CCCLXII – Things Going Wrong

If you saw a version of this article posted, for some reason the date it posted was “yesterday”–I think because I started the draft on my phone. I have deleted the prior version and reposted this version so it would correct the timestamp to be “today”. Thank you, WordPress.

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What are things that can go wrong with a nation state?

• There’s corruptions of power
  • Military Power, powerful generals who want to make a name for themselves and parlay their power into a title
  • Ecclesiastical Power, where Church hierarchs enrich themselves and seek more expansive latitude within the state
  • Political power, where Nobles and Aristocrats are trying to control more and more of the apparatus of state.
  • Economic Power via Corporations, where profit-making entities seek more expansive latitude and occasionally exceptions within the state.
  • International power, where foreign entities seek to influence the affairs of Scootland in their favor, perhaps for favorable trade deals or exceptions to a fairly restrictive trade policy.
  • Populist power, where agitators drum up popular support among the people in order to change some way of doing things
• There’s corruptions of Justice
  • Authorities who are willing to allow injustice for a price or otherwise some personal gain
  • Law enforcers who fail to enforce the law for a price or otherwise some personal gain
  • Corporations or landlords who engage in unjust or questionably legal practices
• There’s corruptions of authority
  • An unjust use of force to enforce a just law
  • An unjust use of force to suppress a popular demonstration
  • An unjust law which harms the people
  • An unjust tax which harms the people
  • An unjust international policy which harms the people (or the people of another state).

The second two broad categories fall under matters of law and the specific system of justice. There will always be corrupt people but you hope the culture is such that it roots them out and isolates them. The real concern is the first category, corruptions of power, because these can be very destabilizing. In Ancient Rome, the Senate usurped the power of the King and made themselves primary, ushering in the Republic. Any time you have a body that views itself as being in competition with or resentful of a higher authority, they will gradually seek to reduce that authority and increase their own. So far I have not addressed a legislature for this reason–the fear is that a legislature represents a bastion of classical liberalism. There needs to be a mechanism for crafting and judging laws without relying on a populist conclave.

The absence of classical liberalism does not mean that power struggles will not happen, they certainly will. So here I plan to discuss what the controls or solutions are to these particular problems.

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Controls for Military Power

A large standing army gives Generals a significant amount of power. Financial power, as a category on the Sovereign budget, and personnel power in the standing army. There is always a risk of a military coup to overthrow the sovereign. These also happened with worrying regularity in the Roman era.

The first control is that the professional military ought to be small. It is the smallest possible size to be maximally effective at first-line national defense. This means that a military coup, while possible, would be more challenging because the first-line military is the smallest part of the national military apparatus.

The second control is that the Generals serve at the discretion of the King. The King can reassign a general, dismiss a general, or appoint a general arbitrarily, because the King is the chief officer of the Military. A General who is beloved by his troops and is making noise about a coup or some other thing can be dismissed from service or reassigned to another regiment to whom he would be a foreigner. This might make the troops unhappy for a time but as a professional army they would be bound otherwise to serve for a certain term, and their only recourse would be to abandon their service or to revolt against their new general, both of these things being blatantly bad things if not crimes and easy to identify and suppress.

Because during war-time the army would swell in size and gradually increase in skill, the Sovereign has an incentive to keep wars as brief as possible, to avoid giving Generals too much war-time power that mitigates the controls in place in peace-time. This is a two-way control, where the Sovereign controls for the military and the military controls for the sovereign.

The result here, I think, would be a stable relationship between the Sovereign and the military.

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Controls for Ecclesiastical Power

The Church is given a much more central and much more expansive role in this model, and the risk naturally being that certain Church hierarchs would abuse this power and seek more of it. This is part of the calculus for not including a Bishopric in the political schema–the Ecclesial hierarchy is parallel to and separate from the political hierarchy. The Church exists within the State, the state is subject to the authority of the Church, the two owe duties of mutual obedience and cooperation.

