This made me think of a client I had the other day. She works for the FBI doing Medicare fraud investigations and says a fraud wont even hit their radar unless it’s over a million dollars. The thought that the more centralized a function is, the more ripe is it for corruption is certainly true.
Something else changed around 1776. The world passed one billion living souls and did not fall back to 500 million. And it has not stopped. Too few people are in charge. Judges ought to be panels of 5, for every judicial event. Time for an end to monarchs, presidents, and singular power points.
The Constitution originally called for one representative for every 30,000 people. If we had stuck to that we'd have over 11,000 members in the House of Representatives. Imagine the House Whip trying to get that many in line. We'd have a much less intrusive Federal Government.
During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable."
Mr. Perot went on to note that this can easily be done with computer programs. He called it: THE ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL.
"It is only logical that it will become our Fourth Branch of Government", he said.
Objective reality:
the voting members of the US Congress and the State Legislatures do not have enough time to read, comprehend or debate any of the laws they vote on. They vote 100 times a day, every five minutes, while in session.
Approximate absolute facts:
a. Every day that the Congress and Legislatures are in session 100
new bills are introduced and distributed.
b. The representatives are given two weeks to review the laws before they are brought up for the Vote.
c. Two weeks into the session they begin voting on the Laws that were previously introduced, while newer laws are introduced.
d. Many laws are in excess of two thousand pages.
e. The arithmetic demonstrates that they do not have the time to even read the name of the Law much less the content of it.
f. Since the Representative cannot evaluate 200 thousand pages of law speak per day, they vote the way their advisors tell them to vote.
g. Thus, they have all forfeited their delegated obligation to represent us.
h. Representative government is obsolete. It does not work for us.
And the only way to prevent these over worked and fallible people from making even more tragic mistakes, from which we, and the rest of the world, might never recover is to include ourselves, The Citizens, from whom the authority for government comes in the first place, in the final decision making process.
The Electronic Congress
How it works:
1. Before a new law, tax, or expenditure can be put on the books it must first be Ratified by the Citizens.
2. Existing laws can be Annulled by the same super majority required to Ratify them.
This program can be applied to every level of government and will ultimately solve every problem we have.
To prevent chaos, the basic law, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, would be exempt from review.
Mr. Perot speculated that the Founding Fathers would probably have done the same had the technology been available in their day.
Just imagine:
We, The People, could actually direct the priorities and review the progress of the major agencies like the: CDC and NIH as well as the libraries and local police departments.
If our government truly is of the people, by the people and for the people then this is the only way forward.
How to implement it:
We talk about it until it is done.
Have AI parse a recent law or Supreme Court ruling into its actionable elements, apply a Ratify or Annul Questionnaire, then distribute the links.
Can I make money with this?
Use AI to parse the laws you find most egregious into their component pieces. And then have it build the ballot / questionnaire along with some demographic background to make the game especially interesting. Charge a $1 per voter per law and watch the evolution in real time.
The Electronic Townhall becomes an active Petition for a Redress of Grievances.
Ask the local school board for their agenda items, have AI parse the actionable elements, create a questionnaire, distribute it to the concerned citizens and then evaluate the results.
When Human Beings made in the image of God can see the results of their noblest and most sober thoughts, at such a scale, then there will be the moment where Our Benevolence and Good Will shall
overcome Evil and then we all live happily ever after.
Ross Perot publicly promised that if the People of America would elect him to The Presidency he would give us The Electronic Townhall.
The Fourth Branch of Government will allow us to go from Chaos to Prosperity and a Life Worth Living until the end of time.
We were created by God and in the image of God; we are human beings, not animals in a pen.
For the love of God this 1820 supreme court decision must be overturned or amended to require the grounds for the suit to go to a grand jury before wrecking the lives of the defendant and his family on the word of a miscreant and the actions of jackals with diplomatic immunity knowledgeable and adroit in the high art of robbery and murder.
