The Rule of Law — Letter #8

Photo by Peter Nguyen on Unsplash

Dear Ricardo,

Some time has passed since you wrote your last letter.

I’m not sure where to take this conversation. It feels that something is out there, an obvious solution, an obvious 10x improvement, but what is it?

Maybe we could take a step back. What do we want to achieve as a society? Freedom and prosperity. Any time a branch of governance takes the power out of the individual, it reduces our freedom and, empirically, chances are it is reducing also our prosperity. Normally this is done to scale governance or to steal power from the individual to the governance branches.

There has to be a way to control the latter. Stealing power is what corrupts the Rule of Law to begin with. The process of law making has to be more conservative, maybe it would solve some of that. But let’s focus on the scaling issue. It’s ironic, actually! You couldn’t put citizens voting for every single decision because it wouldn’t scale, you’ve created all these branches and bureaucracy. But, now, you have individuals (citizens) voting for every single aspect of their lives, daily, except for governance! The market outpaced the government so badly, that only because you’re used to it you don’t realize how bad it is. So, yes, how can we can come up with something better?

Maybe we can put all the “Rules” together. Maybe we can be clients, more than citizens, in that sense. We have to have the best of the other “Rules” in service of our governance needs. And we should be able to demand better. It’s so ironic that people paint this image of powerless consumers, but powerful citizens, when it’s actually the other way around. We don’t have any control over our governance model.

We should be able to be shareholders in our neighborhoods, cities and countries. We should be able to feasibly switch to another “provider”, or to fire executives at least (how crazy it is that citizens can’t fire politicians?). We should be able to provide instant feedback, and only the governments that would provide us this tools would survive in the free market of governance (put it in another words: in the Rule of Engineering, Rule of Math, Rule of Finance, etc.). Rule of Law would still exist, but it would be much focused and smaller, thus less prone to be assaulted by corrupt people.

What do you think?

Take care,

Francisco