An underlying historical force moves governments to ever greater centralization. The trend is such that we will look wistfully back to the New Deal era as a model of self-government.
That force is transportation.
The very idea that most governance could be done at the state level relied in part in the high cost of changing states. With ease of transport people can arbitrage away the costs and benefits of government services. Work in a low tax state while young and healthy. Get sick or have a handicapped child? Move to the state with generous welfare benefits Authority and responsibility get separated.
Once government gets into the business of social services, you get this disconnect unless you centralize to the point where this arbitrage becomes difficulty.
Without physical and economic walls, the responsibility for welfare provision will move from Washington to a world authority. We will lose sovereignty. Paper will not stop this. Only recognition of this dynamic and the will to stop it.
Excellent point. I'm exploring the calamity from the legal side, so I'm not going to address that in this sequence, but I quite agree. I'd argue it was a mistake for government to get involved in social services, but I'm relatively alone on that point.
All governments provide some welfare services. The Post Office -- which is utterly Constitutional -- is a welfare service. It equalized the communication capabilities of farmers vs. urban drones. Unlike my Libertarian younger self, I now support having a subsidized national post office! Now that our neglected service has jacked up rates to appear "profitable", Amazon can profit by making its own delivery service. Monopoly ensues.
Where I double-plus differ from my former self: corporate monopolies and near monopolies have near government power. I want Power dispersed -- whether it is official government power or not. Subsidized postal rates are an anti-monopoly provision which is much more deterministic than the Sherman Antitrust Law.
And deterministic is good. I like Rule of Law. While I favor progressive corporate tax rates and some other measures, I do believe that even mega-corporations like Disney deserve deterministic law. The ability to plan is important.
This is one thing that many libertarians seem unable to grasp, especially young ones. Capital is a form of power, and human will is not so inviolable that it can't be coerced via capital, especially in the face of necessity. A purpose of governments is to restrain the power of capital, and capital will always seek to restrain or coopt the power of governments. Anti-trust laws, racketeering laws, controls on lending, these all protect the exploitable who would be, and often have been, at the mercy of capital.
What we see now in the world is the re-merging of capital, commerce, and government that we haven't seen since... well really ever in the west. And its terrifying, really.
> Anti-trust laws, racketeering laws, controls on lending, these all protect the exploitable who would be, and often have been, at the mercy of capital.
Of course, those laws can be and now have been used by the government to force capital to do its bidding.
That is also true, meanwhile corporate funding and lobbying of individual politicians and the press has forced government to do corporate bidding as well. Hence why we are witnessing the merger of Government, Capital, and Commerce.
I agree with your sentiment re: corporate power and have written about that extensively here on the blog, in my Parable of the Seasteader essay and others. I would be pleased to see power dispersed, be it capitalist or government power.
But the very desire to see power dispersed makes me loathe centralized social services such as government health care, where the power of life and death is centered in a bureaucracy you cannot control. The struggles of CFS/ME patients in the UK are a nightmare, for instance.
But completely privatizing healthcare for the poor is a challenge and a half. The question is how to maintain a market of paying customers for medical care in order to set the standard for the welfare type care.
The system of making health insurance tax free if you get it from your employer is backwards on so many fronts! A company heavy on high paid professionals has more tax incentive to buy gold plated plans than a company like Wal Mart. I want the high paid professionals to have catastrophic only plans and the low pay workers getting the lower deductible plans. (Or better, an affordable co-pay rate that's based on cash price of the service.)
----
With all this off topic stuff said, I have read -- I think on the Forbes site -- that the Scandinavian model of government healthcare is extremely local, as in at the "commune" level. (Cities are broken into communes.) This provides democratic accountability.
I have not dug further on the subject, but it does provide some hope for maintaining some locality of governance.
> But completely privatizing healthcare for the poor is a challenge and a half.
Not really. Look at the market for veterinary care. Or the health market in most developing countries where the government never entered the healthcare market. Turns out, the market can work for health care as long as the government keeps out of it.
As to how to get from the broken models throughout the developed world into a working model, I have no idea.
Even after all of the abuses of the past three years, most people *still* have faith in laws and the legal system. No matter how many times they get hit over the head, they can't understand that nobody is coming to save them.
It's less about "wishing to be saved" and more about "being locked in" and realizing that (albeit non-linguistically for most of the common folk).
Many residing in Middle America could not flee even if their lives depended on it. When the Steel Mills and Motor Industries closed, that was game over for them and their livelihood. The last few decades have been nothing more than Stasis and misery.
