I have full faith and confidence in the system...it works and has for over 200 years
Hmm...
One could argue that the American Civil War, with it's 600,000 deaths, is a prima facie example that this system doesn't always work
The collapse of the economic system in the Great Depression is another example, that the simplistic economics of the McKinley-Hanna era will lead to instability and insecurity.
War hysteria can lead to illegal abridgement of citizen's freedoms. World War II led to the Japanese interment, and the current "war on terror" has led to the spurious legal doctrine of the enemy combatant, and the travesty of Gitmo.
The need for a RW hysteria campaign to distract voters from the true state of affairs, led Nixon to inaugurate the "war on drugs". This has led "to the US having the second-highest per capita rate of imprisonment of any country in the world".
One could go on, but perhaps this is sufficient to demonstrate that a less "faith-based" analysis of the stability of our system is required.
the political pendulum is always swinging....sometimes too far left..sometimes too far right .....but it always comes back to the middle
We have a good understanding of the governing parameters of forced damped oscillatory systems. Is our's stable as your above statement implies? Have you really considered the possible instabilities? For example:
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Instabilities are the weaknesses inherent to the structure of a control system, flaws that can cause the system to perform poorly or even self-destruct. A vibration that occurs in an airplane's wings at a certain combination of altitude and speed can grow to cause the wings to flutter and the plane to tumble. A complex political control system likewise has inherent instabilities that originate in the system's components and structure.
Indirect Democracy
1. Delegation
The process of many delegating authority to a few necessarily loses information: one can only vote for the candidate whose views best match one's own, though the mismatch may be significant. If the delegation is for a single decision on a single occasion, if the candidate pool is large, and if there is one delegate for each member of the electorate, there is little information loss. If the delegation is for a long period of time, covering multiple decisions on multiple issues, if the candidate pool is small, and if each delegate must represent the views of many members of the electorate, information loss will be high. For example, in an American presidential election, with only two accepted political parties, it is extremely unlikely that a voter will be able to find a candidate whose platform he completely supports.
2. Frequency, Directness, and Granularity of Choice
Imagine flying an airplane with your eyes closed, opening them only for a few seconds once every hour. Next imagine that you are not touching the controls yourself, but giving directions to someone else. Finally, your pilot can only move the controls in 10-degree increments. Besides the delegation of control, this illustrates the problems of sampling and quantization, which lose information and lessen the ability to control. Sampling and quantization are unavoidable in some systems, and the political system is unfortunately one of them. Most citizens have day jobs, and cannot be bothered with voting on every issue; they therefore vote only infrequently (once a year at most) and then elect representatives who will make decisions on a package of issues. Contrast this with a free-market economic system, where decisions are made continuously by each individual:
Parameter Political Commercial
Choice Method Voting Paying
Decision-Makers Few, Indirect Many, Direct
Frequency Rare Continuous
Granularity 1 or 0, Fine
all or nothing
For these reasons alone, a free-market economic system will vastly outperform a political system in responsiveness, flexibility, and accuracy. Voting is overrated.
3. Our Scoundrel
All indirect democracies depend on the accountability of politicians to the electorate, who, it is assumed, will vote in their best interests. Indeed, the US Constitution explicitly assumes that the people through the legislative branch will be the major check on government power. But game theory has demonstrated that in some circumstances rational individuals will make rational choices that not only fail to maximize collective utility, but also their individual utility (as in the Prisoner's Dilemma). One frequently met example is the seemingly compulsive re-election of an incumbent representative who has voted to squander government money on wasteful projects, but making sure that his constituency "gets its fair share." While everyone would be better off if none of the representatives voted to waste money, each constituency would be foolish to unilaterally disarm and elect someone honest.
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This is related to the restaurant effect described by Russell Roberts:
When each member of a group pays his own separate bill, he is careful to order only exactly what he wants to eat.
