Bong Mendoza's Political Poetry

Below are three of the various short poems and septons by a friend, Dr. Amado “Bong” Mendoza of the UP Political Science Department. Posted yesterday and today, reposting them here with his permission. My short comments after each poem.

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(1) self-rule, anarchy and leadership

there is without doubt
greater demand for
than supply of good leaders

for leaders, what's the recipe?
mix vision and charisma?
courage and resolve?

no equilibrium in sight
we should eventually learn
to lead ourselves.

Right Bong, but anarchy to mean "zero authority" and "zero government" is a pipe dream, a fiction. I like the example of many village associations. They provide roads/drainage/flood control construction and maintenance, garbage collection, street lighting, security, fire truck/control, village park and multipurpose hall, etc. They have elected officials with term limits, have appointed or hired staff and bureaucrats. They have their own internal revenues like the annual dues, car sticker fees, household ID fees, etc. It is one classic case of self-government, minarchy, and it is working. People who are not satisfied with how the village fund and security is being managed, can move out and go to another village, or plot to change the leadership of the village.

(2) why do we obey so-called leaders?
t'is the key question in political philosophy

They're elected, they're the best
men of virtu
slaves not to fortuna's
shifting fickle tides

Karl Marx said they owned us
Robert Michels declared
They do what we can't do, daily, 24/7!

(I acknowledge my intellectual debts to Aristotle, John Locke, Niccolò Machiavelli, Karl Marx, and Robert Michels.) 

We obey so-called leaders because we are forced to do so. There are laws, armed forces and prison system by the state that forced us to obey them. True democracy should mean the least coercion. Someone thinks he's got a very bright idea. In a democracy with least coercion, he should be able to finance it without coercion, and not forcing me and you to finance his bright idea. The fact there it needs coercion and legislation means that 99 percent, it is a stupid idea.

(3) what's a CAP?
collective action problem
there's one when people
do not help each other
constitute a community

why this behavior?
we do compete or cooperate
the stronger instinct seems to be
consistent with our best lights.

bakit di magtulungan?
mga tao sa lipunan
sadya bang
mas malakas
pagnanais na
isulong ang sarili
isulong ang interes?

kailangang magtulungan
para mabuo, ating pamayanan.

(c) 2014 Amado M. Mendoza, Jr.

Collective action is often hidden, especially from the eyes of central planners. Some people focus on producing or spreading knowledge, they do not produce a single kilo of food. Some people produce food, they contribute little or nothing in producing knowledge. They exchange somewhere, the knowledge producers have food, the food producers have knowledge for them and their kids. There is collective action there, and it benefits humanity.

Lion Rock 10: On Having Centralized or Self-Government

This Saturday, I will attend the Reading Club Salon 2013 of the Lion Rock Institute in Hong Kong. It is a full day round table discussion with the theme this year, "Democracy -- Past, Present and Future".

There are dozens of reading materials. Today I read  Anti-Federalist Paper #3. This portion is cool.

'The only foreign, or at least evil foreign influence, must be obtained through corruption. Where the government is lodged in the body of the people, as in Switzerland, they can never be corrupted; for no prince, or people, can have resources enough to corrupt the majority of a nation; and if they could, the play is not worth the candle. The facility of corruption is increased in proportion as power tends by representation or delegation, to a concentration in the hands of a few. . . ."

Top of Form

Yes, the main external or foreign source of social disharmony or even decay, is corruption from within, internal and self-inflicted misery. And that is why the more concentration of power in few people, more is corruption unleashed. Thus, people should not give too much power to any few people, even if they look like angels, even if they act and sound like angels.

"Where the people are free there can be no great contrast or distinction among honest citizens in or out of office. In proportion as the people lose their freedom, every gradation of distinction, between the Governors and governed obtains, until the former become masters, and the latter become slaves.... Our people are capable of being made anything that human nature was or is capable of, if we would only have a little patience and give them good and wholesome institutions; but I see none such and very little prospect of such. Alas! I see nothing in my fellow-citizens, that will permit my still fostering the delusion, that they are now capable of sustaining the weight of SELF-GOVERNMENT: a burden to which Greek and Roman shoulders proved unequal."

I agree with the statement that if people are free, corruption, extortion and distrust of the rule of law will significantly decline. And I think the "self government" here refers to a state of civil society. People are mature and responsible enough to run their own lives, their own communities, without much coercion and central planning.

"If the body of the people will not govern themselves, and govern themselves well too, the consequence is unavoidable — a FEW will, and must govern them. Then it is that government becomes truly a government by force only, where men relinquish part of their natural rights to secure the rest, instead of an union of will and force, to protect all their natural rights, which ought to be the foundation of every rightful social compact."

Yes, failure of "self government" would mean the success of coercive government. But such coercion is limited to protecting the people's natural rights. Right to life, right to private property, right to liberty.

"As to any nation attacking a number of confederated independent republics … it is not to be expected, more especially as the wealth of the empire is there universally diffused, and will not be collected into any one overgrown, luxurious and effeminate capital to become a lure to the enterprising ambitious."

Nice term, "overgrown, luxurious and effeminate capital" as magnet for foreign invasion.

"In small independent States contiguous to each other, the people run away and leave despotism to reek its vengeance on itself; and thus it is that moderation becomes with them, the law of self-preservation."

This is possible, so long as people have the freedom to "vote with their feet" or mobility among people across countries and continentis relatively easy.

Bottom of Form

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See also Lion Rock 6: Honoring Milton Friedman, July 31, 2013 
Lion Rock 7: Reading Club Salon 2013, Hong Kong, September 17, 2013 

Lion Rock 8: On Opposition, Factions and James Madison, October 01, 2013 

Lion Rock 9: Federalism, Decentralization and George Clinton, October 07, 2013 

Business 360 12: Optimum Size of Government, October 13, 2013