They had a window of opportunity to "do something about it", but their cultural and ideological brainwashing got the better of them (i.e. "I am no dirty Commie, I'm a Murican patriot) and they refused to take control of their Workplaces to prevent said Stasis.
As an interest group overall thus: Machinists, Farmers, Labourers, etc are "bottom of the barrel" by CHOICE (emphasis here). They CHOSE to be the elites' lapdog and the rest of the world's Dumping Ground; so that is precisely what they will get.
As such, they only await that final defeat, slaughter, conquest and erasure (both from the history books as well as physically) with a sense of dread and are "locked in" with that.
Some will try and feign resistance and claim "they will fight", but at most (for the paltry that actually follow through rather than being "all talk") it will be a larger scale Alamo and what have you and nothing significant enough to salvage their wider condition.
I think there's an argument to be made that blue collar workers will actually be more free / in demand than white collar in the near future. I know I'd rather be a self-employed plumber than a guy in a cubicle farm.
I don't disagree with you there. But it's a matter of "threshold".
If you look at China post-Qing implosion, there did come that window of opportunity for the blue-collars to once more gain prominence... but that was after some 40 million were slaughtered, the country had devolved into warlord-style anarchy, the Japanese had violated major cities (physically and metaphorically, etc). After ALL of that, they managed to wrest control.
The question is... what is the "threshold" for the nominal American given the fact that the United States has NEVER been invaded by a Conquering Army with the sole intent of Slaughter and Inflicting every possible crime imaginable (and yet to be imagined) that is out there? I say it is very little.
The analogy would be naturally procured immunity to things like the flu, mumps, etc. You're not going to fare well if it's your "first time" AND the strain is lethal.
There are two extremes in governments: Government by the people, as espoused by Abraham Lincoln, or government by hierarchy.
The former is eternally inviolate. The latter inexorably corruptive.
The US has been run by hierarchies, leadership, since the day it was formed. But the people have been protected from knowing this by barricades of paper, constructed by their masters. Call it seven if you wish, a million will soon burn once lit.
One thing that becomes apparent the more one reads the Founders and their philosophical progenitors in throughout the late enlightenment/early modernity is just how poor they were at reasoning, and how intellectually uncritical they were of their own basic assumptions. Example: Hamilton being incapable of imagining Federal overreach, therefore it will never happen. And that's not the only case.
Granted, they were experimenting, and we have the benefit of hindsight as to how that experiment bore out, but some of the assumptions are just brain-dead silly when you read them. Its a wonder the system has lasted as long as it has!
I think "the assumptions are brain-dead silly" is far more true of many Enlightenment-era assumptions than we would like to admit -- more or less the entirety of "blank slate" views turned out to be wrong.
Oh absolutely. When I read Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau for the first time, it was apparent to me they were essentially making it all up. They all began their political philosophies with the notion that man in his primal state was an unempathetic solitary individualist, when there has never been a group of humans or even apes that approach that characteristic. Even the most isolated hermits of the Desert era of Christianity maintained routine, if sparse, contact with other hermits and disciples, and that was acknowledged to be a deviation from the natural human tendency to seek community.
Since they made small errors in the beginning they arrived at large errors in the end.
I would argue that there is an additional wall constructed not by the founders, but in the next generation by Martin van Buren in is capacity as Andrew Jackson's fixer. Specifically, the two party system. While this wall is now also being breached, it held on longer then some of the others.
Sadly, the other wall he constructed, the so called "spoils system", i.e., ensuring all civilian executive branch employees were indeed answerable to the president, was torn down in the late 1800s by people who didn't appear to appreciate its purpose.
The main reason for my question was because that would serve as evidence against my preferred interpretation for the "seven walls". Namely, that the States were more concerned about their own sovereignty than the freedoms and liberties of their subjects when adopting the Constitution.
An underlying historical force moves governments to ever greater centralization. The trend is such that we will look wistfully back to the New Deal era as a model of self-government.
That force is transportation.
The very idea that most governance could be done at the state level relied in part in the high cost of changing states. With ease of transport people can arbitrage away the costs and benefits of government services. Work in a low tax state while young and healthy. Get sick or have a handicapped child? Move to the state with generous welfare benefits Authority and responsibility get separated.
Once government gets into the business of social services, you get this disconnect unless you centralize to the point where this arbitrage becomes difficulty.