When a small group divides the bill evenly, but is able to keep an eye on each other, people will tend to eat a little more, so as not to pay more than they get in return.
When a large group divides the bill evenly, people will tend to eat a lot more, with no fear of being caught, and no one wanting to be a sucker.
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$. Limitations of Majority Voting
Decision by majority vote can in numerous ways fail to maximize overall utility. In electing an official out of a list of candidates, it may be that one candidate is would be acceptable to everyone, but still a majority elects its most-preferred candidate who is completely unacceptable to a minority. As described by Donald Saari in his book Basic Geometry of Voting, there exist alternative voting systems which vary on different measures of fairness: for example, when electing a single official from a list, voters could rank the candidates from most to least preferred, assign points to each candidate, or rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10. The first of these methods is called the Borda count, after the French mathematician who invented it. Although more complicated, it yields results that better reflect the collective opinion of the electorate, i.e. find a compromise. What is important to remember is that all voting methods have their weaknesses; hence what is decided politically should be kept to a minimum.
5. Faction
Simple majority voting cannot capture the relative importance of an issue to the various parties involved. A majority group that cares only a little can force its will on a minority group that cares a lot. In fact, a majority can always exploit a minority unless there are safeguards in place to limit what can be decided by majority vote. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison describes this danger of "faction".
6. Concentrated Benefits, Diffused Costs
A small minority that stands to benefit a lot with the cost shared by a much larger population will be more motivated to turn out for a vote or otherwise mobilize resources to influence the outcome of a decision. The classic example is farm subsidies, which might cost each taxpayer only a few dollars per year but funnel millions of dollars into the farm industry. For such a benefit, farms will support full-time lobbyists; taxpayers will be unable to muster the will to fight back. At a small scale such parasitism is only an irritation: you might not chase a mosquito around the room when it only drinks a small amount of blood, but a swarm of them can kill you.
7. Intergenerational Exploitation
"No taxation without representation," but when the current generation of voters decides to borrow money to receive a service today, the future generation that will pay off the debt may not even be born yet, let alone represented. Deficit spending enables the current represented generation to exploit future weak or unrepresented generations, with or without the fig leaf of "investment".
Psychological Instabilities
1. Human Psychology
As an airplane's stability fundamentally depends on the material from which the airframe is composed, a political system--a network of human brains interacting according to rules governing the use of force--is highly dependent on human psychology. The human animal is quite good at some computationally demanding tasks, e.g. facial recognition, but quite poor at others, e.g. probability, statistics, and economics. The human animal evolved over millions of years in a specific environment far removed from the idealized theory of Locke and Mill. Like the other primates, the human animal has some traits conducive to cooperative collective behavior, while other traits work against it. Negative strategies--individual and collective violence, parasitism, cheating, deceiving--are hard-wired into the repertoir of every human brain, and must therefore be constantly guarded against. In particular, the human tendency to use force rather than persuasion suggests that the power to initiate force should be made generally unavailable.
2. Simplest Solution
Probably the biggest driver of government growth is impatience. When a problem arises, the tendency is to reach for the simplest solution, which is coercion. "There ought to be a law" or "the Government ought to do something" are our reflexive reactions to a problem. This is often easier than persuasion, as well as quicker and harder to reverse. Unfortunately, it tends to be a one-size-fits-all solution that everyone is compelled to wear, and the decision is almost never retracted.
3. Fundamental Attribution Error
Human beings have a strong tendency to interpret the motivations and abilities of other human beings in negative light, and their own in a positive light. We attribute another's success to luck and his failure to lack of ability, while we attribute our own success to ability and our failure to bad luck. Similarly, while we trust our own judgment to take care of ourselves without external interference, and know that we will do the right thing when put in a position to choose between right and wrong, we have just the reverse opinion of other people. Having no confidence in other people's judgment or integrity, we therefore want maximum freedom for ourselves individually and maximum restrictions on others. Distrust of the many others outweights the confidence each individual has in his single self, and we choose to slowly restrict the freedoms of everyone.
4. Public Ignorance
A democracy fundamentally depends on an informed electorate to hold its representatives and public officials to account, but what if the electorate not only is uninformed, but is incapable of being sufficiently well informed to exercise control? Jeffrey Friedman of Harvard University argues that this is indeed the case: poll after poll shows that on any given significant political issue the majority of the American public is profoundly ignorant of the most basic relevant facts. This phenomenon is even more pronounced for women, who tend to be even more unaware of national issues. The majority of Americans base their voting on non-factual criteria such as blind loyalty to party or social group, or to whether a candidate is sufficiently "caring", "trustworthy", or "presidential". The oft-lamented spin-doctors and sound bites are an inevitable result. This is not to denigrate American citizens: since the 1930's, the politcal sphere has expanded tremendously, and is now beyond the ability of most educated people to fully understand. If the educational system cannot prepare citizens to control their government, the sphere of government must be reduced to be within their control.
5. Pervasive Fallacies
The human brain easily falls into numerous common errors of logic that resist education, including:
Lump of Labor Fallacy
The idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be performed is particularly common in Europe, where, not having a frontier mentality, history teaches that one group's gain is another's loss. The fallacy of there being a fixed amount of work leads to the belief that people "take" jobs from a fixed pool, instead of contributing their labor to everyone's mutual benefit. In particular, mechanization, immigration, and more recently globalization are blamed for destroying jobs. That this never leads to a long-term increase in unemployment is a lesson lost, and every generation bemoans the impending mass unemployment and poverty even as living standards inexorably rise.
Broken Window Fallacy
Another common labor-related fallacy is the idea that consuming, even destructive consumption, "creates jobs" and is therefore good for the economy. In his essay What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, Frederic Bastiat suggests that breaking a window would therefore not be a loss, the destruction of property, but a gain, the creation of a job. Along with the Lump of Labor Fallacy, the Broken Window Fallacy mistakenly treats a job as a resource unto itself, instead of the act of creating wealth.
Residual Fallacy
Statistics is a notoriously difficult and counter-intuitive subject for the human monkey brain to master, and the Residual Fallacy (described by Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed) is an example. In Sowell's words:
1.Establish that there are statistical disparities between two or more groups,
2.Demonstrate that the odds that these particular disparities are a result of random chance are very small,
3.Show that, even holding constant various nondiscriminatory factors which might influence the outcomes, that still leaves a substantial residual difference betwen the gorups, which must be presumed to be due to discrimination.
This fallacious reasoning is used when convenient by both racists (replacing "discrimination" with "genetic inferiority") and anti-racists alike to prove a causal relationship between race and a negative outcome.
6. Perceived Crises
In a country the size of the USA, improbable events happen every day, some of them bad. These are immediately brought to the attention of the population, who, through the immediacy of television, perceive them as a clear and present danger. For the bulk of the human animal's history, perceived dangers were also near and real dangers, and elevated adrenaline was warranted. Now, our hyper-vigilance is counter-productive, and we have a grossly distorted view of the relative probabilities of various threats. Commonly cited examples: women are most afraid of breast cancer, when heart disease is a greater killer, and more preventable, and schools are perceived to be dangerous war zones, when a child's chances of dying of the flu are many times greater than the likelihood of being killed in school, which is something like 1 in 2 million. Julian Simon in Hoodwinking the Nation, and Barry Glassner in Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, explain how to the media good news is no news, and bad news can be manipulated into a perceived crisis
Bureaucratic Instabilities
Unelected bureaucrats are a doubly indirect democracy, with even less accountability than infrequently elected politicians. With bureaucrats and politicians at the controls, the output of the political system is much more likely to deviate from that desired by the people.
