One of the problems facing the
political discussion today is an insistence on using outmoded
conceptions of Government. Many of our fundamental arguments about
the role of government find their roots in arguments of the 18th
and 19th centuries, a time when the Government was a
separate and distinct entity from the people over who it governed.
This is simply no longer the case. Democracy offers the idea of
putting the governing power in the hands of the people in order that
they by self-governing might cease to be governed at all. Government
(in a democracy) is simply the mechanism by which society can set
priorities for collective goals, and the use of collective resources.
Government cannot be too big or too small, it only can fail to meet
the goals it sets for itself, as the representative of the people who
compose it. The function of a democratic government is to allow the
people a structure through which they can debate the allocation of
the shared resources of the community in order to reach shared goals.
The current political debates in the United States ignore this aspect
of government and instead attempt to frame things as a fundamental
argument about government as if it is still a debate over the form of
government rather than one within the already agreed upon structure
of democratic debate. Instead of debating what the tax levels should
be we need to be discussing what we want the country to look like,
once we have agreed on those issues we will be able to move on to how
to accomplish those goals in the most cost effective manner, and then
how best to raise the resources necessary to reach those goals. It
might very well be true that Americans cannot reach agreement on what
it is we want our nation to look like... but I think much of the
disagreement we see now is based on deeply entrenched
misunderstandings of what would actually happen were we to pursue
various policies. There is fear that such and such would take
people's freedom away, but there seems little evidence to support any
individual given claim. Democracy needs to find its natural
partnership with Technocracy... Democratic decision making to set
goals and a scientific evidenced based technocratic process to
achieve those goals. Ideology cannot help us in deciding on
methodology because it does not have a foundation from which to
launch its criticisms. Either a method results in the desired outcome
or it does not. I can see one of the main objections here would be
the classic of whether the ends justify the means? And I would
normally take the position that the ends do not generally speaking
justify the means if that were not an ideological position such as
the ones I have just now disavowed as having no valid place in such
discussions... Possibly the solution would be to ask whether we would
want our country to be the type of place that would use such and such
means... but this again is opening the door to the exact same
arguments I began by attempting to eliminate from our politics... now
I need to take the time to reconcile these two conflicting opinions
and redevelop this argument...
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