CDXLIV – Judgmental About Tucker

Or, A Grumpy Ramble About The Banks

In keeping with an unintentional theme of increasingly misanthropic screeds against television and media personalities, I have another report to share of things I saw on the gym TV that just didn’t make sense to me.

The funny thing is, my new state is a little more red than my old state of beloved memory, Virginia. So instead of CNN, and MSNBC dominating the televisions, it is a little more Fox News, a little more BBC. Not that BBC is biased the way Fox News is biased but international broadcasts present American news with a little more clarity.

So in the evening it was time for Tucker Carlson to address sweaty news junkies. I couldn’t hear anything my boy Tuck was saying but I could tell the broadcast was about the recent bank-run and the governments response. I am an accountant by trade and interested in matters financial, as long time readers will know, so I my curiosity was piqued by this whole affair. I have a sense of what is wrong with the banking industry, but what did Tucker have to say about it?

Tucker Carlson took this opportunity to decry the source of these ailments: Diversity and Inclusion standards in the financial industry. Instead of a meritocracy we’ve become a adjectiveocracy. Tucker took us back to 2008 and the bail-outs and the Diversity and Inclusion requirements imposed on the financial industry, and traces the origins of this crisis to that crisis.

Here’s the thing–Tucker Carlson might even be right. He probably has a valid point that selecting for people of different arbitrary qualities rather than people with competence and skill degrades the quality of our financial machine.

But that’s not THE problem here. That is A problem. It might even be a significant problem. But it’s not THE problem.

This is where I digress from yappin’ about Tuck and start talking about the financial industry. If you want to read more about Tuck, skip ahead. I’ll put a flag to let you know you’ve arrived.

Banking Bonanza

Here is how for-profit banks work. You deposit a sum of money into your account, along with a bunch of other people. The bank now has a big sum of money to play with. Here is the balance the Bank must strike: How much money does it need to have on hand to supply people with their regular cash needs? Let me amend that–what is the minimum cash balance required to keep on hand to keep the people supplied? There are different answers to the question. Let’s say it’s 10%.

Then what does the bank do with the 90% remaining? It HAS to invest it. It invests in loans–personal, automotive, mortgage loans that almost every bank offers. These are easy, but returns depend on the interest rate which is governed by the Fed. These returns pay salaries, pay interest to depositors, and overall grease the wheels of running a bank. When interest rates are low, everyone wants loans because they are affordable and often a better investment than savings. When interest rates are high, people start having trouble with their loans because they can no longer afford the interest rate. Some loans default, some loans settle, some (few) loans continue to be paid back reliably by belt-tightening citizens with money to spare. If a majority of the banks income is in loans, when interest rates go up the at-risk loan profile of the bank changes dramatically, and a bank can go from solvent to insolvent very quickly.

Another investment for banks is things like the stock market. The stock market is inherently volatile and offers some returns. The returns you can get from the stock market come in two forms: Selling an investment that has matured in value–i.e., you bought the stock low and you can sell it high; or, dividends from long term investments. Dividends are secure and predictable, “buy-low-sell-high” is not really predictable and relies more on horse-sense than science.

Another investment for banks is things like bonds, treasuries, currency speculation, real estate speculation, things like that. Bonds and treasuries are more stable, because they are from the government or other companies; speculation is unstable because it is by definition speculative.

Another thing that for-profit banks do that absolutely boggles my mind is that they go public. This is what I think the biggest problem is.

A for-profit bank will sell shares on the stock market, and wait for their stock to mature so they can get juicy cash from public investments. If the economy is bad, the stock market falls, and it has the opposite effect. Suddenly your equity-generating dynamo starts loosing money and going public suddenly seems like a very bad idea.

Let’s think about this for a moment. What exactly are you investing in? Look at my series on Rai Stones for an in-depth discussion of this. Equity of a company should represent the thing they have that no one else has. When you buy an ownership share of a company, you aren’t just buying a paper instrument, you are buying a part of the whole business. If you are a widget manufacturer, you make widgets. If you are an accounting firm, you sell accounting services. What do banks manufacture? What do they sell? How do banks make money?