I love this! Yet.. how do we get from here to there? I have often wondered how Bitcoin and other cryptos will evolve, as govt currently has the upper hand, as a regulator.
I have worked in regulated financial services.. the burden is heavy, the outcomes inconsistent, and generally smaller entities lose. But none of it is optional, unfortunately.
Some things need to be centralised and those should be managed as transparently as possible. Having the foreign policy of a country managed by a group of trusted (drawn from the best leaders that the decentralised groups can offer) would be good for the country. If the process is open and other countries share the process the open countries could stand together against propaganda/sanctions/lobbying of closed countries.
The goal really is to have systems that are so easy to understand because they are open that the man in the street actually understands and agrees with the good policy.
I have been thinking about KPIs for government. At the federal level. SOTUs are always filled with bs and platitudes. What if we had a non govt run, independent dashboard that showed key metrics with the POV of citizens as customers. Health metrics - longevity, disease rates.. Water, soil, food, air toxicity/ and the opposite (hopefully we can get there!), education.. and tax rates, national debt.. how much it costs to provide (currently shitty) services.
Yes, this is the way. One cannot be fixated on only distributed which I think is too far in the other direction and the middle ground where everyone benefits must be the goal.
Nice essay. I would push the time scale back. You mentioned the last 50- 20 years we have seen consolidation of power. This was made possible because the levers of that power were institutionalized at the end of the 19th century into the early 20th. Power began consolidating a long time ago, which made possible what we are seeing now. The train came off the tracks a long time ago.
Trust science (the scientific method; note, it's an error-checking system), but not Science™. Burn Vannevar Bush in effigy, and scatter his remains far and wide!
We subscribe to Popperian scientific method, as described by David Deutsch. It doesn’t start with observation and end with prediction like the current method. If that was the case then fossils of dinosaurs would just be weird shaped rocks. Rather the real scientific method should start with a problem and end with good explanations. https://youtu.be/tzWGfi4XhLA?si=-6HkZwjEsihk_1It
*After 1776, America was the most decentralized governance system on Earth, and with that came lots of opportunity. People lined up from countries all over the world to move to America. They were not moving to America for the land, or for the people. No, they were moving for The American Dream: a chance to live inside a system that nurtured creativity, individualism, knowledge discovery, and freedom to choose one’s own path.*
And seeing how Humanity, unshackled from the limits of the small minds of the European Monarchs, began to thrive, the Distorter, the Deep State had their apparatchik John Jay Marshall of 1820 SCOTUS fame render the verdict that basically destroyed the America dream:
*A wrongfully sued defendant has no recourse upon the frivolous plaintiff because to allow such would tend to deny a poor man his day in court.*
Error-correcting must start with the information system, where transparency and trust begin. How can readers be chastised for confusing facts with opinions when the writers themselves no longer see the difference?
I'm all for decentralization, but framing a nation built on Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement as the bringer of democracy is not the way to do it. The US has always been a country with power consolidated in the hands of few. They just learned how to use the media to tell lies better to give the illusion of democracy.
"America" led the way to decentralized/democratic systems? No, Indigenous people were already doing that, but the colonizers wanted their land, so they killed them. Turtle Island wasn't enough, so the US spread its empire around the world. Not everyone came to the US willingly. The US bombed and destabilized countries to exploit resources so folks had nowhere to go but the very place that destroyed their homes.
Also, it didn't correct any of its mistakes. It just hid them better or temporarily corrected them. Slavery reformed to the prison system. Abortion is illegal again and child labor is legal again.
If we want to look at the root cause of things, we must first understand the true nature of the US, not through the romanticized tales it has fed its citizens. Without that understanding, we will get nowhere because the US is the reason for much of the turmoil we see in the world today. With decentralization must come decolonization.
Some Indigenous tribes such as the Apache absolutely were decentralized. But they weren’t really governments.
Everything you say otherwise is pretty accurate- except maybe we disagree that some error correction did take place before our systems were totally corrupted.
