“Of the best rulers, (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
The people only know that they exist;
The next best they love and praise
The next they fear;
And the next they revile.
When they do not command the people’s faith,
Some will lose faith in them,
And then they resort to oaths!
But of the best when their task is accomplished,
their work done,
The people all remark, 'We have done it ourselves.'”
Lao-Tzu (6th century B.C.), Chinese philosopher. The Wisdom of Laotse; chapter 17, edited and translated by Lin Yutang; 1948.
"The whole body of the nation is the sovereign legislative, judiciary, and executive power for itself. The inconvenience of meeting to exercise these powers in person, and their inaptitude to exercise them, induce them to appoint special organs to declare their legislative will, to judge and to execute it. It is the will of the nation which makes the law obligatory; it is their will which creates or annihilates the organ which is to declare and announce it…The law being law because it is the will of the nation, is not changed by their changing the organ through which they choose to announce their future will; no more than the acts I have done by one attorney lose their obligation by my changing or discontinuing that attorney."
When you are framing your arguments for a progressive future for the United States, it is vital that you do not assume that everyone understands the terms that you use in the exact same way that you do, or even have a similar starting point in the discussion.
For myself, I have always looked to Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence, as two of my touchstones in political philosophy. Jefferson's statement in the Declaration that, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,” is the founding statement for my own view of the relationship between human beings and the state.
For this reason, I feel it is important for me to define what I mean by the terms: the state, government, authority, and power, while keeping the august words of Jefferson in mind.
The state, which is also called a nation or country, is an artificial human construct that a group or groups of human beings and human communities use as a framework for mutual support and shared responsibility with one another. The relationship between these human beings has, in some manner, been formalized by written law, binding oath, tradition, or some combination of the three.
The formal relationship that exists between the individual, his family, and the larger community or state to which they belong, and its many diverse members, is called government.
All forms of government have two primary components: authority and power.
Of governmental authority there are two types: legitimate and illegitimate.
Legitimate authority results from adherence to the boundaries, written or customary, explicit or implicit, of the state and its government's underlying social contract with the People. This social contract may take the form of a constitution, a set of written laws and legal decisions that form the basis for a consistent legal framework, a system of customs and oral traditions, or some combination of these three forms. Adherence to these boundaries allows the People of a nation to believe in the general benevolence and rightness of their government, which further strengthens the social contract.
Illegitimate authority results when legitimate authority is overthrown, usurped, exceeded, or ignored; especially—though not solely—in those cases involving conquest, self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment, misappropriation of power (especially if the transgressors are socially or economically prominent), expediency, or some combination thereof, by an individual or group whose actions are contrary to law or tradition.
Power for many commentators is a more difficult proposition to identify not only the source of, but to provide proper definition to. I assume, like Jefferson, that all governmental power comes from the consent of the People who believe in that government.
This contradicts Mao Zedong when he said (paraphrasing Trotsky) that all power comes from the barrel of a gun. If this were true, then all governments would arise from criminal or other immoral enterprises. Despite what some anarchists believe, all governments do not arise from these black origins.
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