Banks make money by investing other peoples money in variously risky financial instruments. So buying a share of stock is buying into the investment of other peoples money so that you can get a cut of the profit earned from the investment of other peoples money. A bank that has a good stock price means that it has a lot of other peoples money or it is earning a lot of income on it’s investments of other peoples money.

When interest rates go up, it becomes harder for a publicly traded bank to make money on its investments of other peoples money, and it’s stock price goes down because it can’t make money the way it used to.

That’s the model we are working with here. So what exactly happened?

Silicon Valley Bank invested in long term bonds. The way bonds work is you pay a big sum up front and earn an income over time, depending on the interest rate. The bonds are optimized for a certain interest rate, so when rates change, bonds can stop being useful as an investment. SVB was stuck with a lot of bonds and interest rates had gone up a lot, so the question SVB had was–do we hold on to the investments and hope the interest rates go back to where they were, or do we sell them as they are and eat a loss and raise capital through another way?

Put another way–do we keep the reduced income because we have sunk so much into it, or do we scrape back what cash we can and try to do better investments? SVB made a logical decision to sell the investments at a magnificent loss and announced to investors that they needed to come up with cash. This scared the investors who questioned the solvency of the bank, who sold their investments which aggravated SVB’s cash needs, and created a death spiral. Not only this, but depositors came a-knocking to withdraw their deposits–the lump sum which SVB was investing in the first place, and so could not provide. A run on the bank precipitated, where depositors wanted all their money out and the bank could not provide it.

Note what is going on here: All of these errors precede government intervention. SVB made a bad investment and had to eat dirt because the economy is a dynamic and changing environment. The bad investment panicked the stock holders because it is a publicly traded bank–error compounds error. The panic led to depositors panicking and trying to take THEIR money out–error compounds error compounds error.

All of this was wrong and broken before we even get to the point of government regulation. The governments response was bad and doesn’t help solve any of these problems. But do you see how there are plenty of problems with how things are set up before we even get to that point?

Talkin’ ‘Bout Tuck Again

Tucker Carlson missed the mark on this specific issue. Diversity and Inclusion is not even the worst thing about our grossly dilapidated financial industry. He picked that topic because it was politically expedient and would get people fired up. But it completely misses the point of what is wrong with the banking industry and with our government.

Other banks are struggling and may fail because of the structural problems with how they operate as banks, and not because regulators recently appointed are of a diverse background. The government response one might suggest even has incentivized failures so that they can maximize recoverable capital while the getting is good.

AMDG

CCCXC – The Definition of Liberalism

Libertarians are the perfect liberals. “To each his own, mind your own business, what are they doing to bother me?”

Libertarianism “wins” the argument by reducing the scope of concern to zero. If two men love each other, what business is it of mine what they do in the privacy of their home?

What else is allowed in the privacy of ones own home? Political beliefs? Religious beliefs? Who cares, live and let live, right?

Lets illustrate with a parable. So lets imagine that there was a philosophy out there that was different from libertarianism. First you hear its name in the back pages of the local news: Gerunding (a name i made up). You say, “Gerunding, huh? To each his own, what they believe is none of my business!”

Then a Gerundine moves into your neighborhood. You google a bit—Gerunding believes in political victory at all costs. That sounds extreme! But hey, to each his own, right?

Then one night, you hear glass break and your Gerundine neighbor is standing over you with a sword at your throat. You learn that Gerunding’s sole focus is exterminating libertarians from the face of the earth. Hey, live and let live, right? And then you die.