There are two avenues for Ecclesiastical Power that remain, since they would be somewhat isolated from political power. These avenues are economic power, as they would still receive a Tithe; and legal latitude. The Church could seek to exempt herself from taxes for example, or corrupt hierarchs could bribe politicians to get their way. The primary control there would be transparency–the Archdiocese of Scootland could report on it’s activities to the Sovereign, who could hold them accountable for high incomes but low results. The Church should also not be exempt from Land or Sales taxes, as it conducts business in the name of the Sovereign it should still “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”.

Corruption and bribery fall, again, under a different species of problem, relating to the specific legal relationships between various entities. I will say only that the Titled Nobles to whom are delegated authority over the Duchies, Counties, and Baronies of Scootland serve at the discretion of the Sovereign, and if the Sovereign becomes aware of unjust behavior by the Nobility he can dismiss them and replace them. He cannot interfere with the Ecclesial hierarchy but that wouldn’t stop him from reporting bad affairs to Rome and encouraging the Church hierarchy to take disciplinary measures on any bad fruit on the Ecclesial vine.

I think this would result in a stable–but not without turbulence–relationship between the Sovereign and the Church.

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Controls for Popular Power

Populism is a hard problem to root out. Essentially, an unhappy people without some place to vent their frustrations will rise up in revolt periodically. That’s part of the genius of democracy: an unhappy people go to the ballot box and release their revolutionary frustration, rather than doing so with a glass bottle filled with gasoline.

Especially since the cat of classical liberalism is out of the bag, in Scootland it would be difficult to suppress that knowledge. The first step to avoiding popular revolts is to get and keep the love of the people. This requires a sovereign trained in virtue and intimately connected to the lives of his subjects.

Second, there does need to be a formal mechanism for the people to express their concerns directly to the King. This would be like a consultative council separate from a legislature, but perhaps they provide policy recommendations to the King to address pressing issues.

It feels kind of like a “kids-table” council, especially because there is no binding resolution they can pass, just make recommendations to the King. Perhaps if they can get a noble–a Baron, Count, or Duke to endorse it, the Sovereign would take it seriously, but even with such an endorsement there is no obligation that the King should act on their recommendations. A great thing about such a council is that it would serve as a place for the public to release their political frustrations, and it creates another axis for political power that would need to be managed. Perhaps the ultimate control would be that the King himself convenes the people’s council and so all the work needs to be put in before the King is sitting in front of them to figure out what they are going to say. That way the King can dismiss the council also if they are getting to agitated and wait a while for the heat to die down–or manage some complaint they are raising consistently.

The rules of the “kids-table” council would effectively be that they raise policy recommendations to address specific problems and they take heads-or-tails simple majority votes on whether to present it to the King. If they can’t get a simple majority to agree that a certain thing is a problem or a certain thing is a solution to a problem, then there’s no need to waste the King’s time.

I think this would result in a bit of a political tug-of-war but at least it gives the people a venue to air their grievances, and it gives the King a ritual obligation to convene them and listen. It forces a relationship to exist between them–it is harder to be violently angry at an absent abstraction. This would result in an increase in stability.

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Controls for Economic Power

At the time I started drafting this article, my number one concern was Corporations. I think the controls here are very simple: No multinational firms are allowed, Corporations must be independently chartered in Scootland and be majority owned by Scootland citizens or entities, and their cash must be held in Scootland banks. These create strong anchors to Scootland and hinder international gamesmanship. The power of the purse is very real, and there would be a real concern about corporate bribery to receive exemptions from certain rules, but the lynchpin here is that Charters would be certified at the discretion of the Sovereign and if they are misbehaving there would be a danger of the sovereign revoking their charter and terminating their (legal) operation.

But David the Barbarian raised a point that there’s something of an incentive for a guild system or cooperative. Guilds would certify a trade, it would provide a mechanism for ensuring quality and consistency, provide opportunities for apprenticeships. There could even be competing guilds for the same trade–no reason to limit to one per trade, as this consolidates power and introduces some instability–so competition becomes the mechanism for the guilds to differentiate themselves. The People’s Blacksmiths Guild wants to be seen as the highest quality, but the Blacksmiths Guild of Scootland introduces some new training method that increases their production time, lets say.

