- I am in awe of the combined thinking, writing, context-switching, and snarking skills of IOZ. Sample.
- Falkenstein pushing my line on scarcity.
- Somin @ Volokh on (lack of) truth-seeking in political discussions.
- If I got one wish of government, it would be universal equality before the law...no ability of position, wealth, gender, or race to impact punishment. See Balko on weed for uber-hypocricy, or else insty on sex crimes.
- Crampton on a post-copyright musician income model.
- The formalists want more of this. Ignore your initial disgust.
- Holmes: on RINOs
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
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4 comments:
Formalists want more political corruption? What? Au contraire. This is exactly the sort of thing we think to squelch by formalizing the system.
Right...you want to pay the guy directly, not have him indirectly get the $.
You link to an article that describes how democracy works and then suggest such activity is what formalists want more of. That's nearly perfectly backwards.
Formalists don't suggest that politics can be magically removed or that humans will be magically made perfect. We do however believe that democracy creates the things you find disgusting.
Yes, those rule-bending politicians are powerful men. If we formalized USG in its current state, they should be allocated some shares, which would earn a fat dividend each quarter. Paid directly. This is a formalization of what currently obtains, namely that politicians do have some power within the system.
In a responsible state (which we do not have, but I expect a neocameral state to be), this sort of corruption would be severely punished as stealing from the owners. But these particular politicians would be unable to do their thing for a different reason: a responsible state does not need to have a large parasitic class of actors employed to maintain ancient forms, to confuse the public about where power lies. They'd probably be lustrated as a part of the transition. But even if not, most of our current policians are barely competent to work a window at the DMV.
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