Dispensing with government: rostered administration
Western nations use elected representational government (ERG). The notion behind this type of organisation is that people, grouped by geographic region, elect representatives - people whose task it is to determine and further the will and interests of their electorate.
Winston Churchill is famous for saying that democracy is the worst of all possible systems, except for all the other ones. It is more than reasonable to assume he meant ERG, but ERG and democracy are not the same thing, and so I categorically disagree with him. Believe it or not you can have democracy without any government at all. No, I don’t mean anarchy, I mean administration. We’ll get to that presently.
The precepts of ERG are in general noble, but the fact remains that any government is such a concentration of power that it begs for exploitation. Thus we get political parties: semi-commercial groups whose explicit purpose is to exploit that concentration of power.
Membership in a such a group is a gross conflict of interest. It used to astonish me that such people are eligible to hold office. Then it came to me that this is much the same as legalising the personal use of marijuana: if we embrace the inevitable, we can have orderly public use rather than a clandestine debacle.
There are a number of problems inherent in ERG. We will examine some of them, then consider an alternative that has the qualities for which ERG is prized, yet is exempt from its most profound flaws.
- ERG encourages corruption by providing significant opportunity and motive.
- ERG is a form of government rather than administration.
- The party-based implementation of ERG is not and cannot be representative.
- ERG selects from the pool of people who run for office. The people who want to tell other people how to live are exactly the wrong people to give such power.
- ERG inexorably slides from freedom-to to freedom-from.
Elections stop the nation and cost a mint, so ERG uses “terms of office” of several years to mitigate the overheads. Unfortunately this means there are long periods in which the incumbent party members do not feel particularly beholden to their constituents, and make little or no attempt to represent their will or interests.
Party politics quantise policy. When there is a change of ruling party, there is a large and abrupt change in policy which is disruptive and very expensive.
Parties are far more able to afford and manage large scale PR, severely inhibiting the election of anyone lacking party affiliation and making genuinely representative government extremely unlikely.
There are two sorts of freedom: freedom-to and freedom-from. ERG tends to devolve into what has been called a nanny state. The reasons are many and complex but since ERGs the world over exhibit this pattern the specifics lose relevance and the shift from freedom-to toward freedom-from can reasonably be regarded as intrinsic to ERG.
The degeneration to freedom-from is perhaps the most diabolical issue with ERG. Every attempt to make things better only makes them worse. It were never more true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Quite frequently the members of an ERG government are even aware of the problem and actively resisting it, but the change is an emergent quality of ERG and is inevitable and inexorable.
The only way out of this trap is to restore all responsibility and power to the individual.
But individuals can’t built cars or bridges or spacecraft. That takes many acting as one. What can we do?
Rostering. Everyone cyclically rostered to hold a post in the administration. And everyone rostered out again, putting every would-be scoundrel at the mercy of those previously in their power and making “do unto others…” into a behaviour with real and immediate survival value.
The key is to make cheating profitless, and cooperation the safest, most pleasant course. There will be a level of self-indulgence, but everyone will have their turn and those who fail to show some restraint will soon wish they had, incidentally serving as a lesson to anyone who hadn’t figured it out.
No big-bang changing of the guard, but progressively overlapped terms of service so that at any moment there are a few old-hands, many who know what they are doing and a few greenhorns.
No elections means no pork-barrelling. Projects that aren’t glamorous might stand a chance since they don’t have to be sold to the electorate, and constant new blood will inhibit cronyism and bring a stream of new ideas.
For the first time in human history we would actually have rule of the people by the people. Sometimes I worry that the people aren’t up to the job, but then I realise they couldn’t do a worse job than the self-centred cretins currently in charge, and they just might do a better job of it – especially since taking responsibility will make them grow as people, and they will have a sense that what they think and do does matter.
Finally, no Them. No “They ought to” or “there ought to be a law” because there is no Them, it’s just you and me. The buck doesn’t stop here, but it’s up to me (and you) to hold it for a while, to polish it up and to proudly pass it on.