Alec Rawls' home page: A Republican Form of Government

Welcome to the Rawls for Sheriff home page. In place of the hundreds of pages that were posted on this site, attention is now focused on five items:

In 1987 the California Sheriffs' Association sponsored a ban on electoral competition from outside of the law enforcement establishment. Supreme Court precedent requires that all election laws have the purpose of facilitating the accurate expression of the will of the voters, as by weeding out frivolous candidates (defined by the Court as candidates who do not have a serious chance to win) but this restriction is motivated by the express fear, stated directly in the legislative record, that without it the people will actually elect sheriffs from outside of law enforcement (as indeed they had been doing). The express purpose is to limit what the the people are allowed to choose, and in most audacious fashion: NO CIVILIAN VIEWPOINTS ALLOWED! Our democracy has been usurped.

That's for starters. In addition to violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the California sheriff restriction also violates the Article IV section 4 guarantee to the states that they shall have a republican form of government. The Supreme Court has long since recognized that the fundamental principle of republicanism is, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, "that the people should choose whom they please to govern them." By expressly setting out to stop people from outside of the government from winning elections, California has attacked this principle so directly as to enable the first viable guarantee clause suit in the history of the nation. Will the courts hear it?

Update: This suit was appealed to the United States Supreme Court on September 23rd, 2003. Petition for writ of certiorari.

Update: The foolish Supremes turned down their chance to set a truly important precedent, but at least my petition to the Supremes put my briefs in proper final order. Anyone who lives in a state that limits candidacy to members of the government itself, use my brief as a template and sue until somebody wins! Not every judge can be brain dead.

2) How to unleash police powers to the permanent extremes necessary to defeat an ever more technologically empowered terrorist threat, while at the same time greatly INCREASING protection for liberty:

Just protect liberty directly (by articulating the full ideal of protected liberty and placing it in the Constitution) instead of indirectly (by placing restrictions on law enforcement). Liberty will be much better protected (it will be protected systematically, in place of the hit and miss of indirect protection). This in turn will render indirect protections superfluous, allowing indirect protections to be largely dispensed with, untying the hands of law enforcement. If good is to triumph over evil in the 21st century, half the population must read this. Go.

3) In addition to unleashing police powers, there is also a way that we can make our system of criminal trial vastly more efficient:

Just have juries hand down multiple verdicts according to multiple standards of guilt.

Our present one verdict system lumps the certainly guilty together with the almost certainly guilty, some of whom are innocent. This greatly limits the severity with which we can deal with the certainly guilty while imposing horrific injuries on the wrongly convicted. By the simple device of asking juries to discriminate further we can gain tremendous leverage over the guilty while greatly reducing harm to the innocent. Go.

The above "direct protection" and "multiple verdicts" schemes present the most immediately important sections of a book on republicanism that I am writing. The leverage over the guilty that these two schemes generate combine multiplicatively, not additively. Ten times ten baby. Our body politic needs a modern immune system and this is it. The criminals are history. It might even be enough to deal with the Islamists, and their descendants. For a short introduction to both schemes, and how they fit into the larger structure of republicanism, click here to view the introduction to my book on republicanism.

4) Distrust in truth: studies in the phenomenon of illiberal "liberalism."

Those who call themselves "liberal" in America are relentlessly illiberal. Not only are they against gun rights and school choice. They are against choice on abortion (in favor of forcing people who think abortion is murder to pay for other people's abortions). They are anti-raising-your-own-children (in favor of forcing families with stay-at-home-moms to subsidize working-moms via the socialization of day-care). They are anti-freedom-of-contract (in favor of replacing the at-will contract, where merit is judged by liberty, with government oversight of merit whenever race, sex, language, religion, handicap, sexual behavior, or any other mark of “diversity” is involved, which will soon be always). They reject freedom of association and the treating of people as individuals in favor of sweeping racial, gender and other preferences imposed by law. Etcetera ad nauseum. There is virtually no issue on which "liberals" are liberal.

How to account for this astounding phenomenon? There is a profound correspondence between genuine liberalism and trust in truth. The truth is that liberty works. Gun rights work. School choice works. Freedom of contract works. Freedom of association works. Thus trust in truth leads to trust in liberty. The connection also goes the other way. Trust in liberty leads to truth. Liberty sets up a society-wide scientific process as individuals and groups make and disseminate their own discoveries about where value lies and how to pursue it. Liberty allows everyone's ideas to be tested against reality, thereby uncovering reality, and this discovery of truth leads to trust in truth, because the truth is that only the truth matters. Thus every society is marked by competing synergies. Trust in liberty leads to expansion of liberty which leads to expansion of truth which leads to trust in truth which leads to further trust in liberty; while diminution of liberty leads to diminution of truth and diminished trust in truth which leads to distrust in liberty which leads to further diminution of liberty.

