Some of his list of rules sound useful, some less so. I'd like to hear more analysis of each rule, though, rather than simply assuming it must be a good idea.
For example, decentralization can be useful in some cases. But differing laws in different can be a trade barrier, as companies have to lawyer up for each and every jurisdiction. There can also be arbitrage problems, eg: getting your free education in a generous-public-welfare state, then going to work afterwards in a low-tax state.
Another example is term limits. It has been suggested that in the presence of term limits, lobbyists end up with more political experience than elected representatives, which allows them to capture the political process. There's also the issue that without concern for re-election, an incumbent might feel no restraint in dishing out favors.
So my addition to the list of rules would be: "For each rule, consider how it could go wrong." It might make it harder to rile up the base even when that's appropriate, and it might make discussion take longer than it should, but I think it's worth it.
> Computers are an extension of people's minds, not devices like a record player, typewriter, or printing press. Intrusion into somebody's processing and data should be treated the same as intruding into their thoughts. It shouldn't be done.
Well said. This is probably the most challenging analogy for people (and courts) to grasp.
The right of the people to be secure in their ... papers, ... against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
People used to write down their thoughts on paper, for their own private use, no different than using computers today (save at orders-of-magnitude different velocity). Courts have been struggling with this notion for centuries.
>You can't form a governmental system based on altruism. It has to be based on people acting in their own interests
Nobody has ever proposed pure altruism. We've often proposed a system based on mutual/collective self-interest pursued cooperatively instead of individual/corporate self-interest pursued competitively.
Example: the NHS or Canadian health system versus the American health system. I chose this answer because the answer is really bloody obvious. You would never think that many small risk-pools competing against each other will somehow yield a better ability to spread out risk than a handful of pools, or even a single large pool containing everyone. The interest of the individual taking out insurance is clearly to place themselves in as large a risk-pool as they can in order to defray their own costs.
So what leaves us with insurance companies and HMOs in the States? Capitalist dogma that pronounces that Many Competing For-Profit Entities Beat a Single Central Non-Profit Entity Every Time. But what functions are we envisioning these entities performing? Those for a capitalist health system are, in fact, envisioning HMOs and insurance companies as businesses first and actual risk-pools second, whereas those for a single-payer system are envisioning insurance as fundamentally being about risk-pools and discarding the goal of profit-seeking entirely in favor of mere cost-recovery where possible.
Not surprisingly, each system results in exactly the thing it optimized for! The American system puts out gigantic profits for insurers/HMOs at the expense of both the collective public (through Medicare/Medicaid) and the individual public (through premiums, deductibles, high prices for medical procedures). The Canadian and British systems successfully spread out the risk of requiring treatment for sickness over the entire population.
Like freaking magic. And you can design other things this way.
I think I agree with you, although I certainly don't think either the Canadian or British systems are perfect. The Canadian ban on private health care has its own serious problems, and the PFIs in the UK are a mess. Those systems have resulted in their own (possibly) unintentional but utterly predictable side effects. The other classic that Friedman and co used to point out is the minimum wage.
That said, I support the NHS etc. for entirely selfish reasons. I don't want to get sick, and more importantly I don't want other people making me sick. (Also not needing medical cover for employees is great for small companies). If there's an easy way to balance this I don't think it's been found yet.
Nothing is perfect, but there are very different conceptions of citizenship at work.
The proposed one, to which I object, is the capitalist/neoliberal conception of a citizen: a pseudo-"rational" actor in a political and economic war of all against all for the sake of individual and incorporated self-interest in the form of money and property, restrained only by statutory and Constitutional law from attacking their competitors.
I counterpropose the traditional social-democratic vision of citizenship: a partly-emotional actor who participates in collective decision-making to pursue their values and their collective interests, thus enhancing their private life by placing it in a more secure public matrix.
>The other classic that Friedman and co used to point out is the minimum wage.
Funny how everyone listens to Friedman et al when they propose eliminating the minimum wage, collective ownership of commons property, or most social services, but not when they suggested a citizen's income or a negative income tax.
How do you feel about the East German medical system? Could you design other things that way?
