Posted on 07/31/2003 8:05:59 AM PDT by G. Stolyarov II
The Betrayal of Checks and Balances
The philosophy of Ayn Rand has taught me and numerous other thinkers of the new intellectual Renaissance the moral groundwork for laissez-faire capitalism as the sole economic system which fully and unequivocally recognizes the individual’s objective prerequisites to survival, his natural rights of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and property. With slight loopholes, this was the implicit philosophy behind the founding of America, and the principal force in its first one hundred fifty years of development.
Yet, in the words of Aristotle, "The least initial deviation from the truth gets multiplied later a thousandfold.” This phenomenon was precisely what had befallen the United States, beginning to manifest extensive signs by the final decade of the nineteenth century and gradually paving the way toward the abdication of more and more essential liberties until the formation of a mixed economy welfare state with a stranglehold on education, development, space exploration, health care, and the latter third of every man’s life.
The causes of this collapse are, admittedly, manifold. The moral root, the incompatibility of capitalism with the altruist ethics, has been extensively discussed by Rand in her works. Moreover, the Constitution had granted the government power to regulate interstate commerce, which clause, largely disregarded for over a century, became a principal means of political leverage in the bureaucratic schemes of the past 113 years.
Nevertheless, another root of the decay of limited government has not yet been extensively addressed, and that is, namely the loopholes available within the renowned Constitutional system of Checks and Balances itself.
My respect for the Founding Fathers’ invention transcends all forms of mere courtesy and approaches a single word: reverence. This system had been the first of its sort in attempting to provide inherent protections against the usurpation of power by any one individual or group. Whereas the Roman Republic shielded (for a considerable, but not eternal, span of time, as the assumptions of power by Sulla, and later Julius Caesar demonstrated) its constituents from the emergence of a monarch, this safeguard had been instituted for the sheer purpose of rendering Rome the site of a brutal bloodbath involving a myriad of pressure groups armed with clienteles of dagger-wielding “lobbyists.” The Founding Fathers were the first in history to implement the recognition that the tyranny of many, be it in the form of oligarchy (such as a patrician Senate), anarchy, or Athenian democracy, is just as, if not more so, perilous than the reign of a King or High Priest.
By assimilating ideas of English government, such as legislature by Assembly instead of the mob, the bicameral structure of Congress, and the separateness of the judicial structure from the legislative, as well as adding their own innovations, including the electoral college and a chief executive whose function does not extend to the creation of laws, but merely their enforcement and/or veto, the Founding Fathers intended to bring about a state of affairs in which the whim or “ideological drift” of any odd majority will not enable them to triumph in the violation of individual rights via the seizure of any given organ of government. Or so, at least, they had hoped.
Why then has, in the past 113 years, demagoguery and ever-mounting mass credibility, unseated all of these institutions? Why have the denizens of the freest nation in history succumbed, with sheepishly bleating affirmation that extends to this day, to business-shackling Theodore Roosevelt, welfare-statist Franklin Roosevelt, nationalizing Harry Truman, international altruist John Kennedy, sly manipulator Lyndon Johnson, politically correct socialist Bill Clinton, and, which may be the final culmination in this century-long development, the emerging brazenly anti-individualist, anti-free enterprise Hillary Clinton?
Despite its attempt to limit the tyranny of the majority, the Constitution had erred on the side of majoritarianism, perhaps due to the fact that its creators’ time had been flooded by absolute monarchies, with the age of Cleisthenes, Pericles, Gracchus, and miscellaneous exponents of a “democracy’s” violation of individual rights, far behind. One can forgive the Founding Fathers for lack of omniscience in their inability to predict the re-emergence of duty preachers and drafters a la Pericles, “champions of the poor” a la Gracchus, and flauntingly egalitarian merit-haters a la Cleisthenes. Yet one cannot forgive, or forget, the outcome. One must remedy it by first identifying the flaw in the original system of Checks and Balances and suggesting a more impervious alternative.
It should be noted that every position on every level of government, but especially on the uppermost, is either directly or in large influenced by majority rule. The legislators are elected by direct ballot, whereas unconditional majority influence is counterbalanced only by the Electoral College (which had been elected by direct ballot) in the selection of the President. Presently, even that check is endangered as Hillary Clinton and her supporters, displeased at the loss of their lapdog, Al Gore, in the 2000 Election, are clamoring for the Electoral College’s abolition. (Note and be warned, reader, that, had this been the case, and direct majority vote decided the head of state, we would have been living under the yoke of a Gore Presidency.)
