When engineers design an airplane, they take into account the properties of available materials such as strength, flexibility, and resistance to corrosion. Similarly, when the framers of the Constitution of the United States designed the US political system, they took into account the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the material they were working with: human beings. As a social primate, the human animal has many cooperative traits conducive to forming a large-scale political system, but also many negative traits that will lead him to exploit a political system if possible.
| The French aviator, adventurer, and author Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery, probably best known for his classic children's book "The Little Prince", was also an aircraft designer. He gave us perhaps the best definition of engineering elegance when he said "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." |
Analyze and design as you might, you are never sure whether your system is a 747 or a Spruce Goose until you have tested it, and the true robustness and reliability will not become clear for years. The US Constitution has proven to be a masterful design for a nation that has experienced an unprecedented 200 years of stability and prosperity. Nonetheless, certain design flaws have become apparent, and an analysis of the failure modes is now possible and in order.
Control Systems theory applies to nearly all fields of engineering, and even to many disciplines not traditionally thought of in those terms. Besides an airplane, a robot arm, or a chemical process, one can control an economic system or even a political system. This latter subject is an interesting application, but most people without a graduate degree in engineering are unaware of Control Systems (CS). In actual fact, the concepts are quite simple, even if the math is not, and they shall be presented here in terms of an airplane, drawing parallels to politics.
The aerodynamic model is a particularly useful metaphor because of its familiarity and many parallels with the political system. Though one might understand in theory the principles that make an airplane work, while flying in a plane it is hard to believe in the invisible hand that is holding it up. Similarly, many people cannot believe in the invisible hand that governs the free market, especially when they do not understand the underlying principles at all.
Below is a very brief overview of fundamental control systems concepts, details of which can be found in Modern Control Engineering by Katsuhiko Ogata.
For example, in a heating system, you choose on a thermostat your desired temperature, a signal is sent to the heating or cooling unit, warm or cold air is blown out, temperature sensors tell the controller what the actual temperature in the room is, and the controller adjusts its output up or down according to this feedback. Potential complications include: insufficient or misplaced sensors give the controller poor information, parts of the room are too hot or too cold, and the unit is constantly blowing.
The basic motion of an airplane is the result of several competing forces. Thrust from the engines drives the plane forward, while drag from the air tends to slow it down. Lift is provided by the wings, while gravity pulls the plane down. Wind gusts can randomly push the plane in any direction.
The pilot controls the plane with several control devices in the cockpit. These work control surfaces on the plane's wings and tail, in particular wing flaps for pitching or up/down control, a rudder for yaw or lateral control, and wing ailerons for roll control. These control surfaces slightly alter the effective shape of the wings and tail, changing the resultant aerodynamic forces and the plane's direction.
Instruments provide feedback to the pilot and control system by measuring the plane's height, position, velocity and airspeed. Measuring devices include an inertial navigation system, Global Positioning System, and radar.
The static stability of the airplane is determined by the relative location of the center of gravity and the center of lift. If the center of gravity is in front of the center of lift, a slight downward pitch of the nose will produce a pressure on the wings that restores the plane to a level orientation, and vice versa for a slight upward pitch of the nose: the plane is then stable. If the center of gravity is behind the center of lift, a slight up or down pitch of the nose will produce a force to push the nose even further up or down: the plane is then unstable, and tumbles. If the center of gravity is too close to the center of lift, the plane may be stable most of the time, but unstable under some circumstances, e.g. depending on loading of people and cargo or the bending of the wings, which shift the centers of lift and gravity.
By comparing the roles of the above control systems concepts in aerodynamic and political systems, we can acquire an engineer's way of looking at the mechanism of government. A political system is in many ways no different from any other system, or at least no more different than other systems are from each other.
