Think about our presidential elections – almost everything associated with having an electoral college is now obsolete. So why do we insist on selecting a group of individuals and sending them to a central location to make our decisions for us? This model is breaking down at every level. Just try to keep up with the news – everything is moving so fast and filled with information overload, there’s no way a small group of people can keep up with it all, certainly not effectively.
Our whole system of government was invented when everything moved more slowly, and “mass media” took weeks to percolate through the population. Now, everyone is instantly connected.
And it’s not just the national level where we’re seeing an increasing irrelevance and counter-productivity of sending a small group to make decisions for the masses. (Note I’m talking structures here, not core principles. The Bill of Rights is as relevant as ever, as is representative government.)
Even at the most local level, with our homeowner’s association, we couldn’t get a quorum at our annual meeting to elect new board members. This is with everyone living less than a mile from each other! Everyone is too busy, and the relative effort required for a meeting is not worth it. So we had to change our CC&R’s to declare a quorum based on whoever showed up. But why do we even need an annual meeting? Why not use social networking tools to form committees as needed and make our decisions with online polling?
We also saw the limitations of the represento-kit first hand in a local charter school, now going through an intense financial crisis. The school built up too much too fast; in the simplest of terms they got in over their head with the mortgage and didn’t have the budgetary expertise to handle the more complex situation. To the best of my knowledge, the school board started dealing with the crisis, as a crisis, only five months ago. But a year or two prior, several parents, founding members of the charter school – with vested interest but lacking any authoritative position – were predicting the crisis. These parents are not your typical rabble; they’re CPAs and CEOs who know how to deal with financial situations and could have been of great help. After a limited effort of playing the prophet, they pulled their children and went to different charter schools.
So why didn’t the problem start getting addressed much sooner? Answer: too much work, plain and simple. The founding parents first needed to convince the school board and administration to act, when even admitting to a crisis was “egg on the face” for anyone in a position of responsibility. Or they could have run for the school board themselves, which meant committing to dozens of hours every month for two years, not just to solve the financial problems but deal with everything, and I mean everything.
Instead, why not have a system where problems can be raised publicly and ad hoc task groups formed as a regular course of business? With modern technology, all of the constituents can be connected online; even those without PC’s or an Internet connection have public access at libraries. If an issue is raised that receives a critical mass of acclamation (for example, an online vote hits a threshold to deal with it), then set up a task group. Then, the CPAs and CEOs could volunteer for a few weeks of focused effort – using their specialization – rather than months or years of draining effort on behalf of the other 99.9% doing very little.
In other words, we deal with the fundamental limitation of overloading a central committee. Share the decision load, based on talents, skills and constituent passion, using focused and time-boxed volunteer effort. This could have a side benefit of getting around the typical barriers of politics and bureaucracy by enabling more participatory, informed constituents.
Smaller, local organizations such as a homeowners association, a public charter school, or a small town are the perfect places to test out these kinds of new forms of participatory democracy. In a new, more direct participatory model at the smaller scale, we will learn how checks and balances can be built into the system before rolling it out at a statewide or national level. For example, one of the things that the electoral college does is help prevent not only the tyranny of a minority, but the tyranny of the majority. (As a result, a presidential candidate can’t completely ignore the '”fly-over” states between the population centers.) We’ll figure it out, but we need to get started, since the system we have now is creaking.
In terms of structural impact to our government, the 17th Amendment was the worst amendment to the US Constitution, and should be repealed. Currently, there is no power structure in Washington DC which represents the states. I'm not speaking of the people in the states, I'm talking about the states themselves.
The founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing in setting up checks and balances in our government, and the 17th Amendment destroyed one of the most valuable -- that is, a check on the centralization of power from the states to the federal government.
I've held this position for years but had little hope of its actual repeal because it seemed too esoteric for the average person. Now it's quite refreshing to see a movement of people -- everyday, salt of the earth people -- who know their Constitutional history well enough to understand the consequences at stake in this debate.
Representing the people of the state is different than representing the government of the state.
We all know why we have three branches of government -- separation of powers. The federal system was based on a similarly motivated separation of powers. You embed into the system checks and balances. Those checks and balances are designed to go far beyond the power of an individual's vote in a general election, to structurally and explicitly prevent consolidation of power.
