Re:US government dictates Swedish copyright laws
by Gormo on Saturday October 08, 2011 @01:05AM
(#3087171)
> The public has failed at this. Nearly every big government program is electorally popular.
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.
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.