Without physical and economic walls, the responsibility for welfare provision will move from Washington to a world authority. We will lose sovereignty. Paper will not stop this. Only recognition of this dynamic and the will to stop it.
Excellent point. I'm exploring the calamity from the legal side, so I'm not going to address that in this sequence, but I quite agree. I'd argue it was a mistake for government to get involved in social services, but I'm relatively alone on that point.
All governments provide some welfare services. The Post Office -- which is utterly Constitutional -- is a welfare service. It equalized the communication capabilities of farmers vs. urban drones. Unlike my Libertarian younger self, I now support having a subsidized national post office! Now that our neglected service has jacked up rates to appear "profitable", Amazon can profit by making its own delivery service. Monopoly ensues.
Where I double-plus differ from my former self: corporate monopolies and near monopolies have near government power. I want Power dispersed -- whether it is official government power or not. Subsidized postal rates are an anti-monopoly provision which is much more deterministic than the Sherman Antitrust Law.
And deterministic is good. I like Rule of Law. While I favor progressive corporate tax rates and some other measures, I do believe that even mega-corporations like Disney deserve deterministic law. The ability to plan is important.
This is one thing that many libertarians seem unable to grasp, especially young ones. Capital is a form of power, and human will is not so inviolable that it can't be coerced via capital, especially in the face of necessity. A purpose of governments is to restrain the power of capital, and capital will always seek to restrain or coopt the power of governments. Anti-trust laws, racketeering laws, controls on lending, these all protect the exploitable who would be, and often have been, at the mercy of capital.
What we see now in the world is the re-merging of capital, commerce, and government that we haven't seen since... well really ever in the west. And its terrifying, really.
> Anti-trust laws, racketeering laws, controls on lending, these all protect the exploitable who would be, and often have been, at the mercy of capital.
Of course, those laws can be and now have been used by the government to force capital to do its bidding.
That is also true, meanwhile corporate funding and lobbying of individual politicians and the press has forced government to do corporate bidding as well. Hence why we are witnessing the merger of Government, Capital, and Commerce.
I agree with your sentiment re: corporate power and have written about that extensively here on the blog, in my Parable of the Seasteader essay and others. I would be pleased to see power dispersed, be it capitalist or government power.
But the very desire to see power dispersed makes me loathe centralized social services such as government health care, where the power of life and death is centered in a bureaucracy you cannot control. The struggles of CFS/ME patients in the UK are a nightmare, for instance.
Absolutely, regarding healthcare!!
But completely privatizing healthcare for the poor is a challenge and a half. The question is how to maintain a market of paying customers for medical care in order to set the standard for the welfare type care.
The system of making health insurance tax free if you get it from your employer is backwards on so many fronts! A company heavy on high paid professionals has more tax incentive to buy gold plated plans than a company like Wal Mart. I want the high paid professionals to have catastrophic only plans and the low pay workers getting the lower deductible plans. (Or better, an affordable co-pay rate that's based on cash price of the service.)
----
With all this off topic stuff said, I have read -- I think on the Forbes site -- that the Scandinavian model of government healthcare is extremely local, as in at the "commune" level. (Cities are broken into communes.) This provides democratic accountability.
I have not dug further on the subject, but it does provide some hope for maintaining some locality of governance.
> But completely privatizing healthcare for the poor is a challenge and a half.
Not really. Look at the market for veterinary care. Or the health market in most developing countries where the government never entered the healthcare market. Turns out, the market can work for health care as long as the government keeps out of it.
As to how to get from the broken models throughout the developed world into a working model, I have no idea.
> Amazon can profit by making its own delivery service. Monopoly ensues.
And UPS, and FedEx, and DHL. About that monopoly.
When do you guys all "Flee! Flee for your lives!" ?
Clearly this legal stuff is a total basket-case and lost cause; almost deterministically so.
Also, speaking of total basket-cases:
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/saudi-arabia-signals-its-not-wedded-to-us-dollar-for-trade
....you might end up vindicated far earlier on in the year than expected!
Even after all of the abuses of the past three years, most people *still* have faith in laws and the legal system. No matter how many times they get hit over the head, they can't understand that nobody is coming to save them.
It's less about "wishing to be saved" and more about "being locked in" and realizing that (albeit non-linguistically for most of the common folk).
Many residing in Middle America could not flee even if their lives depended on it. When the Steel Mills and Motor Industries closed, that was game over for them and their livelihood. The last few decades have been nothing more than Stasis and misery.
