Long Live the Electoral College

I favor the Electoral College. Direct democracy was a failure in Athens; it is a failure in the US. The American people are easily manipulated by special interests and hardcore, tyrannical socialists like Bernie Sanders.

American politics has become a debate between two self-interested, elite interest groups: the Democratic Party, including academics, professional interests like psychologists, schoolteachers, and lawyers, and some investment banks; and the Republican Party, including economic special interests like pharmaceutical companies, natural resource interests, agribusiness, and some investment banks.

Direct democracy represents one or the other of the corrupt special interest constellations, so it has failed. Big government is incompatible with direct democracy. The delusion of direct democracy is one of the principle methods that the Democrats use to manipulate the public into imagining that the Democrats' corrupt special interests somehow represent the public,

The public has done much worse since the establishment of the current presidential primary system and the ending of the republican principle by the 16th, 17th, and 18th Amendments.

The founders saw the need for a republican form of government, one that combines majority and aristocratic rule. Overt aristocratic rule by the Senate led to the best American statesmanship, a point that De Tocqueville explicitly observes in Democracy in America.

American workers fared much better before the Progressive era than they do today. There was more freedom; wages increased every year; savings rates were at 30%. The use of eminent domain to steal private property was comparatively rare. There was more income equality (less income inequality) under the republican system than under the Progressive and post-New Deal systems.

One of the safeguards the founders put in place was to limit the power of urban areas. Urban areas are prone to totalitarian, extremist impulses, and we witness that today with Mayor de Blasio's Red Guard-like lynching of history and his eagerness to smash statutes of Christopher Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt.

The states signed on to a Constitution (a) that was limited to delegated powers and (b) that weighted voting power to limit the authority of the totalitarian-tending masses in urban areas. One of the ways it did this was the Electoral College.

The principle of delegated powers was overthrown by authoritarian, urban elites (in the person of Hamilton and the party of the Federalists) almost as soon as the Constitution was passed; the principle in the Declaration that government exists by the consent of the governed was overturned in the Civil War; the republican principle was overturned by the Progressives in the 16th, 17th, 18th Amendments. All of these centralizing policies were mistakes, but only the 18th Amendment, Prohibition, was repealed.

The people of rural America would be fools to favor ending the Electoral College.

Letter to Gerald Celente

Gerald Celente just e-mailed his summer issue of Trends Research Journal. It is full of valuable information that offers an imaginative alternative to the legacy media, and I highly recommend it. In this issue Celente advocates direct democracy, a policy that would be a serious error. I respond in the following e-mail:

Thanks for your recent issue. I agree with much of it but not  with your claim that direct democracy will  end America’s economic and political decline.  Your Swiss example is intriguing, especially with respect to Switzerland’s decentralization, but direct democracy is inapplicable to America because the size, culture, community, and  incentives differ.  You note that a Swiss canton can be as small as 14,000, but the average American congressional district is  about 735,000.  Switzerland’s population is less than New York City’s.   

Today’s problems result from pathological incentives--privileged groups’ benefits from lobbying outweigh their costs.  Included in lobbying are the same groups’ control of information, their ownership of the mass media, and their influence in the education system.  Direct democracy won’t change the incentive structure that benefits special interests and inhibits the public’s ability to think rationally about events. Your own subscription fee of hundreds of dollars, which is beyond most people’s ability to pay, evidences the inability of the public to obtain good information. 

Thus, in a direct democracy special interests will continue to influence politicians; the information needed for the public to make intelligent decisions about complex issues will be bounded by bad and ideologically driven education and Wall Street-influenced media; and, added to the mix will be the gullibility of the public that is easily brought to  an emotional frenzy and lacks information not controlled by the state.  As Madison put it in the Federalist Number 10:

…a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

The current decline in America’s economic and political system began more than a century ago with Progressivism, which introduced the referendum and the recall as part of an overall thrust toward (a) democratization coupled with (b) the installation of expert management of the economy, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve Bank.  Regulation reflected the Progressive belief that experts would be free of political pressure while, in areas experts designate,  enhanced democracy would enable the public to express its interests given the structure and options that the experts delineate. The Progressive system has failed—special interests capture experts and mislead the public. The public is not capable of understanding underlying issues, even fairly simple ones like monetary policy.  Environmental issues are complex and I have not met anyone who can explain the details of, for instance, the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill.  Are you certain that it would not have had perverse effects such as forced evictions of honest home owners?  Hence, policies that harm the average American, such as Keynesian and monetarist economic theories, can be sold through the propaganda of supposed experts that convinces even the most intelligent voters.  Orwell was right about language—freedom is easily painted as slavery and the public cannot figure it out.

