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I read an interesting passage lately in Murray Rothbard's _Anatomy of the State_, where he makes a convincing argument that every check, every balance, is immed
by JasonFruit 7y ago
I read an interesting passage lately in Murray Rothbard's _Anatomy of the State_, where he makes a convincing argument that every check, every balance, is immediately repurposed by the State as a means of legitimizing its tyrannical overreach.
For example, in the US, the Supreme Court is often seen as the arbiter of constitutionality. If the legislature or the executive can get the Supreme Court, then, to give its approval to a limited, innocuous-seeming version of an abuse, it can then point to that as a seal of legitimacy — and the tactic frequently succeeds, mollifying what would otherwise become public outrage.
An example is the Supreme Court resistance to, and final acceptance of, FDR's New Deal policies. When the court finally relented and allowed Roosevelt to proceed, it took the wind out of the opposition, which might otherwise have put a stop to it. Instead, similar policies have proceeded without opposition ever since, and finally gained acceptance by both sides of the political establishment.
In the end, the only check on abusive government is the people, which must be able to identify tyranny and have a will to oppose it by either voting the bums out, resisting their abuses directly, or forcing them out if necessary.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoUh, so things that are created for the express purpose of only allowing legitimate descisions are "repurposed" to give legitimacy? Granting legitimacy seems pretty inherent to that whole "only allow the legitimate" business... Overall I don't find much of merit to that argument, as it is appears built from the weird notion that the state is the spawn of the devil and all its acts are made for the enslavement of mankind, slightly ignoring the fact that a state is actually a bunch of people with fairly boring jobs related to different sorts of accounting.
- JasonFruit 7y agoWhat you're missing in your first paragraph is that legitimacy is being given to what is illegitimate, and when that failure has taken place, it then becomes permanent, because, after all, if the Supreme Court says it's okay, who am I to argue? I'd be less inclined to say, "spawn of the devil… for the enslavement of mankind," than "parasitic beast bent on survival at any cost." (If it were less parasitic, fewer accountants would be needed.) Like a tapeworm, the government parasite doesn't require malice to be harmful.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoA mechanism that allows the obviously illegitimate clearly will have no legitimacy itself, and so can't legitimise anything in particular. I don't see what the fuss is about?
- JasonFruit 7y agoWould you use the Dred Scott decision to prove your point? What about Korematsu, Yasui, or Hirabayashi v. United States?
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> is immediately repurposed by the State as a means of legitimizing its tyrannical overreach Bureaucracies and people in power will, by nature, try to increase their power. That doesn't mean everything happens immediately. The purpose of checks is to increase the pool of people who must consent to an expansion of power. By setting up competing pools of power, the system can be made more resilient to a string of bad leaders. Obviously, no system will survive an endless supply of idiots. But systems which rely on competent politicians tend to fail when the first dummy comes up.
- JasonFruit 7y agoI agree completely. Checks and balances are better than nothing. I'm just pointing out their limitations, and that there is no substitute for an educated and angry public.
- LocalH 7y ago> In the end, the only check on abusive government is the people, which must be able to identify tyranny and have a will to oppose it by either voting the bums out, resisting their abuses directly, or forcing them out if necessary. So, in other words, we're screwed. Sounds about right.
- comnetxr 7y agoThis seems to assume that the Court's initial resistance is a signifier that the policy was _truly_ illegitimate, and their eventual acceptance was a fake legitimacy being bestowed upon tyranny. However, there are plenty of times where the Court's initial resistance was the tyranny, and the eventual acceptance was to _remove_ legitimacy from an illegitimate policy. Besides the obvious cases where the supreme court upheld segregation, I would argue that on average the trajectory of the court has been towards properly legitimate policies under our Constitutional principles rather than towards greater and greater perversion of them. On other principles, like federal power vs states rights, there has been a clear trajectory but I wouldn't identify either side as clearly legitimate or clearly tyranny.
- JasonFruit 7y agoI think you read my assumption correctly — I believe the court has generally given, not gained, ground on matters of liberty. It's especially on those "other principles" you mention that we disagree most, and that probably explains our disagreement on the point at hand. I don't think either of us would gain from extending the disagreement here.
- marcosdumay 7y ago> every check, every balance, is immediately repurposed by the State as a means of legitimizing its tyrannical overreach That's a symptom of the people in power having too much power over the ones doing the checks. Make the people checking fear a bad decision more than they fear your country's leadership. (Of course, it's easier said than done.)