The State

People commonly view the state as having the duty to provide people with certain services that go beyond protection from crime. Apart from those states that have extensive mineral resources, this involves collecting taxes. Hence it is a form of redistribution. Even wars fought to liberate people can be thought of as redistribution. Taxes are collected and people are killed in order that others may be freed. Both in the case of wars and social programs, different moral and ethical values are applied to the state than to individuals. If I were to collect money from my neighbor in order to support some charitable cause, few would morally support this course of action. However, when the state fails to take this course of action, people often act as if our government officials are neglecting their duty.

My view on this matter is that the state may indeed have a unique moral status. This is because the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of certain kinds of force. We don't want to live in the kind of world where every individual, or even a large number of individuals, each have the ability to collect their own individual tax. This would prevent any individual from controlling the total amount collected in taxes. There would be no incentive to limit taxation so as to collect more in the future. So the state has the legitimate and unique authority to prevent others from stealing, committing extortion or replacing the government. In order to keep this moral and ethical principle general and universal, there should be a democratic form of government and equality under the law.

I am reluctant to go beyond those powers that would be necessary to enforce this. For example, I would say that taxes are legitimate to the extent that they are used to protect life, liberty and property. It makes little sense to try to establish an absolute protection of property if by doing so the system would fall apart so that there would be no protection whatsoever.

That having been said, I am willing to concede that my idea on this matter is not held by many. Popular opinion being what it is, there would be no way to put my idea into practice under a democratic form of government. Since democracy is part of my idea about how the government should operate, there is no way to implement it at all.

In order for a republican form of government to work, voters must be able to morally evaluate their leaders in order to determine if they are fit to hold office. Voting is something that only makes sense if it is performed for ethical reasons. The result of an election might be meaningful, but the chance of making a difference is very small. Elections are rarely decided by one vote. It is only the fact that the election will effect many people that makes voting worth while.

This being the case, how can a moral evaluation of the government be performed. First we will have to have some moral and ethical principles. Next, it will be necessary for voters to be able to apply these principles to the people who hold political power. Finally these principles must be shared by a large proportion of the public.

As a first step we will have to know what the government is doing. In order to evaluate the legislature, it will be necessary that a large number of voters can reasonably be expected to know what laws have been passed. This will require that the law be reasonably short and comprehensible. Passing laws that are neither should be considered an offense that disqualifies the legislator from office. This is something our legislators need to work on.

Representative democracy has the characteristic that the citizens can replace their rulers. In practice there is not a dark line separating representative government from unrepresentative forms. Governments can make it more difficult or more expensive to replace the rulers. Our own system is fairly good in that regard, but there are a few deficiencies I would like to point out.

First the government has control of voting districts and uses it to make it more likely that incumbents will be re-elected. It has done this be making many districts either overwhelmingly liberal or conservative. Voters will find it more difficult to replace a legislator if they need to vote for someone of the opposing political party in order to do so.

Next legislatures typically make powerful committee assignments to more experienced legislators. Perhaps there is something to be said for giving such assignments to those with more experience. However, this presents voters with the choice of re-electing the incumbent or selecting someone who will then be the low man on the totem pole. In short it increases the cost of removing an office holder.

One thing that frustrates many people about the political process is the huge amounts of money that are spent on political campaigns. Since giving money to such a campaign is seen as giving money to the candidate, it can be difficult to distinguish making a donation to support a candidate you believe in and bribery. How can we tell that people aren't making contributions in order to buy legislation that is more favorable to themselves. This would be undesirable even if the legislation were good. Legislators should not be put in the position where they can extort money from people by threatening to support bad legislation.

On the other hand campaign finance issues raise the question of free speech. Supporting a political campaign can be seen as a form of political expression. When our founding fathers wrote the first amendment protections of freedom of the press into the constitution they didn't worry that not everyone was able to afford a printing press.

There are a number of ways that we could deal with these problems. In general we would want to come up with the least radical change to fix the problem. Voting districts could be set by abstract principles instead of giving government officials the discretion to set boundaries in any way they like. Voters could be given the ability to set limits on how much legislation the government had the authority to enact.

Another reform we might try would be to hold the legislature collectively responsible for the legislation that it enacts and the results of its effort. We could do this by allowing voters to specify that a certain number of legislators be removed from office at random. That way, if the legislature as a whole were unpopular each individual legislator would be punished by reducing the probability that he or she would continue to hold office.

With regard to campaign finance I'm afraid that the problem is not as easy to fix as is commonly believed. Any meaningful restriction on campaign expenditure would limit political expression. If the law were to seal up all of the loopholes, then we would lose the ability to make our moral evaluations of public officials public. We could eliminate political campaigns altogether by using random processes in order to select legislators, but that is quite a radical solution. If we did that we would probably also want to find some way of holding the people in office accountable. Otherwise they are likely to be more corrupt than they are today. If we were to allow voters to determine what proportion of legislators should be replaced, this would provide an incentive for integrity and good performance.

With all proposed changes, it would be prudent to see how they work by implementing them at a lower level. The result of changes at the state or local level can give us a good indication of whether similar changes ought to be tried at the national level.