Michael,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments as always. Some responses below...
All good points, Starchild.
I'm very much impressed with what a good job the American Founders did. It would be hard to imagine a greater assembly of intelligence and passion for liberty again in the history of the world. I'm also impressed with how quickly their design fell apart. Rob thinks we could do better next time, and I assume his supermajority formula might help somewhat. But I think the history of legal or Constitutional systems would show that there is a limit to how far laws can diverge from popular opinion. After a certain point, the laws, or the Constitution, become irrelevant. A Constitution or a legal system works only so long as the people generally support it. But if they do, then, paradoxically, it's not clear that they're needed. It's often observed that the reason most people don't vandalize or steal isn't the laws against them; and the laws aren't very helpful against those who have no other deterrent.
One thing I think the American Founders overlooked is the matter of incentives. They didn't include in their structure any incentives to counterbalance the natural incentive of officials in a conventional government to gradually expand their powers at the expense of liberty. One way to address this issue might be to establish a branch or branches of government whose authority is strictly limited to repealing laws and auditing the other branches. Design the system so that the higher the percentage of legislation repealed and the more money the other branches are prohibited from spending, the more money and staff this branch gets. Just imagine: Instead of politicians promising to cut spending and repeal bad laws and then doing the opposite, the danger with elected officials in this branch could be that they would campaign on promises to allow good laws and necessary spending to stand, then get in office and do the opposite! Such a system could provide a critical improvement over what the Founders laid out.
To be a tiny bit provocative, I would ask: Do we look for our protection to a piece of paper or to the market? More provocatively still, I might invite reflection on ethics and logic as parallels. What has either one ever accomplished? They're both great tools of denunciation, for making people feel bad about themselves (at least the gullible ones). But have you ever seen a substantive argument resolved by someone's pointing to an undistributed middle term? How often have we seen someone's behavior or thinking changed by having been labeled illogical or unethical? (Edelstein is the one exception I've known; if he sees something illogical in his thinking, he changes his mind, on the spot.) And of course we're all aware of the mischief that can be perpetrated by arguments masquerading as logical or ethical. I'm raising a question in general here about pinning our hopes on formalisms.
Obviously you still believe in logic Mike, or you wouldn't waste your time making logical arguments! And I have seen people convinced by arguments appealing to logic and ethics on plenty of occasions. Didn't many of us become libertarians because of logical or ethical reasons? Your comment that only gullible people will easily feel bad when someone points their illogical or unethical behavior out to them sounds very cynical. Knowing you, I don't really believe you're that misanthropic!
Relying on the protection of a governing document or on the protection of the market don't need to be mutually exclusive. Libertarians rely on our party's platform as a reaffirmation of our commitment to libertarianism and a bulwark against this commitment being watered down, for instance, but we also rely on healthy dialogue in the marketplace of ideas to challenge and refine our understanding of and approach to implementing the philosophy (as we are doing in this discussion).
My concerns about the deterioration of a Constitutional system, however, can also be applied to anarchy. You raised the question, in another post, about the American colonies, which certainly had governments under the Articles of Confederation. (And certainly there were tyrannical _families_ within the colonies.) The _national_ level was closer to anarchic. But, again, I'm impressed with how quickly (within a decade) people successfully pressed for a strong national government, to serve various narrowly self-interested purposes. So there's no guarantee at all that an anarchic system would last even a decade, if it's not what most people want.
In general, any organization strong enough to function as a government has enough power to keep expanding its power. That seems a good enough reason not to create one.
I don't think a government need necessarily be the strongest organization in a society, just institutionalized enough to keep other people from getting ideas. What kind of strength do you think an organization would need in order to function as the kind of government I have described?
One final point I think worth making is the importance of not getting too hung up on the word "government." Some things called "governments" could be much better than other things not called "governments" but coming closer to fitting the negative profile of the governments we know and hate. The reasons I see for maintaining an institution or institutions with this name have almost as much to do with symbolism as with substance.
Yours in liberty,
<<< Starchild >>>