An email correspondent asked me for my essay on competitive government vs. democracy, and I had to go to the Wayback Machine to find it.
What is needed to implement competitive government are rules, procedures, and norms that allow groups of citizens to secede from existing government programs and regulations while forming new organizations to provide services in different ways. Competitive government requires easy entry and easy exit relative to government functions.
Worth re-reading. Contains the core ideas of the widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced.
the respectable version of mencius moldbugs’ patchwork ?
also the archive link doesn’t work
and also also the kindle of Unchecked and Unbalanced costs 25$
I imagine most of his readers would nod in agreement, myself included, but there’s nothing regular people can _do_ about it.
Is competitive government that much different than living by the principle of subsidiarity? Is democracy really the antithesis of democracy? No, democracy and competitive government are entirely compatible. See the cantons of Switzerland in all their remarkable diversity and differences.
Searching this blog for “subsidiarity “ returns three blog posts: one quoting Dierdre McClosekey who tossed it into her kettle of stew manifesto; once in which it was viewed as conservative, and once quoting Reihan Selan on TEA Party principles:
“Deep divisions notwithstanding, there are a number of principles that unite the movement. The most important is a devotion to subsidiarity, which holds that power should rest as close to ordinary people as possible.
In practice, this leads Tea Party conservatives to favor voluntary cooperation among free individuals over local government, local government over state government and state government over the federal government. Teatopia would in some respects look much like our own America, only the contrasts would be heightened.”
Hairdresser Republicans and Libertarians don’t really like the principle of subsidiarity because it means that the little people, left to their own devices, are a scary, scary mob that is insufficiently servile. For example, the hairdresser BushAdministration thought local schools need No Child Left Behind standardized nationwide testing. And libertarians cheered as California stripped gated communities and homeowners associations, the ultimate form of competitive government, of their ability to control housing density within their communities.
For meaningful competitive government, it will take a populist movement to kick the idiot elites to the curb. Given that the clerisy classes who have worshipped at the church of idiot elite are now getting what they voted for good and hard, perhaps that populist movement will get some wind in its sails.
Reading through the obituaries of the most excellent Bernard Bailyn, several make reference to a passage that apparently moved Daniel Ellsberg:
“ “But some, caught up in a vision of the future in which the peculiarities of American life became the marks of a chosen people, found in the defiance of traditional order the firmest of all grounds for their hope for a freer life,” Ellsberg read.
“It was only where there was this defiance, this refusal to truckle, this distrust of all authority, political or social, that institutions would express human aspirations, not crush them.””
First and foremost for any movement to competitive democracy is to reawaken this attitude.
You should copy and republish your essay here.
Maybe also put your Unchecked and Unbalanced book in a downloadable pdf / rtf format.
Here’s a suggestion – offer a contest to your readers to make short videos about your books, which they could publish but you would also publish; plus upload to YouTube or some other video sharing site.