I think you win, but then I have a lot of problems with Yarvin's ideas, right down to the notion that absolute monarchs have some ability to avoid oligarchy in a large state.
My only quibble with you is: What makes you think psychopaths don't jockey for positions within corporations? I think that same lack of responsibility to power ratio that makes government positions desirable for psychopaths make corporate level positions desirable. Empirically, at least my casual empirics, show that many are vastly under capable of anything other than dissimulation. That said, government power is much worse than corporate power, so it is less damaging; I mainly bring this up when people say they are hoping to have government protect from evil businesses. If you dislike big business, you should really dislike big government!
I agree wholeheartedly with your last sentence. The federal government is probably 100 times more powerful than any corporation, so it's way more dangerous.
Think of Yarvin's argument like this: At some point around, say 1800, we stopped trying new forms of government.
Since then there has been a revolution in corporate governance in the private sector. A CEO (a monarch, in political science terms) with a relatively uninvolved Board of Directors has become the dominant market solution. The market has spoken and at this point there are no realistic alternative contenders with respect to corporate governance. We have complete free market domination for this form of organization in the corporate world.
Is it really so crazy to suggest that the type governance that has come to completely dominate the private sector should be tried in the public sector as opposed to relics from a couple centuries ago? Put this way, isn't it super obvious that some country should try it?
For the Market Economist types, I like to put it this way.
When you see the government performing a function that could be handled by a firm, you already know it would almost always be handled -better- by a firm, and you almost always prescribe either, "Privatization!" or "Contract to Outsource!" That is, whenever possible, hand it over to a private (or at least quasi-private) for-profit companies, run by CEOs.
While inferior to unregulated companies in competition, you will sometimes allow for, "Regulated Monopolies", run by CEOs, as still superior to the way the government would do it.
Or, if one can't avoid having some function performed by a government agency, then you say that at the very least it should be executed by that agency in a manner adopting the most suitable cutting-edge "best practices" from the private sector, organizational capital built by companies run by CEOs.
If you would just apply this same valid reasoning to the question of the allocation of authorities of the state government itself, by looking at a badly-run government process and yelling, "Privatize!" and "Adopt Best Practices!", and follow the implications of the logic to their ultimate conclusions, you would end up in the same place as Yarvin.
I'm curious what people think when we go more specific. Take a municipal water supply. Do we gain by privatizing? Does the private company have incentive to be cost efficient? Offer a low price?
As someone who works in a field with lots of "privatization" I'd say generally no to all.
The emphasis on privatization (is a private company performing the activity) is largely misleading because it's secondary to the nature of the activity being performed and the regulations the government puts in place.
Much privatization is simply the government outsourcing its activity to a private company while enforcing it must operate just as the government did. Some aren't, but most, in my experience, are pretty useless efforts.
Like, the federal government doesn't need to privatize the post office. UPS and Fedex are already private alternatives. If we want to get rid of the post office entirely, I guess we could, but I think there's something to be said politically and culturally for offering basic services like this.
I don’t have enough experience or good enough memory/observation from living in different places to know about rates - but rates aren’t everything.
Three or 4 million Houstonians are unhappy with their electricity provider at any given moment. Like, to the point of making tee shirts with vulgar representations of their corporate logos. Meanwhile, the people who live in an electric co-op area seem happy, and my time under an electric co-op bore that out. They were super easy to deal with & quickly responsive. A co-op tends to be one of the area’s major employers and there is no object to keeping extra dudes on the payroll for extreme weather events, or some folks who print the co-op magazine.
Much of this may be due to difference in scale though.
10 times the people is 100 times any problem, maybe more.
Some of my issues with this stem from the fact that the understanding of "corporate governance" seems very superficial. And corporate governance doesn't seem very innovative to me.
1. OK, Shareholders select a board which selects a CEO. The template that Yarvin is referring to is, quite literally, representative democracy. Corporate governance, itself, was patterned on representative democracy.
2. I strongly suggest that the theory of how big companies operate is quite different from the practice. They obey the corporate form because the corporate form is, itself, legally mandated. Under the surface, different companies operate wildly differently. There's no dominant, uniform method.
3. Over time, there's very little success. Let's understand that from the perspective of continuous government, corporate existence is quite fleeting. A big reason for this is that mistakes by a corporate CEO are often fatal. How many of the initial DJI companies are still there? Is that the kind of stability we want in society?
Generally, I feel like these ideas are the kind that seem super obvious because they aren't being examined very deeply.
