The King is dead. Long live the King

James De Long has an interesting piece today in The American. I just want to comment on one small part of his essay.

Today's society has become much more complex than the Founding Fathers could ever have envisioned. This creates the unfortunate (to De Long and I agree) circumstance that strong special interests are inevitable. There is no way to become a powerful advocate of anything anymore without specialization. And only special interests with real money at stake can afford that kind of time commitment (by hiring full time lobbyists, etc). And each interest group plays a sort of prisoner's dilemma with each other so that they can all keep their power.

This also guarantees an ever expanding government. The only way new ideas can gain any traction is to carve out a new government agency so that they aren't butting heads with entrenched interests that have more power. So instead of rethinking the crazy bureaucracy, we just add to it.

But De Long makes a very interesting observation. As the special interests control a larger percentage of the government, and the government controls a larger percentage of our lives, the special interests are starting to bump heads. You can't play the prisoner's dilemma game with too many simultaneous players because someone is bound to defect each round. So at some point, and he thinks this point is upon us, the system will break down.

What will come next? He suggests perhaps a new Constitutional Convention (which would require 2/3 of state legislatures to call). I think the lack of civic engagement would prevent this from happening. State legislatures have special interests too. His other suggestion is a third political party will grow based on the promise to exclude special interests. This may be more possible, but how well did Ross Perot do? Maybe someone like Michael Bloomberg could pull it off, being a centrist, rich, and well-respected.

I am hopeful that things will change because I don't like the long term (decades) path we are on. But I am concerned about what the change will be as I have become a bit cynical about our society. The innovation and creativity of the American people has been our greatest strategic advantage. But we haven't applied this to government very well in the past hundred years.