This subject has long been a research topic for me. During the summer of 2003 I wrote up two short studies exposing and accounting for illiberal "liberalism." One is a "Special Report" documenting distrust in truth on the part of California's "liberal" newspapers:

Media bias in California: Why a moderately conservative electorate is represented by a left-wing legislature

The other is a dissection of the anti-conservative theory of conservatism, published in a psychological journal by four leftist "liberal" professors at Stanford, Berkeley and the University of Maryland in July of '03:

Researchers expose the psychology of the illiberal “liberal” mind

In presenting their characterization of conservatives, who they take to be their opposites, these self-professedly "liberal" professors actually give, in photo negative, a pretty compelling picture of their own illiberal-liberal minds, and it isn't just them. Apparently this kind of photo-negative self-description has been going on for fifty years, all compiled by the four lefty professors in their glorified literature review, lending perhaps some real credence to this self-characterization by the left. Both the methods and the results of the study strongly support the connection between illiberalism and distrust in truth and help to give an account of it.

5) The decentralized coordination of intelligence

In addition to a modern immune system, our body politic also needs a modern brain. Again, this is from my upcoming book on republicanism. Again, what I am releasing now only focuses on the most immediate need. I'm just trying to hook up that one wire that will bring a dead picture tube to life. Go.

What am I doing pressing a suit? I don't even wear a suit. Look at the knot on that tie.

Links

Lawsuit

Direct protection of liberty

Multiple verdicts of guilt

Book on republicanism

Illiberal "liberalism"

Decentralized coordination of intelligence

Latest opinion columns etc.

Visit my Latest Postings page to find my latest opinion columns from Newsmax, OpEds.com and The Stanford Review. Older columns appear further down the page. News about my lawsuit and entries under any other headings will be linked in on the Latest Postings page as they appear.

You can reach me at alec@rawls.org. I send out a blind cc mailing list with links to new articles as I post them. If you would like to be on this list, let me know.

Imagine if those who shared some particular set of political or cultural interests started paying for online content that they thought was worth their time. That group would gain a huge advantage because their intellectuals would be supported in our society. In particular, when the mainstream media, with its numerous little bastions of monopoly power, are almost entirely controlled by one political party, paying for content online allows alternative viewpoints to be supported.

Ideally, this support should be on a unit basis, maybe five or ten cents per short article. Unfortunately, micro-payments that small are still not supported. The PayPal fee schedule on donations, the one viable service for this kind of transaction at present, is 30 cents + 2.2%. As a practical matter, then, donations have to be lump sum rather than item by item, but this is only a small hurdle. Have you found my writings worth your time? Then please consider paying me one tenth, or one hundredth, of the value of your time (or of what you are willing to sell it to your employers for) for the time you spend here.

Eventually, this kind of scheme will enable the decentralized coordination of intelligence. As people pay for what they find worthwhile, information will accumulate about who has similar judgment about what things. (The accuracy of this information can be increased by people taking another few seconds to submit numerical ratings of merit for what they are paying for). It will then be possible to compile this feedback automatically and use it to formulate personalized predictions of what individual users will find most worth their time, based on what other individuals who display similar judgment have rated most worthwhile. Such a system will allow everyone to act as everyone else's eyes and ears, which will allow current editorial bottlenecks to be bypassed.

The accuracy of the predictions offered by this kind of "rating engine" is a function of the ratings base that it has to project from. As more people use it, predictive power will increase until at some point the predictive power will be such that payments will probably switch to the same up-front format as for other consumer goods. People will prefer to spend a small fraction of the value of their time attending to what can be expected to be worth their time rather than waste a large fraction of their time looking for what is worth their time. Efficiency and desert will both be served. Less time will be wasted, and merit will be both disseminated and rewarded automatically. Until then, dissemination of judgment and the rewarding of merit depend on the socially concerned action of individuals. It is up to each of us to spread the word about what is worthwhile, and to pay for it, so that those who speak for us can continue to do so.

All it requires is for lots of people to take five minutes to enter their credit card numbers one time at PayPal. All PayPal wants is thirty cents a pop. We can deal with that, until we can convince them to give us something like a 12.2% fee schedule on the first $3 (the point beyond which 12.2% becomes greater than 30 cents + 2.2%), on the condition that donators have a positive PayPal balance (in which case PayPal does not have to bill the credit card, reducing its transactions costs to almost zero, a matter of automated internal accounting). That kind of pure percentage fee schedule will allow true micro-payments. Until then, we just need to make our payments to each other lump sum instead of pay as you go. Wait till you figure you owe me a buck or two, then send it along. PayPal will come around (or risk losing out to who will) but there is no need for us to wait. As is, PayPal is offering We the People an unprecedented opportunity to break the mainstream media monopoly on who gets paid for their contributions to public discussion. Let's take advantage of it.