“It’s passed,” US president Joe Biden said of his student loan forgiveness plan at a recent forum. “I got it passed by a vote or two.” But he didn’t “get it passed,” nor were there any votes. He issued an executive order.

“Where’s Jackie?” Biden asked at a conference in September, scanning the crowd for US Representative Jackie Walorski (R-IN). “I thought she was going to be here.” The month before, he’d pronounced himself “shocked and saddened” by Walorski’s death in an automobile accident.

I am not a doctor. I do not play a doctor on TV, or on the Internet.  You’re probably not a doctor, either. But our lack of credentials to issue medical diagnoses doesn’t prevent us from noticing, and making plausible inferences from, visible signs of (likely age-related) mental decline.

Joe Biden just ain’t right in the head. He’s not remembering and understanding things that people with normal mental function remember and understand. He’s living, at least some of the time, in an alternate reality.

Nor is he the first. Ronald Reagan is now acknowledged to have been in the early stages of Alzheimer’s during the last years of his presidency. Donald Trump seems incapable of opening his mouth without saying something bizarrely disconnected from reality, though whether that’s down to age, mental illness, dishonesty, or some combination of the three in any given case is open to question.

It’s not just the presidency, either. Over the last few years, we’ve watched several older members of Congress descend during floor speech and debate into the kind of rambling incoherence that would result in normal people being gently led back to their rooms at the nursing homes where they’re living out their final days.

Is it time to set upper age limits on tenure in political office?

Just to be clear, I don’t believe that age and infirmity explain why government “doesn’t work.” It doesn’t work because it CAN’T work, at least if we define working in terms of maximizing peace and prosperity while reducing or eliminating aggression.

But there are different kinds of not working, and some of them are more dangerous than others. If politicians living in perpetual brain fog aren’t inherently more dangerous than their younger counterparts, their handlers and puppet-masters probably are, if for no other reason than that those handlers are, due to their near invisibility, even less accountable to the public.

The US Constitution mandates that US Representatives be at least 25 years of age, US Senators at least 30, and US presidents at least 35.

At the time the Constitution was ratified, the life expectancy for white males (the only people permitted to exercise political power) was about 35. We didn’t have a big problem with senile politicians back then because most people didn’t live long enough to develop dementia.

If we’re going to continue trusting people with political power — I say again, we shouldn’t! — it’s time for a constitutional amendment setting an upper limit to match those lower limits. How does 70 years old sound?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Hereby it is manifest,” Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651’s Leviathan, “that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man.”

Hobbes’s solution to the absence of a “common Power” was a “covenant” with a “sovereign” who would act on behalf of all — what we today call “the state” or “government” — thus bringing an end to the terrible war he discerned.

So, how well has that worked out for us?

Hobbes wrote in the shadow of the Thirty Years’ War, concluded by the Peace of Westphalia, which created the state as we know it. Casualties in that war are estimated at eight million.

Here are some  death tolls for a select few of Earth’s near-constant wars since the consolidation of the Westphalian nation-state model in the late 19th century with the unifications of Germany and Italy, and subsequent struggles between/within nation-states:

World War One: 40 million
Russian Civil War: 9 million
Chinese Civil War: 11.6 million
Second Sino-Japanese War: 25 million
World War Two: 85 million
Korean War. 4.5 million
Vietnam War: 4.3 million
Nigerian Civil War: 3 million
Afghanistan Conflict: 2 million
Second Congo War: 5.4 million

The verdict was certainly in by 1918, when Randolph Bourne died and his essay “The State” was published posthumously. The takeaway line:  “War is the health of the state.”

Hobbes’s “sovereign” suggestion, as taken, didn’t end war. It put war on steroids.

Political government as we’ve constructed it is geared toward maximizing death to increase its own power and expand its own reach at the expense of everyone. We’ve still got perpetual war of  every man against every man. Only now it’s highly organized, well-funded, and waged for the benefit of the political class.

As Leon Trotsky — a “state-ist” himself, but one who hoped for a “withering away” of political government into communism — put it in 1937’s The Revolution Betrayed:

“Whatever be the programs of the government, stateism inevitably leads to a transfer of the damages of the decaying system from strong shoulders to weak. … State-ism means applying brakes to the development of technique, supporting unviable enterprises, perpetuating parasitic social strata.”

What private commercial interest, operating under a weak state or no state at all, would have invented the tank, the aerial bomb, or the nuclear warhead? Such weapons only promise profitability in the context of a strong, powerful states waging war with each other.

I’m often told that my anarchist philosophy and my goal of reaching, at least, a “panarchy” under which each individual chooses a governing entity instead of remaining trapped in the Westphalian Model’s geographic “sovereignty” trap, are unrealistic fantasies worthy only of dismissal.

But if unrealism is a disqualifying factor, Hobbes’s “sovereign” and the state as we know it have, unlike my ideas, had their chance … and are clearly failures when it comes to ending war.

As we stare down the barrel of nuclear holocaust, it’s clearly time to re-think how we do government.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On Valentine’s Day in 2018, Nikolas Cruz murdered 14 students and three school employees at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. More than four years later, a jury determined that Cruz’s crimes made him eligible for the death penalty, but did not unanimously vote to recommend that penalty. That absence of unanimity means Cruz will instead serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.

While it’s a stretch to say that the jury made the right decision — the vote was 9-3 in favor of death — those three votes did prevent it from making the wrong decision.

Yes, some crimes are so heinous that they merit death.

If Cruz had been killed at the scene of the crime, in immediate defense of innocents and when split-second decisions had to be made, I’d be the last to criticize his killers.

But trusting the state with the power to kill disarmed prisoners in cold blood and with premeditation is never a good idea, for two reasons.

One is that any time we trust the state with power of any kind, mistakes will inevitably be made.

The other is that any time we trust the state with power of any kind, political considerations will affect how that power is exercised.

The difference between most mistakes and political considerations and this particular type is that in most cases the damages can be at least partially remedied. The victims can take the government to court or vote  the calculating politician out of office. Those wrongly convicted of crimes can continue to seek exoneration and freedom.

But dead is dead. The executed prisoner can’t be freed. No damage award can make the executed prisoner whole. If the governor who signed a death warrant because he needed that 1% edge in the polls from the “tough on crime” crowd loses his next election, the executed prisoner can’t rise from the grave and take up his or her life where it left off.

The Death Penalty Information Center’s Innocence Database lists 190 persons sentenced to death in the United States, but later exonerated, since 1973. The group also provides 20 examples of actual executions of likely innocent convicts.

Does Nikolas Cruz deserve to die? In my opinion, he does.

Do the rest of us deserve to live with the possibility of wrongful execution hanging constantly over our heads? No.

To spare the innocent, we must deny the state power to kill the guilty.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY