I take it that you’ve read neither Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty nor other works of his that address the role of democratic institutions and abstract, non-market rules in the structure and evolution of liberal social orders. His distinction between abstract law and concrete command is, in my view, fundamental to questions of first- and second-order relationships between democracy and the exercise of power.

Hayek isn’t the cartoon figure drawn by his popular followers and casual critics, and shouldn’t be lumped together with Friedman and the market fundamentalists. By current libertarian standards, the man was a flaming socialist.

He was quite wrong about Keynes, of course.

I’m truly curious here. You have posted many similar comments on the last 10 threads here discussing forms of government (although not, IIRC, in the last discussion of Hobbes). What form of government do you recommend (or if you refuse to recommend, prefer for yourself and your family) for a modern technological state of any significant size? Why? Thanks.

You’ve been consistently posting comments on the ‘form of government’ threads criticizing all possible government formation processes based on movement toward mass franchise and some form of representation. There are direct arguments against representative democracy (or indeed any form of representative government), but you haven’t been making them – just criticizing every analysis thereof. I’m genuinely curious as to (a) what you’re after (b) what you recommend. But you are quite adept at dancing around those questions.

Cranky

= = = Mao Cheng Ji @ 9:55 am
“unwilling to synthesize a superior option”
[...]
Your example is a good one, actually. NIMBY seems to be an example of a democratic failure that might be better addressed by libertarian (rather than democratic) means, by courts. So there.
[...]
= = =

So, the magic libertarian court system that appears whole cloth and in perfect form from nowhere, requires no supporting or checking governmental institutions, and is free of the bias of wealth, class, and raw physical power [1]? Somewhat similar to the court system the Koch brothers are purchasing for themselves in Kansas and Sinqufeld in Missouri? Ah, OK.

Cranky

[1] Ref the Icelanders’ Althing ca 1000 AD

First of all, I’m very skeptical about the framing. 100 million people electing a president who decides what each of them will eat for lunch would be a democratic institution (and 50 million of them may be happy with this arrangement), but I could easily imagine an undemocratic one that I might prefer.

Your example is a good one, actually. NIMBY seems to be an example of a democratic failure that might be better addressed by libertarian (rather than democratic) means, by courts. So there.

Let me ask you something. In 1962 federal troops entered the state of Mississippi, to end the practice of racial segregation, supported by a majority of the population there, and by the duly elected democratic government of that state. Before that, the federal government passed various Fugitive Slave laws, forcing democratic states of the North (though women couldn’t vote) to capture and return runaway slaves. How do you sort this out? What is democratic, and what is not; how do you categorize these things, to make sense of it?

…we start by characterizing the “circumstances of politics” as constituted by persistent disagreement over not just interests and attachments but also by difference generated by diverse moral and ethical commitments

That wd seem to be the answer: they see “persistent disagreement over…interests”.

No, I don’t think they even come close to saying “single unified interest”; they’re very big on the line about democratic deliberation’s point being to “structure disagreement” not produce consensus. If they don’t emphasize consensus, it wd follow, ISTM, that they don’t see a single unified interest. In fact they start out by talking about the plurality of interests as a basic feature of any “complex” society.

The post I meant to refer to was not the post to which this comment thread is attached but Knight and Johnson’s post “Defending The Priority of Democracy” which I haven’t bothered to finish yet, but even from the first third or so it shd be pretty clear that they don’t see all interests as reconcilable or think of society as having a single unified interest. (Now they may think there is some viable notion of a “public interest” which implies something less than “a single unified interest”; but in any case I don’t remember a whole lot of discussion of that in the book. My recollection of the details becomes less clear as time goes on.)

Political institutions at their core are mechanisms for deciding between irreconcilable interests — deciding in conflicts who will be the winner and who will be the loser. Talk of an “epistemically best regime” is meaningless in almost all of the areas where democracy makes sense; the question political institutions actually decide is: best for whom?

= = = Mao Cheng Ji @ 10:22 pm
Look, #10 says: ” no-one has a right to rule over anyone else, end of story”, and I agree.
Now, as a practical matter, it doesn’t look like any anarcho-communist paradise is on the horizon, so, at least at present and in the foreseeable future, coercion is inevitable. Most of us do put up with it (we pay taxes, for example, that are mostly spent on weapons and wars), because we don’t want to get arrested. But I really don’t think ‘legitimate’ is the right word here. = = =

That’s an interesting set of observations, but it doesn’t really touch on my question. If we abandon modern technological civilization the human population will decrease by at least 95% – even Jefferson’s imagined utopia of yeoman farmers was already backed, in 1789, by substantial heavy industry in upstate New York, Manchester, Dresden, etc. If we don’t abandon modern civilization then we have the problem of what happens when I move in next door to you, build a steel mill in my back yard, and start exhausting coke battery gas into your living space. The latter choice is going to require some form of government; you seem highly critical of all proposed here but unwilling to synthesize a superior option.

Cranky

Now, as a practical matter, it doesn’t look like any anarcho-communist paradise is on the horizon, so, at least at present and in the foreseeable future, coercion is inevitable. Most of us do put up with it (we pay taxes, for example, that are mostly spent on weapons and wars), because we don’t want to get arrested. But I really don’t think ‘legitimate’ is the right word here.

= = = Mao Cheng Ji @ 9:39 pm
Why should it be accepted as legitimate by the loser? I see no reason whatsoever. I suppose it might happen occasionally, when nothing serious is at stake, and maintaining unity and stability seems more important than winning (this, however, works for a dictatorial rule just the same), but otherwise it would seem logical for the loser to fight, or try to split off. = = =

I’m truly curious here. You have posted many similar comments on the last 10 threads here discussing forms of government (although not, IIRC, in the last discussion of Hobbes). What form of government do you recommend (or if you refuse to recommend, prefer for yourself and your family) for a modern technological state of any significant size? Why? Thanks.

Cranky

Why should it be accepted as legitimate by the loser? I see no reason whatsoever. I suppose it might happen occasionally, when nothing serious is at stake, and maintaining unity and stability seems more important than winning (this, however, works for a dictatorial rule just the same), but otherwise it would seem logical for the loser to fight, or try to split off. Or both. Like, say, Kurds in Turkey.