The current American system is not an example of free-market medicine, it's a strawman of free-market medicine. It's pretty hard to have a free-market system with a central price-fixing committee. Does the term "RVU" mean anything to you? See under:
For a non-strawman, you'd need a system in which fee for service, catastrophic insurance (ie, actual insurance - the correct solution to your "risk pools"), and charity care were all separated. Look at any Anglosphere country before 1940, and add modern technology.
The separation of charity and paid care (universal before 1940) is the absolutely essential reform, and it's so politically incorrect that no one on either side can even mention it. (Even the word "charity" is almost illegal.)
For instance, the Canadian system is a reasonably good charity health system extended to the entire population. But Canada has to make private medicine illegal, to prevent the middle class from inventing it. As it is they just resort to the United States.
And I haven't even mentioned medical innovation, which has ground to a giant flaming fscked-up halt. No, if you were designing something that you didn't want to suck, you wouldn't start with any of the existing solutions.
You are so right. Look at the continually improving capabilities and continually decreasing prices of computer chips and notice that this results from market processes. The same can be seen in health care where government is rarely not involved (Lasik).
The only fundamental difference between health care and any other good or service is that it is "really, really important" and people are more apt to fall for "We're with the government and we're here to help."
First, a question: to what extent are you involved in local/regional/national politics and government, Daniel? Have you actually tried to work in/with political institutions, draft legislation, deal with groups of constituents, build consensus around your preferred political priorities, organize?
Words are cheap. Making real political change is damn hard, and takes a lot more commitment than a blog post here or there.
* * *
Half this list is just a poorly worded rehash of the existing basis for U.S. government (poorly worded as compared to e.g. the clear, expressive, rhetorically masterful Federalist Papers), and the other half is hopelessly naïve and broken. None of his claims are backed by any kind of supporting evidence or analysis, or even clarification of exactly what he means.
For instance:
> Representative democracy, where (in the States) you elect somebody to go make decisions for you, should involve somebody who physically lives near you, who only works part time making decisions, who is not representing too many people (100K seems about right), and who doesn't have a job for life.
This is a terrible principle. It sounds good in theory, but practical attempts to be led by it – such as short term limits – lead to terrible outcomes, as we’re seeing in the California legislature, where now no legislators have enough time to learn what they’re doing and won’t stick around long enough that cooperation is worthwhile, and so both parties have become intransigent and the whole institution is broken.
> The president's term should be extended and he should be allowed only one term. That way he won't spend all of his time running for re-election.
This is also bad. The president’s power falls quite dramatically in his second “lame duck” term. Making him a lame duck on the first day in office won’t help anyone.
The proper fix is to get rid of the 2-term limit, which was only created in misguided posthumous revenge against FDR, by opponents who lost policy fights while he was alive and bore a grudge about it.
> Politicians should not be able to make decisions today that require my kids to pay money for them 30 years from now. If my kids aren't represented, they shouldn't be able to be taxed
This is ludicrous. All decisions have consequences, and all big decisions today will still effect people 30 years from now. How could you possibly isolate government from any decision which would have impact 30 years in the future, and whyever would you want to? Who would make those decisions instead?
Hey jacobulus. Thanks for the comment! It certainly seemed to animate you, so that's a good thing. I'll try to respond here, but I have a feeling we're already off-the-rails so I'm not going to do one of those 47-level nested things.
to what extent are you involved in local/regional/national politics
I am and have been student of complex systems of both people and technology. As such, I'm aware of all these things. But this is not about me, my experiences or qualifications. Let's not go there. Also you are talking applied politics -- the getting of results. My essay is on design themes. The two are not related at all.
None of his claims are backed by any kind of supporting evidence or analysis, or even clarification of exactly what he means.
Dude. It's a blog. Blogs are written quickly and in an off-hand, informal manner. This is just a list of thoughts. It's not even an argument. You want the Federalist Papers, go see Madison.
You go into a lot of other details here -- arguments against term limits and in support of possible presidents for life -- Including a nice little ad-hominem about the people who took action against FDR when he tried to pack the court. Memories DO last a long time, eh? :) I'm going to pick the one that is easiest to reply to.