Moreover, the Judicial Branch, perhaps the best-cushioned out of all the three, is selected by the President (via the appointment of justices to the Supreme Court), who is selected by the Electoral College, which is selected by direct ballot. Despite the fact that it is the least alterable by present majority whim, the Judicial Branch’s danger is even more lingering. It is the voice of past majority whim, embodied in the selections by past Presidents, who were more often collectivist demagogues than not and employed the Supreme Court to rubber-stamp their proposals. There was a time when such a conservative force would have been conductive to preserving a “traditional” state of liberty and holding back regulating “innovators,” yet it is the “social reformers” who have now become “traditional,” with a lengthy history of judicial appointments before them, and it is the task of the new innovators to dismantle the behemoth of big government which their gullible predecessors had left as their legacy. This indirect appointment of justices by majority vote subverts, however tactfully, the entire principle of impartial, dispassionate, objective law independent of the “zeitgeist,” the lobby, or “community standards” (see Miller v. California).
Also in the history of the Supreme Court, which further multiplies its fallibility, is the unfortunate incident in 1935 when Franklin Roosevelt, enraged at the Court’s declaration of the National Industrial Recovery Act’s unconstitutionality, attempted to expand the number of seats in the Court by executive decree and pack it with his lackeys. While the subversion failed, Roosevelt did manage to mandate a set retirement age for justices in 1937, which immediately struck out over half of his principal opponents in the Judicial Branch. In summation, executive control over the judicial system manifests itself in two dangerous phenomena, which have been conductive to firmly entrenching and magnifying regulatory law during the past eleven decades:
1) Past Presidents “ruling from the grave” by selecting judicial nominees that will rubber stamp their agendas, as especially conspicuous in the case of the post-FDR Court, which continued to intensify, from 1945 to 1961, the crackdown on businesses and the profit motive in such antitrust cases as ALCOA and General Electric. FDR’s meddling had rendered the Supreme Court far more docile than it had been prior to 1937 and thus extended the New Dealers’ ability to strangle the country with impunity.
2) The mounting power which present executives can wield against the Supreme Court. There has been a history of intervention, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, which, though unconstitutional on all counts, has been tacitly and sometimes crusadingly upheld by statists tactful and cunning enough to know which power ploys will not attract the public’s notice or spark its outrage. A recent statement by Dick Gephardt, one of the prospective Democratic Presidential nominees for 2004, brazenly spewed forth his dictatorial intention: to overrule the Supreme Court with an executive edict in the event that the racist practice of affirmative action becomes definitively outlawed. Can anyone expect anything less from an ideological descendant of FDR?
Of course, some institutions guided by the premise of majority rule are essential to a free society; the sole purpose of government is to exercise the powers that its citizens have delegated to it. Thus, an assembly of representatives and senators is necessary to be called upon to debate any innovation in public policy, this being a partly logistical consideration, as there is simply insufficient time to present, in the same forum, the comments of every suffrage-holding citizen. More importantly, it is a safeguard in and of itself, as, in theory at least, representatives are individuals well enlightened in both fundamental moral/political principles and the intricacies of the voluminous law codes in existence. The key to proper government, however, is that this assembly be limited in the sort of decisions it may pass and be barred from promulgating any measure that violates the rights of even a single individual. So is it necessary for the majority to hold an indirect sway over the selection of a chief executive; this is merely the people’s choice as to whose personality, work ethic, and ideological sympathies are best suited to optimal law enforcement and restraint of any pressure group that decides to use a privileged position in the legislative to grant itself handouts at the expense of others. The purpose of the Electoral College is quite ingenious in this regard. The presence of two senators in every state places the less populated states within greater proximity to the densely inhabited ones in terms of their contribution to the vote pool. As such, should a given demagogue come to hold tremendous influence in a large city and allure its population by means of proposing state-sponsored projects of development, transfer payments, or plain brute expropriation by looting the remainder of the country (or its rural areas), his capacity to win the Presidency would be diminished compared to the scenario of pure majority vote.
