It turns out that my concept of competitive aristocracy has already been thought of. Such is the nature of invention. A few people of which Le Grand E. Day was a member already thought of the idea years ago. To quote him,
"Panarchy gives the individual their natural developmental right to choose their own government by creating competitive, autonomous, non-coercive, co-existing organizations called Panarchies to perform the different types of government services. People can choose from among the Panarchies what suits them best. Supporting this system is a necessary minimum sovereign for people/land relationship called the “geographical Democracy” and a Law-justice umbrella the 'Judicial Republic'."
The formalization of an existing power structure means that the government creates a legal framework for its existence in order to create a more peaceful and orderly structure for the activity. Formalism means mapping the existing power structure and then translating that into a legal framework. For some reason some people, like Mencius Moldbug, thing this is a good idea. I am more on the fence about it because to name a thing is to change it, to formalize a structure is to move the informal structure to a new location. But nonetheless formality can be useful for reducing violence.
Governments have a tendency to evolve towards more ritualized forms over time. You can sit in the gallery of any state legislature and witness these rituals. Although the courts of kings and dictators are not open to the public they follow the same trend towards ritualistic titles, behaviors, and penalties. "Manipulating procedural outcomes," as Moldy would call it, is how a violent game is sublimated into a nonviolent game.
Mold argues that the natural evolution of monarchy wants to become a shareholder Republic. This is false and I have examined this assertion before. My contention here is that gangster states do want to evolve into a more formalized system and this is true of Russia in the 90s or Mexico today. When effective public law collapses and the government is no longer solving crimes then into that vacuum private law flows, and since this is a more natural evolution than a week democracy becoming strong the struggle for democracy in these countries is a waste of time.
Russia did not solve its gangster state problem with democracy; it solved it with autocracy, and it solved it by folding the strongest oligarchs into the state function while smashing the weak ones. The US abandoned the goal of destroying the mexican cartels in favor of elevating one or two strongest ones and limiting fentanyl sales. The attempt to create democracy in Afghanistan failed and the Taliban gangsters coalesced into a unified government. Violent Israeli terrorist settlers became the state of Israel. Hezbollah now has seats in the Lebanese Parliament.
Looking at these examples we see that is much easier to co-op these entities than to destroy them. We see that the general pattern is to coalesce a government around the strongest gangster entities and then create a set of rules that turn into a quasi rule of law over time. For whatever reason any form of government, whether it be oligarchy, democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, or whatever is more easily pushed to evolve in a certain direction than others and this direction depends on the incentives of the given system. Gangster states want to go towards consolidation and formalization and can be pushed along this path towards procedural rule of law governance.
A government where cartels plug into the political structure with bribes has an informal donor class of criminals. This can be nearly impossible to dislodge, but turning gangs into providers of private law services represents a way out of this. To eliminate the extortion factor the government insists on collecting a standardized fee for protection, basically taxes, and then paying the cartels / gangs to solve crimes when they occur. This can be done by putting a government minder in every patrol car of the gang. (Yes gangs have patrols) The minder collects all fees under a standardized tax schedule, (minus his own cut) returns those fees to the state, which then pays the gang to administer justice under a service level agreement. The victim of the gangs is converted into a client / taxpayer and they get to choose which entity receives payment for service. They choose who they subscribe to for protection. The cartel may still try to intercede and intimidate the victim into choosing their agency, but the government can monitor them and punish them financially when they behave unethically. The cartels are converted from illegitimate gangster businesses into legitimate providers of security services through a tightening ratchet that eliminates non-cooperative gangsters via incarceration and / or hangings. The minders help the government map out the extent of cartel operations making them and their members legible to the state.
Alternatively, one can just bring in a mercenary corporation to provide security services, collect taxes, and wipe out the previous entity—if that works.
One might even separate the lawmaking function from enforcement by having private aristocrats make law and citizen-subscribers choose among those aristocrats. Since the government receives bribes from the cartels, separating the lawmaking function from the government itself might somewhat insulate the people from the effect of corruption. The government then becomes nothing more than a neutral mediator between these various factions of private security, aristocrats, and citizens. Since the aristocrats will also give money to politicians, and since aristocrats have an incentive to protect their subscribers in order to gain more subscribers, and since the cartels have an incentive to do their jobs competently in order to get chosen, there is a balance of forces here with only a net vector pulling in the direction of oligopoly. This oligarchical tendency can be counterbalanced with an independent Supreme Court, appointed for life, with a Bill of Rights and a provision in the same that requires large entities to divide themselves in a process of automatic trust busting. The whole system exists under a tension that moves it in the direction of serving subscribers better, since they are the source of revenue for all three functions of state, enforcer, and law giver, and since they are given a choice.
A trust busting provision should have been included in the US Constitution to begin with. If you are going to check and limit power you should limit all power, public and private, since anything not checked becomes a potential source of subversion for what is checked. A trust busting provision might be worded like: whenever any organization of humans, whether public, private, political, religious, or otherwise, reaches a market share of fifty percent in a county jurisdiction of one hundred thousand persons, ten percent in a jurisdiction one million, or two percent in ten million, it is required to divide into two approximately equal entities with equal debts, incomes, and personnel.
It might feel like a diversion to talk about a very specific Constitutional provision but it is important to get the design of any system precisely correct, insofar as the crucial details are concerned. Governments have a constant problem with financial influence over political affairs. In a democracy there is a donor class that acts like shadow government.
