Theme: Constitutional Order

http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most-successful-political-idea-20th-century-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be-doPROPERTARIANISM: **ALL LAW IS “THEORY” AND IS BOUND BY REQUIREMENTS OF THEORY**

The Economist finally gets on board and criticizes democracy. TWENTY-TWO YEARS after most of us. It was pretty clear by 1992 that democracy was a failed experiment. It is pretty clear to those of us who specialize in political economy, that FEDERALISM is also a failure.

REASONS WHY THE ECONOMIST ARTICLE IS MERELY “OK”

Because, while the author does raise awareness of the failure of democracy, he does not address the reason’s for that failure:

1) RENT SEEKING AND BUREAUCRACY: Succeeds in identifying rent-seeking and bureaucracy as the structural problem that democracy cannot correct. But does not address that privatization and competition solve that problem.

2) RULE OF LAW AND CALCULABILITY : Fails to identify the difference between majoritarianism (bad) and rule of law (good). And therefore fails to Hayek’s argument requiring the CALCULABILITY of the rule of law and legal processes requires to change law under rule of law.

3) REPRESENTATION vs LOTTOCRACY: Fails to identify that the problem with republican democracy is that we have chosen the worst of all worlds: elected representatives. When we could also choose between direct democracy, economic democracy, lottocracy, lottocratic citizen juries, and flexibility to add additional houses to represent each class’s interests. All of these solutions solve the problem of interests, and return us to the original purpose of democracy: lottocracy. (The common law is lottocratic which is why it’s so successful.)

4) THE TRADEOFF OF SCALE: Fails to identify the reason micro-nationalism succeeds and macro-nationalism fails: That is because there is a trade off between the trade and insurance benefits of scale on the one hand, and the similarity of interests on another.

5) THE PROBLEM OF MORAL DIVERSITY: Fails to identify the problem of moral diversity in different family structures, and the impossibility of reconciling competing moral codes except by degrading the higher moral code. **All moral compromises are devolutionary.** Truth is not a matter for compromise. The greater the suppression of free riding, the more moral the rule. Differences then, are not matters for compromise. They are matters for evolution or devolution.

ALL LAW IS THEORETICAL, AND ALL LAWS, THEORIES

What we have learned about humans from the discipline of science is that we must always adhere to two rules, in articulating any theory, because ALL LAW is a theory, and is bound by the same constraints as scientific theory.

Revision of law, is equally a revision of theory, bound by the same constraints as all theory.

Those two rules are:

— a) Calculability and;

— b) Operational language.

In the context of law, ‘Calculability’ is a property of Empiricism (observation) that refers to the necessity that all monetary actions are made visible – and therefore there is a prohibition on pooling and laundering data through the use of aggregates. This implication is vast, and applies to all laws in all circumstances.

For example, taxes are pooled into general funds, and their use discretionary, rather than taxes (fees) are collected for the purpose of particular contracts, and when those contracts are complete the taxes (fees) expire. Cause and effect are broken. Laws are not contracts that expire. They must be. Otherwise they would be ‘incalculable’.

(continued)

PART II. See my next post: The Canons Of Theory (which is the philosophical basis of Propertarianism.)