Plant |
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The plant is the airframe, meaning the basic flying machine with wings and a space for passengers and cargo. |
The plant of a political system is society, or the collection of interacting human beings. The set consists of smaller subsets, including the hierarchy of state, local, community, family, and individual levels. |
State |
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An airplane's state consists of position, velocity, and orientation, all in three dimensions, and also various bending modes of all the flexible structures. For example, the wings can flap up and down, and the body can twist. Typically the pilot cares mostly about position, orientation, and velocity, which are the variables he is consciously trying to control. |
The state of society consists of an infinite number of variables, but we only choose some to measure and control. Typical indicators are economic (e.g. economic freedom and rates of unemployment, inflation, growth, poverty), sociological (e.g. personal freedom, rates of crime, suicide, various 'happiness' indicators), and health (e.g. life expectancy, abortion). Other indicators are more subjective, like morality (births out of wedlock, church attendance, charitable giving). All these state variables can be affected by government policy. Besides the ones these, there are other state variables that do not matter to most people, such as demographics like the age, racial, and religious composition of society, or the distribution of musical preferences. |
State-Space |
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An airplane's state-space is the collection of all possible states. Some of them are undesirable (e.g. flying upside down), some are unsustainable (climbing too steeply or flying too slowly or sideways) and some are forbidden (flying through a mountain or outside the atmosphere). |
If the state of a political system has an infinite number of variables, the entire state-space is an infinity of infinities. Never-the-less, world history helps one to imagine the range of possible societies and conditions of the human animal. Note that another species, like the ant or termite, with a different, non-primate origin, would have a completely different state-space. |
Input |
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Input comes at two different stages. First, the passengers express where they want to go. The pilot takes this input, processes it in his brain, and then outputs a control in the form of manipulation of the cockpit controls, especially the stick. This is then the input to the plane, which may in fact have further stages of input and output. |
The initial input is the "will of the people", as expressed by their purchasing choices in the commercial sphere, or votes in the political sphere, or other means such as opinion polls. The will of the people is inherently a nebulous thing, and hard to measure accurately. Finally, elected politicians and unelected government bureaucrats can work a few sorts of levers: economic (e.g. monetary policy, and tax policy can encourage or discourage various activities), laws (what is or is not permitted), and regulation (how property may be used). |
Output |
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The output of the aerodynamic system is those variables of the state that we care about, namely position, orientation, and velocity. In actual fact, the output is usually not known exactly, but measured by sensors, which implies a degree of uncertainty. |
The output of the political system is the state variables that we are trying to control, such as rates of inflation, unemployment, and crime. In the original US political system, there were few controlled output variables, especially at the federal level. Making treaties, defending the country, and other externally-oriented activities were within the federal government's role, but not increasing literacy, decreasing drug use, or reducing unemployment. In the 20th century, the US government took upon itself the responsibility to control a great many more state variables than in the past, or than are authorized by the Constitution. |
Error |
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Error is the difference between what is desired and what actually is, the input and the output. It is the controller's job to reduce the error to zero, or at least to an acceptable level, within a reasonable amount of time. In a large cargo plane, it may take some time after the pilot moves the stick before the plane changes direction, and the error is large. A state-of-the-art fighter plane may respond seemingly instantaneously to the pilot's direction. |
Error is the difference between the real state of affairs and the people's will. Of course, since the people as individuals have differing ideas of how things should be, the more state variables the system attempts to control, the less able it is to drive the error to zero. The best that can be achieved is a compromise, which may still be unacceptable to some people, so the variables to be controlled should be kept to a minimum. Another reason to reduce the number of controlled state variables is that the control system can better control the most important state variables (e.g. protection of life and property) if it does not attempt to control others that lead to a trade-off. |
Controller |
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The brain of the system, the controller looks at the error (the difference between the input and the measured output), applies some rules to it, and outputs a new control signal. One rule might be that if the error remains large for a long time, the control signal should become larger. Another rule might be that if the measured output changes very suddenly (e.g. too suddenly to be real) to ignore the error unless it remains for a while longer. If an airplane does not quickly react to a new input signal, it is "sluggish". If it reacts too quickly, it may be close to instability. |
