I was thinking- if you had the ultimate power to change things, what sort of government would you create?
Sort of putting ourselves in the position of the founding fathers, knowing everything we do now about how things turned out.
I'm not talking about tweaking the existing system. I'm saying that you have the power to change everything. You do not, however, have the powers of a dictator, or of a god, or the power to change human nature. All you can do is change the system of government.
But in this you do have the ultimate power. You can eliminate taxes. You can require everyone to have a chip implanted in their head. You can create a police force powerful enough to enforce unpopular laws, or eliminate police altogether.
I propose a government run by the scientific method. Here's a definition of that, from the Oxford English Dictionary- "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses."
Government is the organization of power, of force. So the scientific method of government would mean that various ways of organizing power must be subject to observation, testing, and measurement. The question is, how could a method of organizing power be subject to modification if it has been shown to be a failure?
Our foundling fathers felt that the best way to organize things was to pit the various branches of government against each other. They hoped that this system would prevent any one branch from obtaining too much power. What they failed to account for was that an external force might overpower all three branches of government, which is the problem we face now.
But an external force is exactly what is needed to create the scientific method of government. We need an external guardian force, an over-arching power, that can say "no, that system hasn't worked so well. We need to formulate another system and try it." What could that power be?
The answer to this goes right to the heart of governance. We, as individuals, only relinquish power to overwhelming force or to a system which we feel is just. The power of overwhelming force is by its nature a temporary thing. We've seen that every instance of government by intimidation eventually fails. They fail for various reasons, but mainly they fail because a system in which people feel their government is just will always overcome one which governs by compulsion. Yea human nature!
Ultimately, power rests with us. Government only maintains its control of the organization of power if it continues to "make sense" to people. Otherwise, the forces of apathy and outright resistance cause it to fail. That's why the major force in "democracy" is public relations- the selling of consent.
The structure of a government which is based on scientific principles must have the feature that the governed get to to evaluate and change the system when it fails to work. The governed, meaning us- all of us who give up our basic right to be self-serving anarchists in the interests of the common good- need to have the express power to change the structure of government so that it reflects our needs.
What the founding fathers called revolution must be built in to the system. The overthrow of the government must not be considered a titanic event, but part of the normal process. It shouldn't be easy to do, it shouldn't be possible to game it, but it should be part of the established, normal process of governance.