What is the purpose of government? I cannot state it any better than the Preamble of the US Constitution: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." It is worth pondering each of these phrases. Good government serves the purposes of all 7 well-established ideals. Unfortunately, good government is not what we have. As I write this, madman Bush is preparing to wage war on Iraq, against the advice and wishes of everyone, so one problem is that the President has become a little dictator. Our society is choked by government bureaucracy. The tricameral system of checks and balances has left the real power in the hands of an unelected Supreme Court, who were the ones who picked madman Bush to be President in the year 2000. We do not have justice, domestic tranquility or the blessings of liberty. Time for a revolution.
Ever wonder why it costs so much to get from the airport to Manhattan? Because an idiotic FAA regulation forbids building the subways out to New York City's three airports. Why? I don't know. It is theater of the absurd.
Sick of "politics-as-usual?" Bored with political speeches, which promise everything and deliver nothing? Scornful of a government that can't even balance its books? Tied up in red tape and laws so complex that it is impossible even to do your own taxes? Your frustration is not pathological. We have finally arrived at total gridlock, or freeze-up, to use Lazare's metaphor. Our government is now perfectly dysfunctional.
If you want a detailed account of its dysfunctionality, I recommend The Frozen Republic, by Daniel Lazare, and The Death of Common Sense, by Philip Howard. But what is the alternative?
In our present system, it is the attempt to predefine every nit-picking detail, and leave nothing up to the discretion and wisdom of the administrator that has given us 100 million words of law.
The magistrates, metropoles, governors and archons of Aristarchy are given all discretion. Like the Mandarins in classical China, the local magistrate has combined executive and judicial powers. He or she is judge, mayor, and chief of police. The metropole has the same sort of power over a metropolitan region, and is thus is in a position to hire and fire or transfer the magistrates underneath.
The equivalent of a Prime Minister is the First Archon, who is head of government. One virtue of a toothless monarchy, still to be found in England and Denmark, is that it makes the Head of State (who does all the ceremonial stuff) different from the Head of Government (who lives without fanfare at Number 10, Downing Street). I like this system well enough to create something like it. The Head of State would be the First Secretary, head of the diplomatic corps, and appointed by the First Archon. The First Secretary would take on all ceremonial duties which now take up so much of the time of our American Presidents. It would be the First Secretary who lives in the White House, while the First Archon lives across the country in a new capitol to be built somewhere in the Western States. It is the First Secretary who holds ceremonial dinners for foreign diplomats, visiting heads of state or heads of government, who goes abroad on Air Force One to funerals of same, who holds press conferences, who takes visits from foreign diplomats, while the First Archon does none of those things. He communicates with other heads of government by videophone or email. If he travels around the country, he does so inconspicuously, incognito. The new Capitol is a walled city, closed to everyone but the Aristarchy.
The cabinet (and line of succession in case of sudden death) consists in the Second, Third, etc. Archons, each of whom replaces a vast bureaucracy in the present system of government. For instance, there is ONE Archon who decides when a drug has been tested enough to be marketed, thus replacing the entire FDA.
It has been said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Of course, the First Archon does not have such absolute power. Still, it is easy to imagine a First Archon with a Napoleonic complex. How do we get rid of him or her? No problem. First let us define "the electors," somewhat like the electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. They consist in all the Archons, all the governors of the major regions, and all the metropoles (chief aristarch of a metroplex). If a First Archon does not specify a Second Archon before he dies or retires, three-fourths of the electors can elect one. The First Archon can come from any level of the aristarchy. Similarly, a vote by three-fourths of the electors can unseat a First Archon. So, we need not fear little Napoleons.
Although Dee was a real person, who rose to cabinet rank, and wrote many brilliant position papers which were studied thereafter by Mandarins, there is little real historical knowledge of his life as a local magistrate.
Instead, the Chinese author, and later, Robert Van Gulik, simply made use of the vast number of stories and legends about the adventures and achievements of local magistrates. These local mandarins wrote poems, practiced martial arts, donned disguises and entered the underworld to catch criminals. Sometimes they retired as Taoist mystics, living in the mountains.
Since the exams were open to all, sons of peasants, tradesmen, and Mandarins could and did rise into power, so it was certainly government of the people. Because the exams were open to all, the Mandarins never became a hereditary Aristocracy. Think of the chaos produced by hereditary Aristocracy in Western Civilization. The Chinese experienced all that too, in the Shang and Chou dynasties, before they got rid of their hereditary nobility. Of course, we got rid of hereditary titles in our first revolution, the one of 1776, the one celebrated on July 4th.