Agreed. I would add another: the possibility of a proxy fight or hostile takeover acts as a constraint on CEOs. I don't see any analogue to this in the realm of authoritarian states, unless you want to count the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks, but somehow I'm pretty certain that's not what Yarvin had in mind.
You might enjoy a history of corporate governance. It didn't start like this - there used to be lots of ways to organize a company. Most of what you describe (e.g. the corporate form being legally mandated) is just proof of how dominant this form of corporate governance is. Indeed, it's difficult to separate the revolution in corporate governance from exponential economic growth (they at least highly correlate).
Surely if there were good alternatives, perhaps a corporation run democratically (interesting that this is literally unthinkable to us), some entity would have tried it!
Lastly, corporations are wildly undemocratic. Employees get no votes, even managers. Customers get no votes. Indeed there is no process by which to even vote for a policy or a CEO. You can, at best, elect a board member, and only then if you are an equity owner of the company. Hard to imagine something less democratic.
I can't resist one more. Lots of companies in the US have lasted longer than the average French republic, for example. Even in the US, we just pretend we've had one government since 1776 when we've really had like 5. Plenty of companies have been around longer than all 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies_in_the_United_States
I think there's a significant difference, though, between making a technocratic argument about modern corporate governance and being an apologist for 500 year old European absolutist monarchies (which all were eventually supplanted by the way). The fact that he does both at the same time strikes a shaky chord for me.
This comparison is COMPLETELY wrong. A CEO does not have anywhere close to complete power. Then again, neither does a monarch but that seems missing from all the comments. Regardless, a CEO has far more limited control than a monarch.
Re: "I picture [monarchy, historically] as kind of the kids’ game of King of the Hill, in which you get to the top by shoving everyone else aside. The real-life shoving often took the form of assassinations and civil wars. To prevent that, you need a process for orderly transfer of power. To me, that is what democracy accomplishes."
Blaise Pascal, a keen observer in the age of Absolutism, made a case that primogeniture in dynastic succession is a mechanism — essentially, a psychologically salient Schelling focal point — for orderly transfer of power:
“The most unreasonable things in the world become most reasonable, because of the unruly lives of men. What is less reasonable than to choose the eldest son of a queen to guide a state? for we do not choose as steersman of a ship that one of the passengers who is of the best family. Such a law would be ridiculous and unjust; but since they are so themselves, and ever will be, it becomes reasonable and just. For would they choose the most virtuous and able, we at once fall to blows, since each asserts that he is the most virtuous and able. Let us then affix this quality to something which cannot be disputed. This man is the king’s eldest son. That is clear, and there is no dispute. Reason can do no better, for civil war is the worst of evils.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensée no. 786
Note that dynastic succession via primogeniture does not entail adverse selection for psychopaths (i.e., one of Arnold's concerns about Yarvin's monarchism).
My intuition is that *political equality* among citizens somehow became a more salient focal point in the modern world — and grounds widespread current belief that democracy is uniquely legitimate among political regimes. And Arnold might be correct that succession in democracy tends to be more orderly. An empirical question.
Civil war is definitely a bad outcome, for sure, but primogeniture isn't necessarily a reliable cure for that. You run into problems in cases where a) there is no eldest son, b) paternity is in doubt, and c) the king fathered sons with multiple women (which happens pretty often because kings get around).
Also, because of mean reversion, this system pretty much guarantees the king will sooner or later be some Louis XVI type buffoon.
"Let us then affix this quality to something which cannot be disputed."
It *couldn't be disputed*, perhaps, but the Romanovs presumably gave rise to an atmosphere in which that which couldn't be disputed, that quality of "best", was an utter falsehood, a collective pretense, the majority of the time - something which may have laid the grounds for later developments.
Maybe I'll get into it point by point, but taking a step back... Yes, you can nitpick anything, and something can always go wrong. But: I can't believe our system of government is the final and most perfect one that is possible. I suspect it may be far from it.
The Founders really wrestled with the problem of: how do you engineer a good system of government out of the crooked timber of humanity? They were wise, and rightfully tried to account for the frailty of human nature... But they failed, even on their own terms, and what we have today would be utterly unrecognizable to them. So we should keep trying.
So given that that's the case... Monarchy has been the default form of government throughout human history. So it must have something going for it. It's a good baseline to start with. Some monarchs were good, some bad...as were democracies/republics. But the former seemed to be more common, long-lasting and stable.
