> Moreover, why can't we have both? A government with smaller influence, but still freer of money-influence than today's.
That feels like asking, "why can't we have both a simpler software codebase, with less abstraction and code, while adding all this code & logic over here to try to squash the symptoms of having too much abstraction?"
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I feel like you're asking us to get to simplicity by adding more rules, which isn't really how simplicity works.
I see your idea, that going after money-influence in politics might always end up consisting of simply adding more rules, and thus complicating and expanding government further.
I would take the idea more seriously if its something that can be rigorously demonstrated; i.e. there is no way to amend the US government without adding so many rules as to frustrate the situation even further.
That being said, any government that consists of human beings is going to have an emergent agenda of some sort or the other. It seems to me that job number one of any government would be to police it self so that that agenda is generally in the people's favor, first. I would have thought that that's really what democracy means, maybe I'm wrong.
Surely even a more libertarian government would have policies in place to fight its corruption?
> I would take the idea more seriously if its something that can be rigorously demonstrated; i.e. there is no way to amend the US government without adding so many rules as to frustrate the situation even further.
I cannot scientifically prove this hypothesis, as I am not dictator of the world, or even of a small island. (Technically, I'd have to be dictator of multiple worlds to prove my hypothesis, as I understand the scientific method.) Most political debates have this problem, so I'm not inclined to lose sleep over it. Of course, I don't expect you to accept the idea wholesale, either. I just threw it out there for discussion.
> That being said, any government that consists of human beings is going to have an emergent agenda of some sort or the other. It seems to me that job number one of any government would be to police it self so that that agenda is generally in the people's favor, first.
It's my understanding this is why we have 3 branches of government, yes. Even a relatively simple system can still verify results with other parts of the system (for example, setting up a Pingdom account to verify that yes, the website is returning HTTP 200)
> Surely even a more libertarian government would have policies in place to fight its corruption?
(a) I extrapolate my experience with architecting complex software systems to political systems. Perhaps what applies to the one is entirely different from what applies to another. Software is what I know, politics is an interesting mind game for me, and it seems like some lessons may carry over. Also, applying software architecture disciplines to business procedures has brought me continued success over the past few years, so I'm inclined to think that some/most of these principles may apply across all complicated systems, including political ones. But again, I can't prove it.
(b) I think there is a difference between letting multiple systems "battle it out" (e.g. Pingdom verifying an HTTP 200 response and perhaps even rebooting the server automatically if it is down), and a multitude of automatic failover rules within a system. For example, how many times have we seen recap blog posts from AWS or other large, abstract cloud systems which identify the root cause as "a system we wrote to automatically heal our main system screwed everything up?"
All that said, I agree with your original post's main point: sometimes you've just gotta throw duct tape on stuff yesterday, or in this case, add rules to limit political corruption. I think my point is simply that planning for both long-term seems conflicting: you throw the duct tape on today, but you don't plan to leave it there forever.
The eventual plan is to refactor to a simpler system and get rid of the duct tape.
> The eventual plan is to refactor to a simpler system and get rid of the duct tape.
Yeah, we're on the same page.
I think the critical thing with the software/systems-analogy is that it's far easier for us to understand these technologies, and more over, the technologies generally lend them selves to reproducible experiments. You can collect 'lessons learned' and do experiments, and based on that knowledge, refactor. It's much harder in politics for the reasons you mentioned.
The whole reason we have 'free' markets is that we lack the knowledge that would be required to efficiently run a command-economy, so we let the market decide, and apply duck-tape where appropriate. Same goes with democracy: we lack the knowledge to build a benevolent dictator which maximizes its people's happiness.
So I guess democracy + duck-tape is the best we can do, for now.
That feels like asking, "why can't we have both a simpler software codebase, with less abstraction and code, while adding all this code & logic over here to try to squash the symptoms of having too much abstraction?"
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I feel like you're asking us to get to simplicity by adding more rules, which isn't really how simplicity works.