While the ultimate controlling authority lies with the people, the day-to-day controller is the government, especially the legislature. It applies rules to the input (desired state) and the output (actual state) and decides on a control signal (legislation) to try to minimize the error. For example, if the poverty rate remains stubbornly above its target, the legislature may decide to increase taxes and spending, or to decrease taxes and therefore investment. The legislature may try to 'filter out' sudden changes in the input, to prevent popular passions or panics from immediately passing into law. If the legislature reacts too quickly to every public passion or latest opinion poll, it risks making poor decisions. If it reacts too slowly, it is being unresponsive to the people. |
Actuator |
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As a result of the controller's processing, a signal is finally sent to a motor which turns a flipper one way or another. Air pressure on this control surface is what actually makes the plane change direction. Speed is controlled by providing more or less fuel to the engines. |
The decisions of the government are carried out and enforced by means of the "police power". The police (local, state, or FBI) have the authority to use force to ensure compliance with the law, both to prevent offenses and to punishment offenders. |
Feedback |
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Without feedback, you are "flying blind". Just as your senses tell you the results of your actions, the airplane's sensors give the controller a measurement of the current state, such as altitude, velocity and orientation. Besides the instruments, the pilots own senses give him an idea of the result of his actions |
Information about the output of the system is constantly being gathered and fed back to the controller (the government) and the people. In modern society, one of the fastest reacting indicators is the stock market, which can express within minutes the market's collective opinion about a new government policy. Other important gatherers, sorters, sifters, and analyzers of information include the mass media, the universities, and think tanks, all of which compete to make their opinions heard and acted on. All data measurements are in fact sampled, some at least daily, but others only monthly or quarterly. |
System |
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The system is the combination of all involved interacting components, including the airplane (plant), the controller, measurement devices, and pilot. |
The political control system is the combination of the plant (society), the political control apparatus, and the sensors, e.g. mass media. Economics is the study of free human action and interaction; politics adds the element of legitimate force or coercion. In a free society, fewer decisions are made politically, and more economically. |
Stability |
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As described above, the static stability of an airplane depends upon the relative location of the center of mass and the center of lift. Putting the center of mass in front of the center of lift results in a stable airplane. Putting the center of lift in front creates an unstable airframe that will instantly tumble unless it is under constant active control. Some fighter jets are unstable, because it results in higher responsiveness and agility, but this is not the sort of thing you want in an ordinary passenger or cargo plane. Where safety and reliability are paramount, you want a stable system, with plenty of margin for error. Another source of instability is vibration. Every mechanical structure has a tendency to vibrate at certain frequencies, the resonant frequencies. Under the right flight conditions, if an airplane has been improperly designed, those vibrations can grow large enough to threaten the plane's functioning. |
The common notion of a stable or unstable society is quite consistent with the engineering viewpoint: no sudden changes in the state variables, and the tendency for shocks or crises to be quickly absorbed rather than leading to further chaos. A more subtle understanding of stability is the long-term tendency of the system to remain on course and not drift from fundamental principles. In the case of the United States, its 220-year unbroken chain of presidential elections suggests a highly stable system; on the other hand, the gradual abandonment of certain constitutional principles would certainly displease its original designers. |
Disturbance |
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An obvious source of disturbances to an airplane is wind of various types, including ordinary gusts, wind shear, or a hurricane. Occasionally, birds create an even more dangerous disturbance, sometimes getting sucked into the engines. Disturbances can also affect the sensor measurements. |
Like an airplane, a political system is continuously buffeted by disturbances, some even intentional. Wars, epidemics, natural disasters, dislocations in the economy, or irreconcilable differences between different segments of the population present a constant challenge. Immature or poorly designed unstable political systems can be disrupted by such challenges; better designed systems damp out the noise, respond smoothly to the new requirements, and keep the problem areas decoupled from the rest of the system. For example, in some countries, where church and state are not properly separated, religious differences are a constant source of conflict. In the United States, they are generally not, though there is incresing tension as the role of government expands into the area of education, so that the issue of school prayer now becomes a problem. |
Damping |
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Damping is the tendency for fast changes to the system to be ignored. While this makes the system less responsive, it also prevents the system from responding wildly to noise, and causes annoying vibrations to die out sooner. |
