I'm confused. Are you suggesting that there are only two forms of government: deadlocked representative democracy and militant fascism?
Functional governments, complete with checks and balances, careful distribution of power, and so on can be set up in such a way that the stupid selfishness of human nature can't easily derail it.
Well Jis I really didn't know how to respond to "our founding fathers were morons". Personally I think they did a good job. Perhaps we have just messed it up over time. If you want to open the discussion up beyond HSR, then you have to address global free trade and the loss of millions of jobs to China and other countries overseas. As a country we are dead broke. We don't even take in enought revenue to take care of our basic needs like social security, medicare, unemployment, etc. much less things like HSR. The military budget is not all that big and I really don't want to find myself in a country that has dropped to second or third best in defense as that would be catastrophic for the nation and the world. I am too old to learn Chinese or Russian. To fund all these nice things like the Europeans have we have to increase tax revenue. That means bringing jobs back into this country. No other country that I know of lets their basic industries leave without even putting up a fight and most require that to do business in their country you have to hire the local population. Other than some government contracts, we don't even do that. We have serious fundamental problems and I really don't hear any politician out there addressing them. Government by itself doesn't create wealth or jobs. Government just spends other people's money and right now there is not enough of it. Maybe we should give the job of policing the world to China or Russia. Certainly Europe is not prepared to take up the slack. Maybe there are those on here that think we can just bury our heads in the sand and play with our trains and no one will bother us. Personally I don't share that opinion. The world is an increasingly dangerous place.
I don't think there is anything wrong with our government that a more intelligent, less selfish citizenship couldn't fix.
Among the many scrappy little things I do in pursuit of making a living is finding perfectly good items people throw away and selling it to other people at a low, low price that is, for me, almost 100% profit. You believe in the free market economy? Well I'm in the flea market economy, and doing pretty well in it, thank you.
The other day I found a most lovely couch, made out of beautifully woven fabric. When it was new, it most have cost its owner well north of $1000. Currently, it was filthy, but cleanable. I brought it with me, along with many other things, and proceeded to attempt to hock it at the flea market. I started out with a price of $100. By the end of the day, I had it priced at $5, then put a sign on it saying that they had but to come and take it home with them.
I have no use for such a couch, so I left it there figuring someone else would come running and throw it in their truck. A few hours later, I got an annoyed call from the manager asking me to come and remove my couch. This beautiful couch, a most lovely object, was simply too much trouble and aggravation for anyone to want to take it home.
Likewise, our country is a mares nest of rotten, selfish people, demanding of too much and giving too little. Lazy, inept, arrogant, and generally cantankerous, our country is populated by a ton of problems and hassles. No other country in the world wants to take us over. If they won us without a shot fired, it would still be the most pyrrhic victory of all.
Our government spends way too much money on way too much nonsense, none of which really has to do with any project we undertake, per se, but all of the red tape surrounding it. Forget pointless projects. Get rid of all the studies we perform on whether projects are pointless or pointful, or just plain senatorial pissing contests, and we'd be a good percentage of the way to more efficient government.
Inspectors must inspect swiss cheese in this country, not for quality, or disease, or spoilage, but for the number and size of holes in the cheese. I rest my case.
Our government is defacto defunct. Our economy is a text book example of chaos theory. As Jishnu put it, we spend far too much of our time working on pointless nonsense, while eliminating all high-profile progress to show how much we are tightening our belts.