The vast majority of monarchs did not mass murder their own people etc, so our equation of monarchy = dictator = totalitarian tyranny is silly and parochial. That's transparently what defenders of any regime would say: the only alternative to our rule is chaos! If you don't accept our beliefs, that means you side with the Devil! If you're anti-Communist, you are by definition ("objectively", as they used to like to put it) a Fascist stooge!
And then consider, as Fosti pointed out, in the private sector, in which organizations are subject to quasi-Darwinian selection pressures, a particular model of corporate governance has become practically universal. Perhaps not coincidentally, it resembles a monarchy. In fact, it literally IS monarchy in the sense of "rule of one".
If there was a more effective way to structure a large organization, a company should be able to adopt it and wipe the floor with its competition. That hasn't happened. If the principles on which our government is structured are really sound principles of effective organization, they should be used in the private sector. They are not. See here for some early Yarvin satire: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/08/rotary-management-next-big-thing/
So given all that...sure, the devil is in the details, but a synthesis of monarchy and corporate governance, the two most proven effective organizational structures in human history, actually doesn't sound all that far-fetched.
That's not a good analogy. Poverty isn't an institution, it's just the absence of wealth. You would have been better off mentioning slavery, but I still wouldn't find it very persuasive. The question is, what is the evidence that the American system, or Parliamentary systems, etc are inherently superior. And you can find evidence, but it's circumstantial.
The point I was trying to make is that the fact that something has survived does not make it good.
In the case of monarchy, perhaps it has survived for bad reasons. Perhaps it has survived for bad reasons, e.g. monarchs have a better ability to f*ck people over if they don't go along with the monarch.
Sure, that's possible. It's just that learning again and again that things I once believed were outdated, archaic, etc etc. actually exist for complicated reasons, and are actually good after all, and tearing them down has unintended negative consequences, has caused me to adjust my priors, as the rationalists would put it. For one example, marriage. See here https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/human-reproduction-as-prisoners-dilemma
But sure, not everything that has endured a long time is necessarily optimal for all concerned. The fact that it's Lindy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect means that it works, but you could reasonably ask, for who? Like slavery...it worked, it just sucked for the slaves.
But it doesn't seem at all obvious to me that the majority of people living under traditional monarchies were more oppressed and less free than us. On the contrary, the government takes vastly more of income than any traditional monarch would have dreamed of doing.
Ok, help me out GPT: "It regulates every aspect of life, from how businesses operate to what can be said online. Surveillance is omnipresent, with modern states monitoring citizens’ communications and movements in ways no monarch could have imagined. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic apparatus has grown so large and unaccountable that many decisions affecting our lives are made by unelected officials who face no real consequences for failure or overreach. Conscription is another example—modern states have routinely claimed the right to forcibly conscript millions of citizens into wars, treating their lives as resources to be spent in service of abstract ideals or geopolitical strategies. While monarchs certainly waged wars, the concept of mass conscription and the total mobilization of society for conflict is a distinctly modern invention, one that many people living under traditional monarchies would have found unimaginable."
I'm not saying the fact that it's been the most common type of government throughout history in itself necessarily means it's the best. That's just evidence that it's one that clearly works; it's not some fanciful imagined utopia that never actually worked in reality except maybe for like 2 days in the Spanish Civil War. (Yes, I used to be an anarcho-communist.) So if we want to think about how to make a better government, it's a reasonable starting point.
But it does have problems, like the problem of succession. Maybe there's a way to solve it: "Rather, I think the best way to think of a realm or sovereign corporation is as a modified version of monarchy. A royal family is to an ordinary family business as a Patchwork realm is to an ordinary, nonsovereign, public corporation. Joint-stock realms thus solve the primary historical problem of monarchical government: the vagaries of the biological process. In other words, they assure that the overall direction of the realm will always be both strong and responsible—at least, responsible in a financial sense."
I'm not saying Yarvin's proposed design is necessarily perfect either. But it's not remotely as crackpot as mainstream ideas like men and women are interchangeable and should be treated as such, or allowing people vote means that "the people" actually control the government and it will therefore only do good things etc.
I agree with a lot of what you say but it still seems to me that a monarchy with a powerful king (not the figureheads we have today) just wouldn't be an improvement. I get the same feel as I get when people argue, "We'd have stable prices and a booming economy if we just went on the gold standard". Yeah, central banks screw up a lot but, alas, that doesn't mean that a gold standard would be better.