The tribes of the indigenous fought each other as well. The framing it of peaceful is not truth, not by the Americans nor any of the factions of people anywhere in the world at that time. Violence was the way.
Decentralization prevents corruption. But we never made the argument that it prevents tyranny. Tyranny can be both centralized and decentralized. And solving for it is a separate issue.
Yeah, my whole point was that the US is the problem itself because it is objectively an oppressive and violent country, so calling it "good" and looking to it as the solution is not the way to go. The perspective in this article and this comment is blinded by American propaganda, weakening your analysis and arguments.
I'm not here to argue. I'm just trying to raise awareness that you're believing lies and that your analysis can be sharpened by learning the truth. This video can shed light on the topic: https://youtu.be/ooMCvGlbbc4?si=qza0HzMWNLDDr4bO
Bibles, Qur'ans, Churches, private religious schools, religious leaders & extremists should ALSO be on the "bad/centralized" list, especially toxic religions such as Christianity, Islam, Mormonism & Scientology.
You can also include all corrupt politicians as well. They & religious leaders are nothing more than liars. Thieves. Grifters. Charlatans.
Did you happen to see the infographic in the article? . Basically where power or control or decision making is spread out. Like America. Or Bitcoin. Or podcasts vs centralized news networks. Where no one centralized command or person is in charge. If this is a foreign concept to you we advise to start with the book The Starfish and The Spider, the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
This made me think of a client I had the other day. She works for the FBI doing Medicare fraud investigations and says a fraud wont even hit their radar unless it’s over a million dollars. The thought that the more centralized a function is, the more ripe is it for corruption is certainly true.
Something else changed around 1776. The world passed one billion living souls and did not fall back to 500 million. And it has not stopped. Too few people are in charge. Judges ought to be panels of 5, for every judicial event. Time for an end to monarchs, presidents, and singular power points.
Exactly. Leaders are the weak link. Decentralize them all
The Constitution originally called for one representative for every 30,000 people. If we had stuck to that we'd have over 11,000 members in the House of Representatives. Imagine the House Whip trying to get that many in line. We'd have a much less intrusive Federal Government.
The solution is:
During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Ross Perot observed that: "a general lack of accountability among elected officials and those in the bureaucracy is the one specific reason that the people of America suffered…. and our only means of correction is to inspect their work and hold them accountable."
Mr. Perot went on to note that this can easily be done with computer programs. He called it: THE ELECTRONIC TOWNHALL.
"It is only logical that it will become our Fourth Branch of Government", he said.
Objective reality:
the voting members of the US Congress and the State Legislatures do not have enough time to read, comprehend or debate any of the laws they vote on. They vote 100 times a day, every five minutes, while in session.
Approximate absolute facts:
a. Every day that the Congress and Legislatures are in session 100
new bills are introduced and distributed.
b. The representatives are given two weeks to review the laws before they are brought up for the Vote.
c. Two weeks into the session they begin voting on the Laws that were previously introduced, while newer laws are introduced.
d. Many laws are in excess of two thousand pages.
e. The arithmetic demonstrates that they do not have the time to even read the name of the Law much less the content of it.
f. Since the Representative cannot evaluate 200 thousand pages of law speak per day, they vote the way their advisors tell them to vote.
g. Thus, they have all forfeited their delegated obligation to represent us.
h. Representative government is obsolete. It does not work for us.
And the only way to prevent these over worked and fallible people from making even more tragic mistakes, from which we, and the rest of the world, might never recover is to include ourselves, The Citizens, from whom the authority for government comes in the first place, in the final decision making process.
The Electronic Congress
How it works:
1. Before a new law, tax, or expenditure can be put on the books it must first be Ratified by the Citizens.
2. Existing laws can be Annulled by the same super majority required to Ratify them.
This program can be applied to every level of government and will ultimately solve every problem we have.
To prevent chaos, the basic law, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, would be exempt from review.
Mr. Perot speculated that the Founding Fathers would probably have done the same had the technology been available in their day.
