badgenome said:
Yeah, and with the exception of Canada, they're all boutique countries with mostly homogeneous populations numbering less than 10 million. Such nations have a natural tendency towards low corruption. I'm pretty skeptical that any lessons learned from New Zealand or Finland can be applied to the U.S. I mean, I imagine pretty much all politics in your country are local, whereas in a country the size of the U.S. one has to watch for meddling busybodies and corrupt assholes as the federal, state, and local levels. It is for all intents and purposes impossible. I've already pointed out how arbitrary this shit ends up being in practice here - Dog Eat Dog Films and Lions Gate's vastly more successful (and thus, more dangerous, eek!) Fahrenheit 9/11 doesn't trip the FEC's alarm but Citizens United's two bit production somehow does? - so I'll be fucked if I want to give the ravening beast that is the federal government the power to tell anyone to shut up. |
What about Australia and the United Kingdom? They're reasonably large and generally rank better than the USA in those indices. I know Australia has fairly strict electoral laws and I think the UK does too.
New proposal, the USA becomes 50 countries =P