There is a big, big, big difference between a private company and a government. If a private company is effectively a monarchy and the CEO makes decisions I don't like, I don't have to buy the company's product. I can buy from someone else. If my country is a monarchy and the monarch makes decisions I don't like, I have no choice. I have to obey or be punished.
I'll reprise a couple of comments I made on Ann Althouse's post on this interview.
I agree with you that our options for changing government are pretty much limited to one of two boxes, ballot or cartridge. I know which one generally produces less catastrophic collateral damage.
Voting is a paradox. An individual vote is unlikely to be decisive in any given election but as part of a larger expression of group preference each vote is vital.
I'm not sure if it is Yarvin's intention but in a roundabout way he seems to make the argument that it's not the selection process that produces a good government but the fact that we periodically change who is in charge. We could randomly select people in any fashion to run the government but what matters is they know they will not be permanently in charge, and maybe more importantly, that their chosen successors will not be, either.
Yes. I keep concluding that random selection of limited term managers would be an improvement over elected reps. Eliminating power motive would be huge.
Well, I think the question is: what is the accountability mechanism? And how do you make sure the incentive structure aligns the interests of the sovereign, or politicians, with the flourishing of the people in the country? Elections and limited terms are supposed to do that in theory, but aren't necessarily so effective in practice. See Myth of the Rational Voter for a start.
How well they could actually work, I don't know. But this is one of the (many) things I love about Yarvin's writing...he's actually grappling with these questions. I can think of hardly anyone else who has been since the Founders.
I don't think your model is accurate. Yarvin would absolutely love for Newsom to be an absolute monarch. Yarvin was indeed a pro dictator-Biden supporter.
Psychopath removal would require a legally sanctioned method to sever the military's obligation to follow the chief executive. Yep, that risks civil war. But you need to criminalize interference with transitions of power anyway.
You pointed out that anyone who makes up a dialog and wants one person to "win" will slant it so that the good guy wins. "Given you wrote the text for your opponent, do either of us really know you haven't created a false strawman?"
An author can be more fair or less fair when doing this. My personal opinion is that Plato is very unfair in his dialogs.
So what are you saying and why are you bothered? Did I do something to make you uncharitable? Your sentence "How did you think your question was anything other than absurd?" just drips with dismissal and superiority.
The equivalent of shareholders voting for the corporate board would be taxpayers voting for the government junta. Those who pay more taxes get more votes.
I think you get the pro-democracy argument right, and HCY but also the real CY (RCY) does not jave a good answer to that. However, RCY would also come up with more and better examples (Singapore for instance), and would object to the oligarchic leaning of the Board idea.
What's interesting about the 19th/early 20th century is how well, with the one catastrophic exception, the country muddled right along - because after Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe - the caliber of man occupying the presidency literally fell off a high cliff, never to be regained although Polk was a good president. Maybe the country only needed an able man periodically. Lincoln of course is like the Founders in terms of smarts and a sense of history, but he is perhaps best left out of the sequence.
That's pretty remarkable whether or not Yarvin finds it interesting. Anyway, the country would be unrecognizable to those first men now, so not sure what lessons can be drawn from our own history. It's a different country, the people with nothing in common now or in future, and will indeed need some other sort of governing.
Are suggesting a jury (as a board) , perhaps we should have trials instead of elections. Michael Huemer argues https://open.substack.com/pub/fakenous/p/why-are-trials-better-than-elections?r=kuh0y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false He concludes, "Our current system in fact uses “electors” to choose the President, but then we completely undermine the point by having the electors be already pledged to a specific candidate." Your and HYC debate helps explain what happened to the electoral college. Americas two aristocratic psychopath houses have already solved for the equilibrium preventing open blood shed (most of the time).
I think you win, but then I have a lot of problems with Yarvin's ideas, right down to the notion that absolute monarchs have some ability to avoid oligarchy in a large state.
My only quibble with you is: What makes you think psychopaths don't jockey for positions within corporations? I think that same lack of responsibility to power ratio that makes government positions desirable for psychopaths make corporate level positions desirable. Empirically, at least my casual empirics, show that many are vastly under capable of anything other than dissimulation. That said, government power is much worse than corporate power, so it is less damaging; I mainly bring this up when people say they are hoping to have government protect from evil businesses. If you dislike big business, you should really dislike big government!
I agree wholeheartedly with your last sentence. The federal government is probably 100 times more powerful than any corporation, so it's way more dangerous.
And has a monopoly on force.