Whereas, again, I would like to commend the Founding Fathers for their prudence in the construction of the Legislative and Executive branches, it is essential to remember that their system is functional in the presence of a pivotal condition. This is best expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s statement that “Liberty requires eternal vigilance.” No government, no matter how intricately or keenly constructed, no matter how padded against undue interventions of looters and thugs in disguise or on the streets, is impervious to subversion and corruption from within by men who renounce, either covertly or braggingly, the principles behind its foundation. Thus, even in the two better-planned branches of the United States government, their current exponents have broken practice apart from theory and, in the entirety of their regulatory undertakings, have demonstrated utter and disgraceful contempt for the Constitution and the notion of individual rights. As in all other developments, the latter decade of the twentieth century has seen an ideological climax of this movement that leaves extensive doubt about whether it can conceivably heighten its intellectual profanity even further. It is demonstrable in the writings of liberal propagandist “historians” such as Howard Zinn, who claim that the Bill of Rights was a peculiar prejudice of the Founding Fathers’ “class interests,” which purportedly (but according to no evidence whatsoever) included maintaining the status quo of slavery and continually disenfranchising the working poor. With men like Zinn having held sway over the country’s intellectual centers for the past thirty years, it is no surprise that not the best and most competent, but the most twisted, scheming, anti-principled, and anti-American of men have been indoctrinated into their habits, and, guided by the worst motives, risen to the top of the political hierarchy.
Cleansing the Smear
The word “meritocracy” has often been employed as a pejorative smear against the system of capitalism, which, claimed the egalitarians, establishes the self-contradictory notion of a caste system based on merit (!), which supposedly elevates inherently “gifted” men into positions of “dominance” over the inherently “deprived of mind.” Aside from the obvious mysticism of the deterministic notion of inherited intelligence (every man’s knowledge and skill, just as every man’s profit, are products of his own effort; he may inherit a more reactive brain just as he may inherit a greater share of raw capital, but his intelligence, the synthesis of the means and ends of thought, is attainable only through his volitional choice and self-exertion, just as presently possessed money does not automatically and inexplicably generate more of itself), the term has effaced and smeared what has been a legitimate and benevolent effect of the capitalist system. In the realm where free trade is let alone, both in goods and ideas, the men with the amplest knowledge, most efficient industry, and most fervent motivation, are the ones who succeed in enriching themselves and rising to a position of economic power. This, the legitimate meaning of “meritocracy,” is not that of a caste system, but a fully free society in which every individual can expect to advance, not by birth or by pull, but only through the effort he exerts. (The wealthy heir may be endowed with lavish wealth by his industrious ancestors under a laissez-faire system, but that does not alter the fact that he must utilize his own ingenuity in order to amplify the riches he already has.)
Meritocracy, in the sphere of government, then, would denote that organization which is most conductive to a fully free market, which prevents, to the securest extent, any intervention of the state into the economic sphere. Eternal vigilance is, once again, required, and an administration of scum cannot by definition abstain from violating the integrity of a meritocracy. Thus, a meritocratic structure of government requires for the most knowledgeable, moral, and strictly delimited officials to emerge to the foremost ranks of enforcing the citizens’ negative obligations.
It was thus that I had come to deliberate the matter of a system of leadership that, while imposing only protection against the initiation of force and not regulation, will nevertheless attract men of the cleanest integrity and the finest intellect to its offices. Any positional hierarchy defined by bureaucrats on standards such as social class, level of education, or even a more complex and multi-faceted approach that takes into account the near-whole extent of a given individual’s fortes (which, given the scantiness and superficiality inherent in one-size-fits-all criteria, is improbable at best) is not compatible with a limited view on government merely because it leaves the men of merit themselves dependent on government officials for recognition of their deeds and introduction into a higher social group. Thus we are left to invent a liberty-based meritocracy, at which we can arrive by pinpointing the central characteristic of meritocracies as such, the rewarding of men based on virtuous, selfish choices; the more a man benefits himself, the greater voluntary benefits are conferred upon him by others. A rigidly defined system of social ladders is unessential in this regard. Quite the contrary, a man's perseverance and insight will yield him more substantial gains where there is no bureaucracy to regulate his performance and no panels and committees to whose expectations he must conform in order to receive special favors. The government must therefore remain separated from the field of economics especially, but also from any subsidiary work within the arts, the sciences, and education.
Yet that retains a dilemma within the system thus far. If all the most prodigious men select to pursue their own designs outside the heavily curtailed political field, what types of persons apply for the positions of officials? At best they are average men, frequently lacking the experience and philosophical base to maintain the proper limitations of their activities and to confine them to retaliation against the initiation of force. At worst they are power-lusters, men who seek from lack of productive capacity not to create wealth but to seize it from defenseless creators by means of officially sanctioned force. The fault with such a system is its inability to attract the intellectuals genuinely committed to preserving a strictly limited government.