Direct democracy will be subject  to greater manipulation than the current system. Rather, a reinvention of republicanism, the less obvious solution that Hamilton and Madison proposed, and a sharp Jeffersonian  limitation of government power across the board are needed. Democracy has failed. Its enhancement will be worse.  

Disempowering Rather than Disbanding Congress

Contrairimairi just sent me an e-mail about a Natural News post by Mike Adams. The author argues that because of electronic telecommunication:

"...instant communication is available to almost everyone. A new law being proposed in Washington could be instantly read -- and voted on -- by the People all across America. The Internet has made the whole purpose behind the U.S. Congress obsolete... irrelevant. Why do Americans need someone else to represent them when we can all just read and vote on the bills ourselves? In an age of instant communications, Congress is no longer needed."

The author misconstrues the reason for republican as opposed to democratic government. In fifth century Athens, 2,200 years before the American revolution, direct democracy did exist. The problems were not a matter of communication because Athens was small. Aristotle did not see democracy to be as good as aristocracy. He had seen democracy first hand in Athens. The problems with it were severe. They had to do the emotional nature of groups and mobs; the willingness of the populace to succumb to tyrants; and the eagerness of opportunistic poor people to steal the property of those more successful than themselves. Crowd psychology is easily manipulated. Lynchings and mass murder have been associated with democracy as well as tyranny (which Aristotle saw as the perverse form of monarchy). Aristotle preferred aristocracy to democracy, but held that a mixed form of government is most preferable.

The Founders were aware of these arguments, and equally, were concerned with Aristotle's claim that democracy amounted to rule by the needy. The many will not acquire as much property as the few, and will pass laws to deprive the competent and successful of property, arrogating it to themselves. This will cause the economy to deteriorate as competent people cease to put forth effort.

In our world, the existence of electronic media permits elites to manipulate public opinion in their favor. The ease of communication that television and the Internet permit means that hundreds of millions can think like a single mob. Plans like the bailout and the health insurance bill will seem on the surface to support the poor, in the case of the bailout to prevent unemployment and in the case of the health care bill to make coverage universal. But the effect of these laws is inevitably to further the ends of economic elites.

More democracy gives greater power to the elite power structure. The power of the mass media is too great for bloggers to compete. Even conservative bloggers allow the Wall Street-dominated mass media to control the terms of public debate and harp endlessly about the brain-dead mass media. They do not trust themselves to generate their own ideas, and remain slaves of the Wall Street power structure.

Charles de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu developed the idea of mixed government further. He argued that the republican form of government is best supported by a federation or federal form of government. The Founding Fathers studied Montesquieu carefully. The Swiss provided an example of a federation that was stable.

The Founders argued that the mixed form of government would work best, and they were right. The American republic has lasted longer than any other.

But Aristotle argued that all forms of government are unstable, and that they transmute into each other. We are seeing that now. The instability began with Progressivism, which enhanced the amount of democracy. The high degree of democracy led to the manipulability of public opinion by the power elite and the increasing amount of lobbying and special interest power. Repeatedly, led by the left (whose impulses, including its advocacy of socialism have repeatedly served Wall Street's interests), America has instituted laws that seem to serve the mass but instead serve the wealthy. This has led to the same pattern that will result from Mike Adams's plan in Natural News: more democracy on the surface coupled with greater power in fact to the power elite.

A better approach would be to disempower Congress. That means reinventing federalism to download power to the states and end Congress's ability to pass the bullsh*t laws that is has. Spin off the federal regulatory structure to the states (including social security) and allow each state to decide how to pass laws. The competition that will result will infinitely improve decision making.