Dead Democracy, The State of States

Dead Democracy, The State of States

This essay is an extension of "A Better Tomorrow" and assumes "A Better Tomorrow" has been read.

https://irreni.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-better-tomorrow.html

In "A Better Tomorrow" I kinda drove right by replacing Democracy and all world governments as if that were nothing. In this essay I'm going to explain why this is in three parts: 1.) Democracy is dead today, 2.) inherent flaw of a Democracy going forward, 3.) the replacements.

Dead Democracy Today

There exists a ton of University and political writing that is easily available on the Web explaining all kinds of ways Democracy is now dead.

However, only one is needed for our purposes: dead States.

The US Constitution was designed around rugged individualism, or a weak Federal government. As I stated previously, rugged individualism can be roughly defined in 1789 as this, "Leave me the fuck alone, I can take care of myself." The founders did not trust a strong federal government. However, even from the get-go the weak Federal government was under siege by the centralists, the strong Federal government types. This took the form of Hamilton lobbying for a US Bank and debt assumption. So the seeds of the death of Democracy were in the works from the very beginning.

Federal Budget is 2X all 50 States combined.

The modern stake in the heart of Democracy began in 1913 with the Income Tax amendment. This resulted in Federal courts having ruled that the Sixteenth Amendment allows a direct tax on "wages, salaries, commissions, etc. without apportionment". The end result is that States have been murdered by money. This has resulted in a situation now where the Federal government collects and spends twice as much tax money as all fifty states combined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

Sate    2017 Budget (billions $)
Alabama            30.7
Alaska          10.1
Arizona         39
Arkansas    31.8
California    183.3
Colorado    28.8
Connecticut    20.5
Delaware    4.1
Florida            92.5
Georgia            25
Hawaii            15.4
Idaho            7.9
Illinois    85.1
Indiana            33.6
Iowa            8.5
Kansas            15.9
Kentucky    34.8
Louisiana    32.7
Maine            8.3
Maryland    43.6
Massachusetts    40.2
Michigan    56.5
Minnesota    80.1
Mississippi    6
Missouri    27.9
Montana            13.2
Nebraska    9.1
Nevada            26.3
New Hampshire    5.9
New Jersey    34.7
New Mexico    18.2
New York    171
North Carolina    23
North Dakota    13.5
Ohio            65.7
Oklahoma    6.8
Oregon            75.7
Pennsylvania    32
Rhode Island    9.3
South Carolina    27.4
South Dakota    4.6
Tennessee    37
Texas            108.7
Utah            16.2
Vermont            7.8
Virginia    51.8
Washington    99.4
West Virginia    4.2
Wisconsin    37.1
Wyoming            9

State Total    1869
   
Federal Total    3980

Purely on financial footing the US government is twice as big as all 50 states combined. The founders would be appalled at this. This is not just a strong Federal government, but a twice as strong Federal government as all fifty states combined.

All Trade Is Interstate

The Fifth Amendment gives Congress authority to regulate all interstate trade. Well guess what, in 1789 interstate trade may have affected 10% of all jobs, Americans grew their own food.

And today? With the advent of automobiles and airplanes? The Internet? How much trade is not interstate? I'm putting it out there 100% of all businesses today involve interstate and are Federally regulated.  For example,  Federal beef laws require hanging meat for thirty days such that then even your local restaurant is Federally regulated.

Given all trade these days crosses state lines then we end up with Roe V. Wade in 1973 where a person driving across state lines for a medical procedure ends up in the Supreme Court.

State regulation of trade is a distant power relative to Federal power, and can be argued is relatively nothing.

Federal Funding of States

How sick is this. The Federal government taxes us directly and then gives that money back to the State you live in with laws attached to control them. This can include everything from education to roads. For many of the smaller states Federal spending can easily dwarf the State budget.

The Federal control of States using Federal funds neutralizes State power and makes States subservient to Federal power. This is not how American was defined and our Democracy was conceived. Our country is dead. What we have is a strong central government running the entire country with States only marginally powerful to check the Federal government.

Since the States are neutralized we have no Democracy, just an oligarchy in Washington DC and Democracy is dead as designed.

Inherent Flaw In Democracy

What happened? How did we lose our Democracy?

Well, the explanation is simple to understand as the arguments were put forward by none other than Thomas Paine himself...and the Egyptians.

If one has not read Thomas Paine's works such as "The Rights of Man" I highly recommend doing so. They are freely available on the Gutenberg Project web site.

https://www.gutenberg.org/


To summarize, Paine argued that monarchies where inherently flawed due to kings being hereditary. Kings had no qualifications to rule, at all. Paine makes many arguments such as since royal families tended to inbreed then they were inherently flawed due to inbreeding. Paine argues the ludicrous design of government by a single person...albeit a King.

Every government and every corporation ever in existence has suffered from the same flaw as monarchy: the power pyramid.

In 1789 the argument that President could be qualified sorta made sense. In 2018 this makes no sense. At best someone may have qualifications in one aspect of life, say brain surgery like Ben Carson. In every other aspect though that person is every bit as unqualified as a hereditary king.

