Constitutional Design
1. Design Goals
Constitutional design has the following goals:
- Maintain perfect separation between PUBLIC and PRIVATE at all times. This means making PRIVATE propety and PRIVATE rights unalienable, at least insofar as the way that members of the body politic interact with the government.
- Make conflicts of interest impossible by prohibiting simultaneously serving in a federal office and state office at the same time.
- Prohibit all franchises, because their main goal is to alienate rights that are supposed to be unalienable. Public officers elected to protect private property and private rights must never be allowed to turn the ALIENATION of those same rights into a profitable busienss called a franchise or a privilege.
- Protect PRIVATE rights without having to exchange them for PUBLIC privileges or franchises. The payment of a simple fee for the protection ought to be sufficient. No obligations beyond the payment of that fee should be necessary to implement.
- Allow only for common law PRIVATE remedies only for the populace. Limit the CIVIL law to those who are elected into office or working for the governemnt as employees. This is what Montesquieu suggested in his book The Spirit of Laws, as the autthor of our three branch system of government.
- Enable joint action, especially defense. But assign to groups the same rights that individuals have. Without said rights, the only way they can get protection is to become privileged.
- Divide power among branches, levels to implement separation of powers
- Allow for representation & deliberation, but only to the extent that it affect ONLY PUBLIC property owned by the Constitutional trust indenture and never PRIVATE property.
- Pay or avoid debts. No fiat currency.
- Adjudicate disputes, avoid conflict.
- Allow peaceful expansion and secession.
- Allow for an amendment process to the constitution that requires a supermajority.
- Endure indefinitely, for benefit of posterity.
2. Principles of Implementing Constitutional
Design
Composing a written constitution of government, or an amendment to
one,
involves skills similar to those required for any kind of
legislation,
or for legal briefs, contracts, and notices, but with some
additional
considerations peculiar to supreme laws that supersede ordinary
legislation or official acts that may be inconsistent with them.
- Put it in writing, as brief and simple as possible, but no
briefer or simpler.
- Omit anything that is not enforceable as law.
- Specify who, what, how, when, where, why, whither, to or for
whom, etc.
- Enter provisions that operate together to solve a problem,
providing the necessary structure, procedures, rights, powers,
and
duties, covering all conceivable contingencies, that require no
resources that are not always available or obtainable.
- Anticipate all the ways any language might be twisted by
clever
lawyers trying to find ways to evade the meaning and intent of
each
provision.
- Don't try to micromanage complex social systems. Make sure
everything orchestrates into a harmonious system, but be aware
of the
ways every enactment is an intervention in a chaotic system
highly
sensitive to perturbations, and that can only work if it sets up
self-organized islands of stability in a sea of chaos, that are
largely
undesignable except by trial and error.
- Allow some discretion but not too much, so actions
predictable.
3. Sample implementation
For an example constitutional design that builds on our current system and fixes all of its defects, see:
Self Government Federation: Articles of Confederation, Form #13.001
https://sedm.org/Forms/13-SelfFamilyChurchGovnce/SGFArtOfConfed.pdf
For the reason why the above remedy for our current constitution is necessary, please see:
The Real Social Compact, Form #08.030
https://sedm.org/Forms/08-PolicyDocs/TheRealSocialCompact.pdf