Think of Yarvin's argument like this: At some point around, say 1800, we stopped trying new forms of government.
Since then there has been a revolution in corporate governance in the private sector. A CEO (a monarch, in political science terms) with a relatively uninvolved Board of Directors has become the dominant market solution. The market has spoken and at this point there are no realistic alternative contenders with respect to corporate governance. We have complete free market domination for this form of organization in the corporate world.
Is it really so crazy to suggest that the type governance that has come to completely dominate the private sector should be tried in the public sector as opposed to relics from a couple centuries ago? Put this way, isn't it super obvious that some country should try it?
For the Market Economist types, I like to put it this way.
When you see the government performing a function that could be handled by a firm, you already know it would almost always be handled -better- by a firm, and you almost always prescribe either, "Privatization!" or "Contract to Outsource!" That is, whenever possible, hand it over to a private (or at least quasi-private) for-profit companies, run by CEOs.
While inferior to unregulated companies in competition, you will sometimes allow for, "Regulated Monopolies", run by CEOs, as still superior to the way the government would do it.
Or, if one can't avoid having some function performed by a government agency, then you say that at the very least it should be executed by that agency in a manner adopting the most suitable cutting-edge "best practices" from the private sector, organizational capital built by companies run by CEOs.
If you would just apply this same valid reasoning to the question of the allocation of authorities of the state government itself, by looking at a badly-run government process and yelling, "Privatize!" and "Adopt Best Practices!", and follow the implications of the logic to their ultimate conclusions, you would end up in the same place as Yarvin.
I'm curious what people think when we go more specific. Take a municipal water supply. Do we gain by privatizing? Does the private company have incentive to be cost efficient? Offer a low price?
As someone who works in a field with lots of "privatization" I'd say generally no to all.
The emphasis on privatization (is a private company performing the activity) is largely misleading because it's secondary to the nature of the activity being performed and the regulations the government puts in place.
Much privatization is simply the government outsourcing its activity to a private company while enforcing it must operate just as the government did. Some aren't, but most, in my experience, are pretty useless efforts.
Like, the federal government doesn't need to privatize the post office. UPS and Fedex are already private alternatives. If we want to get rid of the post office entirely, I guess we could, but I think there's something to be said politically and culturally for offering basic services like this.
I don’t have enough experience or good enough memory/observation from living in different places to know about rates - but rates aren’t everything.
Three or 4 million Houstonians are unhappy with their electricity provider at any given moment. Like, to the point of making tee shirts with vulgar representations of their corporate logos. Meanwhile, the people who live in an electric co-op area seem happy, and my time under an electric co-op bore that out. They were super easy to deal with & quickly responsive. A co-op tends to be one of the area’s major employers and there is no object to keeping extra dudes on the payroll for extreme weather events, or some folks who print the co-op magazine.
Much of this may be due to difference in scale though.
10 times the people is 100 times any problem, maybe more.
Some of my issues with this stem from the fact that the understanding of "corporate governance" seems very superficial. And corporate governance doesn't seem very innovative to me.
1. OK, Shareholders select a board which selects a CEO. The template that Yarvin is referring to is, quite literally, representative democracy. Corporate governance, itself, was patterned on representative democracy.
2. I strongly suggest that the theory of how big companies operate is quite different from the practice. They obey the corporate form because the corporate form is, itself, legally mandated. Under the surface, different companies operate wildly differently. There's no dominant, uniform method.
3. Over time, there's very little success. Let's understand that from the perspective of continuous government, corporate existence is quite fleeting. A big reason for this is that mistakes by a corporate CEO are often fatal. How many of the initial DJI companies are still there? Is that the kind of stability we want in society?
Generally, I feel like these ideas are the kind that seem super obvious because they aren't being examined very deeply.
Agreed. I would add another: the possibility of a proxy fight or hostile takeover acts as a constraint on CEOs. I don't see any analogue to this in the realm of authoritarian states, unless you want to count the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks, but somehow I'm pretty certain that's not what Yarvin had in mind.
You might enjoy a history of corporate governance. It didn't start like this - there used to be lots of ways to organize a company. Most of what you describe (e.g. the corporate form being legally mandated) is just proof of how dominant this form of corporate governance is. Indeed, it's difficult to separate the revolution in corporate governance from exponential economic growth (they at least highly correlate).
Surely if there were good alternatives, perhaps a corporation run democratically (interesting that this is literally unthinkable to us), some entity would have tried it!