If the federal government takes a dollar instead of the state government taking a dollar, the individual does not feel the difference right away. But the state government knows immediately when it loses power to the federal government. That is why the senators were initially accountable to the state governments, so they would have a natural check on consolidating their power into Washington DC.
Right now, in Washington DC, the president is accountable to the legislature and judiciary through risk of impeachment; the legislature is accountable to the executive through veto and the judiciary through court rulings, and the judiciary is accountable to the legislature and executive through new legislation. This accountability is built into the structure of the system and exert continuous force even in between the elections; however, since the enactment of the 17th Amendment, no power structure in Washington DC is accountable to state governments. Without this accountability, aka check and balance, consolidation of power is inevitable because unchecked power always grows.
Power is a necessary feature of government, in order to prevent anarchy and an “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” system of personal revenge that happens without government. So the power that comes from the people is delegated, consolidating the right to use force. Yet power corrupts, and consolidation of power hastens corruption, so the American founding fathers were careful in how they designed a system of accountability to prevent the unchecked authority that leads to totalitarianism. One of their concerns – and ours today -- is the federal balance of power between distributed states and centralized national government.
Before the 17th Amendment, power delegated to the state governments was then delegated to the Senate. In other words, the Senators not only answered to the people directly, they answered to the state governments as the intermediate source of their power. With all power in Washington DC coming directly from the people, now there is no overt force to keep power distributed to the states.
Here are two articles that illustrate the impact of unchecked federal power.
Federal Workers Make Twice That of Private Sector Radical Britain: The unlikely revolutionary
Federal Workers Make Twice That of Private Sector
Radical Britain: The unlikely revolutionary
In the latter article, scroll down to see the second chart, titled "Top heavy. Central-government spending as % of total government spending." You'll see that two-thirds of government money in the US flows through Washington DC. That statistic ought to get any advocate for limited government riled up, especially when compared to governments in that same chart that we like to think of as more "socialist" than we are, yet who have much more distributed, decentralized government spending.
With more accountability directly to state governments in order to keep their jobs, you'd have Senators incentivized to vote down federal spending and send government work back home to their bosses, that is, back to the states. You can be sure that state governments would love to pull some of those high-paying federal jobs back into the states, under their own control. But they have no voice.
Remember, the currency of politics is power; how it is distributed is the essence of checks and balances. Without the currency of power (in this case, the election of the Senators) flowing *through* the state governments, the states have no voice in Washington. I'm not talking about the power of the people, I'm talking about the power of the state government itself as a competing force against centralized government. Some say about repealing the 17th Amendment: "The State doesn't get anything out of it." On the contrary, the State would have a powerful veto power: if a Senator consistently votes in a way that takes decision making authority out of the hands of the people who put him or her in office, you can bet the state legislature will not re-select that person. Repealing the 17th Amendment restores that lever of authority given to state legislatures, to directly influence decisions in Washington. A Senator would be hard pressed, for example, to ignore a resolution by his home state legislature on an issue that affects states' rights; ignore enough, and you're out of a job next cycle.
Bottom line: repealing the 17th Amendment would reintroduce into every US Senate vote a subtle issue behind "what is the responsibility of government", and that is, "what is the responsibility of what level of government".
Note added 2010-08-23: This post originated as a discussion with Bob Duker on an Idaho political message board, . He has copied the original exchange to his web site here: http://www.dukertech.com/gpage.html
This is an excellent video if you are frustrated by our legal system and have 20 minutes to learn about real solutions.
Philip Howard: Four ways to fix a broken legal system
Many of the themes are covered in detail by Francis Fukuyama in his classic book called Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity. Without trust as a solid social foundation, society cannot thrive and freedom is impossible. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that an over-regulated, lawsuit-happy society is not one built on trust.
So how do we fix it? Watch the video for some great starting points.
Here’s another video showing how the information age is challenging centralized power and control, including highly organized and corrupt power and control:
Russia's YouTube cop (New York Times video story)
Does anyone else see the pattern here? It’s all connected.
Last week my wife and I toured Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. I think the author of our Declaration of Independence would appreciate the radical freedom of information and checks on overly-powerful government being promoted by a growing effort called WikiLeaks.
Here is a video with real-world examples of information espionage that takes the core American values of freedom of the press to a whole new level.
The end of the video poses a telling question: will information age technology be used for Big Brother to keep an eye on us? or for us to keep an eye on Big Brother? The answer is yet to be known.
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