Libertarianism requires the libertarian to allow beliefs which undermine their own. And if you talk to Libertarians, they all deny this. The killer in my hyperbolic parable isn’t living by libertarian rules, he is crossing the line by trying to kill people. But then the game is up: the libertarian has confesses to being VERY interested in what his neighbors believe in the privacy of their own homes, and is willing to deploy the state to enforce this behavioral ideal. So they aren’t libertarians, they just play one to try to claim the moral high ground to win arguments.

Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity are easy to agree to until someone that hates you starts winning elections.

CCLIV – Thought Experiment

Expanding on the seed of an idea in a previous post:

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I’ve acknowledged before the seeming paradox of a liberal democracy: Who is sovereign in a democracy? Is it the President, or the people that appointed him? Who has to listen to whom? In this thought experiment, let’s resolve this paradox definitively on one side and see how it looks.

Vox Imperii

The people, collectively, are the Imperial Sovereign. The People rule by fiat, their edicts have the force of law. The legislature is a court of appointed nobles–nobles appointed by the collective Emperor. As the court of nobles, they clamor for the affections of the sovereign and seek to formalize his edicts. The President is the chief counselor of the bureaucracy–the prime minister, after a fashion. He represents the interests of the bureaucracy to the collective Emperor, reporting on troop dispositions or the reserves in the treasury, or the various other necessities incurred by a far flung population. The collective Emperor is hard to appeal to, so the President must enlist the help of the court of nobles, and advocate for the bureaucracy in the legislative agenda. Effectively, the legislature is where the will of the collective Emperor and the will of the governing bureaucracy interact. The president can seek to influence, but the Emperor has true power. The Supreme Court then represents the interests of the bureaucracy across time, and validates contemporary issues against the collective Emperor’s past edicts for consistency.

The system of checks and balances only works if each of the branches are independent and disinterested. There is a fourth branch that is, per se the Masses, and it is uncontrolled for. The Masses then can grow out of proportion with the other branches, and tip the scales. If a rodent can push a button to get a pellet, it will learn to do so even to it’s detriment. The Masses don’t have a button to push, but can use their uncontrolled influence of the legislature to indulge itself and enable every ill it desires.

A natural follow up question: how do you control for the 4th branch?

I think the answer is simple: A strong executive.

AMDG

CCLII – Vote for Fiefdom

My trail of thought for how I got here started with Dune. I’m going to see that film this weekend and I loved the book and so I looked it up and refreshed my memory with some of the fictional politics. In the book, certain noble houses hold planets in fief, and the triggering action for the book is that the fiefdom of Arrakis is transferred from House Harkonnen to House Atreides. There’s a computer game called Crusader Kings which I played some years ago which allowed me to simulate royal politics of crusade-era Europe. Transitions of power were always destabilizing–when a Duke died then getting the next Duke to stabilize his reign was always a challenge. Usurpers from other demesne, peasant revolts, incompetence, all of these things came together to make transitions challenging. I know this was a game so maybe it was simpler in real life, but I’m not very familiar with the realities of crusade-era Europe. If there is a resource someone knowledgeable thinks I could read, please let me know.

I connected this thought to American politics, thinking about “foreigners” running for political offices in different states. The Bush family was not from Texas, yet George W. affected Texan charm for political ends. In the Virginia elections ongoing right now, Terry McAuliffe is from New Jersey as I recall, yet is pitching himself as a Virginian. It feels like fiefdoms. Yet, with the cleverness of voting, the political aparatus known as Liberalism gets to suggest two Dukes to Virginians and we get to vote for the one least likely to be destabilizing. It’s a very clever process–Liberalism determines that there will be a change in power; if Liberalism puts anyone they like in power, they risk destabilization and peasant revolts; if Liberalism offers two Candidates then the peasants can choose the least bad one; if peasants choose then they have to live with their choice, even if it’s a bad choice. All the liberal apparatus must do is proffer two options for the peasants to choose, and it guarantees stability unless something dramatic turns the peasants against them.

This is another way in which voting at all endorses the mechanism of Liberalism. There is no vote you can make to diminish liberalism. It’s like tweeting about how bad twitter is: You can complain all you like as long as you complain using their tool.

