Yeah, that's what Standard Oil executives once said.

They also said that traffic laws were desirable and that murder should be a crime.

I'm too cynical to believe that Collusion Always Turns Out Good.

We are currently lacking proper oversight, checks and balances in our candidate selection process, as has been evident for over a decade now. It has finally managed to indeed manifest the worst fears of those claiming money was more important than issues. Without it, you don't get out of the gate.

When the old adage that "anyone can become president" is no longer true, then IMO it's time to examine why, and fix it. With only two major parties, there is a huge disincentive against such action.

I'll go back to being optimistic when the lipsticked pigs begin to fly.

No one said or thinks that Collusion Always Turns Out Good. But describing the current situation as simply the result of collusion is way oversimplifying.

Sorry... I just felt that bringing every aspect of the issue into the thread would crash the server.

Why vote for the lesser of two evils?
VOTE MEGATRON!

Not entirely; it also goes back to when the states were, you know, states. It provided representation to states as well as citizens by including Senators in the EC apportionment. It appears (to me, without any known scholarly backing) that one reason the Founders didn't foresee the two-party system we have was an expectation of state and regional concerns dominating. Of course, after the Civil War era (most especially Reconstruction), states began to fade out, consolidating power in the Federal realm, and consequently the two parties we've come to know and hate.

True, with our flawed election system. But with range voting or similar, the Electoral College would be a much bigger issue. (And I'll take this opportunity to urge everyone who wouldn't vote because it's raining to stay home regardless.)

George Washington warned us against parties.

We didn't listen.

I love parties, especially the political kind. I don't have time to study all the issues in depth, and that's why I like having a representative government -- it's the representative's job to know the issues more than it is mine. That's why I don't like term limitations -- pretty much for the same reason I wouldn't want term limitations for my doctor. He's a professional and I'm glad.

If there were no parties, I would do in-depth studies of my Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Controller, etc etc? Not.

I wouldn't have more time to study the qualifications of and nuances of speeches by all these people. A political party gives me a handy way of distinguishing various politicians. I think that Democracy would be totally unworkable without parties. Maybe that's why every single country has parties that I know of. Please jump out and let me know about a country that doesn't have parties and that works great.

It's amazing how effective theories can be when there are no practical examples. That's why the ideologies of Socialism or Communism or Libertarianism are so effective -- since there are no pure examples of these ideologies having been put into effect, proponents can simply point to fantasy states -- and fantasy ALWAYS works better than reality.

Indeed, I don't think collusion is necessary in a rigid 2-party system (which plurality tends towaraw) to explain the surface problems we have.

With two parties, each starting at some position in an n-dimensional voter space, they both have a 'base' consisting of voters in their lobe of a hyperboloid (of two sheets) with focii at the two positions; those are the voters closer by a certain amount to that party, and so voting for it out of practical necessity.

Voters outside the hyperboloid are up for grabs, with probabilities of going each way proportional to relative closeness. But they might be swayed by rhetoric, and certainly by moving your platform closer to the center. If the distribution of voters is uneven, you'll try to shift to bring dense areas behind you at the expense of sparse areas.

Eventually, you wind up in a local equilibrium with the parties as close as they can get while insuring that voters can still distinguish them.

Now there's complexities not covered yet, such as multiple candidates (P & VP, plus other less significant ones), and the need to avoid irrational behavior (staying home or voting third party) from the base, but these seem to fit in nicely with this collusion-free model.