Reply #16: It's all about gaming the system

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My sons are both heavily into role-playing games and online multi-player games, and they're both analytical enough to have learned a lot from the experience and drawn some general conclusions.

Son #1 in particular believes strongly that there is no rule-based system that players cannot eventually learn how to game. They will use obscure rules to undermine the clear intent of the major rules, they will combine rules in ways they were never meant to be combined, and they will use every possible trick to maximize their advantage while minimizing their risks.

He also believes that this principle applies completely to the real world: There is no rule-based system that will not eventually be gamed. This includes the US Constitution and it includes democracy in general. It's kind of like a predator-prey relationship. No matter how fast and strong and adaptable you are, the predators will eventually find a weakness in your defenses and exploit it mercilessly.

There was an article a few days ago suggesting that sex exists in the natural world because if offspring are exactly like their parents, the predators/parasites/diseases will already know how to get through their defenses. Sexual reproduction, by making each generation a little different, helps them stay a jump ahead of whatever's on their heels.

When it comes to politics, however, sometimes small tweaks are enough to stay ahead -- and sometimes the entire system becomes too thoroughly corrupted to be redeemed. I'm starting to conclude that we've reached the point of systemic rot, where democracy as we know it is no longer able to throw off the disease of corruption.

In part, this is because representative democracy doesn't scale well. A member of Congress who represents a few tens of thousands of constituents and spends most of the year living in their home district is very different from one who represents hundreds of thousands, needs massive amounts of campaign funds to reach the voters, and spends most of the year in Washington hobnobbing with lobbyists.

The technical complexity of issues today has also increased, to the point where most representatives don't really know very much about what they're doing -- which makes them even more vulnerable to lobbying or to groups like ALEC that supply pre-written legislation. I suspect that -- far from cutting the bureaucracy as the right wants -- we need to bureaucratize and de-politicize a lot more of the government, bring the voters more closely into ongoing policy debates, and drastically reduce the current role of the president and Congress to one of keeping the machinery running smoothly.

How to get there, though, is another question.