Let's discuss minarchism

Politics & Elections
1

One thing I’ve taken away from all the debate and controversy today in American politics is that both the Left and the Right are equally terrified of what might happen if the overweening power of the government was firmly in the control of their ideological opponents. This suggests to me that whatever their differences, both sides agree that the government is too powerful; or as a famous fictional character said “People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people”.

So without sinking to the endless debate over the utopian ideal of libertarianism or anarchism, could people at least realistically seek to scale back the scope of government, and what might that look like?

For a start at least, I think most would agree that the executive has become excessively powerful since the end of World War Two, and that something like the old necessity of having the Congress pass an official declaration of war should be necessary to initiate large-scale military action. Heck, even the Vietnam War required the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; today a president might decide to simply send in America’s standing armies, Congress be damned.

On a smaller scale what might be desirable? Plebiscites to directly overturn unpopular laws? Mandatory sunset provisions on some legislation so laws don’t stay on the books forever? What might make government less autonomous and more responsive to the people? Or come closest to fulfilling Thoreau’s quote “That government is best which governs least”

2

I would disagree with this. The MAGA right has shown over the years through their methodology that they want COMPLETE power, much like the totalitarian governments in places like Russia, North Korea, and China have complete power. Also, like those nations, they have a state run media (Fox News) to deliver “information” and its interpretation to the masses.

3

Without getting into a Left-Right debate, let me simply reiterate it this way: how little power would you want the government to have if it was totally in the hands of MAGA?

ETA: or to put it another way, how little power would the government have to have before even MAGAns would concede that the Left simply didn’t have the tools to implement “socialism”?

4

The original thinking, which still seems valid, is that if there was an attack, it would need to be resisted as quickly as possible. Congress would need some time to assemble and debate after the fact.

5

Trump has shown that, unless the President is truly dedicated to upholding the Constitution and serving all the people, he has far too much power via those “executive directives” which, in his hands, have become a way of circumventing the democratic process. He has too much power in terms of being able to START a war and continue a war without Congress being able to stop him.
The health of a democracy depends on the intelligence and character of its people and its leaders. We’ve become sorely lacking in that regard.

6

Well there you go. So instead of simply wishing we had a better president holding dictatorial power, how about less power?

7

The government needs to be significantly more powerful than the non-government malefactors out there.

Of which predatory businesses and oligarchs are to the fore. A unarmed poor nation of Mom and Pop shopkeepers and farmers can have minimalist government.

Conversely, one with large non-governmental organizations of any nature needs a larger government to control them. Since those orgs answer to their owners or managers or foreign governments or whatever, not the People.

8

The chief problem with those malign NGOs with lots of dollars is how easy it is for those dollars to influence policy, always to their benefit of course. All the laws that exist to prevent corruption in government officials are pretty much null today, due to lack of (or difficulty of) enforcement, aside from also being moot now that campaign contributions are so loosely (i.e. not at all) controlled. I don’t think the government needs a lot of power to protect the people from predatory domestic entities, if they had (or could take back) the power to keep a rein on the injection of money into politics. That is, a relatively modestly-sized government that didn’t have to fear monetary influence could establish and run relatively modestly-sized regulatory agencies with teeth, and exercise those teeth often enough to keep malefactors in line, at relatively low cost to taxpayers.

That said, I have no real idea how to get from where we are to there, but then practicality didn’t seem to be part of what OP was interested in.

9

The problem is not the size of the government; the problem is the lack of effective checks and balances. That seems pretty obvious to me.

10

I dunno; maybe the real problem is how well-protected non-government malefactors are by the government against protesters, strikes and vigilante reprisals. In the nineteenth century labor disputes that escalated to armed violence were always ended by the government stepping in firmly on the side of big money. Imagine abolishing that.

11

I agree. But that’s not less government. It is shifting power away from the President to the legislature.

So, the proposal is that there can be a plebiscite to overturn existing laws, but not to pass new ones?

If so, I do not think that would work. It is too condescending to the electoral to give them the power to overturn laws without giving the power to vote for new ones. And once voters have the power to make new ones, they will be more likely to make than to stop them. See:

Voters approved three and defeated three measures that would have established or expanded voter ID requirements in state constitutions

None of these six plebiscites eliminated any laws. At best, they prevented new ones. Most of the plebiscites that pass will establish new laws, as this week.

12

I think this is a flawed assumption to begin with? There are smaller-government proponents across the political spectrum, for sure, but it certainly isn’t the default stance of most, or even many, people. On the further Left, especially, it’s a relatively smaller niche — many of the social programs in that agenda require effective democratic oversight and some degree of centralized planning and redistribution to function, at least before the pie-in-the-sky stateless communism phase. While there are various shades of anarcho-socialist, I’m pretty sure that isn’t the default stance for most of the US left.

