To: TobagoJack who wrote (132684 ) 3/30/2017 2:19:58 AM From: Elroy Jetson Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 218700 China is currently essentially a dictatorship run by the People's Congress and the leaders they elect. This means laws and how things are done in China can be changed very quickly. The United States, like most established democracies, is a nation of laws with specific rules how and when these laws can be changed. Business only flourishes where the law exists. Without contracts and other known certainties those with capital demand much larger risk premiums and business contracts. People can rage against this "deep state" but it provide the basis for our economy and our lives. China is rapidly moving toward this model because it has obvious advantages. An example of a person who never understood is my Father who dropped out of law school, because I can see he never would have understood the law, being a real estate developer didn't understand why governments could take property in return for appraised value. But there's a simple explanation. US Law is English Common Law, something which evolved over more than a thousand years, as modified by our Constitution. In England and most other nations all property belonged to the Crown. Land given by the crown could be taken back without compensation. In Hong Kong you call this resumption. The exception to this were "free cities" which were common in Continental which is where land was given in perpetuity as an incentive to tradesmen to settle there and make valuable trade goods like cloth, beer, wine, salt - the usual. The concept that the Crown or the government had to pay you for land it took occurred in England with the Magna Carta but this was not absolute. The 1845 "Lands Clauses Consolidation Act" finally formalized "Compulsory Purchase" as often applied by Parliament after the 1500s. America was a melange of land grants from the Crown without "free cities". The Founding Fathers liked their property and didn't like the idea of the uncertainty of possibly losing their land to Washington DC or their State without compensation - so they introduced "Eminent Domain" which required appraised value be paid. As noted previously, England didn't arrive at this absolute requirement for payment until 1845. The Constitution also says if our government requires you to house soldiers in your home, the government had to pay rent. There's no question they can do this, but they have to pay rent. Since that time Congress and our Courts have given Americans a greater right of privacy, so while the government can purchase my home, they can't require me to house soldiers even with the payment of rent. So our legal foundation is like a river, flowing in a given way until it it modified as allowed by our system of legislatures, courts and administrative rulings like Executive Orders. After Lincoln signed the "Emancipation Proclamation ", an Executive Order which freed the slaves he pushed very hard for a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw slavery before the end of the Civil War. Why? Because a later President could repeal Lincoln's Proclamation with another Executive Order and Lincoln judged it was unlikely this Constitutional Amendment would be be passed by the states after the Southern States had again become part of the nation. This is probably a bad example of how stable our system is. It took a Civil War to make slavery illegal. England did this much more easily with the passage of a law. That's our "deep state" - our laws.