Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Minute Paper 3/4

Today's class was quite a treat. Jim Dator came in and gave us all quite a show. He gave us the basic overview of how our government works. The thing that made things really interesting was when he brought up Thomas Hobbs, who imagined a world in a primitive time. Thomas Hobbs had stated that Life in the state of nature is solitary, prude, nasty, and short. Hobbs also said that humans are evil and God-damned sinners. Which is true in a sense because we as humans all have primal instincts and may sometimes resort back to these primal instincts. It is from this that our Founding Fathers was able to create a constitution in which to run our nation. Government was created to control these evil and out of control humans. However, Dator brought up the point as to how can evil humans control evil humans? It was then that the system of Checks and Balances was developed in order to regulate the different groups so that no one group would have absolute power. It's interesting how although we have this system instated, it shows little importance because of the power of persuasion amongst the politicians so that they can each have things done their way.

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