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What does a prototypical skirt-chasing ex-socialist hippie turned closeted Misesian-adjacent, geolibertarian-dabbling sort make of absolutism? Well, flat out, I don’t like it much. I quite dislike this absolutism stuff, even on a scale as small as a football team.
Well, the “ex-socialist” part might be an exaggeration, which I tell left-wing friends. In reality, I’m pretty sure I had more like a simple passing interest in Bernie Sanders rather than ever being outright committed to the cause. I don’t think I was ever a pure-blood, probably just enough to appeal to the dominant political psychographic of the ladies of my day.
I don’t think I was ever Republican before. At the time, when I could've have been one like subconsciously or through osmosis, I wasn’t close enough to my family for that to really happen. I think I also had an aversion to its marketing. I believe atheism may have “polluted” my mind at the time, not that Republicans are necessarily proper Christians or anything. It’s just that it may have turned my teenage self off from it.
Anywho, here’s what absolutism means in the political sense: absolutism (political science, sociology) is the principles or practice of absolute or arbitrary government.
I’ve come to dislike untrammeled democracy and socialism, particularly the democratic socialism I used to have at least like a valleity for, since I've come to assocate it with it inadvertently becoming an absolutist form of governance, where technically nothing is off the table and everything is vulnerable to the whims of mobs, mobs to which I believe my likely autistic self would be vulnerable to. My problem is that I’m too stubborn, honest, and foolish not to become a victim of a mob run amok.
My early exposure to works like the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers got me interested in the “game design” behind governance, particularly through voices I found more sensible, such as James Madison, who believed that a healthy American democracy depends on citizens being able to openly discuss and criticize how well government officials are doing their jobs.
Public scrutiny of this kind is something people in my time often take for granted, they are willing to surrender it in the hope of doing away with what they consider “hate speech,” which is often arbitrarily defined by flawed humans in positions of power. The power of the censor granted to these flawed humans gives them the ability to shut down any speech that criticizes it under the guise of niceties.
This led to a fondness for designing the idealized republic-type system.
Books like Max Borders’ The Social Singularity, Eric Posner’s Radical Markets, and Henry George’s Progress and Poverty really got me experimenting with policy ideas and incentive structures, as well as in exploring more open (non-nation state) governance systems. These would include models where competing CEOs, worker co-op cities, and other governance forms coexist and compete with one another (which someone like Yanis Varoufakis might probably call neo-feudalism).I even became quite interested in the kooky, probably not yet technologically feasible systems of governance, like: "Panarchism an ideology that believes that the populace should have the right to choose the form of government ( or lack thereof) that they are part of/live under without having to change their physical residence."
The “civic class” model of democracy says that politicians have to get elected. In order to get elected, they have to do good things. If they do bad things, voters throw them out and elect politicians who do good things.
The trouble is that, for this model to work, voters have to know whether politicians are doing good or bad things. But it is a very odd thing: politicians almost never campaign for office with a slogan like “I’m the bad guy.” And even when something bad happens, it is often quite easy for them to obfuscate the truth behind it. Many times, the “bad thing” that occurred would have occurred whether the ruling party was right-wing or left-wing, but, like a game of musical chairs, whoever is left holding the bill or problem ends up being blamed.
If you’re trying to evaluate the particular bills they vote for and against, you also run into problems. They almost never submit bills to Congress that explicitly say something like “a bill to make farmers richer and city folk poorer.” We do, in fact, have such bills regularly—that’s what farm programs are—but they aren’t labeled as such.
So, in order for the individual voter to actually vote the way the civics-class model suggests, they would have to spend a great deal of time and energy following what the people they are voting for or against are doing. They would effectively have to make a semi full-time profession out of observing their congressmen and figuring out whether the bills they support are good or bad.
— David Friedman (son of Milton Friedman, and in my opinion an improvement on him)
Aside Aside - Now that I think of it. I mislike the definition of “democrat” or an advocate of rule by the people (“!for the people!” if you want to get histrionic) because of prefer more direct language and
Major Digression Page -
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