[451] in libertarians
Re: Term Limits
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vernon Imrich)
Tue Dec 6 02:13:14 1994
To: khascall@midway.uchicago.edu
Cc: libertarians@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 1994 02:09:51 EST
From: Vernon Imrich <vimrich@MIT.EDU>
|> What about the concepts of "meritocracy"--by which those who are most fit to
|> govern are put into power? I mean, it seems to me like limiting terms will
|> mean that something besides the individual merit of a candidate will determine
|> who is elected.
The problem is that this is happening now! People get elected not on the
basis of their ideas, or conpetency, but on the basis of where they are in
the Washington power structure. Merit only becomes a factor in open races,
because there the clout issue is not as strong.
I'll guarantee you that anyone who was, say, chair of the House Rules committee
would have more to offer his constituiency that any challenger he might get
regardless of merit. Joe Moakley D-MA is proof of that. He's a terrible
public speaker, but knows how to use his position to get things for his
district and/or selected voting groups.
Being in office means being able to give things to people. That is something
no challenger can stop. It may sometimes be that other factors get so large
as to overcome this handicap, but that doesn't alleviate the handicap. Under
term limits, every office will face a purely merit based campaign every X
number of years. Seems like a fair trade off to me.
|> I would say that the less of this kind of interference with
|> the selection process, the better. True, there are a lot of other factors
|> which determine who wins political offices, but we need fewer of such factors,
|> not more.
All you need to do is compare open seat races to incumbent-challenger races.
Open seat races are usually the closet, most nitpicked races of them all.
The voters do not have the luxury of going with the status quo. They
must decide on what kinds of programs they want, not who is more likely
to be in a position to deliver them.
Thus, term limits in this way makes meritocracy more likely overall.
But more dangerous than incompetency is the notion that there CAN be a
class of "enlightened rulers" to tell us how to live. To be an expert
politician is to know how to get Proposal A turned in Law A and no more.
What happens is that people start to think they can be an expert at
knowing what proposal A should be, i.e. they start to think they know
better for us than we do. You can't EVER be an expert in telling other
people how to live. Thus term limits also limits this kind of meritocracy
(or elitism) by knocking people out of a given office before their head
is inflated too much.
Remember Jefferson: "If man cannot be trusted to govern himself then can
he be trusted to govern others, or are there angels in the forms of
Kings to govern him?"
I.e. you can't really be an expert in "morality" (or "philosophy") which
at some level is what government is all about. You can be knowledgable
about the various kinds of philosophies out there, and how to understand
what they claim. But anything beyond that is mere opinion.
Vernon
