taxes. A government has to set taxes to function, but when it's deciding how much money to take for itself, there's always the temptation to skim a little extra off the top.
- So, that's a no-go on cause-preventing. But luckily, we can cut down on the worst effects of Factions by governing.
- By changing the US to a Representative Democracy, big potentially dangerous ideas get filtered down into a smaller set of trained government officials, who will take them and use their best judgment on them.
- Representatives also can be corrupt, so this system hopefully keeps those people in check by cutting down their influence.
- But does a large Republic work better than a tiny one? If there are too many people to one representative they can't really be in touch with the people they represent.
- If there are too many representatives in the kitchen, then big factions get to claim a lot of representatives for themselves, and we're back to the problem of factions to begin with.
- Actually, the bigger the United States are, the better—more people mean more opinions, and thus the powers of faction are kept at bay.
- Also, with a representative democracy, it's a lot easier to slot more states into the Union without overwhelming the government and still ensuring the new regions get their say.
- Faction leaders may be able to start a spark in their necks of the woods, but the proverbial fire won't spread to the rest of the government thanks to our representative system.