Amerika

During the days of Neoreaction, which came after the initial 1990s rejection of the Enlightenment™ and its primary idea of individualism replacing social order through equality, some suggested formalizing democracy.

Formalization means aligning power interests — the future acquisition of wealth, status, and power — with power investments, or present degree of wealth, status, and power. That ends the incentive to cheat by leveraging hidden power.

In a deformalized system like ours, we pretend that everyone is equal, and then hand power to those who say whatever pleases the Crowd, allowing them to then use that power to write themselves pork barrel checks and kickback honoraria glory.

That means that politicians have an incentive to lie to us, but so also do the voters. If the government is going to spend tax money, then the self-interested voter wants as much as possible going to him, especially if he did not pay it.

This situation was not so much of a problem before diversity, since nothing makes a group happier than to take something from another group, making them weaker. Class warfare however prevailed because the poor love taking from the rich using democracy.

Here is how we could convert our government to a formalized structure:

• Vote your taxes. Each person would get a ballot based on what legislation they wanted approved, replacing the Congress. They would vote for what percentage of their tax payment, which would be made at the time of voting, would go to each program. This incentivizes government to have few programs, because otherwise people will pass over what they do not recognize and those will die out. In this way, budget, legislation, and personal responsibility would be combined.
• Stock in government. Politicians would be required to convert their wealth to shares in the American government. They would be paid in the same, and unable to cash out for the duration of their lives. Any income they want to receive would have to be converted to shares in the USG. If they make bad decisions, they go bankrupt, not the government.
• Review of the judiciary. We should borrow the UK rule that says that the losing side pays the legal fees of the winning side, and then reduce costs. This will cut out extra cases. The state would have to pay for any case it brought and lost, and judges would be personally liable for any financial consequences of their decisions.
• Elected for life. Term limits are a moron pacifier that say “steal everything you can and get out,” and will produce worse results. Instead, elect Congresscritters and Presidents for life, so that in ten to twenty years when the consequences of their acts are finally visible, they must fix the problem or resign in disgrace. Make them accountable in the only way that matters: mate them to the effects of their actions, no matter how distant.
• No anonymous agencies. Any federal agency, like the FDA or even Capitol police, must be named after the Congresscritter, President, or judge responsible for creating and guiding it. This way, a name is attached to every decision and people know who to praise or curse for any results obtained.

Like most things neoreaction and libertarian (née “classical liberal” a.k.a. the original cucks who were afraid to simply insist on persistence of the monarchy) this plan has many flaws.

The first problem is that formalization of anything makes it a target for manipulation. If the goal is to make the USA prosperous, after all, a politician may decide to run it like a casino, hiring mercenaries and amping up the economy at the cost of culture. Then again, that is the nature of government itself; aristocracy, by drawing people from a social hierarchy instead of popularity contest, avoids this problem.

The second issue arises from democracy itself. Your voters might, in a fit of pique or following trends conducted by the media as they usually do, opt to vote all of their income to free stuff for the poor/brown instead of the military and infrastructure. People in groups vote for what they think the group will support, and they are usually both negative and incorrect; most people, having the attention span of goldfish, do not connect the things they vote for today with the consequences tomorrow, as we can see from the millions of Biden/Xi voters staggering around amazed that their taxes are going up.

Further, you have the problem of humans confusing the symbol for the reality. When you want your team to win, you whomp the other team good, so if they endorse a policy, you reverse it or counteract it. This leads to choices which are destructive because they do not consider results, only beating the other team. For example, when the Democrats struggled in Vietnam, Republicans supported an act to re-home Vietnamese refugees here in the states because it made the Democrats look bad.

Then there is hierarchy itself. Most people have little ability to do much with their money, so there is no reason to expect that they will do better with a national budget. They tend to misunderstand priorities and have little knowledge about how the budget works; for example, most Americans think that the military is our biggest outlay.

Finally, this system like all other formal systems is easily gamed by changing definitions. The first politician to see this will create a Freedom Plan which involves fixed apportionments of money to benefits programs, and that will end any type of independence from the parasitism.

In the end, we will probably find that there is no escape from democracy, but this thought experiment provides a useful realization about the nature of power. When those in power are also on the make, and have no actual fiscal accountability, nothing stops them from exploiting the population.

Perhaps the only real formalization comes through trust in specific leaders. If we gave near total autonomy to Georgia, for example, and it opted for cutting taxes and abolishing entitlements and diversity programs, many of us might move there for the better prosperity outlook and greater political stability that this promises. However, that could only be maintained if a specific leader — say, Donald Trump — were in charge and could administer the program. The instant we write it down it becomes open to interpretation, and humans (“talking monkeys with car keys” – Kam Lee) would begin their usual habit of stealing from the group with the vote or the pen.

As democracy winds down, we find ourselves thinking about such things more. What would society be like if we dropped the parasitism, and focused on paying for government as a service, therefore became able to demand that this service, like a business, actually deliver value?

Perhaps the real utility in thought-experiments about formalization consists of separating ideology from function. If we want function, we cannot have ideological government, and vice-versa. That might be the template for the future that we need.

Tags: democracy, formalization, prosperity, taxes