First post I found, as directed by Devin says:
From the Justinian Code we get two totalitarian superstitions: first, that there must be a locus of power, a "sovereign", somewhere in any political system. In Justinian's Empire, this locus was the emperor himself, whose word was law. From this philosophy came the view of the sovereign king or dictator espoused by Bodin and Hobbes. In this model the king is the "head" and the rest of the "body politic" is controlled by the king, just as our brains control our bodies. Under Rosseau and Bentham, this locus was switched to "the people" or to, in practice, a parliament that supposedly represented "the people." Under the extreme sovereigntist view, separation of powers, federalism, and political property rights are all an illusion -- all power is just a revocable delegation from a supreme locus of sovereignty.As I've said before...it was only under extreme conditions of limited powers that capitalism ever got going...and it will only be under extreme limited powers that it ever continues. The Moldbugian pro-authority superstition is just that.
Actual English law and political structure were very different. Under this law, royal power was actually divided among the King, the King's counselors, Parliament, and justices. None of these entities was the "locus" of power but all played crucial roles. Furthermore, much of this power had been granted to other entities -- nobles, lords proprietor, municipal and colonial and church corporations, guilds, and so on -- in the form of largely irrevocable political property rights. Under the sovereigntist view, taught in universities, all such property grants were merely revocable delegations. But under the actual common law, taught to the actual lawyers and judges of the time in the Inns of Court (institutions completely independent of universities, and thus largely uninfected by Roman Law), these delegations were property rights forfeitable back to the grantor -- and the original grantor was the Crown -- only under extreme breach of grant conditions under a quo warranto proceeding.
I now officially owe Devin a beverage of choice if I ever see him.
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11 comments:
Sorry to comment on all your posts, but . . .
Here's what's wrong (from a Moldbuggian perspective) with the quote.
The quote says: "royal power was actually divided among the King, the King's counselors, Parliament, and justices."
Let's say that the King and the Parliament disagreed. How would this dispute be resolved? By the justices? If so, then the justices are the very locus of power that you believe to have been removed (or "limited").
f not justices then something else and if this situation becomes too uncertain, the winner will be the one with the bigger army and the result will be a civil war.
Nice system.
Foseti,
Before I disagree aggressively, I'd like to say...I like my active commentariat a great deal, you included. If you didn't comment, I wouldn't have as good of an idea of which of my positions were between unclear, confusing and wrong. Please continue.
I know that the Moldbuggian perspective holds that this is wrong. I hold that history, and particularly the insane success of exactly the model I'm referencing outvotes Moldbug's thinking on the topic.
For what it's worth, this is the reality of the situation that Carlyle was romanticizing. In reality, the King and the parliament had signed agreements indicating which one had the power to do which...and neither of them trusted one another.
My (shortened) argument for the last few months has been that Cromwell caused the industrial revolution. Because of Cromwell and his beheading spree, the English crown in reality was very mindful (read afraid) of the commoners, and unwilling to use whatever power it had too roughly. Indeed, if I recall correctly, it was mighty unclear where the power lay if there was a big dispute.
Civil wars are expensive, and uncertain, and everyone would rather avoid them.
So...the claim is that your (and Moldbug's) intuition about the necessity of "sovereignty" is wrong according to history...a Roman myth about efficacy.
The other position would be the Szabo/de Mesquita/Aretae position:
In reality, there are ALWAYS dozens of groups which each cling to their own (narrow) interests fiercely. If the king doesn't leave enough space for the barons to be rapacious, they band together, and replace him violently. If the Barons try to extract too much money from the peasants, they pull up the pitchforks, and fight back (though they usually lose).
There is very complex balance of power naturally...and attempting to impose a false notion of sovereignty on top of that is silly.
Libertarianism doesn't work. This is NOT because of the growth of power, but because to allow individuals freedom would be to take the ability to compel people away from some small group which whose support is politically essential (to withdraw support would eventually cause the coalition to fall).
I'm going to reply to all of your posts today in this thread, to keep things contained.
Nick's posts on unpredictable elections and for profit government are also excellent.
I would love to see a full-on debate between Szabo and Moldbug on the topic: "Resolved: Coherent authority is superior to division of powers".
But now that I've introduced Szabo, let me try and refute him.
I remain unconvinced that centralized authority was the main blocker to the industrial revolution. For instance, in France the king needed a way to raise revenue, but he had no method of direct taxation. Thus he sold guild monopoly rights and sold the rights to offices. These guilds then blocked economic growth. Had the king been strong enough to enact a direct property tax, perhaps France would have industrialized sooner.
In England, Elizabeth seems to have aided the advancement of rule of law. Edward Coke may have quarreled with King Charles, but Coke was originally appointed and supported by the monarch and developed much of our tradition of contract rights and property rights. Elizabeth helped build up England's navy and allow it to rise in foreign trade. Meanwhile the Parliament of the 1650's enacted the highly mercantilist Navigation Acts.
It's really difficult for me to see the lopping off of Charles the First's head as some great advance that caused the industrial revolution. I'd need to see greater evidence of the specific things that he did to hold back trade, and the changes that his death brought about.
