15 Min. of Blame

It's not anarchy, there are rules, people who make the rules, and people who enforce them. Yet there is not a group or a class of people who make the rules. There are no rulers. A small group of people bears the responsibility for a given rule and no more. How can some guidance be instilled into that process?

First of all a special sub-constitution but above law document should provide general guidelines to which rulers have to adhere. This should mention things like:

• The simpler rule is always to be preferred.
• A standard should be established to determine when the cost of a law's complexity exceeds its usefulness (e.g. to prevent something like modern tax laws).
• A law must be enforced (drug laws and German speed limits would be unconstitutional because of this).
• Organized crime is a great danger to society, if law making can undermine the revenue sources of organized crime, this has to be a high priority (drugs, prostitution, problematic: weapons).
• ...

This is meant to illustrate the form guidance in this document rather than the content.

The final decision on if to make a given law and how to formulate it has to lie with a rather small group of people - like a hand full. If too many people are involved in the decision, the responsibility is spread too far. Yet the group of decision makers should incorporate different views and opinions even though they can and should hear opinions from people who do not vote on the law. The group of voters should have a size that allows discussions between all voters, i.e. below maybe ten or twenty people. A balance has to found here.

The constitution and above document should be subject to the same law-making process as ``normal'' laws. Maybe the group of voters should be a bit bigger though, selected to represent more or less the spread and weight of opinions in the population, and a greater than simple majority should be required.

Some people in the proposed system have to move some very long levers: for example whoever decides on the global tariff. Similar mechanisms have to employed here as for determining the basic lending rate in western central banks. Maybe the characteristic of the total-working-hours/pay-per-hour curve has to be determined through the law-making process and the clergy may ``merely'' set some parameters.

Combined the ability to set the base lending rate, the global tariff, the law refactoring process and possibly other key functions lend immense power to whomever controls this. Some checks and balances may have to be provide to prevent misuse of this power.