In all political structures up to the present day, which had involved some manner of economic intervention, officials were forbidden to occupy any manner of post in scientific research, industry, or any miscellaneous money-making, competing enterprise for the fear that they would employ their governmental position as leverage to extort their rivals who would not possess such a footing. This menace could be remedied by an utter breach between government and economics and a severe system of penalties for any attempt to promulgate legislation restricting laissez-faire capitalism. Thus, the prohibition of multiple employments would no longer be warranted and administrative offices would be opened to businessmen, scientists, engineers, artists who seek a supplementary income and simultaneously are unable to thereby influence in any coercive manner their other field of activity. The best among men would be attracted to newly available positions because it would be in their rational self-interest (without which they could not have established their tremendous financial success) to provide an optimal check to government intervention by serving as the government and hence depriving the government of the power to regulate their own enterprises. Simultaneously, those same men would be encouraged to contribute monetarily to their own administrations in order to maintain an edge over authoritarian ideological opponents, strengthen the enforcement and penalty mechanism for the sake of a deterrent effect, and lighten the tax burden on their own customers, who would subsequently be encouraged to purchase their products (as well as those of their competitors, so no unfair manipulation is performed here, merely a mutually profitable action to all participants in the marketplace) for their core price alone. After some time during which businessmen will begin to utilize the opportunity given them and recognize the benefits of contributing funds voluntarily to the infrastructure devoted to preserving their ability to function unregulated, the abolition of coercive taxation, as the final step to economic liberalization, may become a possibility.
Once government is prohibited from meddling with the economy, the dishonest politicians, lobbyists, and demagogues whom Ayn Rand had referred to as the “pull peddlers” will promptly flee the field; they will have nothing more to gain. Politics and the subsidized propagation of false ideologies being their haven, their sole means of sustenance in a reality that does not tolerate unreason and parasitism, they shall be compelled by market pressures to mend their ways or starve, with no welfare state to bail them out this time. In the meantime, the majority of men will become open to more rational voices and a competition for government posts using the same criteria as does business competition. A businessman offers not theft and extortion to his customers, but a service. In this case, the service is protection from the initiation of force, and voters will decide which legislators and executives are most competent in habit, thought, and organization to accomplish this task. The political arena will thus cease to be a battleground of pressure groups and become similar to an appointment for a sheriff or military officer, except by a larger constituency.
This approach shall hereby be termed “laissez-faire meritocracy," an extrapolation upon Objectivist politics and a vehicle for the implementation of lasting, unmarred free enterprise. The term is a redundancy (just as “laissez-faire capitalism” would be in a more enlightened status quo), but a necessary one to distinguish from those pseudo-meritocracies that would have bureaucrats assign privileges based on officially defined “gradations of accomplishment.”
The Ultimate Check
During the summer of 2002, I had had the pleasure of touring through Canada with a guide who was one of the most ingenious, industrious, and rationally selfish men I had ever met. A Ph. D. and author of thirty-two inventions during his early life in the Soviet Union, he had refused an American firm’s offer of employment on the grounds that his name would not be included as that of the author of his work in the company’s records and advertisement, attaining instead his present profession and working for over fourteen hours per day in order to plan the most intriguing possible routes, historical presentations, and trip logistics. He was extensively read in both standard and “alternative” interpretations of history, and often presented them side by side for comparison. At the beginning of the ten-day-long tour, he posed a question to the entire group for ponderance: “Why do Canadians still keep-- and express staunch pride in—a Queen?” Queen Elizabeth possesses virtually no de facto power in Canada, and even her official representative, the Governor-General, serves the purpose of merely rubber-stamping the proposals accepted by Parliament. Most tourists’ guesses over those ten days, including my own, ranged from the “need to represent and recollect upon Canada’s past through a concrete” (a more subtle variant of traditionalism), to the Canadians’ sheer fancy for the luster and glamour of royalty. On the route back, however, after we had been decently acquainted with both the physical and theoretical structures of Canada’s government, the guide at last revealed a most enlightening answer.
There is no seizure of power as dangerous as a legal usurpation, with the sanction of the majority, of the coercive mechanisms of the state for the purpose of violating individual rights. In 1933, this was the path which had brought dictatorship to Adolf Hitler and near-dictatorship to Franklin Roosevelt. Both men held their posts until their deaths in 1945, with ample opportunities to intrude upon individual sovereignty at home and abroad. No superior authority had been able to intercede and pre-empt Hitler’s suspension of Germany’s flawed enough constitution, nor to forcefully halt his hunt against “enemies of the state” following the government-staged Reichstag fire shortly after Hitler’s assumption of chancellorship. Similarly, in a freer land with greater public vigilance, there was yet no systematic opposition to Roosevelt’s finally successful attempt to seize control of the Supreme Court in a move that preceded the institution of perhaps the three most disastrous initiatives in U.S. history, welfare, social security, and “fair” labor standards, which continue to be responsible for the bulk of the country’s domestic perils, as a “pie” over which pressure groups can squabble by promising larger shares of it to their constituents at the expense of everyone else.
