The snarkier folks in the audience might ask: Isn't that an awful lot like taxation without representation? Not quite. Taxation without representation is Authority without Voice.
The modern problem is that the personal cost to individuals in government of damaging the country is minimal. So they try stupid experiments like "Health Care Reform" that don't solve any problems, and put us substantially closer to having big problems later. Ditto the Iraq War.
The big dispute between the Modlbugians and me has come down to the best way to reduce Authority without Responsibility.
My assertion, contra Moldbug: The only thing that has historically worked is a combination of 3 factors. I claim that the industrial revolution was primarily a flowering in 3 locations: Holland since 1581, England since ~1660, and America since ~1700. Further, I claim that the growth rates caused by the industrial revolution were due to:
- Killing an oppressor or two, thereby putting the fear of god into rulers. In England, Charles 1 went headless followed by Cromwell's posthumous execution. Proper fear was instilled in the rulers. The Netherlands kicked out the Spanish in 1581. Proper fear was instilled in the rulers. The Americans fought the British, and thus instilled fear in the subsequent rulers of America. Violence by the people was the core check on government power.
- Balanced interests, thereby making divided government. Holland in the 16th century had the Union of Utrecht, a republican, distributed power center. England in the 17th Century had Parliament, the King, and a dozen other moderately inviolable power centers. See my link to Nick Szabo. Madison expressly built the structure of US government to balance power against power (Courts, Legislature, Executive -- States, Locals, Feds)
- Ability to exit: Europe in the 16th-18th centuries was a patchwork of small-ish countries, all somewhat at odds with one another. This means that if you got in trouble politically somewhere (England), you had the ability (if you were educated enough to get in trouble) to decamp to Holland, Spain, Portugal, or Venice. America had a federalist system and a frontier.
- Distributed authority makes it near impossible to shoot the person responsible.
- Due in no small part to the rise of the university/media/civil service as a unitary entity (no discernable differences of opinion between the 3), there is no longer any capability to build balanced power, as the interests are the same.
- There is no frontier and America is a hegemon. Exit is impossible.
- Therefore, regardless its historical merits, the Madisonian solution is no longer possible.
- I have advocated before, and continue to advocate the following...which appears thoroughly Modlbugian. People who make and enforce decisions should sign their names to them, and should be responsible (read liable) for them. My boss made me do it is NOT a defense. True in military, corporation, and government. Government should not be allowed to indemnify. Insofar as Moldbug's line is that we need to be able to identify who to hang for each bad decision, I agree. Insofar as he's saying more than that, I am less sanguine about it.
- If one were to create an amendment, even in the current system, wherein TOTAL government expenditures (State, federal, local) were limited to X% of GDP (start at 30, decrease to 5 over 25 years) , it would create a system wherein the interests of Moldbug's Cthuloid monster would no longer be cohesive cohesive. Rather than being able to extract money from the private sector, Government would be in competition against itself. Arguably, it is this feature of the pre-industrial revolution world along with the separation of powers that built the Industrial revolution. As Clark's Malthusian view informs us, there simply wasn't enough surplus to extract...and so all levels of government were forced to compete for the same small pie. Perhaps government pie restriction to the zero-sum game they tend to believe in would solve a problem.
- There is indeed no frontier. America itself now constitutes a monopoly of the type that antitrust regulators hate. It needs to be broken up, like AT&T. The federal government should be left with only the national-defense business unit. Smallness and competition is the only solution. This may be the key issue. What I really want is for the meaningful differences between California's entirely disfunctional government, Illinois's hideously corrupt government, and Texas's minimalist approach to become obvious. With Texas getting better results on every front than California, with fewer regulations, lower taxes, better economic growth, and better social services (though less pretty scenery -- not terribly impactable through government programs), eventually smaller systems under mild competition will gravitate towards successful models.
- Madison may indeed no longer be possible. However, I believe that the odds of a hard-cap on total government expenditures, a real accountability measure (preferably that includes violence), and/or a breakup of the American monopoly are all (as incremental improvements) more likely to succeed than the Moldbugian reset. It may be that the solution that the MOST successful state has matches Moldbug's. I'd bet against it though. Not because I think Moldbug's approach doesn't have value...but because I think that experimentation is better attuned to reality than I am (or Moldbug is).
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So, now, to save the remnant of the Madisonian system, we just need to get the government to impose restraints on itself. Easier said than done!
I think Moldbug goes a step further and argues that it's not possible to reduce the size of government until order has been established. The government we have now, is incapable of establishing order.