Cooperatives would also serve as cost saving measures. A certain coop, lets say they are geographically restricted to be local, so a coop cannot transcend a counties borders, lets say. The coop purchases supplies (and pays sales taxes) and then distributes those supplies to the members of the coop, and the members of the coop operate as usual and contribute a portion of their revenue to the coop for continued purchase of supplies. The geographical limitation of coops helps prevent a massive national coop from forming–perhaps they become associated with Guilds but there would not necessarily be a requirement that coops are guild affiliated. It would probably naturally shake out that way.

The Guild and Coop system would be enough to positively affect a lot of industries, leaving Corporations to fill the gaps that cannot be filled by guilds or coops. By limiting their scope, Corporations would be somewhat defanged and have reduced power and influence. The Guilds would be controlled by competition, the Coops would be controlled by geography. All of these factors would serve to mitigate the power of consolidated economic means and the corruption that frequently accompanies this. This would create a stable relationship between Economic organizations and the Sovereign.

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Controls for International Power

Minimizing foreign influence can be difficult at times, because there are many clever ways for a foreign entity to infiltrate a nation and influence affairs in their favor. One way is economic, which has been mitigated above through discussions of Corporations (no multinationals) and trade (no depletive exportation). The methods of influence that remain are through information and through diplomacy.

Diplomacy is simple, because the Sovereign is the chief diplomat of the land and all ambassadors serve as delegates of the Sovereign. Non-diplomatic relations, between say a Duke and a foreign nation, would be strictly illegal to begin with, but even if a wayward Duke accepted bribes there’s little the Duke could do to force the matter, as the Sovereign is the chief decision maker. This, and the Nobles serve at the discretion of the Sovereign so they could be dismissed if they violate their oath of loyalty to the King.

Information is more challenging, but a determined propaganda campaign by a foreign power only serves to influence the people, and the people have no direct authority other than to represent their opinions via the “kids-table” council. All of these controls serve to force foreign powers to direct their primary focus to the Sovereign and to ensure the Sovereign is hearing and considering their requests.

A corrupt sovereign could certainly make bad decisions that favor the foreign power, but exemptions from rules would be immediately obvious and receive the immediate displeasure of the people. There’s a negative feedback loop for every bad decision the Sovereign could make, and the Sovereign has all the power to address bad decisions by subjects of nobles.

This would result in a stable relationship between foreign powers and the King.

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This has been an exhaustive look at problems with this model for society, as illustrated through the fictional state of Scootland. I am ever at risk of being blind to my own faults, so I welcome constructive criticisms of this model. The more we flesh it out the more coherent it feels, but the law of unintended consequences tells us that there’s ways this kind of society would run completely off the rails.

Let me know what you think!

AMDG

CCCLXI – Addressing Some Open Questions

In our previous article, where we introduced a conceptual social model under the framework of the fictional kingdom of Scootland, there were some questions which were open and which were raised by commenter David the Barbarian. Let’s tackle some of them.

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Question 1: What happens to the Suburbs?

To answer this, let’s try and understand why suburbs exist today. Suburbs exist around cities, and generally are oriented towards cities. Cities contain jobs, suburbs contain people, and transit allows the people to get to the jobs in a reasonable amount of time. The suburbs allow for people to own a decent sized plot of land yet still have all the convenience and benefits of city life. Suburbs are only possible in areas that do not use the land itself for income (as in the Rurlands), and are only possible where transit is achievable to and from the City. That is to say, there is some distance from the city beyond which the commute is impractical and within which it is more profitable for developers to build homes than to work the land.

David’s comment says:

The distinction between Urban and Rural is very mixed up, turned upside down in some ways, in our time. Traditionally, the rural estate, from the crofter to the plantation, is a mini-city, a great deal of its goods are produced by itself. The monocultural agro-business and the suburb are mostly a product of technology, as well as social and economic factors, of modernity.

So, what I now see this thought experiment as affecting is making suburbs, exurbs and ruralish areas much more urban and rural in different ways. They would have to be more compact and more self-sufficient. The commuter town would just not work. That all would probably be more good than bad.