And much of the MAGA agenda depends on outright fascism… government doesn’t get much “bigger” than that.

What we see today isn’t a public outcry for smaller government, but more responsive government, whether that’s MAGA eroding away the OG Republicans or the Progressives gnawing away at the centralist Democrats. Of course, what we got instead is corruption plus gaslighting :person_shrugging:

These things don’t require a smaller government, but this:

There is so much that could in theory be done to provide more effective and responsive and democratic government, like:

  • Reforming campaign finance, especially Citizens United
  • Term limits for the Supreme Court and/or more seats
  • Fairer nonpartisan district maps
  • Plebiscites, yes, and also federal recalls
  • National voting holidays and mandatory employer leave to vote
  • Constitutional changes, especially in terms of the 1st Amendment, corporate speech, hate speech, etc.
  • Electoral College reforms
  • Better civics education
  • Limiting foreign influence and money in lobbying
  • Law enforcement reform
  • Ballot reforms (e.g. parliamentary systems or ranked-choice)
    etc.

Not saying any of those are right or wrong, but that there are many ways to change (and hopefully improve) government without simply shrinking it. The problem is that there is no realistic pathway to most of those because the two-party duopoly and campaign finance combined with private ownership of public media means that the entrenched footholds are so strong and so wealthy that there’s not a realistic pathway for challenging them at a grassroots level.

Anyway, I think one of the tragedies of American Exceptionalism is that a lot of our populace doesn’t know the difference between “big government” and “bad government”, having mostly never seen an effective government in their lives. Compared to most other rich countries, more Americans have never visited abroad, and the idea of government that “just works” is completely foreign to most of us.

Libertarianism as a significant political ideology is an American peculiarity; elsewhere in the developed world, people just aren’t as concerned about the size of government as opposed to what it’s doing and especially how well it’s doing it. Even the “Right” in much of the world is left of the US center-Left, especially in terms of their views of what the state should do: Americans, Western Europeans Differ on the Role of the State | Pew Research Center (in terms of providing for social welfare vs staying out of the way).

TLDR the argument we ought to be having is how to get better government, not smaller or bigger.

13

Power exists, and that means power differentials exist, and government is only one form of power and power differential. If we minimize government power while maintaining monied power, that would lead to unrestrained atrocities.

I want most power to be under the control of democratic institutions. It’d be better to have fewer power differentials in the first place, but as long as they exist, government can serve as a check on them. It’s obviously an inadequate solution, so let’s build something better, but until then let’s keep the democratic institutions we have, and not minimize their importance.

14

Checks and balances, unfortunately, aren’t self-enforcing. As soon as the human beings entrusted with enforcing the checks abrogate the responsibility to do so, an authoritarian can advance an agenda unabated.

I can’t conceive of checks and balances scheme that can overcome motivated neglect. The only idea I’ve had that kind of touches on checks is, in a two-party system, having a kind of power-sharing system between the parties where even one party having the Presidency, the majority of the Supreme Court, and majorities of both Houses of Congress were still insufficient to pass legislation, rule on laws, etc. without the opposing party’s approval. Not sure how that would work in the details.

15

Minarchism? If you’re going to put a neologism into a thread title, shouldn’t the body of the OP give a definition of it?

I mean, from context, I think I get the gist, but I have a preference for being told outright.

17
18

One of the first things that should be done is a complete repeal of the Patriot Act of 2001 and all of the extensions and laws that grew out of it.

The post 9/11 hysteria got this bundle of laws passed and most of the other things the OP would oppose are largely fruit of that poisonous tree. And we should note it was the GOP that proposed these laws. Repeal of this would get us back to a much less troublesome place.

19

The Democrats were not free from jingoistic rhetoric, and they were (barely) in control of the Senate at the time. Just for perspective. At the time, it would have been political death to strongly oppose most of the provisions of that act. I agree that it is long past time to repeal it, and restore the full constitutional rights that have been infringed by it.

20

From what I am reading about minarchism, there is no public education, and parents are complete dictators over their children.

This presents serious problems when it comes to parents who want their children to have minimal education when it comes to secular subjects. It might be objected that those parents are rare. But with the birth rate so far below replacement in mainstream secular society, by the time my grandchildren are my age, a significant portion of the population will be members of high birth rate communities such as the Amish, Hutterites, and Hasidic Jews. Without a government that enforces basic educational curriculum requirements, a large portion of the population will not have the freedom to effectively join the modern world.

It might be objected that even today, there is no enforcement of basic educational curriculum requirements for private and homeschooling. Getting rid of public schools will not make that worse. Yes, true, but requiring basic education for the modern world is one of the areas where, in the future, we will need more government.

Minarchism, if established, would not last long because as society changes, people will see need for new laws and governmental functions.

21

In practice, I believe actual anarchists in power have been for things like collective labor, not “close all the schools”.