On 01/16/2011 07:35 AM, Richard C. Bozian wrote:
[Your proposal] lacks an appreciation that human beings
are fallible.
On the contrary. It recognizes that fallibility makes fallible most of
the processes of government we now have.
Why else
would progressives and conservatives come to diametrically-opposed
responses to problems in a society?
Because they try to understand complex processes with simplistic
mental models.
Your convoluted process does not
change the reality of the contribution of perceptions.
No, but it might reduce the problem to a slightly less dangerous level.
I was encouraged to read that you have gotten around to appreciating
that moneyed interests are dangerous.
I have always appreciated that. But that doesn't mean the proposals by
others to reduce that danger are not themselves even more dangerous.
What
is wrong with an egoist running for office?.
They tend to be too sure they are right, when they're not, and too
likely to be dangerous psychopaths who will destroy the world.
Only an egoist would seek
office.
So we should not select persons who seek it.
Why else would anyone seek to leave home, profession or
occupational activities to run for an office?
Duty? Honor? A professional challenge to his skills?
Human fallibility calls
for a meaningful regulatory process.
By whom? Computers? Certainly not by fallible humans, working for low
wages, who are easily captured by those they are supposed to regulate.
What has gone wrong with our
process has been two-fold.
Simplistic reductionism.
There has been a lack of regulation.
There has been a lack of systems that are regulatable by mere humans
with the information they have or can acquire.
Adam
Smith implored for its need.
He had something else in mind, for a different situation.
In addition, we have weakened the
regulators by defunding them and stacking the agencies with
unenlightened interests.
So who is to regulate the regulators, and who is to regulate them?
All individuals and organizations require an
enlightened interest.
It makes a huge difference what that interest is. I prefer duty and
satisfaction in a job well done. Not prospects of money, power, or
status.
The individual and/or an organization needs first
to ensure its own survival.
No. It should seek to do the job so well that it puts itself out of the
job.
But the long-term survival of individual,
an organization, or a country for that matter, depends upon concern
for fellow human beings and each other.
Again, you are expecting a change in human nature without a mechanism
to change it. The best we can do is to try to nurture, then choose,
persons of higher quality, one of the defining characteristics of which
is that they do not seek money, power, or status.
Our country is forgetting this.
Countries don't forget. Individuals do. Or they never learn. What we
are seeing is in part the failure of previous generations to propagate
their wisdom to their successors. But the wisdom we need to return to
is that of the Founders, not the New Deal progressives, who didn't have
a clue. That is not to say the Founders got everything right. There is
room for improvement in their work. My amendments
represent one approach to doing that. They are designed to return
government to a state that is manageable by fallible human beings,
which mostly involves shrinking it severely.
-- Jon
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