perfidy

NYTimes' Kristof: A Modest Proposal: A King and Queen for America

Well, hot damn with whip cream! Did I ever jump on the right boat. I admit, somewhat shamfacedly, that I don't dig this whole democracy thing, and just days later the NYTimes is calling for the installation of a monarchy. Do I have timing or what?

Wait, they didn't mean it like I thought they meant it.

It turns out that Mr. Kristof is calling not for a Stuart Restoration as I had hoped, but rather for finding some dope to take Prince Charles' job of walking around cutting ribbon and looking like a doofus.  The point of this, apparently, would be to free President Obama from all the tiresome ceremonial duties of his job and focus on gettin' shit done.  Like, you know, talking to the CEO of BP about the oil spill and stuff.

A figurehead head of state is a nifty foreign policy tool as well. President Obama has twice had to delay his trip to Indonesia and Australia because of the press of domestic policy, but an American king and queen could spend days greeting crowds and cutting ribbons at new schools. And when they aren’t traveling, our king and queen could be kept busy hosting state dinners five nights a week.

Some folks complain that it’s silly to fret that Mr. Obama doesn’t emote. Of course, it is. It’s farcical that we have bullied our president into trash-talking on television about kicking some you know what.

One of the things I admire about this administration is its cerebral, no-drama emphasis on empirical evidence in addressing issues such as health, education and poverty. This is government by adults, by engineers rather than by dramatists.

But Mr. Obama also knows that drama and emotion are the fuel of American politics, and that’s why he’s struggling to feign fury.

As Stephen Colbert observed about the oil spill: “We know if this was Reagan, he would have stripped to his skivvies, put a knife in his teeth, gone down there and punched that oil well shut!”

That's obviously incorrect.  Reagan would have asked Chuck Norris to swim down and punch the oil well shut, and Chuck Norris wouldn't need a knife.  Chuck Norris might roundhouse kick the leak, or just glare at it - that's a stylistic issue solely up to Chuck Norris' discretion.  But you know that well will stop.

The monarchy in England is expensive.  And embarrassing.  Why would we want that?  Why spend billions of dollars a year for a mook like Charles, his cringe-inducing siblings, and the pleasure of watching a pathetic reality show funded on your dime.  Let's let the networks pay the bills, please.

No, if you're going to get a monarch, let's us do it right.  A milquetoast, emasculated semi-monarch is not the answer.  The answer is a kick ass monarch.  Someone who can speak truth to power because he is, uh, power.  Someone like this.

And that gets us to this, a thread over at Aretae's where Devin Finbarr was schooling me on being a total wuss about reaction.  Here I was, being cautious, and worrying about some possible ill effects - it turns out I was worrying about the wrong effects:

Devin's responding to my earlier comment, here:

[quoting me] My problem with neocameralism as Moldbug goes on with it is that while ideally we'd want Steve Jobs or the like - competent, visionary, minimalist in how he runs Apple - we might get the CEO of Microsoft, or GM. In fact, the latter seems more likely. [end quote]

The management of even GM far exceeds the management of the U.S. government. While many corporations stagnate or fail, they actually have a much harder problem. Microsoft needs to constantly run just to stand still. Maintaining market share/profits requires constant innovation, which is not easy at all.

A government basically needs to keep order, enforce rule of law, maintain a stable currency/business climate, and that's it. A government does not need to innovate (except perhaps in military matters) - it can delegate that to the private sector.

But the U.S. government(s) is increasingly failing to enforce basic rule of law. No corporation has ever destroyed its capital as the American cities did in the 1970's. Almost no corporation manages to turn an operating loss on real estate.

[quoting me] Of course the problem of hereditary monarchy is an issue too - what if the son is an idiot? Elective monarchy might be better, until you get to a point where you have competing claimants to the throne. [end quote]

Elective monarchy is cool, but the trick is to make sure that the elections do not devolve into politics. Once there are parties, competing factions, feedback loops between campaign promises and the results of power, then you're right back where were are now.

As you can see, Devin's thought about this a bit. The next exchange goes a bit further. I commented:

Valid point - the gubmint's job should be easier. You still have the problem of relative bad management - look at North Korea. Almost no corporation - but not to say none. Of course no system will prevent gross stupidity.