The incentives in the Rurlands are for self sufficiency and efficient land use. Because the Land Tax penalizes acreage, the priority in the Rurlands is to get bang-for-your-buck. If you can provide for all your necessities, and do so cheaply, then you won’t need to compound your tax burden with sales tax, and you could even multiply your income by selling the surplus of goods you provision for yourself.

The incentives in the Cities are for income maximization per acre, because the Sales tax penalizes economic activity. If you can build a high quality, low maintenance apartment building, you will earn more income than you pay in taxes both Land and Sales. Commercial properties would likewise want to maximize inventories available for sale to people, and the service economy would want to maximize revenue-generating employment per acre.

So lets say I am a citizen of Scootland and I have a white collar service job near the city but I don’t want to live in the city.

The land use outside of the city would not be efficient because it would not be producing anything from the land; neither would it be income maximizing for anyone but the banks in the form of mortgages, but again the ideal use per acre is for multi-story high density housing or low cost high inventory commercial real estate. So Suburbs just would not be an efficient use per this tax structure, not to say they wouldn’t exist but they would be much smaller.

Edit: It just occurred to me that we would get a series of wealthy countryside villas, because only the wealthy would be able to afford land that doesn’t need to be worked, and they could build a nice and/or luxurious compound on a small enough plot to get recreational use out of it. This mirrors what I believe we saw in the ancient times.

This introduces another problem I hadn’t thought about, so let’s look at that next.

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Question 2: Roads and Highways

The incentives in both the Rurlands and the Cities are essentially income maximization per Acre, but using different methods. The Rurlands method is maximizing income by self sufficiency; the Cities method is maximizing income by density. Surface Area becomes a hot commodity to the sovereign–the Sovereign’s goal is maximizing tax revenue generating surface area of his Kingdom. So let’s look at roads and highways for a moment.

• They are expensive to maintain
• They consume a lot of surface area
• They increase the efficiency of transit between the Cities and the Rurlands.

To put it briefly: Roads present a tradeoff between the movement and sale of goods within the kingdom and income generating surface area.

To my mind this tradeoff incentivizes highways between population centers and is another mark against suburbs, because suburbs consume a lot of surface area without being self sufficient or income generating. We would end up with a system of villages oriented around specific economic activities and highways between them stretching over undeveloped commons. You want quick and efficient transit and you don’t really want a sprawling road system–you just want to get people and goods quickly and easily from point A to point B.

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Question 3: Military and The King’s Peace

I decided to combine considerations of national defense and domestic peace enforcement. The King ought to have a small professional army deployable immediately in case of an invading, aggressive neighbor, but it ought to remain small. the domestic peace enforcers would serve as the next line–trained for combat but deployed to keep the King’s Peace within the national borders. They would be deputized by the Sovereign and be charged with ensuring peace and apprehending people who violate that peace until the Justice system can evaluate their case. In times of military crisis they would be deployed with the army.

The third line would be a pool of volunteers, like the national guard, who train periodically but are otherwise considered civilians. The fourth line would be drafting military age men, let’s call these Irregulars. To reiterate:

• Small professional army, sized appropriately to effectively mitigate risks of immediate military danger.
• Modest force of law enforcers, whose immediate priority is the King’s Peace but as martial men are also prepared for national defense.
• A substantial force of Volunteers, who train periodically for some term but are otherwise considered civilians.
• A huge pool of irregulars: military-age, able bodied, civilian men who are draftable in times of crisis, but not otherwise engaged in military activity.

The sovereign’s responsibility would be to avoid deploying them aggressively, as unjustified use of the populace would be immediately unpleasant to all the subjects; and to keep this military pool large enough to deter aggressive neighbors.

Law enforcement would be funded locally as much as possible, and it would be the responsibility of the Nobles to ensure they are well staffed and supplied. It would be the responsibility of the Sovereign to ensure law enforcers and national-guard volunteers are trained and equipped for combat if necessary.