Lastly, corporations are wildly undemocratic. Employees get no votes, even managers. Customers get no votes. Indeed there is no process by which to even vote for a policy or a CEO. You can, at best, elect a board member, and only then if you are an equity owner of the company. Hard to imagine something less democratic.
I can't resist one more. Lots of companies in the US have lasted longer than the average French republic, for example. Even in the US, we just pretend we've had one government since 1776 when we've really had like 5. Plenty of companies have been around longer than all 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies_in_the_United_States
I think there's a significant difference, though, between making a technocratic argument about modern corporate governance and being an apologist for 500 year old European absolutist monarchies (which all were eventually supplanted by the way). The fact that he does both at the same time strikes a shaky chord for me.
This comparison is COMPLETELY wrong. A CEO does not have anywhere close to complete power. Then again, neither does a monarch but that seems missing from all the comments. Regardless, a CEO has far more limited control than a monarch.
Re: "I picture [monarchy, historically] as kind of the kids’ game of King of the Hill, in which you get to the top by shoving everyone else aside. The real-life shoving often took the form of assassinations and civil wars. To prevent that, you need a process for orderly transfer of power. To me, that is what democracy accomplishes."
Blaise Pascal, a keen observer in the age of Absolutism, made a case that primogeniture in dynastic succession is a mechanism — essentially, a psychologically salient Schelling focal point — for orderly transfer of power:
“The most unreasonable things in the world become most reasonable, because of the unruly lives of men. What is less reasonable than to choose the eldest son of a queen to guide a state? for we do not choose as steersman of a ship that one of the passengers who is of the best family. Such a law would be ridiculous and unjust; but since they are so themselves, and ever will be, it becomes reasonable and just. For would they choose the most virtuous and able, we at once fall to blows, since each asserts that he is the most virtuous and able. Let us then affix this quality to something which cannot be disputed. This man is the king’s eldest son. That is clear, and there is no dispute. Reason can do no better, for civil war is the worst of evils.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensée no. 786
https://www.econlib.org/hard-choices-the-conservative-mind/
Note that dynastic succession via primogeniture does not entail adverse selection for psychopaths (i.e., one of Arnold's concerns about Yarvin's monarchism).
My intuition is that *political equality* among citizens somehow became a more salient focal point in the modern world — and grounds widespread current belief that democracy is uniquely legitimate among political regimes. And Arnold might be correct that succession in democracy tends to be more orderly. An empirical question.
Civil war is definitely a bad outcome, for sure, but primogeniture isn't necessarily a reliable cure for that. You run into problems in cases where a) there is no eldest son, b) paternity is in doubt, and c) the king fathered sons with multiple women (which happens pretty often because kings get around).
Also, because of mean reversion, this system pretty much guarantees the king will sooner or later be some Louis XVI type buffoon.
One must always ask: Compared to what? (Thomas Sowell) Winston Churchill concluded that democracy is the worst system — except all others!
"Let us then affix this quality to something which cannot be disputed."
It *couldn't be disputed*, perhaps, but the Romanovs presumably gave rise to an atmosphere in which that which couldn't be disputed, that quality of "best", was an utter falsehood, a collective pretense, the majority of the time - something which may have laid the grounds for later developments.
You make some good points...but have you read Patchwork? You do a good job of representing his perspective sympathetically, but I think he has attempted to address some of these objections more thoroughly than you're giving him credit for here. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1/
Maybe I'll get into it point by point, but taking a step back... Yes, you can nitpick anything, and something can always go wrong. But: I can't believe our system of government is the final and most perfect one that is possible. I suspect it may be far from it.
The Founders really wrestled with the problem of: how do you engineer a good system of government out of the crooked timber of humanity? They were wise, and rightfully tried to account for the frailty of human nature... But they failed, even on their own terms, and what we have today would be utterly unrecognizable to them. So we should keep trying.
So given that that's the case... Monarchy has been the default form of government throughout human history. So it must have something going for it. It's a good baseline to start with. Some monarchs were good, some bad...as were democracies/republics. But the former seemed to be more common, long-lasting and stable.
The vast majority of monarchs did not mass murder their own people etc, so our equation of monarchy = dictator = totalitarian tyranny is silly and parochial. That's transparently what defenders of any regime would say: the only alternative to our rule is chaos! If you don't accept our beliefs, that means you side with the Devil! If you're anti-Communist, you are by definition ("objectively", as they used to like to put it) a Fascist stooge!