Corporations with their CEOs and boards of directors are nothing more than glorified monarchies. The CEOs are no more qualified to run organizations comprised of thousands or millions of people as any historical hereditary king. Large corporations are dystopias of cubicle hell.


In my industry, software, large corporations are where ideas go to die. IBM hasn't innovated anything since the 1980s. Microsoft has not innovated anything since the 1990s and Windows captured 90% of the desktop market. Google innovates nothing. I often wonder how many people realize Google bought Android. Google also paid a $2 billion settlement to Yahoo for patent infringement of ad technology. No matter how many projects Google has going most of their revenue comes from the technology they stole from Yahoo: ads.

To whit, monarchy was not the very heart of the failure of monarchy, bureaucracy was. Guess what, every government and every corporation since 1789 has relied on monarchy in the form of bureaucracy. Otherwise known as the power pyramid.


The inherent problem with the power pyramid was pointed out by Plato. Power pyramids are always, always corrupted. The people at the top are seduced. As the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The larger the power pyramid the larger the corruption.

And here's the deal. This corruption in power pyramid manifests equally in the public and private sectors, government and corporations. It just doesn't matter. This is what made Reagan's comment about the government infuriating. The root cause for government incompetence is the same as corporation incompetence: bureaucratic corruption.

Anyone who says corporations are better due to meritocracy are simply espousing dogma and not living in reality. I can name many successes of the US government over the last forty years. Who wouldn't want the FDA regulating food and drugs? Or NASA managing the space program? In fact, NASA is able to do what no private company can do to date. SpaceX and other private space ventures all rely on NASA expertise. Further, large corporations cannot innovate new technology. If one wants to waste ones meritocracy skills then go work for a large corporation.

The point is that skilled people work in both the public and private sector. The extent to which either can overcome the corruption of the power pyramid and bureaucracy depends on the people overcoming the corruption, meritocracy buys one nothing in this regard.

To whit, balancing the individual identity with group identity as specified in "A Better Tomorrow" is impossible with bureaucracies because of the inherent corruption of the individuals at the top.

Bureaucracy has to go. Which means every single of form of government to date as well corporations are to be wiped off the face of the planet, forever, due to their reliance on bureaucracy and the inherent flaw of absolute power corrupting absolutely.

The Replacements

What is exciting about politics going forward are the replacements. By the replacements I mean the ideas to replace bureaucracy. Irreni World Scale is the first to market but innovation requires competition. I'm looking forward to the new ideas replacing bureaucracy and hopefully you will too.

So what is Irreni's replacement?

If one were to look at Irreni World Scale from afar then it might look like a container ship sailing on the ocean. The only thing visible from afar are the stacks of containers and the ship they float on. The containers are the micro-modular governing organizations, or MGOs and the ship is made up of the projects MGOs use to do things.


Irreni World Scale will eventually replace all governments with MGOs and projects. MGOs are of a fixed number of people. When a project requires hundreds, thousands or even millions of people then MGOs are combined. In some ways this can be viewed as similar to the job market where instead of hiring an individual, one hires an MGO.

So if MGOs are the new unit of hire then at the scale of thousands or millions isn't there the same risk of a power pyramid, just on a different scale? Yes, except Irreni has safeguards built in to prevent this. First the government of authority is the smallest government, not the largest. In other words the government with final say is that of the MGO. This means that all MGO "hiring" is a contract between governing bodies. Further, Irreni includes provisions to monitor MGO contracts and how well MGOs fulfil contracts. MGOs can then write anti-corruption clauses into contracts pretty much ensuring good behavior. And if that is not enough projects are required to be ephemeral, no more than a few years. All maintenance and implementation projects must be renewed. Power abuses can be walked away from. Large, long-term projects such as say building a Space Port must necessarily be specified as a much larger set of small projects that are ephemeral in duration. This small, ephemeral project building block approach mitigates the organizing of large companies that last indefinitely.

There are far more details that go into the workings of Irreni's  MGOs and projects so as to replace governments and corporations, but the paragraph above outlines how power pyramids of bureaucracies are to be replaced in their entirety over the next two-hundred years.

I'm sorry I will not live to see this come to pass. As with the ninety-nine percent of us who work under the heel of bureaucracy and corporations, I hate it. Most of my managers have no clue as to my full range capabilities and even if they did they couldn't make use of them as the corporation is only looking for a very thin slice. Don't get me wrong, the pay is great as a software engineer but the work product is very unsatisfactory even as I love what I do, programming. In some respects, working for corporations as a software developer is like playing a video game. I enjoy doing it but at the end of the time there is nothing there.

I hate working in cubes, I hate the entire impersonal treatment we all receive by corporation and government bureaucracy.

Irreni World Scale allows us to flower as human beings by our first and final governing authority being an MGO of size thirty where everyone knows everyone. It is going to be an interesting future.

Cheers!

Let's get cracking!

Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!

Politics as Science!

Demand Irreni World Scale!

Anti-theism is feminism!  

Think disruption!

Empathy for all!

Moral relativity: think it, breath it!

Prove it or lose it!

Conversations equal consensus! 

Welcome to the 21st century!

Scale your empathy, scale the world! 

Find your tribe!

Be sexy people!

The future is coming! 

Innovate at a rapid pace!

Slow speed ahead!

Well come! and well met!