4 ms·

The key is having an accountable "dictator". There are two interpretations to democracy: you can emphasize "representation", and parliamentary system, or you ca

The key is having an accountable "dictator". There are two interpretations to democracy: you can emphasize "representation", and parliamentary system, or you can emphasize "accountability" and singular leaders. The idea being, if you rolled the dictatorship dice badly, you minimize damage and reroll it. The U.S. was clearly designed with the second interpretation in mind. The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, and their anger at the British crown was that the king did not stop the parliament. The president / executive branch is a single person, and it represented their view of preferring an accountable monarch over distributed accountability dispersing Parliament. They also designed the house seats with very lower upper bounds on the number of people represented by a single person, and the design of voting districts reflects a view of accountability over representation. However, the prevailing meta game of politics is using the representation interpretation. And the design of the U.S constitution is quite bad when that is the understanding. It's just not designed for it. And the pubic has been trained, in almost pavlovian way, to interpret the "accountability" interpretation as "populism" with negative connotation.

eru 4y ago
> The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, [...] It's a bit more complicated. Colonials paid lower taxes than people back in England, too. See also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html > His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president. > An excerpt about GW’s wealth: >> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  This seems like a pretty irrelevant derail of the GPs point, no? Regardless the revolution was about their rights as Englishmen being infringed upon, not the amount of taxes paid.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    Spending the 1770s paying doing business as usual and paying taxes would have made all the big personalities much wealthier than dragging armies across their place of business and having a country to show for it wound up making them.
  - eru 4y ago
    Ostensibly the criminal revolt against the rightful authority of the crown was about rights and stuff. I don't think we should necessarily take traitors at their word. (Especially when they talk a big talk about freedom and mankind, but keep slaves.)
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
The US design was a bit more than that. It was designed, first, so that the entire system had strictly limited power. Second, it was designed so that within the system, there was nobody who had power that someone else could not block. It was very much not a "dictator" design. For example, the President could appoint the cabinet and judges, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could negotiate treaties, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could veto a bill, but Congress can override it. And so on, and so on. That's not a dictator. The president has been moving closer and closer to a dictator, though, because Congress has become more and more useless. They have become so tied up in political trench warfare that they can't actually govern. They often can't even pass a budget, which is their most basic job. So the president rules more and more by executive order, which is very much not the way the system was supposed to work.
- tastyfreeze 4y ago
  The president has become more of a dictator because Congress has abdicated a majority of their law making authority to the executive by creating administrative agencies. There is no real check on administrative agency rule making. The judiciary can block a rule but often defer to the expertise of the administrative agencies making the rules.
foolswisdom 4y ago
I agree the design wasn't about representation, and does seem to have been designed with being able to kick people out being important, rather than representation (think about the fact that per the original constitution, the only federal office voted for by citizens was the House of Representatives). However, describing it as optimizing for concentration of power in comparison to British parliament seems to be incorrect (as others in this thread have pointed out). From my readings of The Federalist Papers, it seems more that they were trying to design a system which forced cooperation between its members instead of individuals with massive power. The executive is an individual, however, because actual execution is always better done with an individual on top. Of course, changes to the constitution and the world in the meantime have massively weakened the original design.

eru 4y ago

> The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, [...] It's a bit more complicated. Colonials paid lower taxes than people back in England, too. See also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html > His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president. > An excerpt about GW’s wealth: >> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.

edgyquant 4y ago
This seems like a pretty irrelevant derail of the GPs point, no? Regardless the revolution was about their rights as Englishmen being infringed upon, not the amount of taxes paid.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  Spending the 1770s paying doing business as usual and paying taxes would have made all the big personalities much wealthier than dragging armies across their place of business and having a country to show for it wound up making them.
- eru 4y ago
  Ostensibly the criminal revolt against the rightful authority of the crown was about rights and stuff. I don't think we should necessarily take traitors at their word. (Especially when they talk a big talk about freedom and mankind, but keep slaves.)

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

The US design was a bit more than that. It was designed, first, so that the entire system had strictly limited power. Second, it was designed so that within the system, there was nobody who had power that someone else could not block. It was very much not a "dictator" design. For example, the President could appoint the cabinet and judges, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could negotiate treaties, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could veto a bill, but Congress can override it. And so on, and so on. That's not a dictator. The president has been moving closer and closer to a dictator, though, because Congress has become more and more useless. They have become so tied up in political trench warfare that they can't actually govern. They often can't even pass a budget, which is their most basic job. So the president rules more and more by executive order, which is very much not the way the system was supposed to work.

tastyfreeze 4y ago
The president has become more of a dictator because Congress has abdicated a majority of their law making authority to the executive by creating administrative agencies. There is no real check on administrative agency rule making. The judiciary can block a rule but often defer to the expertise of the administrative agencies making the rules.

foolswisdom 4y ago

I agree the design wasn't about representation, and does seem to have been designed with being able to kick people out being important, rather than representation (think about the fact that per the original constitution, the only federal office voted for by citizens was the House of Representatives). However, describing it as optimizing for concentration of power in comparison to British parliament seems to be incorrect (as others in this thread have pointed out). From my readings of The Federalist Papers, it seems more that they were trying to design a system which forced cooperation between its members instead of individuals with massive power. The executive is an individual, however, because actual execution is always better done with an individual on top. Of course, changes to the constitution and the world in the meantime have massively weakened the original design.