JBD

K.C. Jones passes on this excellent review of The Forms of Government.

It is jingoistic in places, and I'm sure there are classics majors and historians out there who will quibble with some of the shortcuts taken to make certain points. But for defining terms, and for clarifying how we make our choices, this is excellent, and particularly timely.

This presentation whittles all forms of government down to two - Oligarchies (rule by a few) and Republics (rule of law).  Close readers of my blog know that I often use Thomas Sowell's formulation to express this same approach - all government decision-making comes down to two questions - Who decides? And at what cost?

Using this simple dichotomy, choices become easier, and rhetoric and bombast can be stripped away to reveal the core beliefs of the contestants.  Let's take the current hot topic and try this out - who gets a government bail out, and how much will it be?

For those companies and organizations looking for money, they want a single individual or small group to make the decisions, so that they can lobby them. The beggars can spin their stories of catastrophic consequences and widespread misery, attempting to scare people into agreeing that a chosen few should take power and prevent mayhem. This has been the approach so far - reducing individual liberty, expanding the government, concentrating power into an ever-smaller group. This is the definition of oligarchy.

For the taxpayers, we want to be as free as possible to protect our own property and make our own decisions. If a particular company or organization - city, state or other government entity - can't pay its bills within its own scope of operation, then is must go bankrupt, as the law specifies. Then the damage is limited just to the people who invested or participated in spending the money. The creditors, with a judge as referee, can decide how best to liquidate or restructure.

In the case of the Detroit three, bankruptcy is the obvious choice. But they want to go outside the law and get public money to protect their investors and employees, all of who joined and participated of their own free will. And, these same investors and employees certainly did not volunteer to give up any profits or income over and above what the law required when times were good.

Giving them loans from taxpayers when their own investors won't put in any more money is criminal madness. Bankruptcy is the only way, the sooner the better.

For cities or even whole states, the bankruptcy process breaks all the existing obligations, and allows the judge and owners (the electorate) to re-adjust the income, assets and liabilities based on first principles, not on politics. So all the unions get booted, pensioners get their contracts adjusted down to market values, and luxuries like recycling, and ridiculous clean air standards, and make-work "hero" projects, and all forms of welfare, get terminated.

So given this analysis, will Obama's plans create more freedom via the rule of law, or less freedom via an increase in government? The question answers itself.

Posted by: JBD at 01:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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