How would this have worked as a "constitutional limit"?

Economics Political Theory
1

I’m an AnCap, but in the spirit of A) minarchism would still be a helluva lot better than what we have now, and B) in an AnCap society we’de each more or less choose a free-market “government” and so I’d like to think about what properties I’d like that government to have, I was wondering how much the following constitutional imitation would have/might have had:

Association of people is entirely a private matter. The government shall not define or recognize in any way any association of people. No law, statute, executive order, or any other act or statement by government can define or recognize an association of people in any way; it cannot even refer to such an association.

OK, so I’m NAL so I’m sure this can be written better, but the idea is a combination of “freedom of association” and “separation of church and state” on steroids. The point is that government should be defining the rule of law; any collective action that occurs within that rule of law is entirely a private matter.

If it could have worked, basically it is attempting to redress some of the major negatives that have emerged in our current system:

  1. Limited corporate liability. Since a “corporation” is an association of people, government can make no “law” about it, including any sort of “limited liability”. This cuts at the heart of much of “crony capitalism”.

  2. Banks. Banks are private associations of people, and thus cannot be referenced by laws. Thus, no special sweetheart setups between the banking system and government; banking would have to be entirely market-driven.

  3. Political parties: I don’t see many people note or stress this, but the fact that political parties are recognized by government seems absurd to me, and clearly has led to our current state where our government is run by a single party with two factions. Why should the citizens pay for and officially recognize primary elections, for example? If you are a group that wants some internal process by which you will pick one candidate for an office, great, that’s your business, but you should organize, run, and pay for that operation completely independently of government. There should be no recognition of political parties: they are associations of people.

  4. Separation of church and state: this comes as a subset of this much stronger statement.

  5. Special interests: literally every special interest is a “group”, either self-defined or defined by government. If government cannot in any way recognize a special interest, they literally can’t write a law that gives them something.

In a way, I think it would “work”, except it’s such a powerful clause that ties the hands of the government so much that any self-respecting statist (if that’s not an oxymoron, which it might be) would probably have rejected it forthwith.

2

You can’t advocate for such a separation without contradicting yourself. Separation between State and economics, as the Randians would have it.

No separation can ever take place since the government is a real and tangible thing, which requires scarce resources and the coercive means to finance them. A government that does not violate your freedom of association is a government that does not exist.

3

No separation can ever take place since the government is a real and tangible thing, which requires scarce resources and the coercive means to finance them. A government that does not violate your freedom of association is a government that does not exist.

Thanks for not actually addressing the question I asked. Anyone else?

[FWIW, your objecting does not apply to an AnCap “government”, that is, a defense agency, which does not get its scarse resources coercively but rather via the free market. And I clearly stated at the beginning that while being an anarchist, I’m aslo asking the question "what would have happened’ if this clause had been in our constitution? Definitions aside, like any other clause, it might have been in our constitution (or some future constitution), and the question isn’t whether that’s a “contradiction” philosophically, the question is “what would have been/would be the result?”]

4

IMO any government (territorial monopoly of force; final arbiter of disputes; power of taxation) that can define its own powers will always tend to progressively expand those powers regardless of any written restrictions. If the question is whether the changes you suggest would slow down that process, I do not know. The strongest factor limiting government’s power grab is the degree of consent of the governed. To me the changes you propose are more technical in nature and would not significantly change the governed’s tolerance to government. I suspect that the government would still find excuses and loopholes to increase its power just like it did with the Constitution. The only way to avoid this is to have a set of rules that is simple, timeless, ethical, and universal, like the NAP and absolute private property rights. Those are the only kinds of principles that have a chance to be dependably guarded over the generations, and I doubt anyone could imagine any government that didn’t immediately violate such principles as soon as it was created.

5

Hmm that clause would break the government completely, since it can’t even dicern the lawmakers and cops from regular people. They need to be allowed at least the ability to recognize and form associations that are within itself.