And then consider, as Fosti pointed out, in the private sector, in which organizations are subject to quasi-Darwinian selection pressures, a particular model of corporate governance has become practically universal. Perhaps not coincidentally, it resembles a monarchy. In fact, it literally IS monarchy in the sense of "rule of one".
If there was a more effective way to structure a large organization, a company should be able to adopt it and wipe the floor with its competition. That hasn't happened. If the principles on which our government is structured are really sound principles of effective organization, they should be used in the private sector. They are not. See here for some early Yarvin satire: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/08/rotary-management-next-big-thing/
So given all that...sure, the devil is in the details, but a synthesis of monarchy and corporate governance, the two most proven effective organizational structures in human history, actually doesn't sound all that far-fetched.
"Monarchy has been the default form of government throughout human history. So it must have something going for it."
Poverty has been the default throughout human history. So it must have something going for it.
Uh, no.
That's not a good analogy. Poverty isn't an institution, it's just the absence of wealth. You would have been better off mentioning slavery, but I still wouldn't find it very persuasive. The question is, what is the evidence that the American system, or Parliamentary systems, etc are inherently superior. And you can find evidence, but it's circumstantial.
The point I was trying to make is that the fact that something has survived does not make it good.
In the case of monarchy, perhaps it has survived for bad reasons. Perhaps it has survived for bad reasons, e.g. monarchs have a better ability to f*ck people over if they don't go along with the monarch.
Sure, that's possible. It's just that learning again and again that things I once believed were outdated, archaic, etc etc. actually exist for complicated reasons, and are actually good after all, and tearing them down has unintended negative consequences, has caused me to adjust my priors, as the rationalists would put it. For one example, marriage. See here https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/human-reproduction-as-prisoners-dilemma
But sure, not everything that has endured a long time is necessarily optimal for all concerned. The fact that it's Lindy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect means that it works, but you could reasonably ask, for who? Like slavery...it worked, it just sucked for the slaves.
But it doesn't seem at all obvious to me that the majority of people living under traditional monarchies were more oppressed and less free than us. On the contrary, the government takes vastly more of income than any traditional monarch would have dreamed of doing.
Ok, help me out GPT: "It regulates every aspect of life, from how businesses operate to what can be said online. Surveillance is omnipresent, with modern states monitoring citizens’ communications and movements in ways no monarch could have imagined. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic apparatus has grown so large and unaccountable that many decisions affecting our lives are made by unelected officials who face no real consequences for failure or overreach. Conscription is another example—modern states have routinely claimed the right to forcibly conscript millions of citizens into wars, treating their lives as resources to be spent in service of abstract ideals or geopolitical strategies. While monarchs certainly waged wars, the concept of mass conscription and the total mobilization of society for conflict is a distinctly modern invention, one that many people living under traditional monarchies would have found unimaginable."
I'm not saying the fact that it's been the most common type of government throughout history in itself necessarily means it's the best. That's just evidence that it's one that clearly works; it's not some fanciful imagined utopia that never actually worked in reality except maybe for like 2 days in the Spanish Civil War. (Yes, I used to be an anarcho-communist.) So if we want to think about how to make a better government, it's a reasonable starting point.
But it does have problems, like the problem of succession. Maybe there's a way to solve it: "Rather, I think the best way to think of a realm or sovereign corporation is as a modified version of monarchy. A royal family is to an ordinary family business as a Patchwork realm is to an ordinary, nonsovereign, public corporation. Joint-stock realms thus solve the primary historical problem of monarchical government: the vagaries of the biological process. In other words, they assure that the overall direction of the realm will always be both strong and responsible—at least, responsible in a financial sense."
I'm not saying Yarvin's proposed design is necessarily perfect either. But it's not remotely as crackpot as mainstream ideas like men and women are interchangeable and should be treated as such, or allowing people vote means that "the people" actually control the government and it will therefore only do good things etc.
I agree with a lot of what you say but it still seems to me that a monarchy with a powerful king (not the figureheads we have today) just wouldn't be an improvement. I get the same feel as I get when people argue, "We'd have stable prices and a booming economy if we just went on the gold standard". Yeah, central banks screw up a lot but, alas, that doesn't mean that a gold standard would be better.
There is a big, big, big difference between a private company and a government. If a private company is effectively a monarchy and the CEO makes decisions I don't like, I don't have to buy the company's product. I can buy from someone else. If my country is a monarchy and the monarch makes decisions I don't like, I have no choice. I have to obey or be punished.