They had a window of opportunity to "do something about it", but their cultural and ideological brainwashing got the better of them (i.e. "I am no dirty Commie, I'm a Murican patriot) and they refused to take control of their Workplaces to prevent said Stasis.
As an interest group overall thus: Machinists, Farmers, Labourers, etc are "bottom of the barrel" by CHOICE (emphasis here). They CHOSE to be the elites' lapdog and the rest of the world's Dumping Ground; so that is precisely what they will get.
As such, they only await that final defeat, slaughter, conquest and erasure (both from the history books as well as physically) with a sense of dread and are "locked in" with that.
Some will try and feign resistance and claim "they will fight", but at most (for the paltry that actually follow through rather than being "all talk") it will be a larger scale Alamo and what have you and nothing significant enough to salvage their wider condition.
I think there's an argument to be made that blue collar workers will actually be more free / in demand than white collar in the near future. I know I'd rather be a self-employed plumber than a guy in a cubicle farm.
I don't disagree with you there. But it's a matter of "threshold".
If you look at China post-Qing implosion, there did come that window of opportunity for the blue-collars to once more gain prominence... but that was after some 40 million were slaughtered, the country had devolved into warlord-style anarchy, the Japanese had violated major cities (physically and metaphorically, etc). After ALL of that, they managed to wrest control.
The question is... what is the "threshold" for the nominal American given the fact that the United States has NEVER been invaded by a Conquering Army with the sole intent of Slaughter and Inflicting every possible crime imaginable (and yet to be imagined) that is out there? I say it is very little.
The analogy would be naturally procured immunity to things like the flu, mumps, etc. You're not going to fare well if it's your "first time" AND the strain is lethal.
I saw that. No wonder my book is a #1 new release, ahahah.
My bet is that at this point it is a negotiating tactic.
The first person to yell that gets a staff across the face. Prepare for battle!
There are two extremes in governments: Government by the people, as espoused by Abraham Lincoln, or government by hierarchy.
The former is eternally inviolate. The latter inexorably corruptive.
The US has been run by hierarchies, leadership, since the day it was formed. But the people have been protected from knowing this by barricades of paper, constructed by their masters. Call it seven if you wish, a million will soon burn once lit.
How could this go wrong?
Fortunately I have an extended Minas Tirith analogy to show exactly how it will go wrong!
It's impossible to manage a village without hierarchy. Much less a nation of 300 million people.
One thing that becomes apparent the more one reads the Founders and their philosophical progenitors in throughout the late enlightenment/early modernity is just how poor they were at reasoning, and how intellectually uncritical they were of their own basic assumptions. Example: Hamilton being incapable of imagining Federal overreach, therefore it will never happen. And that's not the only case.
Granted, they were experimenting, and we have the benefit of hindsight as to how that experiment bore out, but some of the assumptions are just brain-dead silly when you read them. Its a wonder the system has lasted as long as it has!
I think "the assumptions are brain-dead silly" is far more true of many Enlightenment-era assumptions than we would like to admit -- more or less the entirety of "blank slate" views turned out to be wrong.
Oh absolutely. When I read Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau for the first time, it was apparent to me they were essentially making it all up. They all began their political philosophies with the notion that man in his primal state was an unempathetic solitary individualist, when there has never been a group of humans or even apes that approach that characteristic. Even the most isolated hermits of the Desert era of Christianity maintained routine, if sparse, contact with other hermits and disciples, and that was acknowledged to be a deviation from the natural human tendency to seek community.
Since they made small errors in the beginning they arrived at large errors in the end.
I would argue that there is an additional wall constructed not by the founders, but in the next generation by Martin van Buren in is capacity as Andrew Jackson's fixer. Specifically, the two party system. While this wall is now also being breached, it held on longer then some of the others.
Sadly, the other wall he constructed, the so called "spoils system", i.e., ensuring all civilian executive branch employees were indeed answerable to the president, was torn down in the late 1800s by people who didn't appear to appreciate its purpose.
And yet we do it here on some sixty villages.
>Why was the issue of enumerated powers so important to the Framers? Because there were several states, and Americans could move between them. <...>
Do you have sources to support the idea that the Framers had that in mind?
No, that is my own conclusion from thinking about it, not a quote or someone else's conclusion.
The main reason for my question was because that would serve as evidence against my preferred interpretation for the "seven walls". Namely, that the States were more concerned about their own sovereignty than the freedoms and liberties of their subjects when adopting the Constitution.