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Question 4: Education & Universities

I like the idea of education being an ecclesiastical responsibility. This ensures that education is linked to the search for truth and that science, rhetoric, history, are all validly joined as aspects of God’s creation. There would already be a Church in every town and village, so why not include parochial schools as part of that? Tithes both from subjects and from the Sovereign (The sovereign being subject to the Church and not in competition with it) would fund pastoral duties as well as parochial schools.

Advanced studies would take three different tracks: Professional/Vocational schools, Seminaries, and Philosophical universities. Professional/Vocational schools would train students for work in a trade, in a profession, in a service, whichever. I went to school for Accounting, I would have gone to a professional school for accounting. Seminaries obviously would train both Priests and teachers. Philosophical universities would be for the truly advanced and learned men and women who are studying and advancing the search for truth. Seminaries would be funded by the Tithe, Professional and Vocational schools would be funded by private tuition and professional sponsorships/apprenticeships, and Universities would be something of a patronage model, like the arts. A learned man would receive a patronage to conduct his studies at a place of learning in some quest for truth. The patronage would pay for his necessities and a fee to the university to allow him to live there and access the academic resources of the university.

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Question 5: International Trade

We’ve already built out a model for this, somewhat. The policy would be that products would not be permitted to leave the country so long as some domestic need is unmet. For example, if there are starving people anywhere in the country, the King would not permit exporting food. If there was a lumber shortage in one part of the country, we would not export lumber from another. Exporting is for surplus after needs are met.

Foreign investment would be tightly controlled as well. Again–foreign companies wanting to manufacture goods would not be able to export raw materials–raw materials would never be exported, because they must be used to serve domestic needs first. Neither could manufactured goods be directly exported unless domestic demand for them was fully satisfied. Effectively, anything produced and extracted, all economic activity, would be geared first towards satisfying domestic needs, and then be permitted to exit the country. It is the failure of this that leads to a permanent third world and exploitation of resources and workers in other countries. No matter what riches are offered, the most prudent thing is always to ensure domestic needs are met first. This creates an incentive in foreign nations and in domestic manufacturers to ensure domestic needs are met so that they can export to their hearts content.

Importing foreign goods would only be to supplement unmet demand internally. If population exceeds food supply, for example, we would need to import food, but we would not import food after the food supply caught up, because then the cheap import would serve as a disincentive for domestic production. This system would be balanced with tariffs.

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That’s all for now. What else did I miss? In the next installment I think I am going to start exploring defects in the system using other states to illustrate when things don’t work according to the ideal.

AMDG

CCLXIV – The Sovereign People, Cont’d

David the Barbarian and JMSmith are having a great dialog in the comments of my previous article. They touch on a lot of points so rather than interrupt the flow of things I thought I would offer clarifications/ my POV in another article, since the conversation has broadened in scope.

I. Sovereign Majority

JMSmith clarifies a point he made about the majority being sovereign, rather than all the people:

That the majority is, in fact, sovereign becomes clear when we look at a multi-racial state where the races vote as blocs and the minority race always loses. If my candidates and policies never win, I have a very odd sort of “supreme power.”

David joins:

I wonder if we should rather say, Team Red or Team Blue is sovereign at any given time. Democracy is a contest for rule, a game of who can stack the bigger pile of rocks. The people are the rocks, but we can say they have power in a sense because they (individually) pick which pile they go into, but not actually whether their team wins. If the winning team is sovereign, the people are like the fans of each team, who do in some sense say “we won” but more accurately said for the coaches, players, etc. who divide the spoils

My disagreement with JMSmith is on the basis that the people qua sovereign cannot be subdivided. This is confusing because when we look at democratic systems we see only the choices of the majority winning and so think only the majority had a say. We can look at this like the stock market. The price of a given stock doesn’t just reflect the value proposition of the people who decided to buy it. It also cooks in the value proposition of the people who decided not to buy it. The people who decided not to buy drive the price down. The people who decide to buy it drive the price up. The equilibrium is of both price and quantity. The price equilibrium is that above which fewer people would decide to own the stock and below which more people would decide to own the stock. The quantity equilibrium is the number of people above which the price would seek to decrease, and below which the price would seek to increase. The key is that for there to be an equilibrium at all there needs to be some number of people who own the stock and some number of people who do not own the stock.

