Brownstone Institute
Government by the People: Is It Possible?
The Gettysburg Address celebrated “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” echoing the ideals of the Enlightenment: equality for all, and liberation from the yoke of tyrannical rulers.
Since 1863 when Abraham Lincoln made his iconic speech, the “government of the people” bit has just purred along without a glitch. There has been no dearth of individuals wanting to rule others, whether by election or by birthright. The people have been thoroughly governed, and governed more still.
The “government for the people” bit has had its ups and downs. Every government claims it rules for the people – it would be political suicide not to make that claim in a developed Western society – but humans have a tendency to look after Number 1 before they help others. When placed in positions of authority, individuals have usually used those positions to amass more power and wealth for themselves.
As a slogan though, “government for the people” has been a roaring success. Even the swastika of the Nazis symbolised prosperity and happiness (being derived from the Sanskrit svastika, meaning ‘good to exist’). The reality in recent times, as in many historical ones, is that government has been for the people only in name.
It’s the “government by the people” bit that has been the most problematic.
But we have elections!
Elections of politicians may be heralded as the pinnacle of democracy, but elections embody neither the Athenian idea of democracy nor, in the modern media age especially, the idea of “government by the people.” On the contrary, elections are an elitist system through which “men and women of high standing” achieve power over others — for their own good, of course! Modern representative democracy is akin to an aristocratic marketing exercise, wherein clubs of important people specialise in how to get others to give them more power. Political dynasties and training trajectories have emerged to buttress and strengthen this exercise.
Politicians today go to great lengths to forge coalitions with the media and with wealthy individuals who can buy them airtime there. A class of elite professional persuaders has risen to the top of our “democratic” systems. The system does not reward the ability to lead or to put the needs of the people first, but the ability to persuade others. This is merely yet more “government of the people.”
Hence with a hand wave to the existence of “free and fair elections,” and apart from a few odd places like Switzerland, the “by the people” bit of Lincoln’s vision is being roundly ignored in modern democratic countries. The elites in charge like to think that populations cannot be trusted to make good decisions and are in need of their guidance. The political elites denigrate movements oriented towards giving a greater say in national affairs to the population by using the term “populism,” and their negative use of that term perfectly sums up what the elected class and their mates think about ordinary people.
The lack of government “by the people” has been a key problem in our societies for the past 30 years or more, particularly in the US where obscene amounts of money have blatantly entered the elite election game. There has been too much government of the people rather than by it, leading to widespread apathy among populations that then become more susceptible to abuse. Abuse is what happens when one does not stand up for one’s rights. Perennial vigilance and standing up for yourself when you are pushed around is the only way to deal with those who face a perennial temptation to push you around.
We have seen decay in spades over the past two to three years, but in Anglo-Saxon countries the downward slide in the living standards of the bottom 50% has been accelerating since about the 1980s. The year 2020 ushered in a fresh phase of decay in living standards. Only the very top of society is now prospering, while the rest suffers a diminution in every way: their health, wealth, education, prospects of owning a home, ability to travel, self-respect, myriad freedoms, and access to reliable information are all under unprecedented assault. A new medieval society has emerged with a few chiefs and a lot of abused Indians.
Power (back) to the People!
To escape this trap, populations need hope. To have hope, one needs a plan and a slogan. The slogan of the Gettysburg Address is still a good one. Let’s take it truly seriously.
What would “government by the people” look like, and what core changes should a reform movement champion to make Lincoln’s vision a reality? We propose a set of two complementary reforms, both of which aim to reintegrate the presently governed masses into the business of power. The first reform would assign to the masses the role of appointing public-service leaders, and the second would involve the masses in the presently dysfunctional production of information (i.e., the media sector). Let’s get into the first one now, and we’ll cover the second one in a forthcoming piece.
The most important duty that the public must reclaim is that of appointing its leaders. Elections of politicians are not enough when the modern state apparatus contains hundreds of top bureaucratic posts associated with significant authority to wield the power of the people via large-scale resource allocation decisions.
Neither is it only in the government bureaucracy that the “power of the people” – the power represented by the nation state – resides. State-funded universities, schools, hospitals, libraries, statistical agencies, and other institutions also benefit from the state “brand” and hence draw on the power whose ultimate source is the population making up that state. The leaders of such organisations, and of the various silos of the state bureaucracy, should in fairness be led by individuals chosen by that same population, not just “of” it.
