Shorter terms devolve the actual functions of governance to unelected, long term burrocrats, thereby ensuring the reigns of power are held in a stable structure that cannot be perturbed by passing social fancies. and that would be better yet, right?
I think that best government is least government; if we need a "governing class" hanging around all the time, then making sure they're webbed up and tied down with process, procedures, and other bullshit to the point of almost total sclerosis is the best way for society to survive their presence.
> I think that best government is least government;
The problem with this view is that government is the way that we - as a society - make collective decisions about the rules and norms under which we want to live, as well as the way we build programs to serve the public good and achieve things that we want to achieve together.
If you make that process - the process of deciding rules and norms - so painstaking slow, and the process of enforcing the rules nearly impossible, then what you end up with is a society with out rules or norms. Which isn't a society. Or with rules and norms locked down and frozen, unable to adjust to the changing needs of the society.
What we need is a government that is as responsive to the needs and wants of the governed as possible.
Usually the way you achieve that is through various forms of democracies, but those are prone to tyrannies of the majority - in which a majority intentionally choose to oppress various minorities. So the trick is to have a super-responsive Democracy that also has safeguards in place to protect the minority from the majority.
And there in lies the rub, what those safeguards should be is the never ending debate.
But "best government is least government" is a truly toxic and self-destructive meme that has badly infected US culture. If you want to understand what you're actually saying with that sentence, s/government/civilization/g. Government is simply the mechanism through which we collectively build our civilization.
> The problem with this view is that government is the way that we - as a society - make collective decisions about the rules and norms under which we want to live, as well as the way we build programs to serve the public good and achieve things that we want to achieve together.
There's nothing in what you wrote there that can't be and isn't done in the private spheres. Making "collective decisions about the rules and norms under which we want to live"? That's part of any culture, and often happens by social processes in which government is irrelevant. And charitable organizations — or "programs to serve the public good" — have a long and successful history of outdoing government at actually helping people in need. Finally, business and social organizations "achieve things that we want to achieve together" in a way that doesn't involve government coercion.
You suggest we can "s/government/civilization/g", but I'd say you have it backwards, if you value people working together willingly to accomplish great things for each other.
> There's nothing in what you wrote there that can't be and isn't done in the private spheres.
There are many things which the private sphere cannot do, and other things which it could do in theory but has utterly failed at in practice. The obvious things it cannot do in theory or practice are set laws - the rules we all must live by whether we want to or not. Things like you don't get to murder other people on a whim. That is no something the private sector can enforce, and if you argue that society could simply enforce that through the majority exiling people who commit those sort of crimes - what you are describing is government, in its most primitive form. The private sector cannot handle this - not even in theory.
As for things the private sector could handle in theory, but has utterly failed at in practice, health care is an obvious one. If you compare the places where the government handles health care as a private good well to places where health care is handled by the private sector, the private sector has not outperformed the government - anywhere.
It really boils down to this: not everything can be voluntary in a society. Some rules have to be set, and enforced by everyone with no opt out. We can debate endlessly about exactly which set of rules should be included in that, but there's a minimal set (don't kill, don't steal, etc) that almost everyone can agree on. The process of agreeing upon those rules and enforcing them is, by definition, government. And having those rules exist and enforced is, by definition, civilization.
I'm with you on paragraphs one and three — there is a minimum government below which, if it didn't exist, it would arise spontaneously. Paragraph two, well, I'd like to see this country where a reasonably undistorted private sector provides healthcare. Certainly no such thing exists in the United States, where every subsector of the healthcare and insurance industries is regulated beyond any sort of fair competition.
No such thing exists anywhere. Almost every country on the planet provides some sort of public health care. And any country that doesn't, one could argue the private sector health care is distorted.
This is because it is impossible to provide private health care in an undistorted market. A patient can often cannot "shop around" for health care. It can never be a truly voluntary exchange when one party's health is on the line. There will always be an significant element of coercion and urgency for the party needing care. This is especially true of emergency and urgent care, but is true to varying degrees for most forms of health care.
I like most of your post, but I think your last paragraph is wrong. The government is not the civilization. It is one of the ways we collectively build our civilization, but far from the only one. Government is essential - anarchy does not build great civilizations - and it has been the foundation of building western civilization. It was the foundation by being limited - by not doing everything, by letting people and companies do most of the building.
> But "best government is least government" is a truly toxic and self-destructive meme that has badly infected US culture. If you want to understand what you're actually saying with that sentence, s/government/civilization/g. Government is simply the mechanism through which we collectively build our civilization.
Now that our civilization is built, we don't need armies of elected politicians or long-term, unelected functionaries controlling the society or ourselves.
It's worth comparing the way the Constitution is amended in Hungary and the USA. In Hungary the process is too fast, in the USA the process is too slow. There must be a sweet spot, in-between these two countries:
>I think that best government is least government...
and thus if need a project management class in the company then making sure they're webbed up and tied down with process, procedures, and other bullshit to the point of almost total sclerosis is the best way to get our projects delivered on time and under budget!