Likewise, when I’m talking about liberalism we need to get into a mindset that is not focused on the party. Liberalism has two attributes: First, People vote; second, people abide by the outcome of the vote. There can be two parties, five parties, one hundred million parties. It doesn’t matter–what matters is that people are voting. The party system describes what motivates people to vote–kind of like a specific stock in the stock market example. For there to be a majority at all implies there is a minority. Otherwise there is no need to consider that the minority exists.

In JMSmiths example, talking about the multi-ethnic state where voting blocs are organized around race, this is a real problem that happens especially in post-colonial countries. The problem is that when one party, group, team, or race, has a permanent majority then they are the permanent sovereign and all other parties are subject to that party. Especially if the system is structured to favor the one party. The only other alternative is that the minority party who always loses represents a nation-within-a-nation. If that nation becomes big enough, they will (and must) either secede or revolt. It becomes unstable. If they succeed they will form a new nation, if they lose they will be crushed and integrated into the establishment state. This is a consequence of the American Civil War, that the minority was crushed and her people assimilated. The nation-within-a-nation was extinguished and they became simply a minority of voters.

It’s important to note that Catholic social teaching bears the idea of a custodial majority which cares benevolently for the minority, like an elder sibling. That may be an ideal of a Perfectly Formed Catholic (PFC) Society, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be aspired to.

II. Cyclical Sovereignty

David makes this point:

Aristotle defines democracy, or more precisely, the constitutional state, as something like friends ruling each other in turn. That “in turn” seems to me to be the defining feature of democracy from other forms, that there is a regular turnover in rulers, selected from a whole population. But in a constitutional state, I would say whoever’s turn it is to rule is the sovereign. Ochlocracy, which Aristotle calls democracy, is mob rule.

Which JMSmith Joins:

I think DtheB is right that popular sovereignty requires periodic change of government, although we all know that a loyal bloc of voters can be neglected by the party they vote for.

Democracy just is liberalism. The essence of liberalism is this bottom-up conception of political authority, the bottom being the people and the political authority being given to agents of the sovereign. Whether it be iterative rule or oligarchical or Ochlocrical, we need only look for the two attributes of liberalism: People are voting, and abiding by the outcome. I think JMSmith has causality backwards, given what i’ve described in Part I: Popular sovereignty doesn’t require periodic changes of government, but causes periodic changes of government. This is destabilizing, again, for the reasons noted already: We end up with a bureaucratic tree with many layers which repel and work against each other.

The “friends” idea noted by Aristotle implies an understanding of a custodial majority and not an oppressive majority.

III. Rights, Mob Rule, and Enforcement

David continues:

I just reread your original piece and I am groking what it means, I think. The constitutional state is “the people” with “rights,” mob rule is “the people’s sovereignty.” Liberalism is/was the tension between those two. Now looks rather like we are moving to a mix of mob rule and oligarchy, what is now called anarcho-tyranny.

To which JMSmith Adds:

I cannot decide if rights granted by the true sovereign are really sovereignty. The sovereignty of the U.S. government rests on the fact that the U.S. military will fight anyone who try to overrule that sovereignty. If I have a sovereign right to decide what medicines I take, that also rests on the fact that the U.S. military will (for now) fight anyone who try to overrule that sovereignty.

David has misunderstood my point but only a little bit. First is a conflation of the state and the sovereign. The constitutional state is ruled by the people, who are sovereign over the state. Rights are privileges which are granted to a people by the sovereign–the bill of rights in the US Constitution is not a declaration of anything inherent about us, as people but a standing order of permissible acts by the sovereign (which is the people). I mentioned mob rule as a simplification to help understand the concepts I am talking about, but am not proposing that mob rule is a contrary force to liberalism. Honestly, mob rule is probably more purely liberal than a constitutional state.