Our proposal is that the appointments to all leadership roles in hospitals, universities, national media companies, government departments, scientific and statistical agencies, courts, police forces, and so on — in short, the leadership of what has come to be called the ‘administrative state’ or the ‘deep state’ — should be made directly by the people.
One might even argue that strategic roles in large public-service-oriented entities, even if technically part of the private sector, should be included too because they also have major effects on captive national populations. This would mean adding to the above list the top roles within entities like water suppliers, electricity generators, large charities, and big media companies, hospitals, and universities, regardless of sector.
How to make this happen? We propose adopting a method of mobilising and organising the population to judge others that worked reasonably well in Ancient Rome and Greece, worked again more recently in Italian city-states, and is ubiquitous today in courts of law: juries of citizens. The many benefits of giving citizens a strong and direct voice in the selection of leaders through citizen juries include fostering diversity of thought and breaking down the monocultures that have coiled their tendrils through and around our public institutions. At the same time, they can act as a bulwark against the power of the new private-sector barons whose wishes have come to dominate policy in many aspects of our economy and culture.
In a jury, unlike in an election, people pay attention and really talk to each other, particularly if they feel they truly are the ones deciding something important. They will be more likely to feel a weight of responsibility and to take their task seriously as members of a jury than when casting a vote together with millions of others once every couple of years.
We suggest juries of, say, 20 randomly chosen citizens apiece, of which each jury makes one appointment and is then disbanded. Expertise in specific disciplines is not required for jurors, just as jurors deciding the verdict in a money-laundering case do not need degrees in finance or accounting. Juries that do desire some expert guidance when making a decision can obtain this guidance easily.
As a practical matter, a sophisticated apparatus would be required to support the juries administratively. This would consist partly of a combination of jury alumni — citizens who have been part of juries before — and a purely administrative organisation that coordinates the jurors and the jury appointments. Jurors should not be told who to look for, what the selection criteria are, or any other such “guidance” that boils down to telling them what the existing power-holders want them to do. Via this system, trust is placed in the population, just as trust in the developed West is placed in markets rather than in central planning.
Involving the population directly in the appointment of thousands of leaders in the country every year is a step towards government by the people. Breaking the stranglehold of money and the professional persuaders over society in this way creates a new set of civic institutions that is independent of media-led elections and state and business elites, dragging the top of the public sector into the dominion of the citizens they are supposed to serve.
You can bet that this real transfer of power to the people will be strongly resisted by most elite individuals and institutions. They will loudly proclaim every single reason they can think of for why it is a crazy, impossible idea, and get “experts” from their networks to loudly profess the silliness of even proposing the notion. This vitriolic denigration is exactly the measure of how badly we need to loosen their grip on power and change the system they have entrenched for their own benefit.
Like Lincoln’s, our era calls out again for a “new birth of freedom,” not only for the United States but for all of the Western world, so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Authors
From the Brownstone Institute
On August 27, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement confirming what the Twitter Files, Murthy vs. Missouri, and many others had long claimed – that the Biden administration aggressively pushed to censor First Amendment-protected speech on social media, in particular relating to Covid-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop.
In the case of Covid, Zuckerberg writes that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including “humor and satire.”
Zuckerberg also notes that the “FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma,” a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of. The laptop was not “disinformation”, it was real and Twitter and Facebook wrongly suppressed the New York Post story that exposed it.
But Zuckerberg’s statement missed a key detail – at least three Facebook staff members participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden table-top exercise that game-planned how to suppress the story two months in advance of the New York Post story.
The Aspen Institute “table-top” brought together a host of media and Big Tech including Facebook, the New York Times, Twitter, the Washington Post, and “anti-disinformation” NGO First Draft, to create their very own disinformation operation, literally planning day-by-day how they would respond to the leak.
Zuckerberg, however, writes, “That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
You can almost see the fall maple leaves feathering their way innocently to the forest floor.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.”
But there was no surprise, as Facebook had participated in the Aspen exercise two months before the story broke.
Even for Aspen’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the exercise, things went even better than planned:
Regarding Covid-19, Zuckerberg says the government “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor.” Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, he only mentions they were “warned” “about a potential Russian disinformation operation.” There is no mention of pressure to censor. Did the federal government push Facebook to attend the Aspen Institute exercise? It seems they attended of their own volition.