Thanks. Feel free to pound away at any and all of my comments.
I don't think I understand your argument. I hate to speak too much for Moldbug, since I'm still trying to learn his views, but . . .
You're making "sovereignty" way more complicated than he does - I think.
Government either decides to do something or not to do something. Somehow government arrives at the decision to do, or not do, something.
The person or group that controls this decision-making process is the sovereign. No one is imposing any "false sense" of sovereignty. It exists - decisions are made or not made.
The question then becomes what form should the sovereign take? You seem to be arguing for an unclear, spread-out sovereign.
I think you can make a good argument for this form of sovereignty over a more Moldbuggian, authoritarian sovereign if there is no good way to choose and replace the sovereign. If, on the other hand, someone develops a good way to choose the sovereign (or a good way is developed in the free market that can be applied to governemnt) then I think you're going to lose the argument.
The success that it did have came entirely from proper balancing between the powers of government. Any further work in the direction of limiting government should rely even further on balancing powers&interests, and less on paper restraints.
This is the crux of my disagreement with you and Szabo.
The problem the world faces now is not tyranny but anarcho-tyranny. It's death by a thousand cuts, death by a thousand unaccountable boards, commissions, courts, etc, that all exercise power without accountability. It's the zoning board that doesn't let my parents plant a tree outside their house. The 1970's appellate court decisions that prevented teachers from disciplining students, allowing bullies to take control of the school. It's the failure of law enforcement in the big cities. It's the family court that enables divorce theft. It's the doctors guild that bars any increase in supply. It's the supreme court banning the use of tests in hiring. The universities lobbying for credentialing laws.
This is even more so the case in countries like Mexico, Brazil or the Congo. These countries need, strong, competent, accountable authority. What they have is anarcho-tyranny. No one really in control, but a number of powerful oligarchs who try and steal money from the public treasury while letting the economy and society collapse.
I fail to see how the Szabo/Madison approach addresses these real problems.
A rerun of the Madisonian experiment, with a few tweaks of the types discussed above, or a Moldbugian restart?
I also fail to see how we could go back to the Madisonian experiment. How do you abolish the civil service, purge the judicial system of all the legal realists, undo all the regulations that have been created, revoke all the bogus supreme court rulings of the past 50 years, go back on the gold standard, etc. etc.? You would need "a man in charge". Our system is so warped from the Madison design, that Moldbug's proposal is actually closer to the modern system than the original constitution is to our modern system.
So far direct democracy, only really managed by the Swiss, seems to have been a fabulously higher success over time than the representative democracy or autocracies.
No real direct democracy can exist beyond a city of a couple of thousand people. Swiss has referendums, but so do most U.S. states. I suspect Switzerland is nice place for the same reason Vermont is a nice place - it's small and has good demographics. Referendums in general have not been very successful in producing better governance. And at most, they can only play a minor role in governance. The real work of government is done by the agents - the representatives, judges, civil servants, etc. Controlling these agents it the key to a government design.
Henry Maine had a great section of his book "Popular Government" about representative democracy and the party system. His theory was that representative democracy was a way to solve the problems of direct democracy (direct democracy having been thoroughly discredited during the Greek era). The idea is that the representatives would be an elite responsible for making judgments, while accountable to the electorate. But the party system ruined this. Instead of allowing representatives to exercise judgement, parties developed platforms in which they would come up with policies that would result in siphoning money off to the supporters side.
One possible reform would be to outlaw political parties and campaigning. Any person standing for election would only be allowed to submit an application that looked like a college application. But even that application could not contain promises that dealt with the allocation of money. The idea would be to choose representatives who would exercise leadership, rather than engage in battles over how to divide the pie.
Here is one proposal I've been thinking about for the next rocket ship design. It's a bit less extreme than Moldbug's, but far from Madison:
The state level (or even better, metro/city-state level) is the primary level of government. There is a Senate of 25 people. Six are elected by the leaders of the ideological institutions. In Massachusetts, that would mean the tenured professors would elect the six. In Mexico, the Catholic Church would appoint the six. Another six Senators are retired generals, elected by the military. Six other senators are elected by the bondholders, with voting power apportioned by how many bonds each voter held. The final six senators would be selected by an election/lottery combination. The election part would prohibit all campaigning, parties, etc, it would just be an election based on resume. The twenty-fifth senator is chosen by unanimous consent of the other twenty-four. All members of the senate are appointed to one, ten year term.
The senate chooses an executive. The executive has full executive powers - he can hire and fire at will members of the bureaucracy, order divisions of the government to obey his command, control the budget, authorize spending, etc. But he can be fired for any cause, at any time by the Senate. The senate may also have to approve major policy changes or expenditures. The Senate is essentially a board of directors.
The city-state government must obey contracts it makes with its residents. Every resident of the state would be subject to a default contract, created at the time the government was founded, granting such rights as a fair trial, property rights, no unreasonable search or seizure, etc.
Disputes between the residents and the city-state government would be settled by an independent court system. The independent court system would have top justices appointed by a jury selected by a combo election/lottery process.
