A BASIC IDEA OF HOW OUR GOVERNMENT WORKS

By Jay Hanson, June 24, 2008
Permission to reprint expressly granted! – http://www.warsocialism.com/democratic.htm

“What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”
– 1955, Charlie Wilson

Our Founders, for excellent reasons, didn’t trust government, so they founded [1] a government that was controlled by the rich. It’s based on three core assumptions:

1: The best way to solve social problems is through economic [2] growth.

2: Individuals know best how to improve their lives.

3: The best way to increase economic growth is to simply ask people who are good at it for advice. That’s why lobbyists are absolutely necessary to the function of our government. Without lobbyists, our corruptible-but-otherwise-unqualified [3] elected officials and their appointed cronies would have absolutely no idea what to do!

In other words, elected officials ask the factory owner what government can do to increase his profit so he will build more factories, provide more jobs, and then individuals can make themselves better off. Keep giving the rich a greater fraction of the economic pie and they will keep increasing the size of the pie.

That’s how our Founders designed it, and that’s how public policy is made today:

“The policy formation process begins in corporate boardrooms... where problems are identified as issues to be solved by new policies. It ends in government, where policies are enacted and implemented.” – William Domhoff

Our Founders saw the “common good” as the sum of “individual goods” which could be measured by spending [4] – the more, the better. Obviously, now that we are entering a decades-long period of declining global economic activity (in the physical sense – not GDP), all of our Founders’ core assumptions are known to be wrong …

BIOPHYSICAL LAWS

Thermodynamic laws, evolution theory, and modern genetic sciences were unknown by our Founders. Today, these laws and sciences signal the end of our form of government.

The first law of thermodynamics (conservation law) states that there can be no creation of matter/energy. This means that the economy is totally dependent upon natural resources for everything. The German physicist Helmholtz and the British physicist Lord Kelvin had explained the principle by the middle of the 19th century.

The second law of thermodynamics (entropy law) tells us that energy is wasted in all economic activity. In 1824, the French physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law’s concepts while working on “heat engines”. Lord Kelvin and the German physicist Clausius eventually formalized Carnot’s concepts as the second law of thermodynamics.

Our government was designed to require more-and-more energy (endless economic growth) to solve social problems, but the thermodynamic laws described above limit the available energy. Energy “resources” must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called “sinks” (this is known as the “net energy” principle). In other words, if it costs more-than-one-barrel-of-oil to “produce” one-barrel-of-oil, then that barrel will never be produced – the money price of oil is irrelevant!  Thus, the net energy principle places strict limits (in the physical sense) on our government’s ability to solve social problems. Although bankers can print money, they can not print energy!

Biologists have found that our genes predispose us to act in certain ways under certain environments. This explains why history repeats itself and why humans have engaged in war after war throughout history: from time-to-time an environment emerges when “inclusive fitness”[5] is served by attacking your neighbor and stealing his resources. [6]

Since our government was designed to require ever-growing energy resources, but energy resources are strictly limited by thermodynamic laws, sooner-or-later our government will collapse into another orgy of world wars. It’s just a matter of time...

ELECTIONS DON’T MATTER!
WHAT MATTERS ARE LOBBYISTS!

A “genetic” process called “reciprocal altruism” guarantees that elected officials and their cronies will nearly always come around to agree with the suggestions of lobbyists. It’s a natural, automatic and subconscious process. Only a sociopath is immune. Unfortunately, no lobbyists represent the common interest. Our Founders assumed that the common interest was the sum of individual interests. Our Founders based our system on the ideas of the French Physiocrats,[7] which were formulated before the laws of thermodynamics were understood.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT: No public advocate!

Local government policy begins in corporate boardrooms too, but additional structural aspects of our political system guarantee that local communities are powerless to stop the rich from converting local neighborhoods into cash.

Our present system of government is designed so elected and appointed officials serve as BOTH public advocate and judge. I can tell you from personal experience that it’s impossible. On the one hand, we are expected to evaluate the impacts of complex economic proposals; on the other hand, we are supposed to be non-professionals – just plain folks.

The result is that commissioners can’t personally evaluate the proposals in front of them, nor do they get objective opinions or studies from a public advocate (the government’s professional planners are known to NOT represent the public interest – in fact, commissioners are supposed to act as a watchdog on government).

Yes, commissioners DO hear from a few citizens of unknown motivation and expertise who are able to take a day off work to testify. But since these individuals do not bring “studies” (with explicitly-stated assumptions, etc.), it’s always unclear how much weight to give to their testimony. Moreover, commissioners are acutely aware of their impossible double role of judge AND advocate, bend over backwards to give the appearance of objectivity, and thereby nearly-always give the benefit of the doubt to the developer.

A good analogy for our present system is a trial composed of a “defendant” (the public), a “prosecutor” (the developer), and a “judge” (elected officials or commissioners.) The public has NO professional advocate and there is no trial by jury. Moreover, the judge frequently accepts gifts from – and takes the advice of – the prosecutor (the developer’s lobbyists).

No one would argue that the defendant could ever get a fair trial with a legal system like this!

Our Founders assumed that since economic growth was always the best way to solve social problems, the public didn’t need a professional advocate to ever question special interests.

The point here is that our government was specifically designed to rely on perpetual economic growth to solve social problems and maintain public order. The political system is self-reinforcing and literally out of human control. When economic growth becomes impossible – as thermodynamics tells us it must – then our present form of government becomes impossible too.

“Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise.” – Reinhold Neibuhr