To fit this into your industrial revolution framework, Cromwell established order thereby allowing for future developments (and demonstrating Carlyle's fondness for Cromwell).
Interesting post, and I like it!
Your plans sound wonderful.
(I have little idea what/which shifts are actually psychosocially plausible. That might be where Moldbug would argue with you -- that he thinks a reset is just way more plausible.)
Again, I'm replying to all posts/comments in one thread.
d bet against it though. Not because I think Moldbug's approach doesn't have value...but because I think that experimentation is better attuned to reality than I am (or Moldbug is).
We all want experiments. I want to experiment. Moldbug wrote before that he would rather try his plan on a city-state first. The question is, "what should the next experiment be?".
It's constructive to say, "I think my method is better, because it is less radical and thus will not introduce new, horrible bugs."
But it's not constructive to say, "My approach is better because it is experimental". We all to want to experiment to whatever degree possible. The design of the experiment is the question.
We are in agreement that all things being equal, smaller is better. We also agree that all things being equal, a chain of accountability is better than an unaccountable dictator.
So let's think about the design of a government for a small state. Imagine it as one U.S. state that was attempting secession - say Indiana or Louisiana or Massachusetts. What kind of government should that state have? What general principles go into the design?
Let's examine your proposals.
People who make and enforce decisions should sign their names to them, and should be responsible (read liable) for them.
Who holds them liable? What is the structure that enforces accountability? That is the real question. There are forms of accountability now. The Fed does report to the President and Congress, and those both report to the people. But it doesn't seem to be working well. Zoning boards report to the people, that's not working either. etc. etc. The civil service is not very accountable. But the problem was that without a civil service, government jobs were promised in return for votes. So how do you solve both the problem of the civil service and the spoils system?
If one were to create an amendment, even in the current system, wherein TOTAL government expenditures (State, federal, local) were limited to X% of GDP (start at 30, decrease to 5 over 25 years) ,
Direct taxes are not actually main my beef with government. Regulations and psuedo-taxes are a much bigger problem. For instance, putting a cap on med school graduates is essentially a 100% marginal tax rate on new doctors. That's way beyond the laffer curve optimal point. It's just a giveaway to the doctors.
Also, if government's ability to direct tax is limited it will find other ways to raise revenue that are far less efficient. Reading Douglas North, this is the real reason France and Spain got left behind England. England had a Parliament that could raise taxes directly. But the king of France had to use indirect means, by granting guild monopolies, and this crippled growth.
Also, by limiting taxes, you give the incentive for the government to create a crisis to raise taxes (and then it will never lower them). See: the New Deal.
Or you given an incentive for people to rally to a political movement that will distribute the taxes to them. Except that movement will probably do the distribution in a massively inefficient way (such as the latest healthcare bill).
What I would do instead is set the tax rate at 30% by statute and keep it there. All revenues above necessary government expenses for infrastructure and defense is dedicated to a dividend pool. 80% of that pool would be distributed evenly to all citizens, either in straight cash or perhaps a pension benefit or healthcare voucher. The other 20% would be openly traded stock. Those shareholders would have voting rights in the government (maybe not full control, ala moldbug, but some voting power). But those shareholders are junior to the citizens benefits check, so they only get paid if the government can keep its costs down.
If that benefit pool gets cut, there will be a huge outrage - a much greater outrage than raising taxes, Tax hikes can always be passed off on a smaller portion of the population, but benefit cuts hit all voters. That's why social security is the third rail, not taxes. And conversely, there is no support from any broad coalition, populist or elitist, red state or blue state, for lowering taxes at the expense of benefits.
Overall, I don't think that just breaking up the American monopoly will fix everything. Look at some of our major problems: crime and blight in the inner cities, a medical cartel, zoning laws that drive up housing prices, a broken financial system, infrastructure that is falling apart, terrible land development policies/soulless suburban sprawl, an education system that destroys souls, a bureaucracy that grows with bounds.
I don't see how secession/devolving authority to the states will solve any of these problems. Sure the Feds have made things worse, but no state or city in America is well run. State and city regulations are part of all the above problems. Nor are cities and states doing a good job of experimenting and learning from other cities and states. Not a single state has implemented education vouchers for instance. Not a single state has copied Singapore's healthcare system, despite its obvious success.
Nor do I see how your other proposals (accountability, limits on taxes) will solve the above problems.
Secession or creating a special freedom zone as an experiment is a great first step. But it needs to be an accompanied by a governance plan that will actually be an improvement, or else the experiment will be discredited.
