At 12:26 PM 5/26/2016, Mueller, Milton L wrote:
>To: David Post [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>
>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.
>
>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?” [SNIP]

Milton:  Fair question, and my response would 
look something like this.  There are times to 
rush into things, and there are times not to.  I 
don't know about you, but I'm not boarding the 
rocket to the space station if you tell me that 
it has never been tried or tested ... unless the 
asteroid is hurtling towards earth, and there's no time for messing around.

So it all depends on how much of an "emergency 
situation" one thinks that we're in. The American 
revolutionaries clearly believed that the 
situation had become impossible and had to be 
immediately terminated, and they had to throw 
together a totally new kind of government, 
untested and untried, and hope that it would 
work.  And note:  IT DIDN'T WORK, AT  FIRST!  A 
bunch of really smart people reached a consensus 
plan that was a hideous failure - the government 
that was set up under the "Articles of 
Confederation" was a catastrophe and a 
laughingstock, and it came very close to sinking the whole country.

And while I'm on it, I'd also note that the 
efforts to "tweak" that original design were made 
MUCH more difficult by one truly colossal mistake 
the designers of U.S. v. 1  made:
they put in a provision that said you couldn't 
dissolve the Confederation, or amend its charter, 
without unanimous consent of all the States in 
the Confederation.  Ouch.  As a practical matter, 
getting unanimous consent to anything was a 
virtual impossibility; the new government was 
effectively set in concrete, 
forever.  Fortunately, Madison and the others 
finally just said (though not without serious 
misgivings):  the hell with that, that's totally 
crazy, if we can get 9 States to sign onto the 
new constitution who's going to complain that 
we're violating the Articles of 
Confederation?  But it took a extraordinary act 
of political genius and courage to make the 
changes necessary - can't count on that sort of thing, these days.

So our disagreement may be on how much of an 
"emergency" we think the DNS is currently 
facing.  I don't think the world comes to an end 
if the USG says: "Great plan you've come up 
with!  We're handing everything over, but we 
can't tell how it will work and how the pieces 
will all fit together, so we can't tell whether 
it actually does provide for true 
multi-stakeholder control, so we're going to 
reserve the right to re-consider in 2 years 
..."  You and others might have a different view on that.

David
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David G. Post
Volokh Conspiracy Blog http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/david-post
Book (ISO Jefferson's Moose)  http://tinyurl.com/c327w2n
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Publications & Misc. http://www.ssrn.com/author=537   http://www.davidpost.com
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