The US political system was intentionally designed to slow decision-making and make inaction the rule rather than the exception. The US Constitution assumes that all power belongs to the people, and then some is delegated to the government; in other countries the government is assumed to be able to do anything not explicitly denied it by a constitution. Power is divided wherever possible, and democracy is always indirect: of the three branches of government, only the Legislative is elected directly. Many important decisions require super-majorities of 2/3, even 3/4 of the voting bodies. As with physicians, a basic rule should be "do no harm." This tendency to inaction was unquestionably an advantage during the country's infancy, when the law books were blank, but now it is a mixed blessing: political damping slows down reform as well, including deregulation and the retiring of outdated laws. |
Robustness |
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A robust airplane design can withstand adverse changes that are ordinarily outside the realm of ordinary events, such as
While robustness must be designed into the system, many of the adverse events are unforeseeable, and the designers must rely on experience, and only time and testing brings confidence that the design is indeed robust. A belt-and-suspenders system might be expensive and heavy, but it is less prone to catastrophic failure. |
A robust political design can recover from adverse or unplanned-for political conditions:
The United States has an extremely flexible, robust political system that has accomodated many shocks and differences in population for over two centuries. However, it is more illustrative to examine the failures than to tout the successes:
These disruptions did not destroy the political system, but they caused and cause enormous damage, imposing a cost in terms of the various input state variables. |
Estimation |
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Most of the measurements have a degree of uncertainty, so a best guess is made on the basis of multiple measurements over time from multiple instruments. For example, position information could come from radar, GPS, and an Inertial Navigation System, each of which provides information over time with varying degrees of reliability. If the INS suddenly began to give strange information, disagreeing strongly with the other devices, the controller would discount the new readings and rely more heavily on the older readings and information from the other sensors. |
Since the state of American society is actually the state of 275 million individuals, whose changing desires, priorities and sense of well-being are hidden away in each person's head, the true state can never be known, only estimated or approximated. Other global indicators are more measurable, but still without 100% accuracy. |
Sampling |
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Numerous airplane signals are not generated continuously, but periodically. Radar and the GPS provide information in such a way (but quite rapidly, on the order of seconds), and the pilot does not check his instruments or change course very often (on the order of minutes). These various measurement and control signals must occur "often enough". Common sense says that "enough" is more often than events are changing; mathematics says that enough is in fact twice as fast as the rate at which events are changing. |
In a political system, the primary means of decision-making is by voting. In the US, voting by the people for candidates or on imortant issues takes place annually at best; for some offices, the sampling rate is every two years, four years, or even six years. Decision-making by politicians occurs more frequently, but not often. Measurements of most output variables are also made at intervals; economic indicators are typically measured monthly or quarterly. Sampling too much and responding to every change results in a system that is overly sensitive. Sampling too infrequently results in a system that does not respond to the people's wishes. In an economic system, sampling occurs much more often, or as often as the consumer wants to make a purchasing decision, and the decision is not a simple yea or nay, but a variable dollar amount. In a political system, there is no fair way to give one voter greater voice than another, even if on a particular issue he has more to win or lose. |
Observability |
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An airplane system is fully observable if the sensors are sufficient to either give the controller a direct measurement of a state variable or at least enable the controller to figure the state out. This means that you do not need one sensor per state variable, just enough. Of course, since the sensors are not perfect, you probably want some redundant sensors. Redundancy also provides a backup in case some sensors fail. |
Do the current political and economic sensors provide enough data to fully determine the state of society? Probably. Even though the mass media are heavily biased leftward (roughly 90% of journalists vote for the Democratic Party), the remaining media are probably enough to provide alternative points of view. Our ability to gather data has only increased over time, and the more affluent the society, the more resources it can devote to such non-productive quality control. The arrow of technology is clear: the Internet is merely the latest step in a long-term trend of lowering barriers to information gathering and dissemination. |
Controllability |
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An airplane is fully controllable if from any permitted state in the state-space it can reach any other state. In fact, there are some states where controllability is lost, such as when the airplane is moving too slowly at too steep an angle, and goes into a stall. |
The US political system was originally designed to control a very few output variables, like safety from foreign invaders. In those days, the existing control apparatus was sufficient to its modest task. In the modern era, when government has taken over many duties formerly in the domain of civil society, the realm of voluntary action, the system may no longer be controllable. In other words, it may be impossible for the single, central federal government to use its available controls (or any controls) to achieve a desired state. The solution would be to reduce the number of controlled variables to something manageable, and to decentralize control to distributed controllers. |