AMDG

(e) – Afterthought about Bad Sovereigns

It is easy to be obedient to a good Sovereign. It is hard to be obedient to a bad Sovereign. But the bad Sovereign needs our obedience more because our obedience (and also our forbearance) lends itself to both social stability and our sanctification. There are many stories of Saints whose path to holiness passed through a monastery with an ill tempered superior.

Our duty of obedience goes up to and no further than the point of Tyranny, where they become an evil Sovereign by enforcing some moral evil as truth, and our duty becomes one of disobedience.

I’ll leave you to figure out how that works in a Democracy.

CCXLIX – Winning With Parasitism

Wood over at his blog made a quip about liberalism, to which I had this to say:

“Liberalism wins by making you think that liberalism is a means to winning and not the end to be won.”

I want to follow up on this idea by thinking about what we mean by winning.

I think what Wood meant in his original post was political victory. By engaging in Liberalism–i.e. liberal institutions and rituals–any given group can achieve victory. It’s the “embarrassed millionaire” theory of politics. John Steinbeck said “In America, there are no poor, only temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. This was an economic point, but likewise, with liberalism, there are no lay-folk, only temporarily embarrassed Presidents. Winning in this sense means taking control of the political system through liberalism.

I added to Wood’s point by suggesting that, beyond serving as a means to winning (political victory), Liberalism is the end to be won. I wasn’t thinking about anything specific but considering it now, this takes a Darwinian sense.

If political ideologies are in a basic world and competing for fitness to survive, then Liberalism wins by reproducing. We know by discussing our faith that Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi can help us to be intentional about our faith life. It works with political ideology too: Your actions influence and are influenced by your beliefs and your prayers. In other words, Liberalism cares that you vote and not who you vote for because when you vote you consent that the mechanism is appropriate to address the problem foremost in your mind.

Lets keep the Economic metaphor going for a moment. Entrepreneurship is a mechanism for mobilizing resources to satisfy some unmet demand. If I demand clean gutters, an Entrepreneur can come along and offer to clear them in exchange for money. If I pay him, I am consenting that the exchange is appropriate to resolving the problem. Exchanging goods (money) for services (clean gutters) is a reasonable way of solving the problem.

If I offered the entrepreneur high-fives in exchange for clean gutters, and the entrepreneur accepts, then the entrepreneur has established that high-fives are a reasonable means of solving problems. The entrepreneur must accept high-fives both from the next customer and the next engagement with the same customer, or else be inconsistent with his own beliefs. Likewise, because one problem has been resolved with a sequence of high-fives, you have learned that high fives are reasonable and will try to solve other problems by offering high-fives as payment.

Likewise, if the problem you have in mind is “the tax rate is too high” and politicians offer to lower taxes in exchange for your vote, then when you vote you are consenting that voting is a reasonable means of exchange to resolve that problem. But really–politicians can’t promise to lower taxes the way the entrepreneur can promise to clean your gutter. So the politician can promise to try to lower taxes.

Both the voter and the politician are bound by that exchange. You agree that votes are reasonable compensation for attempting to solve a problem; the politician agrees that attempts at solving a problem are worth a vote. Both parties have consented and both parties must live by that consent.

Liberalism then perpetuates it’s species by inducing little acts of liberalism which allow the ideology to lay it’s eggs in our brain. Repeated acts of liberalism feed the parasitic eggs, and eventually the eggs hatch and larvae eat us out from the inside and we become empty husks with single minded loyalty to liberalism as an ideology. Liberalism has won.

Voting is a good macguffin for Liberalism because it is the primary means of exchange, just as money is the primary economic means of exchange. This is why when I refused to vote for the first time, I felt liberated. Some eggs in my brain atrophied and died, and liberalism as an ideology lost the battle for survival in my brain alone.

