From: David Post [mailto:[log in to unmask]]

But that's not the goal, in my eyes. The goal is to create an institution that can manage these resources in a reasonable way, for the next [many] years.

MM: As Avri noted, the goal of the stewardship transition was to...transition, i.e. get the US govt out of its current role. I am flabbergasted by the fact that you do not see the US oversight role as a broken part of the institution.

MM: As someone who has written about early post-revolutionary America, I wonder how you would respond to my argument "all these new democratic government models are new and untested. We don't really know how well they will work. Why doesn't the United States retain its status as a British colony under the King for a few years, and let him decide if the experiment has worked?"

All I'm suggesting is that it would hardly seem unreasonable, to me, if the USG took the position that while it is signing off on the transition, it is doing so subject to a kind of probationary period that will enable us all to understand better whether and how it actually works. Perhaps other countries will view that as a terribly untrustworthy move, perhaps they won't - I do think it helps that it is, fundamentally, quite a reasonable position to take.

MM: So you assume that the USG is NOT part of the machine, it is a deus ex machina that we can invoke at any time to insert an entirely rational, undistorted corrective action on whatever happens?