Optimal Control |
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There may be many or even infinite ways to reach a target state from the initial state, and for a given set of performance criteria there may be just one set of rules, an optimal control, that will accomplish this best. Typically, the optimization is according to a "cost" function such as minimum time, minimum fuel, or minimum error. Implicit is the idea of a trade-off: to reduce the time to reach the target, you have to expend more fuel. To reduce the error (get closer to the target) you may have to expend more time. The cost function expresses the relative value of each of these goals. For example, we may want to reduce time and fuel expenditure, but we value even more landing our airplane within certain speed limits, lest we crash it. |
"Optimal" control assumes that someone is able to not only set targets for the output variables, but to also determine their relative priorities in relation to each other and to cost and time. It is not enough to say that we will "eliminate poverty," but that we will reduce it to a certain level within a certain amount of time and at a maximum cost, without sacrificing the other output variables. Given the large number of variables, and that 275 million Americans have their own individual ideas about priorities, attempts to find an optimal control should be kept modest in scope. The government should try to control just a few variables (e.g. crime and inflation), conscious of the costs and trade-offs. Hayek called the notion that any bureaucrat-god, however intelligent and well educated, could dare to control the full range of state variables the "fatal conceit." |
Distributed Control |
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It may be desirable to control the airplane with multiple computers. One may control flight, while another controls weapons systems, while a third is devoted to communications. They may share some information, but each is focused on its special task. Each controller is better at its individual task, there is no single point of failure, and each can swapped out individually and upgraded. |
One of the most important features of the Constitution is subsidiarity. Decision-making power is preferably kept at the lowest level, first that of the individual, then family, then local, then state, and only finally should a few issues belong to the federal level. Decentralized decison-making has numerous advantages, including |
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The natural progress of things is for Government to gain ground and for Liberty to yield.
--Thomas Jefferson
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Instabilities are the weaknesses inherent to the structure of a control system, flaws that can cause the system to perform poorly or even self-destruct. A vibration that occurs in an airplane's wings at a certain combination of altitude and speed can grow to cause the wings to flutter and the plane to tumble. A complex political control system likewise has inherent instabilities that originate in the system's components and structure.
The process of many delegating authority to a few necessarily loses information: one can only vote for the candidate whose views best match one's own, though the mismatch may be significant. If the delegation is for a single decision on a single occasion, if the candidate pool is large, and if there is one delegate for each member of the electorate, there is little information loss. If the delegation is for a long period of time, covering multiple decisions on multiple issues, if the candidate pool is small, and if each delegate must represent the views of many members of the electorate, information loss will be high. For example, in an American presidential election, with only two accepted political parties, it is extremely unlikely that a voter will be able to find a candidate whose platform he completely supports.
Imagine flying an airplane with your eyes closed, opening them only for a few seconds once every hour. Next imagine that you are not touching the controls yourself, but giving directions to someone else. Finally, your pilot can only move the controls in 10-degree increments. Besides the delegation of control, this illustrates the problems of sampling and quantization, which lose information and lessen the ability to control. Sampling and quantization are unavoidable in some systems, and the political system is unfortunately one of them. Most citizens have day jobs, and cannot be bothered with voting on every issue; they therefore vote only infrequently (once a year at most) and then elect representatives who will make decisions on a package of issues. Contrast this with a free-market economic system, where decisions are made continuously by each individual:
| Parameter | Political | Commercial |
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| Choice Method | Voting | Paying |
| Decision-Makers | Few, Indirect | Many, Direct |
| Frequency | Rare | Continuous |
| Granularity | 1 or 0, all or nothing | Fine |
For these reasons alone, a free-market economic system will vastly outperform a political system in responsiveness, flexibility, and accuracy. Voting is overrated.
All indirect democracies depend on the accountability of politicians to the electorate, who, it is assumed, will vote in their best interests. Indeed, the US Constitution explicitly assumes that the people through the legislative branch will be the major check on government power. But game theory has demonstrated that in some circumstances rational individuals will make rational choices that not only fail to maximize collective utility, but also their individual utility (as in the Prisoner's Dilemma). One frequently met example is the seemingly compulsive re-election of an incumbent representative who has voted to squander government money on wasteful projects, but making sure that his constituency "gets its fair share." While everyone would be better off if none of the representatives voted to waste money, each constituency would be foolish to unilaterally disarm and elect someone honest.
