. . . muttered the ogre

Dan Kohn writes: “It is shocking that there is not more of an outcry over the unlawful detainment of radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ suspect Jose Padilla.” The old bleat that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” is brought up, and that’s the hook for my comment.

Lincoln may have said it first; it fits Lincoln’s pattern – a plausible homily which, if examined closely in the light of real history rather than fairytales, proves (if anything) the opposite of the proposition in support of which it was invoked.
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Vin Suprynowicz often complains about decay in the separation of state powers, particularly about public school teachers (and other employees of the executive branch) holding part-time legislative office; today’s column is on that subject, and the link ought to be up any minute now.

Various Anglosphere constitutions specify a threefold division, legislative – judicial – executive; I wonder whether other cultures have a similar concept but a different notion of the natural cleavage. Dan Goodman, though he has since forgotten it, once imagined a culture where institutions are classified by the length of their time-horizon.

For three centuries beginning in 930, the Norse settlers of Iceland enjoyed the literate world’s nearest thing to a stateless society; possibly the largest non-nomadic society ever to lack territorial monopolies in government. Competition between the goðar (customarily and poorly translated as ‘chieftains’) is often blamed for the feuds that led to annexation by Norway in 1262; so why did the evils of anarchy happen only when the system became less competitive?

Roderick Long (cited at Gene Expression) concisely explains what went wrong. As usual, the fatal flaw was a non-competitive element: a church tax, imposed on the households of a territory. Another flaw was a restriction on the number of goðar – analogous to taxi medallions. These two features concentrated wealth and power in a few families.

I think it was indirectly through a link from Long’s essay that I found Sean Gabb’s “How to Destroy the Enemy Class”, a manifesto for the first libertarian Parliament.