Now you are getting down to my level. Can't wait for the Land Shark, Mr. Bill and Mr. Hands, and Toonces.
I'll reprise a couple of comments I made on Ann Althouse's post on this interview.
I agree with you that our options for changing government are pretty much limited to one of two boxes, ballot or cartridge. I know which one generally produces less catastrophic collateral damage.
Voting is a paradox. An individual vote is unlikely to be decisive in any given election but as part of a larger expression of group preference each vote is vital.
I'm not sure if it is Yarvin's intention but in a roundabout way he seems to make the argument that it's not the selection process that produces a good government but the fact that we periodically change who is in charge. We could randomly select people in any fashion to run the government but what matters is they know they will not be permanently in charge, and maybe more importantly, that their chosen successors will not be, either.
Yes. I keep concluding that random selection of limited term managers would be an improvement over elected reps. Eliminating power motive would be huge.
Well, I think the question is: what is the accountability mechanism? And how do you make sure the incentive structure aligns the interests of the sovereign, or politicians, with the flourishing of the people in the country? Elections and limited terms are supposed to do that in theory, but aren't necessarily so effective in practice. See Myth of the Rational Voter for a start.
Yarvin has some interesting ideas about how you could do that more effectively. See https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1/
How well they could actually work, I don't know. But this is one of the (many) things I love about Yarvin's writing...he's actually grappling with these questions. I can think of hardly anyone else who has been since the Founders.
I don't think your model is accurate. Yarvin would absolutely love for Newsom to be an absolute monarch. Yarvin was indeed a pro dictator-Biden supporter.
Psychopath removal would require a legally sanctioned method to sever the military's obligation to follow the chief executive. Yep, that risks civil war. But you need to criminalize interference with transitions of power anyway.
Why have a bloody board of directors?
Just make the term length of the monarch shorter so that voters can remove him directly
FIXED!
"You judge the debate
Did I win? "
lol.
Given in agree with you, am I able to judge on an unbiased manner?
Given you wrote the text for your opponent, do either of us really know you haven't created a false strawman?
Are you accusing Arnold of being as phony as Plato?
Absolutely not. What I said was that I am in no position to judge.
How did you think your question was anything other than absurd?
You pointed out that anyone who makes up a dialog and wants one person to "win" will slant it so that the good guy wins. "Given you wrote the text for your opponent, do either of us really know you haven't created a false strawman?"
An author can be more fair or less fair when doing this. My personal opinion is that Plato is very unfair in his dialogs.
Sorry I pissed you off.
Not what I said.
So what are you saying and why are you bothered? Did I do something to make you uncharitable? Your sentence "How did you think your question was anything other than absurd?" just drips with dismissal and superiority.
The equivalent of shareholders voting for the corporate board would be taxpayers voting for the government junta. Those who pay more taxes get more votes.
I could be convinced.
Pairs well (but awkwardly) with Hansons "Celebrity v CEO v Politician"
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/celebrity-v-ceo-v-politician
Please Arnold, as guys our age all know, it’s Jane Curtin that is the ignorant slut.
Jane Curtis Yarvin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91XUyg9iWM
I think you get the pro-democracy argument right, and HCY but also the real CY (RCY) does not jave a good answer to that. However, RCY would also come up with more and better examples (Singapore for instance), and would object to the oligarchic leaning of the Board idea.
What's interesting about the 19th/early 20th century is how well, with the one catastrophic exception, the country muddled right along - because after Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe - the caliber of man occupying the presidency literally fell off a high cliff, never to be regained although Polk was a good president. Maybe the country only needed an able man periodically. Lincoln of course is like the Founders in terms of smarts and a sense of history, but he is perhaps best left out of the sequence.
That's pretty remarkable whether or not Yarvin finds it interesting. Anyway, the country would be unrecognizable to those first men now, so not sure what lessons can be drawn from our own history. It's a different country, the people with nothing in common now or in future, and will indeed need some other sort of governing.
Are suggesting a jury (as a board) , perhaps we should have trials instead of elections. Michael Huemer argues https://open.substack.com/pub/fakenous/p/why-are-trials-better-than-elections?r=kuh0y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false He concludes, "Our current system in fact uses “electors” to choose the President, but then we completely undermine the point by having the electors be already pledged to a specific candidate." Your and HYC debate helps explain what happened to the electoral college. Americas two aristocratic psychopath houses have already solved for the equilibrium preventing open blood shed (most of the time).