1. Corruption
Any individual wielding public decision-making power, especially when empowered to use force, has increased susceptibility to corruption, i.e. abusing his position for personal gain. For that reason, we subject our political figures and government employees to increased scrutiny and higher standards of personal integrity. However, as the sphere of government action grows ever larger, these controls become harder to maintain, even as the need for them grows.
2. Public Choice
Economist James Buchanan won a Nobel Prize for explaining that corruption is not the only way that the behavior of bureaucrats' and politicians deviates from the public interest. Buchanan and colleague Gordon Tullock pointed out the obvious: like people in the free market, bureaucrats and politicians are also rational individuals seeking to maximize their personal benefit. Even if they do not resort to unlawful means, they will still tend to act in their own self interest. In the free market, a self-interested individual must find a willing partner to trade with, and businesses can be measured by their profitability; bureaucrats operate under much less accountability, just budget constraints, with no need or even possibility of showing profit. As Tullock first pointed out, bureaucrats will tend to seek rents, or extract risk-free benefit from property that they control, but do not own. Public Choice theory points to the solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma in which we find ourselves.
3. Seen vs. Unseen, the Anointed vs. the Benighted
An inherent asymetry exists between those who would do something versus those who would do nothing. Politicians who exercise restraint and advocate inaction or depoliticizing an issue will have nothing concrete to show, when their constituencies measure them by their demonstrable achievements. In What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, Bastiat points out public works projects paid for out of taxes result in visible monuments; what taxpayers would have done with that money remains forever unseen.
Politics will tend not to attract such people of inaction, but rather those who want exert control and change things, people with confidence in their abilities, perhaps more confidence than is warranted. in The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell dubs these people the "anointed", those who consider themselves uniquely qualified by virtue of superior education and intellect to guide the country with their brilliant decisions. Unfortunately, quite often the best decision is no decision, and that is the one decision that the Anointed cannot make.
Structural Instabilities
1. Ratchet Effect
Some changes tend to move in one direction only, the ratchet effect. For example, laws are made, but rarely repealed or expired. Since laws generally restrict freedom rather than extending it, the result is a gradual reduction in freedom. In time of crisis, these reductions can be anything but gradual, but when the crisis is passed, the laws remain. Jesse Ventura, governor of Minnesota, has proposed that the state legislature devote one year of every four to cleaning house, retiring old obsolete laws. Not surprisingly, this was not too popular among the lawmakers.
2. Entropy
An airplane or any other mechanism tends to loosen up with age, developing a rattle, and so can a political system. The US Constitution was wordsmithed to such a degree that every phrase is loaded with meaning, but some of it has been lost with time. The original writers are long gone, and companion writings forgotten and unread. Some of the Constitution's clauses are now distorted and misinterpreted enough that some safeguards built into the Constitution are broken. A mechanism, like an organism, requires a means of identifying damage and repairing it.
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from
elsol.org
While I don't agree with all of the above, and neither I {nor the author(s)} maintain this is an exhaustive list of the instabilities, it is sufficient to give pause to any simplistic belief "that everything is going to be all right". Also included in the above article is an H. L. Mencken quote, "Difficult, complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers".
In my first post in this dialog, I stated, "In a system of checks and balances designed to protect the liberty of the populace to pursue their happiness and fulfillment, how do you balance the power of large accumulations of capital that are not only the product, but the sine qua non, of the industrial and post industrial ages? Since our country began at the birth of the Industrial Revolution, the Founding Fathers not only didn't address this problem, they couldn't anticipate that it would ever exist". My reading of the effect of this unbalanced power on our system, is that it has an interrupted ratchet effect. Clearly, there are systemic counterbalancing forces operating. But they never are able to push the "system" back to a stable equilibrium point. Rather, after some counter movement (as under the two Roosevelt Admins), the system moves even further in the direction of the dominant controlling force being unrestrained capital. So over several cycles there is an inexorable net component of the increased power of capital, and less liberty for individuals. This is not the behavior of a stable system in equilibrium, but instead that of classic instability.
JMO
lurqer |