“Eternal vigilance” must come not only from the masses, for whom, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “rebellion against a tyrant is obedience to God.” (Replace “God” with “Man’s Nature” to receive a fully Objectivist statement.) It must come from an agency which can freely and legally sack, remove, and penalize usurping legislators and executives, but may do so in a severely delimited context, with its use of force not exceeding the boundaries of the crime committed, not breaching the liberties of the innocent, nor relying on mere subjective judgment but on specific statutory definition to execute this power. Prior to the actual implementation of physical force, this agency must possess the capacity of resorting to peaceful correction, via the power of irrevocable veto of any measure passed through the Legislative and Executive branches, and affirmed, either out of timidity or Presidential lapdog status, by the Judicial. Should this fail to quell the power grabs of the “representatives of the majority,” this agency must possess a cadre of enforcers of its will. In Canada (and Great Britain), though this power had never been employed to as thoroughly as was needed during the period of figurehead monarchy, which possessed the de facto ability of irrevocable veto via the simple refusal to rubber-stamp a given proposal. The public’s culturally dominant loyalty to the crown would render the enforcement of such a counterbalance guaranteed, if not through an official military or police body, then by a militia of concerned citizens. Based on the British model (though with certain significant modifications), a full-fledged laissez-faire meritocracy must adopt a fourth branch of government. This new branch herein contrived shall be termed the Protectorate branch for the sole purpose which it is intended to serve, to protect the laissez-faire economy from infiltration by regulators and the government from infestation by crooks.
The Protectorate cannot be headed by a multiplicity of persons. The state of the Supreme Court, which does have the theoretical power of irrevocable veto (via the unconstitutionality declaration) is testimony to this criterion. Whenever an agency is headed by many, be it nine or two, it is all too easy for a demagogue to suggest, for the sake of a power play, the amplification of that quantity. This has been the case even in Imperial Rome after its leadership’s split into two “Emperors” of the East and West. This had occurred prior to its fracture into two separate Empires in 395, and, even a century earlier led the Emperor Diocletian to employ this precedent to form a “tetrarchy,” and double the number of ruling figures in the country. It was the tetrarchy, under Diocletian’s devious ventriloquism, that was able to institute some of the most draconian regulations in Roman history, including the forced assumption by each man of the career of his father and thus the creation of the second most vicious official caste system the world had ever seen. In almost every body of multiple equally-empowered members, some attempt, successful or failed, had been made to increase its number. Some such enhancements are justified, as in the case of a territorially expanding country that requires new slots for representation, others, especially in the field of law interpretation, are devastating. If the Protectorate is to resemble a hydra in composition, then we may someday experience the phenomenon of a minority of its leaders disagreeing with the majority on whether or not to veto a proposition or employ physical force against a violator. Yet, in the realm of usurping legislature, the benefit of the doubt must always reside on the side of guilt; unless a law is proven to be “innocent” of hindering the free market and individual rights, it cannot be admitted into the lives of citizens, for it must be ascertained without question that no sly bureaucrat is attempting to smuggle into it the beginnings of regulatory authority. Not even a condition of unanimity for the approval of any given piece of legislature would suffice here, for, in the event that the mechanism of fair government is endangered, the extensive disputes required to convince the dissenting members of the organization would not be practicable under the imperative to act with lightning swiftness lest the usurpers consolidate their forces into an impenetrable web, upheld by a constituency prepared to riot or even commit outright violence at their masters’ bidding (as Hitler, for example, had prepared, a decade ahead of his seizure of power, while the Democratic Party has been erecting it, in the form of welfare recipients, militant hippies, and privileged union members, for three-quarters of a century). The Protectorate must be headed by a single individual, to be known as the Protector.
There is a symbolic distinction between this title and that of the British Queen in that it assumes none of the worn atavistic trappings of absolute monarchy and does not pride itself on assuming the same reference as was bestowed upon an older variant of tyrants. If I had been alive in 1787 and suggested for George Washington to assume the title of Protector (instead of King, as was advised by many), I am confident that he would have consented and thus alleviated from the earliest point the causes of the decay which had managed to plunge America into its present condition. The old Kings’ power was positive and regulatory. The power of the Protector shall be purely negative and reactive. Moreover, the Protectorate does not entitle itself to the glamour and celebrity status with which the British figurehead monarchy has been hounded (at the public’s expense), especially in the recent decade.
