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> Why does this need to be a formal body? The public itself - in the form of a dynamic and multi-polar civil society and not a single formal institution - is an

> Why does this need to be a formal body? The public itself - in the form of a dynamic and multi-polar civil society and not a single formal institution - is an appropriate counterbalance. The public has failed at this. Nearly every big government program is electorally popular. Medicare. Medicaid. An enormous military. The Drug War. Social Security. Proposing serious cuts to most of these programs is electoral suicide. Look at what happened to Barry Goldwater. This holds even more true in Europe. > Tweaking the balance between various co-equal government institutions is a good way to limit the capabilities of the overall system without having to rely on any permanent external force to restrain it. Where has this tweaking actually succeeded? All Western governments are far larger than they were originally intended to be. Even if this tweaking is theoretically fool-proof, the fatal flaw is that government bureaucrats themselves must implement those tweaks. Conflict of interest. > If we returned to dealing with social problems via judicial means on a case-by-case basis, instead of giving legislative and executive authority a priori top-down control over everything, we'd be much better off. The courts themselves have given their stamp of approval to legislative and executive over-reaching. The courts, on their own, stretched the Commerce Clause to ridiculous extremes. The courts, on their own, reduced the Tenth Amendment to a dead letter. Franklin Roosevelt's packing of the Supreme Court was the last stand for judicial limitation of the government. Besides, who decides what judges sit on federal benches if not the legislative and executive branches? Again, conflict of interest.

Gormo 15y ago
> The public has failed at this. Nearly every big government program is electorally popular. But I think this is the product of a feedback cycle. Increasing government intervention erodes civil society, creating pervasive problems that society can't solve on its own, thereby generating pressure for more government intervention. We can halt this process by making the deliberate attempt to address social problems within society, without turning to the state. You can't treat the public as a monolithic entity here; a small group of like-minded people can work together to build self-sufficient social structures on a small scale, and establish a feedback cycle that gradually erodes the support for state intervention by making more people less willing to rely on government. Social entrepreneurship, with good leadership and a long-term strategy, can start to reverse the process. > Where has this tweaking actually succeeded? All Western governments are far larger than they were originally intended to be. Even if this tweaking is theoretically fool-proof, the fatal flaw is that government bureaucrats themselves must implement those tweaks. Conflict of interest. You're thinking in too short a time scale. It's worked quite well over the centuries. Look at the progression from Magna Carta to the US Constitution. I'm not saying that we need a new constitutional settlement - and if we tried to in the modern era, it'd be too heavily influenced by people who want to treat society as a machine to be administered from the top down, or who equate the state with society - but that doesn't mean we can't set up some better second-order constraints within the generally good set of constraints we've already got. > The courts, on their own, stretched the Commerce Clause to ridiculous extremes. The courts, on their own, reduced the Tenth Amendment to a dead letter. Only because the courts have bought into the modern notion of democracy, which blurs the line between the state and society, regards the formal legislative process as being the true consensus of society, and regards universal prior restraint as the solution to most problems. This modern concept of democracy is what's undermined the balance and effectiveness of our political system. That's what we need to start challenging, and make people understand that democratic process is necessary but not sufficient to keep the political system working properly.

Gormo 15y ago

> The public has failed at this. Nearly every big government program is electorally popular. But I think this is the product of a feedback cycle. Increasing government intervention erodes civil society, creating pervasive problems that society can't solve on its own, thereby generating pressure for more government intervention. We can halt this process by making the deliberate attempt to address social problems within society, without turning to the state. You can't treat the public as a monolithic entity here; a small group of like-minded people can work together to build self-sufficient social structures on a small scale, and establish a feedback cycle that gradually erodes the support for state intervention by making more people less willing to rely on government. Social entrepreneurship, with good leadership and a long-term strategy, can start to reverse the process. > Where has this tweaking actually succeeded? All Western governments are far larger than they were originally intended to be. Even if this tweaking is theoretically fool-proof, the fatal flaw is that government bureaucrats themselves must implement those tweaks. Conflict of interest. You're thinking in too short a time scale. It's worked quite well over the centuries. Look at the progression from Magna Carta to the US Constitution. I'm not saying that we need a new constitutional settlement - and if we tried to in the modern era, it'd be too heavily influenced by people who want to treat society as a machine to be administered from the top down, or who equate the state with society - but that doesn't mean we can't set up some better second-order constraints within the generally good set of constraints we've already got. > The courts, on their own, stretched the Commerce Clause to ridiculous extremes. The courts, on their own, reduced the Tenth Amendment to a dead letter. Only because the courts have bought into the modern notion of democracy, which blurs the line between the state and society, regards the formal legislative process as being the true consensus of society, and regards universal prior restraint as the solution to most problems. This modern concept of democracy is what's undermined the balance and effectiveness of our political system. That's what we need to start challenging, and make people understand that democratic process is necessary but not sufficient to keep the political system working properly.