Decision by majority vote can in numerous ways fail to maximize overall utility. In electing an official out of a list of candidates, it may be that one candidate is would be acceptable to everyone, but still a majority elects its most-preferred candidate who is completely unacceptable to a minority. As described by Donald Saari in his book Basic Geometry of Voting, there exist alternative voting systems which vary on different measures of fairness: for example, when electing a single official from a list, voters could rank the candidates from most to least preferred, assign points to each candidate, or rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10. The first of these methods is called the Borda count, after the French mathematician who invented it. Although more complicated, it yields results that better reflect the collective opinion of the electorate, i.e. find a compromise. What is important to remember is that all voting methods have their weaknesses; hence what is decided politically should be kept to a minimum.
Simple majority voting cannot capture the relative importance of an issue to the various parties involved. A majority group that cares only a little can force its will on a minority group that cares a lot. In fact, a majority can always exploit a minority unless there are safeguards in place to limit what can be decided by majority vote. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison describes this danger of "faction".
A small minority that stands to benefit a lot with the cost shared by a much larger population will be more motivated to turn out for a vote or otherwise mobilize resources to influence the outcome of a decision. The classic example is farm subsidies, which might cost each taxpayer only a few dollars per year but funnel millions of dollars into the farm industry. For such a benefit, farms will support full-time lobbyists; taxpayers will be unable to muster the will to fight back. At a small scale such parasitism is only an irritation: you might not chase a mosquito around the room when it only drinks a small amount of blood, but a swarm of them can kill you.
"No taxation without representation," but when the current generation of voters decides to borrow money to receive a service today, the future generation that will pay off the debt may not even be born yet, let alone represented. Deficit spending enables the current represented generation to exploit future weak or unrepresented generations, with or without the fig leaf of "investment".
As an airplane's stability fundamentally depends on the material from which the airframe is composed, a political system--a network of human brains interacting according to rules governing the use of force--is highly dependent on human psychology. The human animal is quite good at some computationally demanding tasks, e.g. facial recognition, but quite poor at others, e.g. probability, statistics, and economics. The human animal evolved over millions of years in a specific environment far removed from the idealized theory of Locke and Mill. Like the other primates, the human animal has some traits conducive to cooperative collective behavior, while other traits work against it. Negative strategies--individual and collective violence, parasitism, cheating, deceiving--are hard-wired into the repertoir of every human brain, and must therefore be constantly guarded against. In particular, the human tendency to use force rather than persuasion suggests that the power to initiate force should be made generally unavailable.
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Difficult, complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.
--H. L. Mencken
The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.
--Milton Friedman
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Probably the biggest driver of government growth is impatience. When a problem arises, the tendency is to reach for the simplest solution, which is coercion. "There ought to be a law" or "the Government ought to do something" are our reflexive reactions to a problem. This is often easier than persuasion, as well as quicker and harder to reverse. Unfortunately, it tends to be a one-size-fits-all solution that everyone is compelled to wear, and the decision is almost never retracted.
Human beings have a strong tendency to interpret the motivations and abilities of other human beings in negative light, and their own in a positive light. We attribute another's success to luck and his failure to lack of ability, while we attribute our own success to ability and our failure to bad luck. Similarly, while we trust our own judgment to take care of ourselves without external interference, and know that we will do the right thing when put in a position to choose between right and wrong, we have just the reverse opinion of other people. Having no confidence in other people's judgment or integrity, we therefore want maximum freedom for ourselves individually and maximum restrictions on others. Distrust of the many others outweights the confidence each individual has in his single self, and we choose to slowly restrict the freedoms of everyone.
A democracy fundamentally depends on an informed electorate to hold its representatives and public officials to account, but what if the electorate not only is uninformed, but is incapable of being sufficiently well informed to exercise control? Jeffrey Friedman of Harvard University argues that this is indeed the case: poll after poll shows that on any given significant political issue the majority of the American public is profoundly ignorant of the most basic relevant facts. This phenomenon is even more pronounced for women, who tend to be even more unaware of national issues. The majority of Americans base their voting on non-factual criteria such as blind loyalty to party or social group, or to whether a candidate is sufficiently "caring", "trustworthy", or "presidential". The oft-lamented spin-doctors and sound bites are an inevitable result. This is not to denigrate American citizens: since the 1930's, the politcal sphere has expanded tremendously, and is now beyond the ability of most educated people to fully understand. If the educational system cannot prepare citizens to control their government, the sphere of government must be reduced to be within their control.