All decisions have consequences, and all big decisions today will still effect people 30 years from now
Yes, but I was specifically referring to taxation and debt. The funny thing here is that it doesn't even matter if I provide an argument or not. At some level of pain, future generations will just invalidate earlier debt anyway. All I was suggesting is that we be honest about the situation while we were making the debt, instead of sticking our heads in the sand.
Words are cheap. Making real political change is damn hard
Yes, and design principles are a dime-a-dozen. The intent wasn't to change, or even suggest a method of change. We're talking principles of construction, not applied politics or how to make the world a happier place. An ideal system would function for many parties with many various dreams of how they would want their government to work.
If you'd like to dive down on some of these, sounds like fun! Send me an email. Happy to take some kind of public space like my blog or something and explore the foundations of what I'm talking about. But one blog entry or a comment thread on HN isn't going to do it.
Thanks again for the feedback. You sound very passionate. I hope that passion stays with you.
> but I have a feeling we're already off-the-rails
Hey Daniel, sorry, I wasn’t trying to seem too annoyed/aggressive. I understand that you’re a well meaning guy, and your blog is just a platform for throwing ideas around, etc.
In general, though, as you say, design principles (and gripes about how flawed all the people in the society who disagree about this or that) are a dime a dozen. This kind of glib “I’ve worked in a variety of social organizations and so the people working on things in some entirely different set of social organizations that I’m not actively engaged in must be doing it wrong, and here’s how they should organize things the way I like to” is a very natural impulse, and probably can’t be helped. I’ve heard arguments from the same direction from construction workers, teachers, businessmen, career civil servants, bankers, etc.
At the same time, statements like yours – at least the way the tone came across to me – seem presumptuous. In particular “tech guys are the philosophers of the modern world” (paraphrased, you seem to have removed the sentence) is awfully dismissive of several hundred years of professional political theorists. Sweeping statements like “You can't form a governmental system based on altruism” are so oversimplified that they either involve a tricky bait-and-switch with a hedge built into the “based on” part, or else are just wrong. Altruism is a large and essential component of the functioning of any human society or institution. Of course, there are other motivations and interactions to consider as well.
Anyway, I think we can agree on: citizens should study history, should learn the theoretical underpinnings of their governments, should consider the consequences of specific institutional design, and should engage in the political process.
As for the legacy we leave future generations: I absolutely agree we should aim to leave the society better in the future than it is today. As a state we should restructure the tax system to redirect resources from locked-down corporate holdings and inheritances (taxing wealth in preference to income, at least relative to today) toward long-term public infrastructure; should hopefully in the construction process encourage young people to become civil engineers &c.; should radically cut wasteful military adventurism and should directly employ people to do military support jobs rather than overspending on poorly overseen private military contractors; should probably bring back some kind of compulsory public service both to get public advantage from young healthy enthusiastic people and to make sure our whole society is actually invested in military actions; should treat municipal/state bonds as investments and should use them for projects with long-term benefits rather than just routine governmental functions, which instead should be paid for with taxes; should even more heavily subsidize basic scientific research, especially in energy; should stop so heavily subsidizing fossil fuels; should work to promote industries which produce real things rather than those designed to skim off the top of financial transactions and should re-regulate the latter to prevent their current abuses; should work to reorganize the healthcare system to improve preventative care and better prioritize expenditures; should work to improve public education, in particular by respecting and paying teachers enough that smart ambitious young people will want to make a career of it, instead of trying to break teachers unions and turn teaching into a high-turnover unskilled job; should work to reduce the current massive underemployment (for one thing, by imprisoning fewer poor brown people on minor drug charges), so that huge amounts of manpower don’t go to waste; should adjust our immigration policies to make the US a more welcoming place, both to attract highly skilled ambitious people, and to respect the humanity and dignity of the people we import to do unskilled labor; etc.
