22 Comments

"Twitter is America’s version of Pravda, but with propaganda provided from the bottom up."

This continues to be a blind spot for you and a lot of others that I respect. The propaganda isn't coming from the bottom up- it only looks that way because it serves the purposes of those in power for it to do so.

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Mar 16, 2022·edited Mar 16, 2022

People conflate governance with Government and so it goes, if you don’t have the latter you cannot have the former… therefore chaos. Those rooting for Government are those in it or its cronies. But our early societies emerged under governance (Common Law, moral code, custom, tradition etiquette, interdependence through voluntary exchange) with no centralised Government.

As for the Founding Fathers: they were certainly well informed and thoughtful, but were confounded by their conceit thinking they could write it all down in an elegant document as proof against those who in future would seek power and control and abuse it. They needed only have looked to Magna Carta which King John started to ignore before the ink was dry as did subsequent Plantagenet Kings of England requiring revised charters to be written and signed at the insistance of the Barons of the day. Its wholesale disregard finally resulted in dynastic war. Today not a scrap of it remains in the British Constitution.

Universal suffrage inevitably meant those seeking election/re-election would treat tax revenues as a slush fund to bribe voters; voters soon realised this and elections have become auctions where they sell their votes to the highest bidder. Tax revenues are mostly used for bribery than for delivering public goods efficiently - not that Government is capable of efficiency anyway.

We do need to move provision of public goods into the competitive private sector paid for directly by their consumers with the concomitant reduction in taxation. “The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism” by David Friedman explores this transition and is a thought-provoking read.

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Oh man... I'm know you're going to feel as if I'm oversimplifying and not steel-manning your argument, but it very much seems to boil down to a paleo-conservative authoritarianism rather than a libertarian argument. It seems to say

1) People are fundamentally irrational

2) are the authors of their own oppression

3) so democracy is bad and

4) we should further elevate elites, limit their accountability to only some other elites, limit the right to vote, and hope this works.

Arnold, I am not trying to straw-man you, but this argument is so far out of basic explication that it has lost its way.

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(apologies for commenting on a "stale" post, it's the most recent relevant one I could find)

Here in San Francisco, a newish moderate organization is calling for a unified and more independent city auditing agency:

https://www.sfgate.com/politics-op-eds/article/how-to-fix-sf-government-17430726.php

I'm curious what you think about the parameters of their proposal-- obviously self interested as an SF resident in whether this could actually improve our terrible municipal governance, but also in whether it could serve as a pilot/proof-of-concept for your Chief Auditor idea.

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“We need elites that are anti-elitist, inclined to respect the judgment of private individuals.” An elite that is modest about itself, that takes a positive view of non-elite individuals: is it any wonder we do not have that?

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We need a failure mechanism for government monopoly institutions. It is the threat of bankruptcy that makes capitalism work. All (public, private and non-profit) institutions evolve towards self-serving bureaucracies where little internal fiefdoms grow at the expense of the institutional purpose or goals.

A good example is IBM, that owned the world of my generation, evolved into a non-responsive institution which finally failed (black ties and white shirts weren't forever) as its production cycle became too long. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has also totally failed and couldn't even keep basic accounting records accurately but the institution remains with a 2.7 billion/yr budget for 1.6 million people. After 100's of years and billions spent, the problems persist.

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"Unfortunately, the consequence of giving more people the right to vote has been to create a constituency for erasing the boundaries and knocking down the guardrails that the Constitution tries to construct."

Is that the problem? Elite decisionmakers are too beholden to popular sentiment? FDA refused to do HCT, fractional dosing, early massive screening tests becasue they were not popular?

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founding

Regarding checks and turnover... it would be lovely if there was more competition in government. Here's a half-baked idea that almost certainly wouldn't work: split every government agency into three identical, competing organizations, each with a third the budget of the old monolithic agency.

Give citizens the choice of which one they use (e.g. imagine getting to choose which version of the department of motor vehicles gets to issue you license plates).

After some number of years (five? ten?) fire everybody in the worst-performing agency (as determined by... the chief auditor? voters? customer satisfaction survey? politicians?). And split the second-worst into two. Then let them compete for another five or ten years.

This would work best for public-facing bureaucracies. I dunno if it would work for organizations like the CDC or FDA where there isn't as clear a "customer" for them to try to satisfy.

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I wonder if one can draw a parallel between the founders of the country and those who currently obtain leadership positions with the founders of your 20th or 21st century tech start-up versus those who join the party after the company I established / etc.

There are likely going to be fundamental differences between the types of people who start a new enterprise and those who rise through the ranks of an existing Goliath. And those who rise in an existing structure will probably naturally be less skeptical of power.

I think its a pretty large stretch to connect where we're at with "giving too many people the right to vote." Is there any evidence that voting restrictions lead to improved leadership of nations? That seems like a fairly significant statement to make. Obviously anecdotal but many of the dumbest voters I'm aware of (think your typical white progressive liberal) never really lacked the ability to vote in the past.

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Mar 16, 2022·edited Mar 16, 2022

I’ve been thinking a lot about the argument Arnold makes. I like his chief auditor concept, but I doubt it carries as much efficacy as he believes.

I continue to think that we should change how independent agencies work: give the enforcement and supervision activities to a regular executive branch department, give the adjudicators activities back to the judiciary, and then strengthen the ability of the now-purely legislative commissions to legislate within their sphere and subject to control.

To me, that control looks something like this:

- Each house appoints a majority and minority representative, and the president appoints one, without Senate oversight. Members get appointed at the beginning of every Congress and their terms expire when the next Congress convenes.

- Regulations passed by only three votes come into force 180 days after the next Congress convenes (yes, that could be a delay of two years). This gives the minority party the chance to make the argument to the voters that the refs are bad, so vote for us so we can reverse them.

- Regulations passed by four votes come into effect as stated in the regulation, but only after at least 20 legislative days have passed (to limit the regulations passed when the Congress is adjourned).

- Either house can veto a regulation by majority vote before it takes effect.

-The president can veto a regulation in the same manner as any other law, in which case Congress can override the veto in the same manner as any other law.

- There would need to be some boundaries on what the commissions can do — they should not be able to create a tax, fee, public regulatory action, or private right of action; they should not have subpoena power over anyone but employees of governments and perhaps government contractors (as such in each case).

- They should have regular staff.

This feels to me like it would produce commissions that work within their boxes to legislate consistently with the will of the majority, but in a way that is relatively easy to roll back in the case of a very temporary majority. Moreover, it would give any temporary majorities a strong incentive to find a compromise to get them the fourth vote to accelerate effective dates.

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