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Main article: Political systems
In our society, the distribution of power is as important, if not more so, than the distribution of income. In fact, one reason we are concerned about the distribution of income is because it profoundly affects how power is distributed. We have discussed ways our ratings-based society might choose to change the distribution of income. This is fairly easy because we can simply measure the amount of money someone receives or, in a moneyless economy, the amount of goods/services one receives. For power, it is harder to measure.
Power has two distinct sides: hard and soft. Hard power is the kind granted explicitly by a rule or law. The President’s ability to command military forces or the ability of government to tax citizens is hard power. Soft power is the implicit influence one has on others. A person of high social skill can often influence the behavior of others. Some salespeople selling the exact same product with the same resources (eg car dealers at the same dealership) sell more than others. The only difference is their soft skills.
It is obvious that a ratings system can influence hard power more than soft power. Clearly, moving legislative power to a direct-democracy system will negate the outsize power of legislators, the primary role our politicians occupy. But there will still be a need for administrative offices to run various departments: data collection & statistics, economics, environmental, defense, etc. In many ways the structure of a community’s government will mirror the departments of the executive function in our own. Someone will need to do the work, even at a minimal level, of managing the various activities of the community. The people who do this work will inevitably have power greater than that of the average citizen.
Clearly the ratings system will need to rate such people extra carefully and, as distinct from the regular citizen, in relation to their office. An index of how much power each bureaucrat has could be developed for ratings purposes. This could be done in an objective way by gauging the specific powers each office commands. Some cases will be obvious: the ability to command the military outweighs the ability to write environmental regulations. But some cases will not be so clear. Is the Secretary of Education more or less powerful than the Secretary of Agriculture? These cases will be decided by the public through the ratings system. We can envision a hard power ratings index which will standardize how we measure official power. Much of this could be pre-populated by those with intimate knowledge of the office in question. Since ensuring that the powerful use their office responsibly, we can envision a whole separate watchdog agency whose mission is assessment and analysis of governmental offices.
Alongside the power rating itself, an index of how cleanly power is wielded can be established. Is the office-holder in question abusing his power or biased in its application? In addition, the community will be able to carefully circumscribe the power of such individuals. Rules that require the bureaucrat to leave office when their ratings go below a certain point can be instituted.
But none of this addresses the fundamental problem of power inequality. The only remedy would appear to be to impose a power distribution curve on the whole of the community, similar to the income distribution curve. This would mean carefully designing an office so power is never excessively concentrated in any one person. We could allow some inequality, based on community agreement, and then force compliance through various means:
- Rotating the powerful jobs through all the people in the community fit to hold them (and interested in them). This would make power temporary and shared.
- Breaking offices up into multiple people, each of which wields some power.
- Requirements that if a bureaucrat is seen as too powerful, that he devolve his power back to the community by giving up some aspects of it.
The key to doing this lies in a ratings system that accurately measures the degree to which individuals possess power through their offices.
Although harder to do, the ratings system can also identify and manage soft power. Someone with a lot of friends may possess soft power but if all he’s using it for is influencing them on where to eat dinner, it wouldn’t be a concern. But if someone starts developing a cult and influencing young converts in bizarre ways, we might flag such a person with an outsize power rating. It is conceivable that if the cult leader then violates the power distribution a community has decided on, he could also be constrained in some way. This is admittedly hard to do in a free society but we would hope that a culture of “power humility” will do much to prevent this sort of thing in the first place.
Soft power poses an interesting dynamic because it is often unclear who has it or how it is being used. Donald Trump has soft power among his base but it was not clear at the beginning how much. The press routinely wrote him off as an unserious figure who would eventually implode. It never happened and we can see now that he has developed, mostly through soft power, an unshakable relationship with his core supporters. Would rating Trump as having too much power dissuade his base? Obviously not, nor would such an approach work with any popular public figure. Visceral bonds like this are hard to break which makes it all the more imperative to identify early on those who have the power to develop this type of relationship with followers.
There is also an obvious way to curtail soft power and prevent a community-decided distribution from getting further skewed. And that is to not allow people who have it to also gain an office where they have hard power. For a politician with alot of soft power, this would mean not allowing them to run for elected office. Such a policy would have the advantage of keeping the ranks of our governmental class focused on people of character and competence. It would also tend to favor those with policy knowledge rather than the ability to get elected.
In addition to focusing on individuals we might also focus on groups who wield power. Our own founders worried constantly about the power that political parties, corporations, mobs, etc. might wield to the detriment of the people and their legitimate government. The power of a group is often easier to spot than that of an individual and can be circumscribed more effectively. Disbanding a group does not infringe nearly so much on an individual as curtailing an individual’s own power. Our ratings system should have a direct method by which group power can be limited. In a sense, the people of the community will stand as a built-in opposition group to any private group that forms and develops outsize influence. A distribution of power for groups, depending on their size, might be developed with a measure of power per capita developed to keep it in check.
Power is subtle and multitudinous in its manifestations. Rules to cover every case would be both unproductive and costly. Companies often try to regulate office relationships to prevent bad outcomes from unequal power dynamics (eg dating between manager & worker). These rules exist as cover for the companies that implement them. They also serve to illustrate how ineffective they are, not to mention their obvious violation of personal liberty.