No Power To People: Systems Make Better States Than People Do

*“A government of laws, and not of men.”* – John Adams

If Trump, damn his name‘s presidencies should have taught the American public anything, it’s that States based on systems (laws, structures of counter-balanced powers, etc.) just plain work better than States based on an individual ruler do.

It’s a good principle.

And it’s one of the bits of pre-political science wisdom that the authors of the Constitution understood quite well and did their best to implement.

Sure, a State based on systems can be terrible, but one based on handing power to individuals is more likely to. A State with a good system will be good, or at least not bad, but having a good person at the top is not enough to make a personalist State good; every individual with power has to be good for that.

And a bad system can be fixed, but bad people once given power generally can’t.

Once they have power, they’re devilishly hard to even remove.

It takes time for people to realize this, though; when I was young I sincerely believed that the “benevolent dictator” would make for the best State. After all, if you have a good person with all the power, surely that would lead to all the exercises of that power being good.

But there are two problems with that idea:

succession: people die, and there’s no way to guarantee that the next ruler will be good; history more than amply demonstrates that people raised from birth to be rulers tend to not be any better than some random schmuck
delegation: it’s impossible for the one “ruler” to make and implement all decisions, so every single government administrator and agent must also be good

And if you have a strong system for choosing “good” rulers and administrators, then you’ve already moved on to having a State based on a system rather than an individual and you’re not a “benevolent dictatorship” after all.

Of course, all that ignores the glaring fact that people disagree about what “good” means anyway.

So the best State can’t be based on the rule of a “good” individual; it has to be:

minimal: since people disagree on what’s “good”, the State should interfere in each person’s life only when necessary to protect some other person’s ability to choose what is “good” for themself
systemic: since the “goodness” of individual power depends on the “goodness” of that individual, the State should minimize the personal power any individual can exercise
democratic: since no individual can be trusted to be “good” in everyone’s eyes, the final basis for State decisions has to be in a vote of the citizens

Since each population is different, and each population changes over time, you can make a wide variety of States that meet these criteria and each will be different in important ways from the others and from those that precede and follow it.