You're ignoring that politicians and bureaucrats do not want to solve the problems that created and maintain their jobs. That's the last thing they want. The first thing they want is to wring every possible drop of blood out of every little problem, to get more votes, bigger budgets, more subordinates, and the opportunity to issue more regulations to prove they are working on the problem.
The gullible public assumes that means working to solve the problem. Everyone with any common sense knows it means they are working to exacerbate the problem.
The analogy being: You're never going to get open borders. No one wants it.
But you advocate for it a lot. Yet I've never seen you advocate for ending welfare (including free education) for immigrants. You'd probably agree too! (Heck I want to end it for citizens too.)
If you are concerned about increasing human welfare for all those immigrants you should strongly endorse such compromises: No birthright citizenship. No welfare. Those are easy compromises, right?
There is not much difference between your view and that of the credibility theorists. They are saying: “The policy is unpopular (obvious, since it is not, and is not close to being, in place); and even if you could temporarily institute it—sneaking it past the voters—before long its inherent unpopularity would rise to the fore, and it would be reversed.”
Respectfully disagree: credibility is a real problem in many important cases. Voters are fickle and the entire policy structure of a democracy can change in a matter of months- prior loud pronouncements (even by the same individuals!) notwithstanding. For people who have to make investments with longer time horizons, the risks of these changes far out weight any potential benefits so the investments rationally do not get made.
Take the case Byran knows well of Prospera where Honduran officials gave loud speeches promising to respect the rights of foreign capital. And yet now, one election later, they are doing everything they can to expropriate it all.
In the USA, we do have ways to tie ourselves to the mast- most notably constitutional amendments because they are slow and difficult to enact and change. But maybe they are too slow and so almost never get used for this purpose. So maybe we need more practical solutions....
The history of judges amending the Constitution by reinterpretation does justify thinking the difficulty of Article V is any roadblock. I can't imagine any founding father, not even Hamilton, approving the current understanding of the current Constitution.
So true. Unless we amend the constitution to replace SCOTUS with a LLM. No oral arguments - parties would submit briefs to the system and out would come deterministic decisions. Weights and seed would be public so anyone could confirm decisions independently, and even try experiments like "what-if brief A had made this argument instead?" People would still be unhappy with decisions, but probably not more so than today.
Then we could all argue about how often to update the weights and what should be in the training data and prompts - but at least it would get rid of ex-post decision making.
I have a simpler solution. Give We, the People, the ultimate veto. Allow anyone to pay for a jury of random competent adults to veto any law, regulation, or any other government edict, including executive orders, memos, etc. Put every juror in a room by themselves, with the law, regulation, or edict in question; a notepad; a pen; and a dictionary and appropriate technical dictionary. No legal dictionary. No internet, no eraser, no trash can or shredder.
Tell them to write down their interpretation of the law, regulation, or edict. Or answer a question, such as “Does the IEEPA(?) allow Trump’s tariffs?”.
When all are done, compare the answers. If 10 or 11 agree, their notes define future judicial interpretations — judges cannot make up new interpretations 10 years later. If more than 1 or 2 jurors disagree, the law, regulation, or edict is void. The jurors can also say they think the law, regulation, or edict is bonkers, unwelcome, ugly, or make up any other reason to veto it.
No attorneys to “explain” what it means or answer questions. No appeals — the jury’s veto is final. Jurors cannot revise the law, regulation, or edit, nor can they void only part of it.
It needs work and it will never happen. But I cannot think of any other way to stop government from defining its own limits. There is something truly awful about government judges deciding when other government employees have crossed the line. There has to be some simple immediate way for ordinary people to stop government overreach.
If anyone can convene one of these veto courts, and we assume there is a distribution of beliefs in the population, then I'd expect people would just keep spinning the wheel until they, through random sampling, happen to come up with a jury willing to veto. So, in practice, because of the ratchet effect everything would be vetoed - even things that the vast, vast majority of people are in favor of.
Is that worse than what we have now, where the people get no say and everything depends on 9 unaccountable government employees to rein in the other several million?
My scheme has lots of things to work out, but your example is one of the easiest: don’t allow more than one challenge per year for each law, regulation, or edict. Or don’t allow any single person to challenge more than once a year. Or don’t allow any single person to be a juror more than once a year.
You're ignoring that politicians and bureaucrats do not want to solve the problems that created and maintain their jobs. That's the last thing they want. The first thing they want is to wring every possible drop of blood out of every little problem, to get more votes, bigger budgets, more subordinates, and the opportunity to issue more regulations to prove they are working on the problem.