For instance, I like your test-rocket better than anything I've read of Moldbug's...but I still think that for reasons I can't predict, it would be unlikely to manage a 250 year run with results anywhere near as good as Madison's.
To go back to the housing analogy, the problem is that you're trying to design our new house with Madison's ice blocks. You've added a new support column, which is good. But in our current climate, building with ice is going to get the same bad result that we're experiencing currently. My proposal might introduce new unknown bugs. But since it actually addresses the known bugs, and tries to put in a fix for them, I think it's substantially more likely to succeed than Madison 2.0.
*gets popcorn*
Devin's winning my vote!
A metric ton of great stuff here, wow.
I confess it's sounding even better than my Roissy/Bezos ticket. Maybe you'll hand them the keys to part of Australia though.
I agree with the things Devin and Andrew are saying, but I think they are missing the bigger picture.
Aretae's plan assume that the US government will either: 1) limit its own power; or 2) allow competitors on a sizable scale.
The US government will not do either one of these things.
Therefore, for Aretae to be allowed to implement his plans, he's going to have to restart or overthrow the government.
If you go to the trouble to cause a restart, why you would re-implement a slightly modified form of the current US government.
Such a proposal is silly.
As always, stimulating.
My position is fundamentally simpler than at least Foseti is claiming...and much closer to what Devin suggested it should be than what I seem to have successfully communicated.
Devin: It's constructive to say, "I think my method is better, because it is less radical and thus will not introduce new, horrible bugs."
My position, written before rereading that:
We make lots of mistakes. And I think that mistake-prevention is higher priority than the pursuit of perfection.
I think that Moldbug, and indeed Devin as well, are pushing systems that pursue increased likelihood of success. While I applaud that line of thinking, I think it's the wrong target.
I am claiming that since failure has many modes MUCH worse than what we've got, our metric should instead be decreased likelihood of failure.
It seems crazy-obvious to me that doing something LOTS different than any form of government that has been successful recently is MUCH more fraught with danger than doing something similar to what has already been done, subject to Devin's igloo caveat.
Fundamentally, it seems as if the argument is still a "what's more likely".
I am saying that I think it's both more likely, and lower chance of failure to get a Constitutional amendment to patch things as compared to something new. My amendment choices are:
1) Capping government size as X% of GDP as per either my or Devin's suggestion (I think Devin's is better than mine),
2) Get a revitalized Federalism via tea party enthusiasm for a revitalized 9th/10th and/or repeal of the 16th.
The strongest argument against my position seem to be:
(a) Devin's igloo position -- it CAN'T work any more...so even though it's the only thing we've ever seen that works well to lead growth (rather than to catch up to other folks wealth levels as colonialism was successful)...we have to try something new.
In other news,
(1) I am agreed with Devin that regulation is a significantly larger problem than taxation (I'm a growther, duh)...I just haven't yet figured out how to model that in my kind of system. Surely there's something that can analog to my 30% GDP...but I don't know what.
(2) I am inclined to think that centralized taxation and regulation at the federal level removes 90% of the benefit of variable systems. For instance, California was prohibited from imposing higher fuel-efficiency standards than the federal standards. Oregon's marijuana decriminalization (a huge positive step towards crime reduction) is also effectively prohibited by the feds. The only meaningful difference between states occurs between Texas's mildly more free-market social-conservative approach, and California's mildly more regulatory social-liberal approach. Less than 10% of the relevant differences, because Texas is federally prohibited from banning welfare and abortion, and California is federally prohibited from electing Castro governor.
(3) My constraints on the government require (like all real constraints on government) the ability of the people to rise up and HANG the rulers. This is why Cromwell was good. Charles I got out of hand...the people under Cromwell killed him. Next dozen rulers were less heavy-handed, from rational fear.
Back to the fundamental remaining disagreement. I expect ALL new proposals to fail. I want to hear about how unlikely they are to fail, not how likely they are to succeed.
All I hear from software architects and managers at work is how likely their designs and plans are to succeed; they're always wrong. This government-construction stuff is a less well developed discipline than software.
Tell me how your system guarantees that we don't get Chavez and Pinochet, not how we might get Lee Kuan Yew.
Your serve.
I actually have a second thrust of argument as well, besides my core "we're mostly wrong...look for error amelioration over success"
The second thrust is that I have become convinced that group decisions tend to be better than individual decisions. While I'm not willing to say this difference is worth the massive lack of alignment between authority and responsibility (who do we shoot?), I do think that it's worth mulling.
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