Just imagine:
We, The People, could actually direct the priorities and review the progress of the major agencies like the: CDC and NIH as well as the libraries and local police departments.
If our government truly is of the people, by the people and for the people then this is the only way forward.
How to implement it:
We talk about it until it is done.
Have AI parse a recent law or Supreme Court ruling into its actionable elements, apply a Ratify or Annul Questionnaire, then distribute the links.
Can I make money with this?
Use AI to parse the laws you find most egregious into their component pieces. And then have it build the ballot / questionnaire along with some demographic background to make the game especially interesting. Charge a $1 per voter per law and watch the evolution in real time.
The Electronic Townhall becomes an active Petition for a Redress of Grievances.
Ask the local school board for their agenda items, have AI parse the actionable elements, create a questionnaire, distribute it to the concerned citizens and then evaluate the results.
When Human Beings made in the image of God can see the results of their noblest and most sober thoughts, at such a scale, then there will be the moment where Our Benevolence and Good Will shall
overcome Evil and then we all live happily ever after.
Ross Perot publicly promised that if the People of America would elect him to The Presidency he would give us The Electronic Townhall.
The Fourth Branch of Government will allow us to go from Chaos to Prosperity and a Life Worth Living until the end of time.
We were created by God and in the image of God; we are human beings, not animals in a pen.
The Electronic Townhall
One might consider Dominion, an electronic voting system...
Of course it would work. They should get with the program and provide receipts for the votes cast to demonstrate that they are honest. Great Idea !!!
Transparent, open sourced, on blockchain, with traceability.
Many ways to build trust again.
And before getting into civil court:
For the love of God this 1820 supreme court decision must be overturned or amended to require the grounds for the suit to go to a grand jury before wrecking the lives of the defendant and his family on the word of a miscreant and the actions of jackals with diplomatic immunity knowledgeable and adroit in the high art of robbery and murder.
That’s why we need inspiration. Check out a better way of living life through better governance. marniekhaw.substack.com
I love this! Yet.. how do we get from here to there? I have often wondered how Bitcoin and other cryptos will evolve, as govt currently has the upper hand, as a regulator.
I have worked in regulated financial services.. the burden is heavy, the outcomes inconsistent, and generally smaller entities lose. But none of it is optional, unfortunately.
Keep in mind, China tried to regulate crypto and ban it. Then it became the number one place for Bitcoin mining and number two for exchanging
Good ideas.
Some things need to be centralised and those should be managed as transparently as possible. Having the foreign policy of a country managed by a group of trusted (drawn from the best leaders that the decentralised groups can offer) would be good for the country. If the process is open and other countries share the process the open countries could stand together against propaganda/sanctions/lobbying of closed countries.
The goal really is to have systems that are so easy to understand because they are open that the man in the street actually understands and agrees with the good policy.
There can be centralized and top-down systems as long as they answer to the people. The last hand on the bat must be the decentralized group.
I have been thinking about KPIs for government. At the federal level. SOTUs are always filled with bs and platitudes. What if we had a non govt run, independent dashboard that showed key metrics with the POV of citizens as customers. Health metrics - longevity, disease rates.. Water, soil, food, air toxicity/ and the opposite (hopefully we can get there!), education.. and tax rates, national debt.. how much it costs to provide (currently shitty) services.
Yes, this is the way. One cannot be fixated on only distributed which I think is too far in the other direction and the middle ground where everyone benefits must be the goal.
Nice essay. I would push the time scale back. You mentioned the last 50- 20 years we have seen consolidation of power. This was made possible because the levers of that power were institutionalized at the end of the 19th century into the early 20th. Power began consolidating a long time ago, which made possible what we are seeing now. The train came off the tracks a long time ago.
Trust science (the scientific method; note, it's an error-checking system), but not Science™. Burn Vannevar Bush in effigy, and scatter his remains far and wide!
