Today, I was reading about declarations and non-declarations of war in the United States, and changes in law surrounding them.
Many people have bemoaned that as the American Empire has progressed, more and more war powers have been invested in the executive branch, with congress doing little to nothing to try to stop it. In a way, this is a form of corruption, corruption being where someone does not appropriately discharge their fiduciary duty because they will personally gain.
To me, it seems that corruption inevitably arises from surplus. They are two sides of the same coin, like encryption and compression*.
The theory goes that when a eventually-to-be-powerful** country is in its infancy, people like Cincinnatus*** and Washington are more willing to give up power and sacrifice self for the good of the tribe.
As the empire becomes more wealthy, things start to change. There is more surplus, so there is not as much a need for leaders to go back to tend to the farm. The people who are more prone to self sacrifice for the greater good seem to not acquire power for one or more of many reasons.
Perhaps self sacrifice is not encouraged as they are growing up, as the society is too affluent to require it. Perhaps they have it worn away by many years of anti-socialization, the lure of personal wealth is too great, or perhaps it is just not necessary for the empire to do so. The power brokers just don’t see the point in giving up useful power to someone to fix the problem unless the situation is dire.
For the Romans, one of the main counterbalances for this was supposed to be the Tribune of the Plebs. What is the counterbalance supposed to be now? The press? Popular opinion? The conscience of politicians****?
I see the fundamental problem is that all of these require active intervention to solve the problem. There is no concept of ‘fail safe’. The closest I’ve seen is from ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘, where the theory is that the civil service tries to damp out wild swings in popular and political opinion, and tries to run the country stably and competently. This is perhaps combined with the theory that whichever organization is more stable lasts longer, and therefore wins. If you’re a stable democracy or republic, you just need to wait until other countries go through disruptive changes to go in and get what you want*****.
I’m not saying it’s good. I’m just saying it’s what happens. And the survivors tend to write the history books.
*A lot of the math is the same, they use entropy in very similar ways. Look it up! 😀
**There are all sorts of theories of why countries become powerful. I don’t think there’s any consensus about this, and in general they do terrible things on their way up, but this is outside the scope.
***I didn’t know this is where Cincinnati, Ohio got its name!
*****There are many recent colonial examples, if you want them.