Hence, one of the essential safeguards of laissez-faire meritocracy lies in its assignment of the pinnacle of power. There is required a man of ultimate merit, who would not possess regulatory authority himself, but would hold veto power over any intervenient piece of legislation proposed or promulgated by a lower-level administrative body. (This is in addition to the President’s conditional veto power and the Supreme Court’s power of declaring unconstitutionality.) Such is to be the optimal deterrent against attempts to subvert the laissez-faire economy and a stern check against abuses of power by the corrupt. The Protector cannot be elected like the other positions, for the majority, even with a sound philosophical base, could be undercut over a period of years by sweet-talking demagogical influences, as had occurred within the United States time and again, exemplified by the Roosevelt cousins, the Kennedys, and the Clintons. Simultaneously he cannot be a mere family dynast in place due to an accident of genetics.
The only solution, therefore, is an appointment by the previous Protector, who would also be a man of ingenious skills and infrequently found understanding as well as-- which is desirable—remarkable accomplishment in another field of activity, of a successor deemed as worthy in serving as the guardian of a meritocracy. The position would be occupied for life, but nevertheless incur the same limits standing alone as that of any lower-level official. Economic control, in other words, is denied even the Protector, though he should be permitted and encouraged (but not through the use of public funds) to pursue a private economic endeavor detached from the affairs of government and thereby gain a stake in the economy he was sworn to protect. The lifetime occupation of the post is desirable due to the consistency that it bestows upon the reactive mechanism. The Protector would be able to, first, establish a vast record of experience and tactical judgment, second, to train a successor for a lengthier time during his more aged years using the entire repository of his amplified knowledge, and, third, eliminate the ability of pressure groups to capitalize on a proximate alteration in leadership in order to elevate their own minions. Though, given that a man owes no unwanted positive service obligations to his society, the Protector should be permitted to resign at will, given that he has appointed a successor to the position.
The Protector should be permitted to create a network of subordinates as intricate and vast as his post requires. A single man could never fully attend to the logistics, mechanisms, and observations that are absolutely indispensable to the Protectorate. What is essential, however, is that the Protectorate have only a single guiding mind which decides its purpose, while leaving all other members to resolve the means toward accomplishing it.
The Champion Corps
Now the question comes as to what means will the Protector have in hand should the usurpers refuse to adhere to his veto (which cannot be legitimately challenged by any elected organization). The answer: a supremely equipped military contingent subordinate to his office and empowered to enforce Protective Decrees in domestic and foreign matters alike. This organization (let it be titled the Champion Corps) can function under the basis of the Protector’s ability to declare limited martial law. The term defines a condition under which no innocent persons’ liberties can be subverted or suspended, but the full range of options is allocated in response to forceful protests, internal and external terrorism, as well as legislators and bureaucrats who actively (as opposed to through mere speech) refuse to recognize the Protector’s veto of any given bill and continue to enforce it as if it were law. However, limited martial law is powerless in response to any action not defined to be forceful, i.e. intrusive upon the rights of others. Holding a placard, however distasteful is not initiation of force; smashing a window, or reposing one’s body in front of traffic on a public or private road, in the disgraceful manner of protesters against the Iraq War in New York, Chicago, and California, is. As for acting in defiance of veto, that is initiation of force by definition, as it involves implementation of a law not yet sanctioned as harmless to the laissez-faire economy.
The Champion Corps is a fitting title for the Protector’s contingent, as this force must be composed of the most elite military personnel within the country, skilled in executing commando raids, hostage rescues, riot control, and even assassination when necessary. Soldiers of the Champion Corps must also be authorized to call upon any military or police person, unit, piece of equipment, or facility for usage in the event that limited martial law is declared, or in the event that the Protector’s life or property are endangered. The President should remain Commander-in-Chief of all armed forces but the Champion Corps and continue to direct them as he and his advisors deem most prudent; there is no fault in permitting the majority to determine the person most qualified to fulfill a task such as military management delimited by the law. Yet when the majority, through its elected executive, will deem it fitting to alter the purpose of military deployment from national security to legalized murder and expropriation, the law must possess a clause of automatic removal of the military from the President’s command. Should the President order, say, the nationalization of a particular industry, and dispatch several armed divisions to occupy its plants and evict its proprietors, the Protector’s orders alone should be sufficient to turn the soldiers one-hundred-eighty degrees, toward the White House if need be. Any soldier who revolts and continues to execute the nationalization edict automatically becomes guilty of high treason and can be shot on the spot by either men of the Champion Corps or army/police units loyal to the Protector.