We subscribe to Popperian scientific method, as described by David Deutsch. It doesn’t start with observation and end with prediction like the current method. If that was the case then fossils of dinosaurs would just be weird shaped rocks. Rather the real scientific method should start with a problem and end with good explanations. https://youtu.be/tzWGfi4XhLA?si=-6HkZwjEsihk_1It
*After 1776, America was the most decentralized governance system on Earth, and with that came lots of opportunity. People lined up from countries all over the world to move to America. They were not moving to America for the land, or for the people. No, they were moving for The American Dream: a chance to live inside a system that nurtured creativity, individualism, knowledge discovery, and freedom to choose one’s own path.*
And seeing how Humanity, unshackled from the limits of the small minds of the European Monarchs, began to thrive, the Distorter, the Deep State had their apparatchik John Jay Marshall of 1820 SCOTUS fame render the verdict that basically destroyed the America dream:
*A wrongfully sued defendant has no recourse upon the frivolous plaintiff because to allow such would tend to deny a poor man his day in court.*
Error-correcting must start with the information system, where transparency and trust begin. How can readers be chastised for confusing facts with opinions when the writers themselves no longer see the difference?
I'm all for decentralization, but framing a nation built on Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement as the bringer of democracy is not the way to do it. The US has always been a country with power consolidated in the hands of few. They just learned how to use the media to tell lies better to give the illusion of democracy.
"America" led the way to decentralized/democratic systems? No, Indigenous people were already doing that, but the colonizers wanted their land, so they killed them. Turtle Island wasn't enough, so the US spread its empire around the world. Not everyone came to the US willingly. The US bombed and destabilized countries to exploit resources so folks had nowhere to go but the very place that destroyed their homes.
Also, it didn't correct any of its mistakes. It just hid them better or temporarily corrected them. Slavery reformed to the prison system. Abortion is illegal again and child labor is legal again.
If we want to look at the root cause of things, we must first understand the true nature of the US, not through the romanticized tales it has fed its citizens. Without that understanding, we will get nowhere because the US is the reason for much of the turmoil we see in the world today. With decentralization must come decolonization.
Some Indigenous tribes such as the Apache absolutely were decentralized. But they weren’t really governments.
Everything you say otherwise is pretty accurate- except maybe we disagree that some error correction did take place before our systems were totally corrupted.
The tribes of the indigenous fought each other as well. The framing it of peaceful is not truth, not by the Americans nor any of the factions of people anywhere in the world at that time. Violence was the way.
Decentralization prevents corruption. But we never made the argument that it prevents tyranny. Tyranny can be both centralized and decentralized. And solving for it is a separate issue.
Yeah, my whole point was that the US is the problem itself because it is objectively an oppressive and violent country, so calling it "good" and looking to it as the solution is not the way to go. The perspective in this article and this comment is blinded by American propaganda, weakening your analysis and arguments.
I'm not here to argue. I'm just trying to raise awareness that you're believing lies and that your analysis can be sharpened by learning the truth. This video can shed light on the topic: https://youtu.be/ooMCvGlbbc4?si=qza0HzMWNLDDr4bO
We were examining what was good with America. No doubt there was a lot not perfect.
The indigenous way couldn’t stop meteors from crashing into Earth. Only new knowledge can do that which requires technology and modern society.
Thank you for the link. We will dive deeper!
Bibles, Qur'ans, Churches, private religious schools, religious leaders & extremists should ALSO be on the "bad/centralized" list, especially toxic religions such as Christianity, Islam, Mormonism & Scientology.
You can also include all corrupt politicians as well. They & religious leaders are nothing more than liars. Thieves. Grifters. Charlatans.
Hello, what do you mean by "decentralization"?
Did you happen to see the infographic in the article? . Basically where power or control or decision making is spread out. Like America. Or Bitcoin. Or podcasts vs centralized news networks. Where no one centralized command or person is in charge. If this is a foreign concept to you we advise to start with the book The Starfish and The Spider, the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations