At 12:26 PM 5/26/2016, Mueller, Milton L wrote:
To: David Post
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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)
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Music
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Publications & Misc.
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http://www.davidpost.com
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