I really didn’t intend to obsess over the US government shutdown, which is not of great importance.
However, while I was distracted catching up on some
pulp monarchist fiction, @Outsideness has only gone and threatened to carry a modified form of Montesqiueuan separation-of-powers into the neoreactionary era.
I think that is a terrible mistake. The British, of course, were going through the process of abandoning the separation of legislature and executive while the US constitution was written — Queen Anne appointed Tory Ministers in spite of Whig Parliaments, but by the 1830s this was recognised to be unworkable, and any Prime Minister who could not win a vote of confidence would resign. The legislature owned the executive.
Against this, @Outsideness points out, reasonably, that the USA has not been the worst-governed nation over the last couple of centuries, so mere association with the treasonous blackguards of 1776 is not quite sufficient to dispose of the idea of separating tax-raising and policy into different bodies. If it is such a bad idea, how did the US manage with it up until 2012?
One way is that, because both the House of Representatives and President have both been elected by the same electorate, they have tended to be mostly in step. The periods of “gridlock” when they have been in opposition have generally been recognised as temporary, so the limits of the powers of each side were not fully tested, both sides assuming that a period of united government would follow at some point. (It’s interesting that the concept of “gridlock” has disappeared from the lexicon over the last six months — it is
something that can only happen to white presidents, not to The Holy One. The disappearance of gridlock is one of the reasons I take the current process to be a permanent shift in constitutional arrangements).
Another has been the unusually legalistic attitude of Americans: more than any Europeans, including British, they tend to accept that something should be done just because it is the rule, whether or not it iseems like a good idea. Presidents before Obama accepted that they could not do much — certainly not anything very expensive — against the will of Congress. The “balance of power” between the executive and legislature could last as long as it was not tested.
The other reason why separation of powers worked longer in the US than in Britain is that the US government was not always the government of the US. In the division between the States and the Federal government, the “Keep the lights on” functions were predominantly State concerns, until the mid-20th Century.
The idea of assembling a government from independent self-perpetuating institutions is not one I would dismiss out of hand. There are strong echoes of the role of the medieval Church. But dividing the taxing institution from the domestic policy-making institution is either a sham or a shortcut to civil war.
Where, then, did it come from? My assumption has always been that the origin of the House of Commons is that it embodied the people whose active cooperation was needed in order to practically gather taxes in 11th to 16th Century England. The King ran his tax demands through them because if they, out in the country, chose to be obstructive about assessing and gathering the tax, he simply wasn’t going to get any. The small to medium landowners handed over their portions to the Royal Treasury without a fight because they knew that everyone else was paying on the same basis, and they weren’t just being landed on and raided, which is what it would look like if the King raised taxes without going through any kind of collective.
By the time of King Charles the Martyr, it was no longer clear that this was the case, and so Parliament’s control over taxation had gone from being a practical physical power to being a constitutional entitlement. As such, it could be lost and needed to be fought for. Since the ensuing fight was, by my measure, where progressivism first started to obtain power in the world — to become a party rather than an occasional aspiration, I strongly suspect that the separation of powers of taxation and executive is the worst idea in the world. That is all.
Apologies for the off-topic: I've created a neoreactionary forum. Anyone interested in a London-based book club?
http://neoreaction.proboards.com/
A London-based book club? Most definitely.
I'm also not sure about this whole 'trichotomy' idea that's kind of emerged in the Reacosphere, which Land relies upon to build his dynamic equilibrium. The tendency to inflate minor disagreements on points of a theory into major ideological schisms, requiring nothing less than holy jihad, lies at the center of the black heart of democracy.
@sconzey This tendency seems to be part of the nature of man. I believe Crawley and Freud used to call it 'the narcissism of small differences'. It takes over when it becomes adaptive to form sub-groups, for instance under resource constraints (the various privation experiments in Scouts camps) or when the group has no objective it feels to be really attainable (popular music, consumerist culture and, apparently, us). Indeed, the second case — no objective — could be seen as a sub-case of the resource-constraint case, the scarce resource in question being the group's attention.
"I strongly suspect that the separation of powers of taxation and executive is the worst idea in the world."
Hmm. In my attempts at government structural engineering, I have advocated for taxes that are constitutionally fixed at a high rate. My latest thinking calls for a tax of roughly 40% of GDP, extracted via taxes on property, very high income earners, and natural resource depletion. New taxes or tax increases could only be initiated by a vote of people paying the tax, with voting power proportional to taxes paid. Any excess of taxes paid over government operating expenses would be paid out as a dividend to citizens and government stakeholders. Citizens and stakeholders elect the senate (though not via a traditional majoritarian, partisan system), the Senate controls the executive, with the ability to hire and fire the president/ceo at any time.
Any government cost or expense comes directly out of the government. So the Senate/stakeholders/citizens have a unitary interest in spending government money efficiently, and leaving as much as possible to go to the dividend.
Does my scheme above count as being part of "the worst idea in the world"? If so, where do you think it goes wrong?
Devin – a constitutionally fixed tax rate would be OK if it could be kept to, but I rather doubt that it could be. Constitutional provisions are routinely ignored if the "zeitgeist" sees them as unnecessary. So, it may be a bad idea, but it's not the specific bad idea of dividing responsibility for government from funding.
unearthing a post like this is probably not the best way to get a conversation going, but since in 2013 I was as far from NRx as any market anarchist is, here it goes anyway:
Land's model doesn't divide executive and tax raising powers: all military power belongs to the ethno-nationalists, if someone doesn't pay their taxes (i.e, violates the law), it is the military who ensures they either pay or go to jail. the techno-commercialists only *define* the level of taxation, according to business productivity and needs. and they do this within the limits set by the holy law that the theonomists *discover*. the division doesn't really map Montesquieu's three powers (although, if you go read Montesquieu, he never quite proposes three powers as used by most modern democracies – executive, judiciary, legislative – but rather an internal executive (police), external executive (army) and judiciary, the legislature being merely an accounting organ, rather than a proper power).