The human brain easily falls into numerous common errors of logic that resist education, including:
| Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. --The White Queen in Through the Looking Glass |
In a country the size of the USA, improbable events happen every day, some of them bad. These are immediately brought to the attention of the population, who, through the immediacy of television, perceive them as a clear and present danger. For the bulk of the human animal's history, perceived dangers were also near and real dangers, and elevated adrenaline was warranted. Now, our hyper-vigilance is counter-productive, and we have a grossly distorted view of the relative probabilities of various threats. Commonly cited examples: women are most afraid of breast cancer, when heart disease is a greater killer, and more preventable, and schools are perceived to be dangerous war zones, when a child's chances of dying of the flu are many times greater than the likelihood of being killed in school, which is something like 1 in 2 million. Julian Simon in Hoodwinking the Nation, and Barry Glassner in Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, explain how to the media good news is no news, and bad news can be manipulated into a perceived crisis
Unelected bureaucrats are a doubly indirect democracy, with even less accountability than infrequently elected politicians. With bureaucrats and politicians at the controls, the output of the political system is much more likely to deviate from that desired by the people.
Any individual wielding public decision-making power, especially when empowered to use force, has increased susceptibility to corruption, i.e. abusing his position for personal gain. For that reason, we subject our political figures and government employees to increased scrutiny and higher standards of personal integrity. However, as the sphere of government action grows ever larger, these controls become harder to maintain, even as the need for them grows.
Economist James Buchanan won a Nobel Prize for explaining that corruption is not the only way that the behavior of bureaucrats' and politicians deviates from the public interest. Buchanan and colleague Gordon Tullock pointed out the obvious: like people in the free market, bureaucrats and politicians are also rational individuals seeking to maximize their personal benefit. Even if they do not resort to unlawful means, they will still tend to act in their own self interest. In the free market, a self-interested individual must find a willing partner to trade with, and businesses can be measured by their profitability; bureaucrats operate under much less accountability, just budget constraints, with no need or even possibility of showing profit. As Tullock first pointed out, bureaucrats will tend to seek rents, or extract risk-free benefit from property that they control, but do not own. Public Choice theory points to the solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma in which we find ourselves.
An inherent asymetry exists between those who would do something versus those who would do nothing. Politicians who exercise restraint and advocate inaction or depoliticizing an issue will have nothing concrete to show, when their constituencies measure them by their demonstrable achievements. In What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, Bastiat points out public works projects paid for out of taxes result in visible monuments; what taxpayers would have done with that money remains forever unseen.
Politics will tend not to attract such people of inaction, but rather those who want exert control and change things, people with confidence in their abilities, perhaps more confidence than is warranted. in The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell dubs these people the "anointed", those who consider themselves uniquely qualified by virtue of superior education and intellect to guide the country with their brilliant decisions. Unfortunately, quite often the best decision is no decision, and that is the one decision that the Anointed cannot make.
Some changes tend to move in one direction only, the ratchet effect. For example, laws are made, but rarely repealed or expired. Since laws generally restrict freedom rather than extending it, the result is a gradual reduction in freedom. In time of crisis, these reductions can be anything but gradual, but when the crisis is passed, the laws remain. Jesse Ventura, governor of Minnesota, has proposed that the state legislature devote one year of every four to cleaning house, retiring old obsolete laws. Not surprisingly, this was not too popular among the lawmakers.
An airplane or any other mechanism tends to loosen up with age, developing a rattle, and so can a political system. The US Constitution was wordsmithed to such a degree that every phrase is loaded with meaning, but some of it has been lost with time. The original writers are long gone, and companion writings forgotten and unread. Some of the Constitution's clauses are now distorted and misinterpreted enough that some safeguards built into the Constitution are broken. A mechanism, like an organism, requires a means of identifying damage and repairing it.
When an instability is discovered to occur in an airplane under normal flight conditions, the solution is to alter system characteristics to either remove the instability or limit it to occurring only in conditions outside those designed for (e.g. mach 5 up in the stratosphere). What steps would help to stabilize the US political system and reverse its slow divergence from democracy and freedom?