Judicial Reassignment
For reasons aforementioned, it is necessary to remove the Judicial Branch from the indirect influence of majority vote and at the same time render it a vehicle of objective, rigid, and immutable laws, as opposed to “flexible” paradigms and “community standards.” The Supreme Court and the District Courts must come to epitomize the spirit present at the country’s founding rather than during the reign of whatever administration appointed the bulk of its justices. Both aims can be accomplished by removing from the President the power to appoint justices to the Supreme Court and any other judicial organization. This power, instead, should be vested in the Protectorate Branch.
Justices can continue to serve lifetime terms, since, in the principles upheld by his office, every Protector must be an impersonal robot strictly adhering to the law for guidance. Thus, the “political bias” of Protector B will not differ from that of Protector A preceding him; it will remain objective, laissez-faire, and Constitutionalist (which is especially reinforced by the fact that Protector B is a student, protégé, and ideological sympathizer of Protector A, else he would not have endured the many decades of training that he had undergone under his predecessor’s guidance). There need be no fear of a past majority “paradigm” becoming entrenched due to the old judges remaining when the new Protector assumes office, nor trepidation at the institutionalization of the present majority “paradigm” via the judges’ replacement by the Protector. The Protectorate functions independently of majoritarian views. The Protector does not need the majority to be elected or re-elected, and he can defy it with impunity to the point of severe unpopularity. Should the majority or its representatives seek any other methods but discourse and peaceful activism to unseat him, they shall incur the legal and legitimate wrath of the Champion Corps.
What if a justice or a multitude of them should displease the Protector by a certain decision, which he considers to have violated individual rights? It would not be prudent to allow for the implementation of retaliatory force immediately, so long as the decision of the justice was not blatantly tyrannical (such as the imprisonment of a man for spreading written speech using his private property to willing correspondents) and no irreversible damage was inflicted (such as the death or mutilation of the convicted—or the release of an acquitted man who then committed another crime). A legal mechanism for sacking a judge must exist, and, in this case, it should be fitting to include a majority-based check to ensure that justice is indeed served and that the Protector’s wish is based on more than mere personal antipathies or indignation. Both the Protector and the judge(s) should be permitted to present their cases before a bicameral Congressional committee whose decision will be final in determining whether the sack should be applied. The principle against double jeopardy must be exercised in full here, and no judge should be brought to such a hearing more than once for the same offense.
This system is quite generous to the judges; they need but one man’s recognition to be appointed, but a far more numerous consensus to be removed from office.
The Right of Coup d'État
Should-- as even the most apt of men are capable of misjudging another's character in that they would overestimate it-- the merit of a Protector’s successor prove a mere illusion upon his assumption of the office and he, against the legal and moral principles at the core of capitalistic society, would usurp those mechanisms which by right should be let alone, it is not merely an option but an imperative for a man of greater merit to demonstrate said quality through an overt and retaliatory revolt against the despot's regime. Afterward he, as the liberator, is entitled to assumption of the Protectorate and of the role as the guardian of unfettered human progress.
The statutes themselves should serve to clearly document such a situation whenever it occurs. Prior to the actual establishment of a Protectorate, the government must be divorced from the economy, and the law codes must be rewritten, with an extensive portion devoted to exhaustively defining which general actions as well as particular instances are considered economic intervention. These laws should be well publicized and accessible to any citizen, who, with any intellect at all, would be able to determine whether or not the Protector had abrogated his guardian function.
In the event that the Champion Corps is used to nationalize instead of crushing nationalization efforts, it will be the Second Amendment that will preserve the country from dictatorship. Gun control laws must be done away with in any legitimately free economy, and the populace must be able to assemble a full-fledged militia and do away with a treasonous Protector. An Amendment clause permitting the military and even the Champion Corps to revolt in the event that the Protector has authorized economic intervention should be included in the Constitution.
