Let’s talk a little bit today about deputies and dispel some democratic mythology. More specifically, the conversation will be about how supporters of minimal state ideas (minarchists) should view such an institution as parliament. In our society, it has somehow become the default assumption that parliament is a sacred cow. That they have some inherent right to write laws for us, tell us how to live, what to smoke, whom to sell our services to, and how many taxes to kick back into the common pot. But what if parliament is not a right, but a privilege?
What is the fundamental difference between a right and a privilege? The main difference is that a privilege is a thousand times easier to annul. To put its own citizen in prison (that is, to deprive them of the basic right to freedom), the state machine has to sweat. It needs investigators, prosecutors, a jury, ironclad evidence, appeals, and a heap of bureaucracy. Why? Because a right is something a person possesses by default. Now let’s take a foreigner with a visa. A visa is a privilege. To throw a foreigner out of the country, you don’t need to prove they are a world-scale villain. It is enough that they violated a couple of residency rules. A snap of the fingers—the privilege is revoked, suitcase, station, deportation.
Now let’s look honestly at history. Where did parliaments come from in the first place? If we discard the pretty fairy tales, then historically any parliament is nothing more than a monarchical privilege. A hypothetical king with an army of thugs could have simply chopped off the heads of all these “fighters for popular representation.” He could have declared them traitors and drowned the very idea of transferring power to some murky deputies in blood. But for various reasons (somewhere the money for war ran out, somewhere it became too tedious to deal with taxes personally), monarchs made a concession and granted a privilege.
As a society, we are today the collective sovereign. But for some reason, we have forgotten that these people sitting in plush chairs are a concession we have made to them. And since it is a privilege, the rules of the game must change radically. Deputies should not tell us how to live. They should wake up in a cold sweat from the thought that they could be thrown out into the cold today. A parliamentarian must live under a constant, invisible sword of Damocles.
How could this look in practice? We need institutional asymmetry so that any decision can be overturned with disproportionate ease. Laws should be hard to pass, but quick to die. For example: to pass a new law restricting anything at all, 50% of the deputies’ votes are needed. But to repeal it, 25% of the votes of those same deputies should be sufficient! Or, even better—just 1% of the citizens’ votes in a referendum. Collect the signatures, and the law flies into the wastebasket. Deputies must physically feel that their papermaking hangs by a thread.
A presumption of guilt for the authorities is also necessary. We must make the profession of a politician as unattractive as possible for careerists, psychopaths, and lovers of other people’s money. How about requiring everyone who enters parliament to sign a voluntary waiver of some of their civil rights? Messed up? Passed a law that destroyed the economy? No immunity. Confiscation of property down to the seventh generation, loss of rights, and for serious failures—expulsion from the country with a “wolf’s ticket” (blacklisted) for any reason, even the smallest. Ideally, only those ready for self-sacrifice should become deputies. It should not be a prestigious job, but an obligation. Hard, dangerous, and thankless.
For minarchists, the state is not a caring mommy. It is a Leviathan. And parliament is simply a temporary “necessary evil,” a kennel where a chained dog sits. Our task is to make the chain as short as possible and the collar strict, with spikes on the inside. So that at any attempt to bark at the owner (that is, at you and me), the dog cuts off its own oxygen.