The Mandarin exams were essay exams, based on the body of so-called Neo-Confucian literature, which were case studies of good and bad government. The Mandarins were the best and the brightest. They were often inventors, scientists, poets or artists, as well as magistrates.
The Mandarins created a marvelous and resilient civilization of great beauty and originality, which time after time rebounded from foreign invasion to re-establish the native empire, with the Mandarins as the civil servants. The Mandarins designed canals, dams and other waterworks and roads which kept a large population fed and informed.
They invented silk, paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder, the stern-post rudder, porcelain, tea-drinking, stir-fried cooking, to name a few, all borrowed by the West. It is unfortunate that we have not borrowed their most brilliant innovation, the Mandarin Aristarchy. When the West was sinking into the Dark Age, the Chinese were rising to their most glorious age, the T'ang Dynasty. And this was due in large part to the Mandarins.
A bureaucracy is a giant social machine which usually only has to make decisions. All the elaborate layers of bureaucracy of the Social Security administration, for instance, has as its sole function deciding who gets disability (which takes them an average of two years), and who gets retirement. All the FDA does is decide what drugs doctors are permitted to prescribe. All the FAA does is set regulations for the airline industry.
The opposite of a machine is a person. The founding fathers tried to build machines that perform their service irregardless of the quality of the office-holders. The Chinese selected the best person, and then gave that person full power and held them personally responsible. For instance, if a magistrate executed someone for murder later shown to be innocent, he was himself executed.
A single individual could make these decisions just as well, and much faster. Furthermore, we would then know who to ask, who to blame, and who gets the credit. SS decisions, for instance, should be made on the local ward level, by the local Aristarch who knows the family and the individual in question, with the money to pay for it coming out of local taxes. In the Aristarchy, all taxes are paid to the local magistrate, who first takes care of local needs, and then passes what is left up the hierarchy. Much government could be conducted on a local level, in this fashion. A person can do in an hour or two what it takes the SS administration two years and thousands of bureaucrats. In the system I propose, a magistrate is in charge of no more than 10,000 households, which could be a small town, or even an entire county in rural areas, or just a local neighborhood in a big city.
Above all, simplify the tax laws. They now occupy a volume the size of an encyclopedia. Using electronic money, many transactions by individuals or institutions would be automatically taxed by a certain percentage. This would be true if the transaction were a purchase (either wholesale or retail), or if it were income (including interest or profit), which would be taxed at a different rate. These are all the taxes that are really needed. The percentages would continually change by small amounts in order to keep the Keynesian business cycle in near perfect balance. There would be no tax returns, and no tax return forms. People under 21 and over 65 and people who are permanently disabled would not be subject to taxes. No distinction would be made between "for profit" and "not for profit" institutions.
There is one other provision which would help to eliminate lawyers. Precedence has no place or value in the courts of the magistrates. Every case must stand on its own.
Revolutions do not have to be bloody. The French and Russian revolutions simply got out of hand, resulting in anarchy, until a tyrant came along to save them. When I think of "revolution" I have in mind the "glorious revolution" of 1688 in Britain, which made Parliament supreme. It was "glorious" precisely because it was bloodless. And I also have in mind our own unconstitutional but peaceful transition from the First Republic, ruled by the Continental Congress, to our present Second Republic, with a strong Federal government. This was done in secret, by the Continental Congress of 1787, who made some vague noises about "the matter of the nation" and "improving government" and promptly threw out reporters and banned the taking of notes. They worked through a hot summer creating this new Constitution, and decided that a favorable vote by three-fourths of the states ratified it, as a clear indication of the consent of the governed. We could do something like that again, and create the Third Republic.
The Classical Greeks invented Democracy. And then as now, sometimes it didn't work. Sometimes there was deadlock. What the Greeks did was to create a temporary dictator, with a limited mandate, and limited time period, on the assumption that some decision is better than gridlock. One of these appointed dictators (nothing like modern military dictators) made such drastic changes, that his name went into our vocabulary. His name was Draco. It may take Draconian measures to lower our murder rate to that of Austria or Japan, or halt the AIDS epidemic. But, let us wait and see. Let us hope that the new government can solve these problems within the framework of the law.
Copyright © Dr.H 2003
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