Whatever body limits the government is itself sovereign. What limits that body? Are written constitutions supposed to limit the power of government? Who implements those provisions if not the government?
The concept of limited government, as it is typically expressed today, had its origins in the Enlightenment. It was all the rage among the cool people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That idea deeply influenced the constitutions of nearly every nation in the West. Look around. All of those nations now have large and growing governments. The idea of limiting the scope and reach of government by popular will or by written charter has had a track record of perfect failure.
A government of limited and specifically enumerated powers is too weak to resist pressure to make it larger. The best way to get big government is to start with a small government.
The way out of this is to think sideways.
Of course, this is ripe for abuse and corruption (one website controlling an entire country), but interesting idea nonetheless.
Would it be possible to build a party with the sole intent on producing transparent government and the eventual ability to open all debate to the public via the internet.
In essence, the reason for representatives is that historically people could not take the time out of work to participate in a debate. Even more so if this meant travelling to a debate.
You're supposed to debate locally, and have your representative go represent your area, but what really happens is that your rep is party of a party and the party agree a line and they vote regardless of local voices.
So... if voting was open on all debates for the people to partake in... what's the worst that could happen? Where would it fall down?
Initially I think security issues would be interesting, could they be open and transparent?
And everyone would initially vote for NIMBY policies, so it would grind a lot of stuff to a halt.
The big question, are people able to think of big things that benefit the whole of society even at the cost of them as individuals.
But then, that's the crux of a lot of political issues.
I guess the idea was that if you don't do a good job, you don't get paid. On the other hand, if you don't pay the representative fairly, then they won't run the following year. "You get what you pay for".
Would this work in the grand scheme of things these days? I always think that there are too many 'key people' and too many companies with so much financial clout that the money they give would overshadow what the constituents would pay privately. The one saving grace there, I guess, is that at the end of the day, the person still needs to be voted back in...
* They often own businesses, which often benefit significantly from government contracts * Direct or indirect kickbacks from other business owners/lobbyists in return for more favorable legislation
Kickbacks etc. are going to be a problem no matter how they are 'officially' paid. This comes back to voters paying attention and caring, I guess, so...
I think this shows the problem, the tyranny of the masses. Basically as I grow older I'm more inclined to think that pure democracy won't work because people won't make short term sacrifices for long term gains or sacrifice there own benefit for the larger benefit of more others.
That said I do think we (I'm in the UK) need more representation for the demos. That, for example, we should have a system like Suisse where a proportion of the population can force a referendum.
My personal opinion is that a country works better if some of it's forces can operate covertly too.
That's a great lead in for something that contrasts fact and theory. Unfortunately....
> You can look at California as an example of this. The populace have voted on referendum after referendum to pass new laws without passing the budget to match
That's simply not true. The referendum-required spending is a small fraction of CA's budget.[1]
The closest thing to an exception is that 50% of the budget has to go to education. However, that doesn't mandate a level of spending.
Even if CA had a huge amount of voter-mandated spending, that doesn't justify or require other spending.
CA has a budget problem because its income tax system is fairly volatile because it is very progressive. (Property tax receipts, thanks to prop 13, is actually fairly stable.) That's a problem because the governor and legislature see good years as opportunities to increase spending, which can't be paid for when bad years come along.
When I lose income, I cut back. CA govt doesn't. (And no, increases in unemployment compensation aren't the problem.)
[1] I'm ignoring the bond measures because they're put on the ballot by the legislature and required for all significant borrowing. The relevant projects aren't referendum-spending.
Why does this need to be a formal body? The public itself - in the form of a dynamic and multi-polar civil society and not a single formal institution - is an appropriate counterbalance.
The catch is that this isn't really possible if the entire system of government is organized on democratic principles - we currently have too much democratic process to achieve appropriately democratic outcomes.
Tweaking the balance between various co-equal government institutions is a good way to limit the capabilities of the overall system without having to rely on any permanent external force to restrain it. If we returned to dealing with social problems via judicial means on a case-by-case basis, instead of giving legislative and executive authority a priori top-down control over everything, we'd be much better off.
The public has failed at this. Nearly every big government program is electorally popular. Medicare. Medicaid. An enormous military. The Drug War. Social Security. Proposing serious cuts to most of these programs is electoral suicide. Look at what happened to Barry Goldwater. This holds even more true in Europe.
> Tweaking the balance between various co-equal government institutions is a good way to limit the capabilities of the overall system without having to rely on any permanent external force to restrain it.
Where has this tweaking actually succeeded? All Western governments are far larger than they were originally intended to be. Even if this tweaking is theoretically fool-proof, the fatal flaw is that government bureaucrats themselves must implement those tweaks. Conflict of interest.
> If we returned to dealing with social problems via judicial means on a case-by-case basis, instead of giving legislative and executive authority a priori top-down control over everything, we'd be much better off.
The courts themselves have given their stamp of approval to legislative and executive over-reaching. The courts, on their own, stretched the Commerce Clause to ridiculous extremes. The courts, on their own, reduced the Tenth Amendment to a dead letter. Franklin Roosevelt's packing of the Supreme Court was the last stand for judicial limitation of the government. Besides, who decides what judges sit on federal benches if not the legislative and executive branches? Again, conflict of interest.
But I think this is the product of a feedback cycle. Increasing government intervention erodes civil society, creating pervasive problems that society can't solve on its own, thereby generating pressure for more government intervention. We can halt this process by making the deliberate attempt to address social problems within society, without turning to the state.
You can't treat the public as a monolithic entity here; a small group of like-minded people can work together to build self-sufficient social structures on a small scale, and establish a feedback cycle that gradually erodes the support for state intervention by making more people less willing to rely on government. Social entrepreneurship, with good leadership and a long-term strategy, can start to reverse the process.
> Where has this tweaking actually succeeded? All Western governments are far larger than they were originally intended to be. Even if this tweaking is theoretically fool-proof, the fatal flaw is that government bureaucrats themselves must implement those tweaks. Conflict of interest.
You're thinking in too short a time scale. It's worked quite well over the centuries. Look at the progression from Magna Carta to the US Constitution. I'm not saying that we need a new constitutional settlement - and if we tried to in the modern era, it'd be too heavily influenced by people who want to treat society as a machine to be administered from the top down, or who equate the state with society - but that doesn't mean we can't set up some better second-order constraints within the generally good set of constraints we've already got.
> The courts, on their own, stretched the Commerce Clause to ridiculous extremes. The courts, on their own, reduced the Tenth Amendment to a dead letter.
Only because the courts have bought into the modern notion of democracy, which blurs the line between the state and society, regards the formal legislative process as being the true consensus of society, and regards universal prior restraint as the solution to most problems.
This modern concept of democracy is what's undermined the balance and effectiveness of our political system. That's what we need to start challenging, and make people understand that democratic process is necessary but not sufficient to keep the political system working properly.