Another question becomes natural from this point: What other ideologies are competing for attention? What are their means of exchange?

A barter system is where both parties to a transaction receive some solution to a problem in exchange for giving some solution to a problem. I need a cow, you need a pig, I will give you my pig for your cow. Money is not essential to productively solve problems, but economics is fundamentally about solving problems and meeting demand. For lay-folk, politics is about our relationship with government, and just as money is not essential to solving problems, neither is voting essential to the relationship with government. So the alternative which I subscribe to is what I will call Neo-Feudalism. The problem to be solved is administration of the Public Good; the means of exchange is obedience. I want the public good to be maintained, the Sovereign promises to do so and in exchange asks for my obedience. I am bound by this exchange, so the next sovereign that comes in I must make the same offer and so make the same exchange, or else be inconsistent with my own beliefs.

AMDG

CCXLV – Keeping Up with President Jones

A feature of democracy is that anyone can rule. It is also a flaw.

When even Joe the Plumber can be King, instead of thinking of obedience to the King, everyone thinks “well if he can do it I could surely do much better”.

Democracy kills the relationship between Sovereign and Subject because instead of the subjects learning to love their sovereign, they begin planning to do his job better. It’s like keeping up with the Joneses but the Joneses are King so the only way to one-up is to be a better King.

CCXXXIV – The Law of the Gaps

It’s time to formalize a point I have made over and over again in articles not explicitly about this topic. The idea is that the Law lags behind society.

There are a few principles which I’ve settled on for this idea. Let’s work backwards through them.

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Principle #4 – The importance of Law increases proportionally with Population Density. This makes intuitive sense: if there is a 1% chance that you will have a disagreeable encounter with any given person, in densely populous areas you will have more disagreeable encounters than in a loosely populous area. In densely populous areas, there is a requirement for more law enforcement because of this, and so the Sovereign Peace is monitored more closely. One of the functions of law is to resolve conflicts, so citizens of cities can rest easy knowing that if they get into conflicts, the party on the side of law will be the party protected. Conversely, on the frontier, law enforcement has a light presence because there are fewer people and fewer disagreeable encounters. Most people on the frontiers learn to resolve disputes inter-personally, because the Law is not near at hand. The Law matters less to people on the frontier because there is less need to invoke the Law to resolve disputes; the Law matters more to people in cities because there is more need to invoke the Law to resolve disputes.

Principle #3 – Government makes Laws to clarify gaps in what Society agrees is important. Lets approach this in a roundabout way: Laws can be written either to expressly state only those things which are permitted (lets call this positive law), or they can be written to expressly state only those things which are not permitted (lets call this negative law). The scope of possible positive laws is infinite, so are typically not the way Laws are written. Most laws–at least the Laws in the United States–are varieties of negative law. Negative Laws take the form of prohibitions on certain behaviors. Which behaviors are prohibited are determined by what Society thinks is important enough to prohibit. The gaps that need clarifying are where there are nuances or disagreements within society about how or what needs to be prohibited. Where Society agrees universally on something, there is no necessity of a law to codify it unless there is a risk of rogue citizens violating that law.

Principle #2 – Social Mores are antecedent to Law. This is implicit in the discussion of #3 above: Society must have some set of values to serve as the basis of law, and law follows that. When the law is written, it applies equally to all citizens, but can only be enforced where law enforcement is present. So law is less prevalent on the frontier and more prevalent in cities, Social Mores govern every human interaction and do not depend on the presence of law enforcement. Social mores keep the peace where law enforcement does not or cannot. Laws serve to strengthen or clarify these mores where necessary.

Principle #1 – Politeness is the true Law of the Land. Politeness is defined as the agreed upon customs of courtesy defined by society: It is the specific set of social mores which govern behavior. Citizens of cities tend to be rude–that is because the law is readily available to enforce the peace. Citizens of frontiers tend to be polite–that is because the law is not readily available to enforce the peace. What people consider polite will do more to preserve the Sovereign Peace than what people consider legal.

More to come on this topic–this opens the doors to a lot of areas and it is worth giving these ideas their due attention.

AMDG

CLIX – More on Public Good

I want to focus here on the idea of government as an emergent behavior from society.

Lets build this model carefully. An individual is a unit within a family. A family is a group of people connected through blood. A community is a group of families connected by geography. A society is a group of communities connected by culture. We know that behavior of large groups is somewhat different from behavior of individuals. The fact that a society shares a culture implies that there are certain behaviors which are preferable, and which they agree to reward; and other behaviors which are not preferable, and which they agree to punish. “Lord of the Flies” is a great example of looking at emergent behaviors in an isolated community. If society all agrees on some priority, nothing more needs to be said about it, the society will align itself with satisfying that priority. It is when a society has disagreements internally about it’s priorities that it needs a formal conflict resolution structure. In “Lord of the Flies”, the Conch was the inception of proto-governmental formality and conflict resolution–or would have been, if everyone agreed to it as a local custom. The system of Judges were established by God through Moses to mediate disputes among the Hebrews before they arrived in Israel. The root cause of government, we might say, is conflict resolution.

Recording every outcome of every judgement is what became the English system of common law. The American system expanded on the idea of the Magna Carta by outlining some fundamental precepts in the form of the Constitution, which are prior to common law judgements and inform the basis for judicial and legislative resolutions. Specialization is the driving force behind Government as an institution. If a few can resolve the resolution of conflicts, then the rest of Society can take care of itself and all those priorities which Society agrees need to be satisfied. We get a picture of a society wherein, on all those things society agrees on, they are managed multiply and separately by society; and on all those things society disagrees on, they are managed by a few appointed for the purpose of conflict resolution in what we call government.

There are a couple fundamental truths we can add into the discussion at this point. Society does not have it’s own interest, but each subset within society does. An individual we can generally assume will act self-interestedly, likewise a family, and a community. It’s this interaction of self-interests that form the culture that underlies society. Government, as a subset within society, also follows its own interest. It is no longer an emergent property of society, but an institution unto itself, and as such interested in it’s own self preservation.

None of this leads to social discord unless or until some of these subsets begins having priorities that are contrary to the priorities of other elements of society. When one community feuds with another over some issue, they both agree that Government is the appropriate means of conflict resolution. But what if the Government is at odds with a community? Who arbitrates?

There are a few possible answers. 1) The disagreeing parties can come to some sort of compromise, and that can be documented and added into the corpus of common law, hopefully avoiding a similar dispute in the future. 2) The non-government party can overrule the government party, and impose it’s priorities on the government. 3) The government party can overrule the non-government party and impose it’s priorities on the rest of society. 4) The two parties go their separate ways; the government keeping those elements of society whose priorities align with it; the disagreeing party forming it’s own government that more closely aligns with it’s priorities.

When Are You Going To Get To Public Good?

I’ve argued previously that Public Good is that which leads people to God. I’ll amend that by saying that Public Good ought to lead people to God. Otherwise, public good tends to just be that which the public considers good. The government reflects society insofar as it governs and legislates in a way that aligns with what Society already values, and it’s fundamental purpose is to arbitrate disputes within that society.

I’ll add one wrinkle: I’ve been thinking of Government as if it were a Liberal Democracy. How is this different if we were dealing with a Monarchical sovereign?

Food for thought. To be continued!

AMDG

CLVI – Public Good

In my previous article about what Good is, I touched on some points which merit further exploration.

I discovered the question of Public Good in this dialogue, here.
I further explore the question of public good as it pertains to COVID, here.

So we return now to the Public Good. In my previous article, I conclude with this claim: Goodness moves you towards God, the greater good moves others towards God, and the greatest good is God.

Obviously, people have many more concerns than just their relationship with God. Telling someone a decision helps their relationship with God doesn’t put food in their belly. So we need to put some parameters on this claim that the “greater good” pertains specifically to God.