Talking about monopolies is not a diversion because it is necessary to nail down exactly how you're going to insulate the government from financial influence. Any kind of government needs this, but especially one that outsources any portion of its operations to the private sector. Keeping these corporations small and diffuse let's you pit them against each other in a competitive struggle. The other word for competitive struggle is checks and balances, or a free market. What is called a free market in capitalism is called checks and balances in government. The competitive free market is to the market mechanism what divided checks and balances are to the government mechanism.
To begin the process of converting these various cartels into security service providers, their representatives must be invited to a meeting. This meeting can be attended remotely if safety is an issue. The cartels are given an ultimatum: you can follow the new rules or you can be exterminated. When one private security provider fails to obey the rules the others are used to exterminate it. Gradually the rules are tightened and the consumer given a choice in service provider. From the beginning of the process the central government has a legal code that applies everywhere and governs the efficient operation of the market.
Within this framework a market of aristocrats, who provide competing legal codes, are eventually brought in as a second layer. The whole process is a gradual domesticating and tightening of rules until cartels are either wiped out and replaced with legitimate security firms or become those security firms themselves. In the end the system has three parts: the federal government (that taxes and provides funding), the aristocrats (who make laws to protect their subscribers), and the private security firms (who provide security for the same subscribers).
Every system requires a moral logic to sustain it, and the moral logic of this system is compelling. Where democracy naturally gravitates to a moral logic of competing victimhood (this is turbocharged if the population is multi-ethnic), the moral justification of a Competitive Aristocracy is extremely based.
Since the customer chooses both the legal code and the cop that enforces it they have no motive to virtue signal or exaggerate their political belief. The act of choosing is a consumer choice and that means it operates on the basis of revealed preference rather than stated preference. In a democracy people have an incentive to both deceive themselves and others since their choices are aggregated with other people's choices. This is because they have an incentive to take a more extreme political position than they actually want in order to pull the other side towards a more moderate and hidden preference.
All of this distorts the real preference of voters, but in a market, the customer of government really is a customer and that means they choose only the preferences they want for themselves, only the laws they want to protect themselves, and only the enforcer they believe will do it correctly. Moreover, because this is an impactful choice they will actually care about making it correctly the same way they care about how they spend their money.
A lot of the problem with effective governance amounts to the fact that virtue signaling is not neutralized as a societal force. Regardless of whether he is an elected politician or king the ruler fears an uprising of the virtue signaling, and so must morally out maneuver competitors to the throne. This causes all governments to spiral into various configurations of propaganda. Some cultivate cults of personality with myth of divinely inspired leadership, some virtue signal about equality, or immigrants, or tolerance, some work though fear of outsiders, some host gladiatorial games as distractions, but regardless of how they do it the public sentiment of the mob has to be manipulated and neutralized. The subversive virtue signaler who might overthrow the regime has to be out-signalled.
Consumer choice is one of the most effective ways of deflecting all criticism of regime behavior. The consumer is the one choosing strong law enforcement, not the dictator. The consumer is the one who would rather spend money on a hangman's noose than a long prison sentence.
The consumer is the one that doesn't want the degeneracy in their neighborhood. The very act of putting the consumer in charge of politics neutralizes all virtue signaling. The power of democracy lies in its ability to convince the public that they are active participants in the power process. In a sense democracy implicates the ordinary person as a co-conspirator in whatever injustice the government is engaged in. This is "powerful" because when the citizen participates in injustice they see themselves not as it's victim but enforcer. To borrow a term from Marxism democracy fosters false consciousness and false identification with government power and injustice. It's power to prevent rebellion is its power to make the population rationalize its actions as co-conspirators.
Under competitive aristocracy there is no such psychological participation in the victimizing others, nor in identifying as classes of victims. There is instead only the individual choosing their own protection. This fosters a different psychological mentality, one that also makes the population take the side of the government, but without any obligation to participate in rationalizing its crimes. The individual takes the side of the government insofar as they need the government to protect them, but where that protection is so does their sympathy. Whereas the voter may virtue signal and call for abolishing the police (while simultaneously believing their political enemies should be killed), the consumer in a competitive aristocracy will generally hold the opposite positions, preferring strong police to protect them while having no desire to kill political enemies—since other consumers are not enemies. Because there is no tug of war between different citizens there is no psychological derangement that comes from that. The competitive aristocracy has consumers, while the monarchy has subjects and the democracy has citizens. If two consumers in a competitive aristocracy have different law givers, with different legal codes, each protecting them in slightly different ways, the only way to bridge that gap is through consensual negotiation. Thus the other man is more of a business deal than an adversary. Removing collective political choice removes all of the deranged virtue signaling used to pull the collective towards a hidden and more moderate position.
They chose this, and there is no escaping that fact, and while neighbors may argue with each other ultimately their chosen policies will tend to converge with minor differences between the various aristocrats. Yes, a narcissism of small differences may remain between neighbors but the overwhelming convergence of all aristocrats and security firms on policies that customers approve of creates a solid defense against virtue signaling.
The problem here is not actually regime oppression but virtue signaling. Because of virtue signaling any political system has to out-virtue signal it's competitors. That leads to oppression because the government becomes morally hysterical. The ability to neutralize criticism and virtue signaling by making the consumer a participant in the security of society contrasts with democracy making the individual a participant in the crimes of the government. These represent opposite outcomes, but similar techniques. Everything has trade-offs, perfect solutions to not exist, and you have to break eggs to make an omelet. The voter won't believe this is true but the consumer will. Therefore it is better if the citizen is a consumer-subject rather than a voting citizen.
You know how people say, "you voted for this," well in a competitive aristocracy they will say "we all subscribed to this." Because we literally marked our subscriptions for whatever the private aristocrat does and the legal code that they enforce. If the market is properly regulated there will be no daylight between what the government does and what the common people want and that represents the most solid regime type imaginable.
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