Coup d'état, extensively decried by the left, is a far more humane method of deposing tyrants than a full-scale revolution, because it is least likely to claim the lives of innocent bystanders or even “human shields.” It is targeted, like a smart weapon, only at the government which is guilty of violation, while performing little or no damage to the nation’s commerce, transportation, communication, and other features of peaceful daily life. Napoleon’s takeover in 1799 of the scheming Directory, which had plotted to arrest and perhaps guillotine him (as was its custom in regard to promising young generals) in reward for his brilliant military exploits in defending France at Toulon, and in Italy and Egypt, was virtually bloodless. So was a recent seizure of power from a quasi-Islamist government by the forces of American ally General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. As for perhaps the most famous coup of all, the 1973 Salvador Allende deposition in Chile (which is precisely an action that a Protector would be permitted to undertake against such a vilely immoral thug of an executive as Allende), General Pinochet had been able to spill the blood only of the criminal president and his defenders, leaving the general population intact. It was only after the fact that Pinochet permitted himself to lapse into the crude error of terrorizing his political opponents and ruining an otherwise stainless reputation of a defender of laissez-faire. If the laws permit not only the possession of firearms but the participation of individuals in training circles and private militias, then it will be possible for a citizen commando squad to neutralize a usurping Protector via a highly concentrated, coordinated, and delimited operation. Afterward, the position of Protector shall be delegated to whomever the rebels should elect. This will be a limited majority ballot only among those who had wielded arms against the tyrant. It will thus be representative of no paradigm, but rather the spirit of liberty unraveled in full via the highest devotion men can pay it.
Implementation
Laissez-faire meritocracy will not come overnight, nor can all of its parts be permitted to come about simultaneously. To establish a Protectorate prior to the full liberalization of the economy and a thorough cleansing and editing of the statutes would be imprudent; it would establish for the Protector the ability to commit actions that counter the intent of his office. Moreover, the question will doubtless be posed: how shall the first Protector be selected?
The following is a skeletal outline as to how the institution of laissez-faire meritocracy should proceed in the manner most conductive to individual liberty and economic progress.
1) The full liberalization of the economy, including the end of gun controls.
2) The allowance for government officials to lead separate “economic lives.”
3) The abolition of all coercive taxation.
4) The adaptation of the statutes and the Constitution to the extent necessary for a proper Protectorate to exist.
5) The appointment of a Protector.
6) The reformation of the Judicial Branch; the Protector may either select to keep the existing justices or to replace them, for the first and only time, without employing the official sacking mechanism.
It is Item 5 that will serve as the last point of discussion in this treatise. Were this system put into effect in 1787, there would have been no question as to who should, as the leader of the prior rebellion against tyranny, assume the leadership of the Protectorate. Alas, heroes of such magnitude are conspicuously lacking in our country today, and any objective criterion on which the selection of a guardian would rest cannot be embodied in full by any public figure. These criteria should include
1) Philosophical enlightenment in the principles behind the nation’s founding and legal system, as well as in the philosophies of Rand, Aristotle, and the Enlightenment thinkers.
2) A substantial enough amount of wealth to demand no increase of the treasury’s volume to pay for the expenses of the Protectorate Branch. This wealth should be especially significant if earned under free-market conditions, as that will be demonstrable of the future Protector’s ingenuity, diligence, and organization, which are essential to his task.
3) A record of political advocacy for economic liberalization and ideological defense of the producers of the free market.
4) Training in the military arts, especially in the atypical realms of urban, guerilla, and commando warfare.
5) Personal physical health and proper fitness habits that would demonstrate the Protector’s ability to remain free of any peril that would swiftly and unexpectedly curtail his activity.
In a meritocracy, the Protector should be the epitome of merit, accomplishment, and personal virtue. It is thus the logical culmination of this system that the best of men should be chosen for its most essential task.
After the creation of the necessary legal groundwork for a Protectorate, Congress should issue a nationwide call for candidates to the post. It should also develop a list of competitive events, pertaining to all the five aforementioned categories, in which the candidates would be able to compete. Committees should be formed for the purpose of vigorously discussing the criteria for evaluating any particular performance and comparing it to that of the other applicants. Possible tests may include a riot simulation or an examination on the intricacies of a given philosophy or legal principle. In other evaluations, such as of wealth and physical fitness, the applicant’s medical record and financial history would be enough to admit him; in these realms it is not essential that he be superior to the rest (the Protectorate should not be restricted to Bill Gates or Arnold Schwarzenegger), just that he fulfill minimum guidelines. This event, if held, would be, hopefully, a one-time endeavor, and a historical landmark. Afterward, the Protectorate will be self-sustaining, and able succession maintained from within.
In Summation
This essay is intended to be a first installment on a prospective book on rational politics, which will explore aspects of both domestic and foreign policy, as well as practical, systematic methods for achieving the eventual full economic liberalization of this country. Guided by a firm moral groundwork built by Ayn Rand, I consider the ideal of laissez-faire meritocracy as well as the means of its institution to be the logical development of Objectivist politics and the legitimate province of political philosophy. Here I have sketched out the domestic policy objective that we would do well to strive toward in order to establish, secure, and preserve a free market, rendering all the demagogues and faulty ideologues powerless in the wake of the final ideological battle, and its lasting triumph.
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