Monday, April 29, 2013

Founders: Smart Dudes, Except for Subsidiarity

Grim points to something interesting in our Constitutional setup.

...What the Founders did was to give us a system that not only checked three branches with three separate functions against one another. They also provided us with a system in which the three basic kinds of government were all present, and counterbalanced. We could get every good Aristotle saw in every system; and when one branch went bad, there was the hope that the competing interests of the other forms of government might right it.

OK.  So?

...There is only one problem, and it is one Aristotle did not consider: the problem of scale. More and more, I think a government must adhere to a human scale in order to be just. I mean by "a human scale" that maximum set of people such that the members can all know one another, and care about one another. At levels beyond this, a fundamental aspect of humanity is lost: we don't love each other any more, and are content to treat the unloved members as less than the beloved ones....

Yah.  The solution is called "subsidiarity," which the Catholic Church has been pushing for centuries.  There's a reason for that, and it's coming into focus.

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