The one thing that got me about the Neocameralist proposal was that with the shareholders and choosing a CEO, it seemed as if Moldbug had just created a very odd sort of democracy, not anything really different. Because if the board can remove the ceo for incompetence, you're right back at politics - same as with an elective monarchy, but worse.

And Devin comes back with:

Shareholder voting is majorly different from democracy.

First, the votes are weighted by the number of shares owned. The typical rich, large shareholder is far smarter and competent than the average American. So right off the bat that's an improvement.

But the most important difference is that there is total alignment of goals. The question of how to grow the pie is totally separate from the question of how to divide the pie.

In democratic debates questions of how to grow the pie and divide the pie are mixed. For example the healthcare bill partly dealt with how to make the system better for everyone, and partly with dealing goodies (the mandate as a giveaway to insurance companies, the subsidies as a giveaway to the Democratic base, etc). Political parties constantly support policies that will actually shrink the pie overall, if it increases the portion for their own side (see again, the healthcare bill). Even worse, they will couch their arguments for changing the division of pie in terms of growing the pie. For example, the democrats have argued that subsidies would save money because people would no longer use emergency room. The parties will actually believe their own myths, and both parties will become utterly delusional about how to actually grow the pie.

And worst of all, the fights over dividing the pie generate an enormous amount of antagonism. The parties polarize and begin to hate each other.

Shareholder ownership fixes the "divide the problem problem" by fixing shares outright. And then distribute all benefits of the company in straight up cash. If you distribute benefits as in kind benefits (imagine starbucks issuing shareholders dividends in lattes), then that will not benefit all shareholders equally, and thus will cause conflict.

Once the shares are fixed, everyone in the company has the same goal - increase the share price.

When I joined my current company I had a month of somewhat stressful negotiation over my stock options. But once that was done, and the contract signed, my interests were very well aligned with management. As a result, a company of 150 people all work together as a team with one unified goal.

That said, shareholder management for a sovereign has a number of problems. These problems stem from the fact that there is no external authority to enforce the companies contracts. Potential problems:

a) how do you enforce minority shareholder rights?

b) how do you keep management from stealing the company from the shareholders?

c) how do you prevent the military from stealing the company from the shareholders?

d) how do you prevent the sovereign from engaging in for-profit activities that are morally repugnant? (for example, going on slaving expeditions, breeding slave children in incubators, liquidating residents who were unable to support themselves)

Well those could be issues. At least now I have the right issues.  And those issues are real ones, and I think that there is little way that you could formally - by means of institutions or laws - prevent them.  The only way to keep these gremlins at bay is culture.  There is nothing material preventing the US Marines and their little helpers in the other services from jacking the entire US Government with M1A2 Abrams tanks and sheer ballsiness.  Except for the culture that makes something like that unthinkable.  I think the reason we have no coups here, or generally in the anglosphere is simply that, along with (nod to Aretae) the economic growth that makes things happy for many people, most of the time.  Of course, the two are related.

We have a culture that on the whole prizes order, and peaceful resolution of differences.  If we, miraculously, had a Stuart Restoration here in the US tomorrow, that fact more than anything would prevent c) so long as the restoration was legitimate (result of a plebiscite, or the like.)  Our culture also holds certain things to be reprehensible.   Some of these things actually are reprehensible, others less so - but I think that no king, any more than any president, could maintain the legitimacy that upholds their rule if they violated key precepts of the local give me money culture.  This would likely take care of d) and any incubator babies and smoking in bars in the capitol city.  It would also militate against a), though to what extent I'm unsure.

The real problem is b) - but since that's the problem we already have, I don't see how you could use that to argue against a reactionary solution.

As Devin pointed out elsewhere, we educate our young to be good democrats.  We could equally educate them to be good monarchists.  The key in any transition would be to set good precedents, and build the cultural institutions that would support the new order over time - much as Washington did in the early days of the Republic.

Not that that transition is imminent.

Read the whole thread, it's kind of a primer on Formalist/Moldbuggian ideas.