As awareness of game theory spreads, society will recognize the prevalence of Prisoner's Dilemma structures underlying many of today's instabilities, in which people rationally choose strategies that do not maximize total utility (e.g. run counter to the common good). The solutions will come to be recognized
Much of the recent unconstitutional growth in government is due to vagueness in the Constitution and further legislation that enables the Executive and Judicial branches to effectively create laws themselves, the former through regulation and executive orders and the latter through"judicial activism", highly creative interpretation of legislation to further the judge's agenda. The authors of the Constitution wrote an exceedingly eloquent document, but understanding requires familiarity with contemporary writings, and after 200 years a few loopholes have appeared that need to be explicitly closed. In particular, the Commerce clause and the General Welfare clause have been exploited and twisted well beyond all original intention. Their original meaning meaning must be restated and clarified.
The original primary constraint on government power was the principle of enumerated powers: the government may only perform those functions explicitly delegated to it by the people through the Constitution. Additional stabilizers included subsidiarity, the division of power among the federal, state, and local levels, with power dispersed as much as possible, and the division of the government into three branches. The system was meant to be simple and inherently stable, not requiring daily participation from the electorate to maintain control. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution were meant to guarantee subsidiarity, but are now routinely ignored. Their original meaning meaning must be restated and reaffirmed.
Increased decision-making power flowing to the political arena and being concentrated at the federal level reduces the speed and granularity with which society can evolve, and increases volatility. On the one hand, a central political machine is slow to act; on the other, when it does act, it affects the entire country at once. As much as possible should be returned from the coercive, winner-take-all political arena to the voluntary, more flexible private sector. What remains in the political sphere should be returned to the state and local level, permitting both greater flexibility, responsiveness, and innovation. Good ideas, tried out and proven locally, can be allowed to spread, bad ideas mercifully nipped early in the bud.
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The second feature I strongly dislike is the abandonment...of the principle of rotation in office and most particularly in the case of the President. Reason and experience tell us that the first magistrate will always be re-elected if he may be re-elected. He then is an officer for life....Educate and inform the whole mass of the people....They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. --Thomas Jefferson
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Term limits would eliminate the instability of voters rationally selecting as representatives incumbents best positioned to exploit the common good for the benefit of their respective constituencies. In the terminology of game theory, this is equivalent to making unavailable the "defect" strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Since it would be madness for one side to disarm unilaterally, term limits must be adopted by all constituencies simultaneously.
A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution would greatly reduce the intergenerational instability by disallowing the current generation to spend the money of unrepresented future generations.
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Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to....On their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
--Thomas Jefferson
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An informed patient can expect better treatment from a doctor, and a knowledgeable car owner is less subject to deception by a mechanic: an informed customer gets better service and can sooner spot incompetence or dishonesty. Better education of the electorate--especially in the subjects of economics and politics, and also history and psychology--will force politicians to better serve their customers. Educated customers cannot be duped into buying services that they don't need, or worse, that actually run counter to their long-term self-interest. Unfortunately, America's public schools are failing to equip citizens with the intellectual tools they will need.
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Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty.
--Thomas Jefferson, inscribed on the National Archives building
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The media industry performs the bulk of the monitoring role, and in a free market the media will respond to public demand. Technological progress, in particular the advent of the Internet, promises to lower barriers and increase the quantity and speed of information gatherers. An increasingly affluent society can afford increasing numbers of watchdog groups, which can use the web to disseminate their findings.
The airplane metaphor is useful as far as it can be stretched, but it has a major limitation: an airplane is an inorganic mechanism, whereas a government, like a business, is an organism, and part of an ecosystem. Like a biological organism, it responds and adapts to its environment. Like any large biological organism, it is subject to parasites, and requires a means of defense. Large animals cope with parasites by means of an internal immune system and symbiotic relationships with other animals (e.g. shark and whale cleaning stations, birds cleaning elephants and rhinos, mutual lice-picking among chimpanzees and humans). The American government is old, and parasites have evolved strategies around its simple defenses. The political system requires a more advanced immune system, one better capable of recognizing, resisting, and eliminating parasites.