Decorrupting Government: The United States Board of Overseers

Bruce Owen ()
Additional contact information
Bruce Owen: Stanford University

No 12-010, Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This essay considers whether the organizational arrangements established by the Constitution of the United States remain effective in promoting “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” which are the purposes of government according to Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. I conclude that they are no longer effective, and explore organizational reforms to address this failure. Specifically, the Constitution lacks a provision for substantive review of laws and regulations for consistency with the purposes of government—a function known in the private sector as quality assurance. The judicial power deals with legislative threats to life and liberty, but we need a better way to interdict threats to well-being. I propose the creation of a new branch, provisionally called the United States Board of Overseers, with responsibilities and powers analogous to those of the Supreme Court, but focused chiefly on the people’s opportunities for well-being rather than protecting life and liberty through the rule of law. For reasons of political legitimacy the eleven Overseers are chosen by lot from a College consisting of millions of citizens qualified by age, education and (middle) income. In political terms, the proposal is intended to counter the current power of the oligarchy over the legislature and the administrative state with a strongly democratic institution representing the principal victims of oligarchic power, the middle class. Given the difficulty faced by the oligarchy in containing the destabilizing and inefficient excess greed of its members, the proposal is also in the collective interest of the one percent. Protection for the poorest is included in the proposal.

Date: 2013-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-siepr.stanford.edu/repec/sip/12-010.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www-siepr.stanford.edu:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sip:dpaper:12-010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Shor ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).