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.  

Americans Are Unfit for Self-Government

President Andrew Jackson suggested that when expedience became the basis on which the Constitution was interpreted, then Americans would no longer be fit for self governance. That day passed a century ago.

I have watched the City of New York, once a great industrial, artistic, cultural, and port center deteriorate and all of its vibrancy wither. It has become a cash cow for real estate and Wall Street interests. All of its innovative callings have fled. This was done in accordance with mandates of the City's democratic vote: urban renewal, taxes, corruption, city projects, expressways, rent control, and mismanagement.

I have watched the nation raise taxes on its citizens so that Americans are no longer free, but are wage slaves to the government, paying half or more of their incomes to corrupt, morally depraved programs like Social Security and the Department of Education.

I have watched Americans accept the debasement of their currency without effort to understand the relationships among banking, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Bank and diminishing American expectations.

I have watched Americans allow their educational system become a plaything for extremist cranks who indoctrinate, brainwash and defraud, but do not educate.

I have watched Americans passively accept waste and failed bureaucracies: the Department of Labor; the Department of Energy; the Department of Education; the Department of Health Education and Welfare. The taxes extracted to subsidize these are paid without protest by brainwashed fools, made dull witted by the American educational system.

I have watched American culture deteriorate to the point where the flagrant stupidity that passes as entertainment and the ignorance that passes as news shocks and disorients the observer, and makes me wonder about the possibility of some widespread mental contagion.

Because Americans are unfit for self government, they have allowed a succession of special interests, Wall Street, education, employers' associations, labor unions and health care lobbies to dictate spending and taxation levels, government programs and tax systems, silently and smugly accepting the abuses of corrupt lobbies.

If future generations might look back and recall the contribution of 20th century Americans to the course of history, they will remark that this was a people that was given a great nation, and through cupidity and stupidity proved that republicanism does not work.