(NB: I use Public Good, Greater Good, Social Good, etc almost interchangeably. I will try throughout this article to use public good, exclusively. I am not drawing any distinctions between the three ideas.)

Proper Order

I think we can begin this discussion by identifying what about the Public Good is properly ordered. The first thing that comes to mind in this case is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It comes in five ascending levels, the first of which is “Physiological Needs”, the things we need to survive. Denying a human the things they need to survive is disordered. Likewise, having an excess of any of these physiological needs would be disordered. I need a shelter. I don’t need twelve shelters. I would suffer if I had no shelter.

So Maslow’s hierarchy is not exactly a description of what is properly ordered, so much as a way to talk about proper order. At it’s most fundamental, the Physiological needs is getting at questions of life: Humanity has the right to life, granted by God. Properly ordered society embraces this right and fulfills these needs within that society.

The second level of Maslow’s hierarchy is “Safety Needs”. We might more accurately refer to this as “security”: Physical security, Economic security, Food security, etc. The Constitution approaches this when it says we have the right to property; the Declaration of Independence approached this by saying “pursuit of happiness”. If we are not secure in our possessions, then we are in a state of anxiety and danger. The disruption of our security in it’s multiple and various forms threatens the life and livelihood on the first level.

Excursus: Life and Livelihood

Especially regarding Coronavirus, I like to bring up that support for life and livelihood are in tension. People are having to forego economic security in defense of physiological needs. This is where there is tension: Some might argue that the Government is seeking to support the most fundamental needs of society; Maslow’s hierarchy describes what ought to be taken care of first. Others might argue that the Government is violating “Safety Needs” which for those not afflicted with disease is putting their “Physiological Needs” in jeopardy.

These aren’t mutually exclusive arguments. Both can be true, but this is where we get at the question of “Public Good”. What is the best way to address the Public Good? A thesis is forming as I’m writing this that it’s less a pyramid and more concentric circles. The “Safety Needs” rung contains within it the “Physiological Needs”, and one cannot be addressed in isolation from the other. I never plan my articles, they are generally stream of consciousness, so lets discover together where this idea takes us.

The Responsibility of Government

Subsequent items on Maslow’s pyramid are things which the government cannot provide but which the government can promote and encourage: Love and Belonging, Esteem, and Self Actualization.

If we accept the argument that the responsibility of Government is the Public Good, and if we further accept that Public Good necessarily implies proper order, then a few questions remain: What is the scope of allowed activities for such a government; how does this government measure it’s success in those activities; how do we differentiate responsibilities of government qua government and those responsibilities of society, broadly conceived.

In order to answer those questions, we have to ask additional questions. How much self determination is allowed to society? To clarify: Some might argue that Government is a spontaneous construction of a society to govern itself. That might be true on some level, but once it congeals into an institution, it becomes separate and distinct from society. That is to say: Society governs itself through emergent flocking behavior, whereas government is more akin to formation flying. Flocking is the spontaneous but coordinated motion of a society pursuing its own ends; government is the ordered and decisive motion of an institution pursuing its own ends.

Self determination for society is kind of like agency, in that it is an inherent feature of any human society. This is what people mean when they say that America was founded on Christian values: The ten commandments form the basis for our system of law. Society determined for itself that certain behaviors were objectionable, so it codified them into law. If the law changes, society will be reluctant to embrace it; if society changes, the law will be slow to adapt. These two forces are in tension, and thus are controlled.

But in order to prevent the tail from wagging the dog, a society ought to self-determine itself first, and embrace the law-giving order of government second. This is compatible with subsidiarity, that things ought to be addressed at the smallest possible level. So I would argue any tool available to government ought to be had in greater abundance in society.

So now we can talk about the allowed activities of government.

I’m cutting this off here because I think I’ve pulled on one too many threads and I’m losing focus. More to come on this.