These clarifications affect JMSmith’s point a little as well. Look at it this way: The sovereign embodies all powers of the state. Agents of the sovereign have authority delegated to them but which does not abrogate the authority from the sovereign. The enforcement of the current establishment of liberalism is a responsibility delegated to the military. It used to be delegated to a well regulated militia (see the Bill of Rights), but that permission was rescinded and has been retained by the professional military class ever since. The US Military is tasked with defense of the nation from threats by external forces and defense of the sovereign peace from threats by internal forces. This is not the root of sovereignty but an attribute of sovereignty. A stable sovereign must be able to enforce his reign, an unstable sovereign cannot enforce his reign.

IV. Tyranny

JMSmith introduced the concept of Tyranny, which David had this to add:

The definition of tyranny I would offer is simply abuse of authority

To which JMSmith had this to say in reply:

If the sovereign is the ultimate authority, he, or she, or it cannot “abuse authority.” Sovereignty is ultimate and this means it is under the judgment of no one (except perhaps God). If I accuse the sovereign of “abuse,” I place myself above the sovereign and effectively declare war on the sovereign.

The reason I kept my definition of Tyranny limited to “positive assertion of some moral evil as a moral good and vice versa is because it captures this idea of abuse as well as Zippy’s original definitions. Zippy’s original was that Tyranny is “a false pretense of authority”. Asserting a claim to the sovereign without legitimacy or licity is not a moral good (I hesitate to call it a moral evil but it is certainly not good). Being a prodigal, oppressive, bellicose, incompetent, improvident leader is also not a moral good–when it rises to an extreme these would be moral evils as well. These would all be examples of Tyranny. It sounds like it’s the same but it’s different in this key respect: Tyranny is based in the morality of the sovereign and not in whether we like them or not. Do you see how “Abuse of authority” is squishier than “asserting moral evil”? The former would change from person to person (see Trump), while the latter has a very high bar for determining what counts as evil.

V. On the Authority of Evil

David and JMSmith have an interesting exchange at the end of the comments thread as it stands right now.

David says:

The command to do evil has no authority. The modern sovereign can no more command evil authoritatively than it can demand authoritatively that I believe 2+2=5. It is an impossibility.

To which JMSmith replies:

Who gets to say what God wants? You, or the sovereign? He answers only to God, you to both God and him. I don’t for a moment deny that a man can, and in some cases must, declare himself a conscientious objector. But he cannot then tell the sovereign how it must deal with a conscientious objector.

I take David to mean that if King Doe orders you to perform an abortion, he has no moral grounds with which to compel you. You have a duty to disobey his order. What JMSmith notes is that if King Doe is otherwise validly, legitimately, licitly King, then he does have the authority to give you commands. So to my reading, a revised rendering of David’s point would be this: The sovereign can command evil but that makes him a tyrant; but as evil the sovereign creates no moral obligation to obey. The sovereign has coercive power qua authority, but cannot compel the citizen on moral grounds.

Big, big thank you to JMSmith and Davidthebarbarian for interesting and thoughtful contributions. I hope this adds some tinder to the fire, I’m enjoying reading your thoughts.

AMDG

CCLXIII – The Sovereign People

Wood, in the comments at his blog, proposed a definition of sovereign as the adjudicator between conflicting claims. I counter-proposed that another definition of sovereign is the “prime lawgiver” (analogous to “prime mover”).

It is important to be able to clearly distinguish who is sovereign because it shows who is running the show. If I went into a grand estate and mistook the butler for the lord, the butlers behavior would be very confusing to me. The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name, so lets figure out how this works in general and in a democracy specifically.

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The foundation of all of this is Zippy’s article on authority, please read it here.

We know some things about a sovereign already.

1. They are holders of a specific office.
2. The Office comes with Power and Authority in the context of governance.
3. They received the office through legitimate means following licit forms.
4. There are people subject to them.

We also know a few things about Governance

1. The sovereign is responsible for choosing (or obliging to be chosen) this thing or that thing.
2. Certain among the areas which the sovereign is responsible for making choices is the national defense, public peace, and treasury.
3. The sovereign is responsible for selecting agents to represent him where he cannot be, and to choose (or oblige to be chosen) as he would choose.