Sadly, social reform of any kind is really really hard. Actually doing it requires sustained engagement and a lot of energy. A whole lot of folks are trying really hard to work at each of these issues. As programmers, there are great extra ways to help them – above and beyond just engaging and organizing and lobbying – by building communications and data analysis tools, for instance.
It's interesting how the lessons learned in startups and IT mesh so closely with those of political theory. IT architects are in some ways the working, practical philosophers of the 21st century.
Yes; his points are exactly why the Constitution was written the way it was - and make clear that moving away from it, as we are, is a very bad idea. Next question is how to push that trend back to our founding documents, when those driving us away are willing to go to great lengths to drag us where they're going.
That's the intersting part, yes. And not just the founding fathers, if you look at Napoleons code civil, the constitution Germany passed after WW II and the like they all share some basic principles and values. Almost seems back then they had more insight to human nature than we have now, at least sometimes.
The post-WW2 West German constitution was written at the behest of the Americans, the British and the French. That should serve as to some hint of why it came out looking so American and French.
The allies wanted one to be written, so yes quite likely their constitutions where IMHO looked at during the process, espacially since they are pretty good. But it is also important to note that
a: it's not realy a constitution, only basic law (Grundgesetz in German)
b: The guys who wrote it were democrats who saw the fall of the monarchy, a doomed democracy and the rise, reign and fall of the Nazis. Some of them even were part of the resistance. And that shows.
That current politicians are maybe following the words of it and definitly not the spirit, well thats a different story.
P.S.: The different view points from the two sides of the atlantic are fascinating.
TL;DR: all "European" institutions were designed and remain supervised by EUR at State. This should only surprise people who think the Warsaw Pact was in some sense Polish.
America was probably the closest the world has had to a "clean slate" design: lots of educated developers, a common understanding of design patterns, lack of external pressure, and more of a common desire to set something up than to control it.
These conditions might repeat themselves in the near future. Hard to tell.
It was also fairly naive. For example, the Founders of America knew nothing about Duverger's Law or Arrow's Impossibility Theorem or most of the rest of modern political science.
I don't know about naive - that word has some negative connotations that may not apply.
You can build a system that doesn't suck by copying what works, discarding what doesn't. And the Founders had a lot of experience with systems that didn't work very well.
I don't actually have Asperger's; I just tend to (in a rare act, for me ;-)) give people the respect of not calling them "naive" in the ordinary sense without actually knowing their decision-making process.
Unfortunately, Filmer was not PC in 1770s Massachusetts. Probably even the Virginians turned up their noses at him. We're all paying for the result. If you want a real laugh at the Founders' expense, though, read this:
Not sure why he threw compulsory military service in their which seems to be counter to the other points, all that would do is give the corrupt politicians a low wage, essentially temporarily enslaved, class of people to do their bidding. If politicians should be assumed corrupt why on earth give them our young people to control and indoctrinate for two years against their will
I didn't read that as specifically referring to military service. Many countries, at least in continental Europe, have non-military national service, or at least a non-military option.
It's not a system I'm terribly comfortable with, either, but if you're specifically looking for a way to create social cohesion, it's at least worth discussing.
I like the thought, but it touches on something else important but isn't very direct about it.
We are best represented by those in our own communities and those who we know on a first name basis. The article suggests 1 representative per 100,000 people - I'd much rather see that number down around 1k. If you want to get power back in the local, make people ONLY elect a local representative per 1k people (+/- 100) and then you can have tiers of representation above that - the local could be a collective 10,000 people with a council of 10 voting, where 1 of them goes to the region / state level - composed of 100 localities - representing 1,000,000 people. Then the national level is just the collective states in the system - preferably, somewhere around 100. It does make national borders harder to cope with, but you can just add layers on top to make super-nations and eventually a global council on top (haha, I made a funny :P)
You get the benefits of having national and state representatives that don't need to be hell bent on campaigns and buzz words and an even more important trait is passed on to the public - it makes political influence easy.
You have ONE person who you, and everyone in your community, knows. You pick that person collectively. If you don't like your regions pick, you can move. If you don't like the local region, you can move to a different local. You should have laws start small and get large through consensus across multiple constituencies.