The national government would be restricted almost entirely to continental defense. Trade policy and currency policy would be delegated to the states. The only duties of the national government would be to: guarantee freedom of movement to citizens, ensure all landlocked city states had fair access to ports, and to settle disputes between the city states.
The idea is the scholars, merchants, soldiers, and masses are the four powerful forces in government. They should all be represented, buy into the central government, and work together constructively. If for instance, you excluded the scholars, then they would work to subvert the government. If you excluded the military, they might launch a coup. You want to align representation in the government with actual power. The other idea is to have coherent authority, but make it accountable to a broad electorate. Finally, by using a city-state design, exit is cheap and risk of tyranny minimized.
To bring this back to the Madison/Moldbug question:
The only thing about the Madison system that worked was the court system that descended from the Anglo system, and the executive branch in times of war. The other parts only worked as well as they did because of America's arch-libertarian culture prevented too much interference from the legislative branch. That culture is gone now, and cannot be restored.
TO change the analogy from rockets to housing, imagine Madison's government design as an igloo. It served well for a time, but the climate has changed, and it is now melting away. We need a new house, and we cannot build an igloo because the times have changed.
And in most countries of the world, an igloo never worked at all. Exporting democracy was an unmitigated disaster.
Mass elections and political parties are the blocks of ice. Any house/government design that does not replace the ice/mass elections with something else, will fail.
I do think the courts have generally worked well, at least they did until they came under heavy democratic pressure. Thus I unlike Moldbug I would keep the court system. But the other broken parts of our system need to be replaced with much better designed parts.
I continue to insist that my commentariat is the best on the web. Small, perhaps, but always thoughtful, tremendously polite, and everyone brings something to the table.
My response to this entire thread:
@Devin:
I think there is one sentence of yours that summarizes our deep agreement...and which I would suggest should be the core of our exploration moving forward:
death by a thousand unaccountable boards, commissions, courts, etc, that all exercise power without accountability.
This is the core idea where I think all reasonable people have to agree. Authority without responsibility is intolerable, and THE CAUSE of the problem.
The question we encounter then is how to best mitigate this problem.
The original libertarian position was to attempt to reduce government authority.
The modern libertarian is a realist and recognizes that this isn't gonna happen in real life (IRL). Given that a reduction of authority isn't going to happen in our current system. Paper restraint is worthless. What then should we do?
We appear to agree that simply smallifying everything would be a HUGE improvement. Singapore, Denmark, and Switzerland all work significantly because they're tiny, not just because of the specific systems they have.
The comparatively minor disagreements come at three points.
1. I personally argue for radical skepticism regarding claims about the future. We universally don't know as well as we think we do, and most plans fail. Others (you, foseti, Moldbug, Andrew) seem not to be so aggressive in your empiricism.
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.
2. I think that the best successes we've ever seen (by a large margin) are from government incapacity, which prevented the government from doing stupid stuff. Balanced power is one choice (Holland, England, America), not being able to figure things out (IT Industry) is another. Other folks reads on history seem to be different.
3. I think the most problematic periods in history are ALL cases where the government had too much authority/sovereignity, and it was clear, and centralized. Mao said jump, you jumped and ribbitted, or you were frog soup.
@Foseti,
My problem is that I don't believe in "government" as a single entity, from Roman times to now...government is a bunch of people working loosely together, and nominally all working for the same purpose.
In reality, it's dozens of competing interest groups, each with a moderately different interest, and usually with overlapping unclear sets of repsonsibilities.
Sometimes it makes decisions...other times it doesn't...other times it can't. I'm arguing for the kind of structure where authority is distributed to 5 different, at-odds groups, where it takes 4/5 to make a decision. In this case...in general, it CAN'T make a decision. This is the kind of government that I argue has been most successful historically. I think Szabo's argument comes down to something similar, even though I haven't read it all. And de Mesquita is the best writer on real politics, and he is where my inspiration started.
I want government to be a nuke that doesn't launch unless 3/3 or 4/5 keys are turned simultaneously, and I want the keyholders to all distrust one other.
Aretae,
You say, "I'm arguing for the kind of structure where authority is distributed to 5 different, at-odds groups, where it takes 4/5 to make a decision."
You should be happy then, because that is the state of our government.
The five groups being: 1) executive; 2) legislature; 3) judiciary; 4) media; and 5) university.
The trick is keeping the groups "at-odds" with each other. You can't do this and this is why the Madisonian system fails.
It fails because of democracy. The executive and legislative branches don't want the responsibility of making decisions. After all, if they did something bad, they'd be thrown out of office. So, decision-making is pushed to non-democratic groups (i.e. the judiciary) and to groups that control public opinion (i.e. universities and media).
The five groups that were supposed to be at odds have found it much easier to work together.
@Foseti,
You jumped over my core qualifier: at-odds.
I agree that currently the system is not at odds. I agree that given that it's not at odds we're screwed. As far as I can tell, the disagreement is now about likelihoods of different solutions, not about the problem itself even.
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