Lets make a few other key clarifications.

1. The Public Peace involves both legislating and enforcement of that legislation. The sovereign sets the legislative agenda and is responsible for enforcing the resultant laws.
   • NB: A “pure” sovereign rules by decree so just is the legislative body; in other governing systems the legislative body is delegated out but still falls under the purview of the sovereign.
2. Justice also falls under the “public peace”, namely the administration of justice and what Zippy liked to focus on, the enforcement of contracts. Public Peace is an expansive term so these clarifications help to show that nothing is missing, it’s just all lumped together.
3. Tyranny is the positive assertion of a moral evil as a moral good or vice versa. A lot of times the word Tyrant is used to denote “a sovereign I don’t like” but we need to have clarity of meaning for the words we use and this definition goes a bit further than Zippy’s.

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A keen observer might think that I’m begging the question in my assumptions. My “NB” notes that lawgiving is included in the responsibilities of the sovereign, which was my point; yet adjudicating between claims is a subset of administering the public peace. So Wood and I both are focusing on some aspect of a sovereign.

In my original article thinking about this, I argued that in a democracy the people are acting as Sovereign. We can evaluate this claim based on the rubric I have described above.

The first hurdle is whether the people occupy an office. I’m going to argue yes but it’s obviously not clear. The fundamental assumption in a liberal democracy is that governance is a social contract, and a contract is where one party gives something to another party, in exchange for some consideration. In this case society gives the government the authority to govern as agents. We can see this in the language of the US Constitution–it opens by invoking the source of it’s authority, We, the People. We the people do hereby establish this government to act on our behalf. “The people” is the office. More specifically, “the voting people” because voting is the consideration for the social contract.

The office comes with power and authority. Power, per Zippy, is the capacity to make this thing happen rather than that thing–say, choosing an agent. Authority is the ability to oblige a subject to choose something. Actually, now that I think about it, this is where it gets tricky. Once we choose an agent they would not be a very good agent if they asked us what to do at every turn. Before technology, a Governor might go off to rule some far flung region of a kingdom and have to operate without direct connection to the King. Once the Governor is appointed by the king, if the governor makes bad decisions the King might not know or might not be easily able to recall the governor. So the office of the people still has authority but that authority is delegated to the agent and the agent operates remotely.

I think the rest of the items as far as sovereign follow naturally if you accept this interpretation of things.

One interesting aspect of this is that since the people occupy a common office, it coheres with the problem of voting. The People are an aggregate office and so the people make an aggregate decision. If you vote and the candidate you want loses, the candidate you don’t want is still your choice. If you agree that voting is a legitimate mechanism for deciding agents of governance, then you are bound by the outcome or to schism against it. You are bound by the outcome not just as a consequence of having voted, but are bound to accept the outcome as your own choice.

The accidents of governance–the presidency, the house, the senate, the supreme court–are all agents, or agents of agents, of the Sovereign People. This is a logical consequence of “bottom up” legitimacy. There can be no kings because no one believes in obedience to authority. The socialist Huey Long was ultimately right: Every man a king!

Democracy is unstable because the Sovereign People are an aggregate and if the Sovereign People cannot decide unambiguously then the authority of the Agents is shaky at best. President Trump won by a narrow margin and he was hampered at every turn, because his boss didn’t 100% trust him.

Here’s another consequence of having a government filled with Agents. Each Agent receives their mandate and then is left alone to operate remotely. They appoint agents. Those agents appoint agents. Then we get a bureaucracy, like tree-rings, who received a commission from an iteration of the Sovereign People that no longer exists. So you end up with an unstable governance because all the agents appointed in the past are not swept out and replaced with new agents with a new commission. This is most obvious in places like the Supreme Court, where left-liberal Judges appointed by left-liberal Presidents appointed by left-liberal Sovereign People last for decades upon decades and influence the administration of justice even when the Sovereign People switch to right-leftists.

AMDG