Attending the Aspen suppression planning for Facebook was Nathaniel Gleicher, “head security policy at Meta,” who continues in his position to this day. The Twitter Files show Gleicher also met regularly with the Department of Defense (DoD) and FBI, and participated in a Harvard-led pre-election tabletop with the DoD whilst the Hunter Biden story was being suppressed on Facebook.
Surely someone as senior as Gleicher, tasked as he was with such sensitive and high-level contacts, would have told his boss about his attendance? After all, the laptop story could have a real impact on the outcome of a presidential election.
Twitter’s Yoel Roth also attended the Aspen exercise and played a critical role in suppressing the Hunter Biden story on that platform. Did Gleicher play the same role at Facebook? Gleicher’s participation has been known publicly since Michael Shellenberger first broke that story, 18 months and more than 100 million impressions ago.
If Zuckerberg believes suppressing the story was wrong, why has he kept Gleicher in such a senior role? If he knew of Gleicher’s participation in the Aspen exercise, why didn’t he blow the whistle at the time? Instead, he places all the blame at the foot of the federal government. No doubt they exerted pressure, but that does not appear to be the whole story.
Is Zuckerberg attempting to absolve himself of responsibility?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Is your food making you sick?
Suddenly, the fact that food is making us sick, really sick, has gained a lot of attention.
When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced he would suspend his presidential campaign and campaign for President Trump on August 23, both he and Trump spoke about the need to improve the food supply to regain America’s health.
The same week, Tucker Carlson interviewed the sister-brother team of Casey and Calley Means, coauthors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. Their thesis, borne out by thousands of medical research studies, is that food can make us very healthy or very sick. The grocery store choices many Americans have made have led us to unprecedented levels of diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic and neurologic diseases that prematurely weaken and age us, our organs, and our arteries.
There is a whole lot wrong with our available food.
- Chemical fertilizers have led to abusing the soil, and consequently, soils became depleted of micronutrients. Unsurprisingly, foods grown in them are now lacking those nutrients.
- Pesticides and herbicides harm humans, as well as bugs and weeds.
- Some experts say we need to take supplements now because we can’t get what we need from our foods anymore.
- Subsidies for wheat, corn, and soybean exceed $5 billion annually in cash plus many other forms of support, exceeding $100 billion since 1995, resulting in vast overproduction and centralization.
- We are practically living on overprocessed junk made of sugar, salt, wheat, and seed oils.
And that is just the start. The problem could have been predicted. Food companies grew bigger and bigger, until they achieved virtual monopolies. In order to compete, they had to use the cheapest ingredients. When the few companies left standing banded together, we got industry capture of the agencies that regulated their businesses, turning regulation on its head.
Consolidation in the Meat Industry
Then the regulators issued rules that advantaged the big guys, and disadvantaged the small guys. But it was the small guys who were producing the highest quality food, in most cases. Most of them had to sell out and find something else to do. It simply became uneconomic to be a farmer.
The farmers and ranchers that were left often became the equivalent of serfs on their own land.
Did you know:
- “Ninety-seven percent of the chicken Americans eat is produced by a farmer under contract with a big chicken company. These chicken farmers are the last independent link in an otherwise completely vertically integrated, company-owned supply chain.”
- “Corporate consolidation is at the root of many of the structural ills of our food system. When corporations have the ability to dictate terms to farmers, farmers lose. Corporations place the burden of financial liability on farmers, dictate details of far.”
- ” Corporations also consolidate ownership of the other steps of the supply chain that farmers depend on — inputs, processing, distribution, and marketing — leaving farmers few options but to deal with an entity against which they have effectively no voice or bargaining power.”
When profitability alone, whether assisted by policy or not, determines which companies succeed and which fail, cutting corners is a necessity for American businesses — unless you have a niche food business, or are able to sell directly to consumers. This simple fact inevitably led to a race to the bottom for quality.
Look at the world’s ten largest food companies. Their sales are enormous, but should we really be consuming their products?
Perhaps the regulators could have avoided the debasement of the food supply. But they didn’t.
And now it has become a truism that Americans have the worst diet in the world.
Could food shortages be looming?
If it seems like the US, blessed with abundant natural resources, could never suffer a food shortage, think again. Did you know that while the US is the world’s largest food exporter, in 2023 the US imported more food than we exported?