The gullible public assumes that means working to solve the problem. Everyone with any common sense knows it means they are working to exacerbate the problem.
A very insightful analysis.
But it's interesting that you can see this and I assume therefore I've never seen you repeating
ad nauseam that we should end welfare for immigrants.
Now apply your same logic for open borders?
The analogy being: You're never going to get open borders. No one wants it.
But you advocate for it a lot. Yet I've never seen you advocate for ending welfare (including free education) for immigrants. You'd probably agree too! (Heck I want to end it for citizens too.)
If you are concerned about increasing human welfare for all those immigrants you should strongly endorse such compromises: No birthright citizenship. No welfare. Those are easy compromises, right?
There is not much difference between your view and that of the credibility theorists. They are saying: “The policy is unpopular (obvious, since it is not, and is not close to being, in place); and even if you could temporarily institute it—sneaking it past the voters—before long its inherent unpopularity would rise to the fore, and it would be reversed.”
Respectfully disagree: credibility is a real problem in many important cases. Voters are fickle and the entire policy structure of a democracy can change in a matter of months- prior loud pronouncements (even by the same individuals!) notwithstanding. For people who have to make investments with longer time horizons, the risks of these changes far out weight any potential benefits so the investments rationally do not get made.
Take the case Byran knows well of Prospera where Honduran officials gave loud speeches promising to respect the rights of foreign capital. And yet now, one election later, they are doing everything they can to expropriate it all.
In the USA, we do have ways to tie ourselves to the mast- most notably constitutional amendments because they are slow and difficult to enact and change. But maybe they are too slow and so almost never get used for this purpose. So maybe we need more practical solutions....
https://wp.josh.com/2025/04/27/how-to-tie-ourselves-to-the-mast-the-persistent-charter/
The history of judges amending the Constitution by reinterpretation does justify thinking the difficulty of Article V is any roadblock. I can't imagine any founding father, not even Hamilton, approving the current understanding of the current Constitution.
So true. Unless we amend the constitution to replace SCOTUS with a LLM. No oral arguments - parties would submit briefs to the system and out would come deterministic decisions. Weights and seed would be public so anyone could confirm decisions independently, and even try experiments like "what-if brief A had made this argument instead?" People would still be unhappy with decisions, but probably not more so than today.
Then we could all argue about how often to update the weights and what should be in the training data and prompts - but at least it would get rid of ex-post decision making.
I have a simpler solution. Give We, the People, the ultimate veto. Allow anyone to pay for a jury of random competent adults to veto any law, regulation, or any other government edict, including executive orders, memos, etc. Put every juror in a room by themselves, with the law, regulation, or edict in question; a notepad; a pen; and a dictionary and appropriate technical dictionary. No legal dictionary. No internet, no eraser, no trash can or shredder.
Tell them to write down their interpretation of the law, regulation, or edict. Or answer a question, such as “Does the IEEPA(?) allow Trump’s tariffs?”.
When all are done, compare the answers. If 10 or 11 agree, their notes define future judicial interpretations — judges cannot make up new interpretations 10 years later. If more than 1 or 2 jurors disagree, the law, regulation, or edict is void. The jurors can also say they think the law, regulation, or edict is bonkers, unwelcome, ugly, or make up any other reason to veto it.
No attorneys to “explain” what it means or answer questions. No appeals — the jury’s veto is final. Jurors cannot revise the law, regulation, or edit, nor can they void only part of it.
It needs work and it will never happen. But I cannot think of any other way to stop government from defining its own limits. There is something truly awful about government judges deciding when other government employees have crossed the line. There has to be some simple immediate way for ordinary people to stop government overreach.
If anyone can convene one of these veto courts, and we assume there is a distribution of beliefs in the population, then I'd expect people would just keep spinning the wheel until they, through random sampling, happen to come up with a jury willing to veto. So, in practice, because of the ratchet effect everything would be vetoed - even things that the vast, vast majority of people are in favor of.
Is that worse than what we have now, where the people get no say and everything depends on 9 unaccountable government employees to rein in the other several million?
My scheme has lots of things to work out, but your example is one of the easiest: don’t allow more than one challenge per year for each law, regulation, or edict. Or don’t allow any single person to challenge more than once a year. Or don’t allow any single person to be a juror more than once a year.
"and public post videos "
and publicLY post videos
Enh, who needs adverbs anyway? All they do is clarify meaning.
Autocorrect my pedantic friend on the latter snark. That whole assign malice ignorance thing sub 2026 auto correct / word suggestions.