Governments seem like legacy code bases. Technically the laws are a form of code. People and institutions are the hardware the code runs on.
Changing requirements of the environment the machine runs in (reality) mean we must refactor and maintain the code.
If the environment changes too quickly and the code is too fragile to change at the required rate then some part of the system will crash. Enough crashes and the whole thing collapses.
Then we have to rewrite the thing from scratch with the lessons we learned from the previous version. Unfortunately some governments make use of dark patterns that are bad for users but good for a few.
I'm done ranting...
Sure, governments are organizations that will eventually 'die' in some form, but how is that a useful observation? The British government has a lot of 'legacy code' going back to the deep middle ages, and yet (in its current 'state of the codebase', which can improve or worsen over time) it is much further away from 'death' than many newcomers in the third world who had no codebase to speak of 60 years ago. Theirs are badly maintained forks and occasionally the whole thing blows up and needs to be monkey-patched to keep creaking on in some fashion.
Age is thus no impediment at all to having a well-functioning, efficient government, and 'startups' are often in the most disadvantageous position of all. So even the software analogy fails us at some point, and cannot be taken any further.
I would argue that what happens in practice is newborn organizations are eaten by old organizations. In fact, startups are being born these days with the express purpose of being eaten by a multinational.
There is no competition whatsoever between the old mammoths and the new things, and in fact it is the exception rather than the rule to see an "old mammoth company" disappear, fail, or be eaten.
Unfortauntely, I think the states are too high at government level. Nothing too bad will happen when one trash company takes over from another trash company but what would happen if some random group took over the defence policy for a country because the current government didn't seem to be doing very well at it?
(Competing state and local governments, federated together and governed by a centralized federal government, which grows over time as citizens of the states agree on what laws they want to enforce).
Most laws passed by the federal government were first experimented with at the local or state level, until a majority of the peoples’ representatives believed they should be applied universally with a centralized implementation. Of course there are many loopholes and exceptions in the US’s system, but this was one of the foundational ideas of the current constitution.
1. What constitutes a well regulated militia
2. Whether certain drugs should be legal to consume
3. At what stage of development human life begins
Moreover, I can't help wondering how popular such an amendment would be with voters, and with the two main parties.
That being said, I don’t think any of these three particular things would become the underpinning of a society or an economy, to the extent that slavery was in the antebellum South. So, there probably wouldn’t be another Civil War fought over it.
I think the 2nd amendment one is the most interesting one to me, since our interpretation of it has become so distorted with the passage of time, and since we don’t seem to be converging over time on a consensus (unlike the other two, which were basically contrived for political purposes in the last generation). It’s almost impossible to imagine what the founding fathers would think about its application today.
Would companies State A (where drugs are legal) be able to trade freely with citizens in State B (where drugs are illegal) without an inspection at the border? Would citizens from State B (where guns are legal) be able to travel freely to State A (where they are heavily restricted) without an inspection at the border?
What laws could State B (where abortion is illegal) create to punish its residents for travelling to State A (where abortions are legal) to get an abortion? How would this disparately impact people based on wealth (i.e someone who could freely afford to fly to State A, vs someone who lives on a min-wage job)
Similarly it should be implicit from the existence and intent of the amendment that the Interstate Commerce Clause doesn't allow the federal government to render it null and void. I think it is a common legal principle that earlier, more general laws are overridden by later, more specific laws.
Finally, I don't think there is anything unique about this hypothetical amendment from the perspective of wealth inequality. There are plenty of things that wealthier people are able to take advantage of, including travelling to countries where the drinking age is lower, for example.
What would change, however, is the temperature of debates about federal politics, and it would become harder for the two main parties to distinguish themselves and divide the population.
In Canada, police forces are compete. For example, municipality can sign contract with one of provincial police force or municipal police force, or create their own police force. This competition creates a positive feeback loop.
If you have multiple different policies (i.e. laws) with no clear indication of what is legal/illegal, you have neither law nor government