That kind of system would get people SO MUCH MORE INVOLVED in the political system. And with technology, we can easily usurp the overhead of linkage between different levels of government. You get a small national government that has explicit powers, and tiers of representation below that, down to the local, where law needs to pass up through the tiers by consensus of senate like bodies past the local.
Do we need representatives at all?
I mean, we have the Internet now.
We used to need experts/professionals for knowledge, news aggregation, and problem help/advice. Now, we have Wikipedia, Reddit, and Stack Exchange.
Why not gov too?
There was a project called Hyperarchy I saw a while ago (their site seems down), which had the idea of 'delegating' your vote to experts you trust on certain topics. So you could say, "I trust Richard Stallman to vote for me on the topic of software copyright", and he would effectively get an extra vote.
I see the biggest problem as being one that you will never force everyone to care about politics, and if you are in a state where someone doesn't care, you need to provide them the means to maximize their representation while minimizing the work they do.
If we were voting on every issue collectively, not only would that be mob rule, but we would never be able to break convention. Some things, like ending prohibition on marijuana would pass because they are a majority opinion, but things like gay marriage still poll below 50% and unless you turn everyones opinion in favor (and it is amazingly hard to sway childhood imbued prejudice) you would have an endless cycle of human rights violations.
When you have people, who you know as your neighbor, but also know they are smart / wise / worthy of being your representative, they can put in the time and should care about the process enough to do the research and understand implications. It is a huge time commitment to understand the breadth of political topics in enough depth to have a reasonable opinion on them. It is the kind of thing best dealt with through employment.
> The rules are not only changing, the entire game is different.
I don't buy it. There have always been revolutions, there have always been ways to offload a lot of work (millennia before machines and computers humanity had slaves).
The most important part of any society hasn't changed -- people haven't changed. We're still pretty much the same animal that roamed the Africa and, unless we start radically modifying our own genome or come up with implants that can actually change our very personalities, the same motives and patterns that permeated our history will remain recognizable in the future. High tech love (or greed, or kindness, or lust...) is not that dissimilar to low tech love. Which is why we can look at Rome or Greece and see our own republics.
I agree about computers, and here's what I would add:
I'd want people to understand that politicians are not leaders - they are servants of the public. They are elected to represent the citizens of the country and make decisions that the citizens want, not which they believe would work or worse, which fit their own needs.
They're not leaders in a league of their own who have followers, those times have past. That's why they must be held in check, not left to do whatever they want - that's how you end up with having to take your shoes off and being patted by some stranger at an airport, while they fly first class or charter with their envoy without even going through a metal detector (just an example).
I think it is naive to think that politicians are "servants". If you take a critical look at it, politicians don't "represent" you in the same way I would "represent" you when you hand me $5 to go down to the corner store and get a soda.
I actually agree with the OP in a minor way, that "there are also really good reasons why it lasted 300 years", but has the US government lasted ~250 years in anything near the same form?
No, it started much closer to an anarchic Hanseatic League. Some days now, it looks more like Communist China. The way "the code" is written leads to continual aggrandizement of power.
If it is really true that "Elections and the regular change of power allows governments to be wrong and adapt.", why not have elections every 6 months?
There isn't enough value in the average person fighting the legislation which affects their lives in minor ways relative to that obtained by lobbying interests.
Please share your thoughts on why I'm wrong or you don't agree with me - I always try to see things from as many points of view as possible. Thank you!
For example, decentralization can be useful in some cases. But differing laws in different can be a trade barrier, as companies have to lawyer up for each and every jurisdiction. There can also be arbitrage problems, eg: getting your free education in a generous-public-welfare state, then going to work afterwards in a low-tax state.
Another example is term limits. It has been suggested that in the presence of term limits, lobbyists end up with more political experience than elected representatives, which allows them to capture the political process. There's also the issue that without concern for re-election, an incumbent might feel no restraint in dishing out favors.
So my addition to the list of rules would be: "For each rule, consider how it could go wrong." It might make it harder to rile up the base even when that's appropriate, and it might make discussion take longer than it should, but I think it's worth it.