I’ve been wondering if we should replace government entirely with all the project managers. They all huddle together learning strategies, processes and practicing on one another. They can read history and philosophy too if deemed useful.
The actual work gets done by everyone else. When a project comes up, the project team applies for a manager or two for just their one project. “Government” helps determine the appropriate management system for the project outcomes and rents/gives the project a (team of) managers trained in Scrum/PRINCE/Consensus/holocracy/etc. At the end of the project the team disbands and the managers return to the pool.
> Shorter terms devolve the actual functions of governance to unelected, long term burrocrats, thereby ensuring the reigns of power are held in a stable structure that cannot be perturbed by passing social fancies. and that would be better yet, right?
Well, sure. I am glad to have ___domain experts who understand the trade offs of highway construction or whatnot on the execution side while other people operate at a higher level of abstraction (how do we allocate funds at a macro level, and trade off the various interests?).
It’s far from perfect but far more effective than having elected officials decide how thick the roadbeds should be or the maximum spacing for electrical plugs in houses.
>> I think that best government is least government
Ok. That is literally an extremist view. It is too easy a mantra. Exactly how little government would be too small? I personally think the IRS should be funded, so to the FBI, EPA and military. Other people think otherwise and would be happy to do away with all those agencies. But to say that less is always better is to wash one's hands of the conversation, to abandon the hard task of working out exactly which services society wants and needs from government. Less always seems better until you actually need something.
I'm quite fond of the NWS; one the one hand there's no particular reason it must be a government body; on the other hand that frees them from "performance metrics" and the need for hype ... but doesn't insulate them, either.
"best government is no government" would be extremist. I submit that "least government" is a reasonable view that admits there are positive functions of government in society, even if they are "all the other options suck worse" judgements where "positive" is "least negative".
On the contrary. It's a bold claim that there should be a government with any size at all. The modern nation state is a relatively recent invention. There is no reason why it among all possible forms of organization or unorganization should be the global optimum. What's more frightening to me is that it would be a local optimum - a corridor of thought impossible to reverse course on once decided, and always preventing us from reaching a more perfect form of governance or ungovernence as the case may be. I'm not here to discuss the benefits any particular form of governance, that's irrelevant to the idea of only having local information in an governance optimization landscape.
All known human societies have government, even the most primitive tribes, so I'm not clear what your point is. I was just reading about the The Tripolye Culture giant-settlements in Ukraine, from 7,000 years ago, who seem to have had something like a democratic government:
The confusion you're experiencing is because I specifically mentioned "modern nation states" and you responded with "even the most primitive tribes." If we stick to the same topic, it might be more clear.
> Whatever form of organization you want to invent for a society, that will be a form of government.
What is the name for this ideology? It feels like it's the political version of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, but I've never seen it given a name before. I am of course interpreting this through a Bergerian/Luckmannian lens[1].
1. Specifically by way of "reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something other than human products - such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will." p 106 TSCoR http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reali...
> Shorter terms devolve the actual functions of governance to unelected,
Baked into that statement is the assumption shorter electoral terms means shorter periods in power. It doesn't.
Governments tend to stay in power for about 8 years where I live, which has 3 year terms. That doesn't seem to be much different to the UK, were terms are twice as long, or the US for that matter. But individual politicians are often there for decades. The fate of the election tends to depend on 10 or 20 swinging seats, out of about 80. Typically a bureaucrat is going to be dealing with politicians with decades of experience at handling bureaucrats.
It's not always true of course. Occasionally, the electorate does get riled up when the government does a particularly poor job. And then it isn't just a matter of 10 or 20 seats, most of them change, and it's after a minimal term in office. But that's only happened literally once in 60 years to me. Yes, that's inefficient, but I don't see any choice. Occasionally, the political class needs to be reminded who is actually in charge. 3 year reminders seems to work well enough.
> Shorter terms devolve the actual functions of governance to unelected, long term burrocrats, thereby ensuring the reigns of power are held in a stable structure that cannot be perturbed by passing social fancies.
Does it though? It's much more than just the heads of agencies that are political appointees [1] that change with administrations.
It may appear that the government can be slowed by paperwork but there really is no penalty for the executive branch (or any branch) to just ignore the other branches (ex. [2]).
I get the sentiment but I'm really curious to ask. What happens if someone wants to go into politics to make positive change for a community and it's bogged down with that same process, procedures, and other bullshit?
I don't think Anarchists and US style Libertarians understand the implications of their beliefs. Go look at countries where there are very weak central governments. You will universally find strife, famine, corruption, war, etc. These are not utopias, frankly they are dystopic.
I think that best government is least government; if we need a "governing class" hanging around all the time, then making sure they're webbed up and tied down with process, procedures, and other bullshit to the point of almost total sclerosis is the best way for society to survive their presence.