Cows are under attack, allegedly because their belching methane contributes to climate change. Holland has said it must get rid of 30-50% of its cows. Ireland and Canada are also preparing to reduce the number of their cows, using the same justification.
In the US, the number of cows being raised has gradually lessened, so that now we have the same number of cows that were being raised in 1951 — but the population has increased by 125% since then. We have more than double the people, but the same number of cows. What!? Much of our beef comes from Brazil.
Pigs and chickens are now mostly raised indoors. Their industries are already consolidated to the max. But cows and other ungulates graze for most of their life, and so the beef industry has been unable to be consolidated in the same way.
But consolidation is happening instead in the slaughterhouses because you cannot process beef without a USDA inspector in a USDA-approved facility — and the number of these facilities has been dropping, as have the number of cows they can handle. Four companies now process over 80% of US beef. And that is how the ranchers are being squeezed.
Meanwhile, efforts are afoot to reduce available farmland for both planting crops and grazing animals. Bill Gates is now the #1 owner of US farmland, much of which lies fallow. Solar farms are covering land that used to grow crops — a practice recently outlawed in Italy. Plans are afoot to impose new restrictions on how land that is under conservation easements can be used.
Brave New Food
That isn’t all. The World Economic Forum, along with many governments and multinational agencies, wants to redesign our food supply. So-called plant-based meats, lab-grown meats, “synbio” products, insect protein, and other totally new foods are to replace much of the real meat people enjoy — potentially leading to even greater consolidation of food production. This would allow “rewilding” of grazing areas, allowing them to return to their natural state and, it is claimed, this would be kinder to the planet. But would it?
Much of the land used for grazing is unsuitable for growing crops or for other purposes. The manure of the animals grazing on it replenishes soil nutrients and contributes to the soil microbiome and plant growth. “Rewilding” may in fact lead to the loss of what topsoil is there and desertification of many grazing areas.
Of course, transitioning the food supply to mostly foods coming from factories is a crazy idea, because how can you make a major change in what people eat and expect it to be good for them? What micronutrients are you missing? What will the new chemicals, or newly designed proteins, or even computer-designed DNA (that will inevitably be present in these novel foods) do to us over time? What will companies be feeding the insects they farm, when food production is governed by ever cheaper inputs?
It gets worse. Real food production, by gardeners and small farmers or homesteaders, is decentralized. It cannot be controlled. Until the last 150 years, almost everyone fed themselves from food they caught, gathered, or grew.
But if food comes mainly from factories, access can be cut off. Supply chains can break down. You can be priced out of buying it. Or it could make you sick, and it might take years or generations before the source of the problem is identified. How long has it taken us to figure out that overprocessed foods are a slow poison?
There are some very big problems brewing in the food realm. Whether we like it or not, powerful forces are moving us into the Great Reset, threatening our diet in new ways, ways that most of us never dreamed of.
Identifying the Problems and Solutions
But we can get on top of what is happening, learn what we need to, and we can resist. That’s why Door to Freedom and Children’s Health Defense have unpacked all of these problems and identified possible solutions.
During a jam-packed two-day online symposium, you will learn about all facets of the attack on food, and how to resist. This is an entirely free event, with a fantastic lineup of speakers and topics. Grab a pad and pencil, because you will definitely want to take notes!
The Attack on Food and Farmers, and How to Fight Back premieres on September 6 and 7. It will remain on our channels for later viewing and sharing as well. By the end of Day 2, you will know what actions to take, both in your own backyard, and in the halls of your legislatures to create a healthier, tastier, safer, and more secure food supply.
See below for a summary and for the complete program.
Author
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Brownstone Institute14 hours agoWhy Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess?
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Agriculture11 hours ago
Glimpse into the Future of Food
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illegal immigration13 hours agoIllegal immigrants crossing from Canada into USA in record numbers
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Alberta12 hours ago‘Coutts Two’ Verdict: Bail and Mischief
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Bruce Dowbiggin10 hours agoFrom Deal With It: A Cruel, Senseless Fate Ends A Brilliant Career
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Crime2 days agoOfficials Arrest Father Of Suspected Georgia School Shooter
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National1 day agoUnemployment Surges as Trudeau’s Policies Wreak Havoc on the Economy
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Addictions1 day agoB.C. addiction centre should not accept drug industry funds