Empire-Scale Representative Democracy: The American Presidency

On the very day in which a health-care company’s executive collapsed in the Oval Office, with U.S. President Trump being the only person in the group standing and looking away in what looks like callous disregard instead of compassion or empathy, that president directed his Administration to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that the U.S. Government had to immediately fund food-assistance, or SNAP (formerly “food stamps”) completely for the month then more than a week in, in spite of the "government shutdown." On the next day, the Trump Administration demanded that the member-states that had just paid out full November benefits to recipients “undo"  the difference between the partial and full amounts that had just been "paid out under judges’ orders” because the U.S. Supreme Court “stayed those rulings.”[1] The photo of Trump literally looking the other way while everyone else in the Oval Office is bending over the collapsed man out of concern perfectly aligns with his lack of concern for Americans going without food due to the sudden stoppage of money for food without notice. That many employees of the U.S. Government who had been laid off without pay since earlier that November would be especially reliant on food-assistance money precisely because they were no longer obtaining income (or else they were receiving unemployment compensation at less than full pay) could be understood to be a matter of callousness rather than moral sentiments from Trump simply by looking at the photo.

President Trump's emotional indifference is palpable. (source: Andrew Harnik via Getty Images)

Looking at that photo, not even psychologists should conclude that a majority of the electoral (and popular) votes went to elect a psychopath. However, callousness in the face of a medical emergency can reasonably be inferred from the president’s non-verbal stance and emotionless facial expression. Had that photo been available to voters in the days before the 2024 presidential election, Trump may have lost that election. Such a hypothetical is useful ex post facto because it raises the question of whether so many voters as vote in a U.S. presidential election have enough actual information on the candidates. If the photo shocked many such voters just over a year after the 2024 election, the implication is that relying on “brand” marketing by presidential campaigns because so few voters even know people who know even just one of the candidates is deficient.

The Electoral College was established in the U.S. Constitution not only because the member-states, like those of the E.U., would retain some governmental sovereignty, but also because with even just 7 million people voting for president, so few of them could be expected to know the characters of the candidates beyond what reaches news print that a check by electors who could meet the candidates was deemed to be necessary. That the political parties captured the Electoral College such that such a check did not in fact operate means that American representative democracy as regards the federal president of the Union has been allowed to operate at a deficiency, which is to say that the elections have been vulnerable to the electorates (of the states) being misled by presidential campaigns.

In short, my point is that if even some of the millions of Americans who had voted for Donald Trump in November, 2024 were subsequently shocked a year later when they scrutinized the photo of Donald Trump being so visually inert emotionally, and perhaps even annoyed at the unwanted delay in his office, while antipodally the other people there could be seen as so obviously concerned about a guest who had just collapsed. Trump stood out so much from the others that even the president’s supporters could have been surprised, even marveling in the privacy of their own minds that they had known so little about Trump the man when they had voted for him. I am assuming that only a small minority of the electorate would favor voting for a person who at the very leeast appears to be so callous in person, for judgment, which involves not just reasoning, but also emotion, is salient in governing. The photo of Turmp in the Oval Office paradoxically demonstrates the importance of humane emotion in governance by so clearly dipicting the utter absence of emotion in a very human situation in which we would naturally expect to find spontaneous emotion. In this surreal way, Trump's repeated efforts to stop food-assistance from reaching the poor judicially and in policy can be grasped in terms of Trump as a person.

Perhaps as in the E.U., the chief executives of the U.S. member-states should nominate a candidate for federal president, with the U.S. House of Representatives, whose counterpart in the E.U. is the European Parliament, confirming or rejecting the candidate. The idea of the states' chief executives, who are themselves elected closer to the people, choosing the federal president outright was considered in the Constitutional Convention, but the proposal was unfortunately voted down in favor of the ill-fated Electoral College. The U.S. federal system can indeed be improved by borrowing some ideas from the E.U., and vice versa; this just takes some humility on both ends. 

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1. Scott Bauer and Nicholas Riccardi, “Trump Administration Demands States ‘Undo’ Full SNAP Payouts as States Warn of ‘Catastrophic Impact,’” The Associated Press, November 9, 2025.

Wealth and Ethics in American Fiscal Policy

In a struggle between wealth and ethics, practically speaking the former tends overwhelmingly to win hands down, even if the form of government is at least nominally a representative democracy, but in fact an oligarchy or plutocracy. The influence of the moneyed interest both in the E.U. and U.S. is likely much stronger than most of the respective citizenries know. When the poorest of the poor are to be made worse off financially by cuts in certain government programs while defense contractor companies stand to get more, which tends to mean higher bonuses for executives (and campaign contributions for elected representatives), the skew toward the gilded and away from the most vulnerable economically can be viewed as an x-ray of sorts indicative of rule by wealth rather than by the People. U.S. President Trump’s fiscal budget enacted in 2025 is a case in point by which the questionable morality of the plutocracy or oligopoly form of government can be gleaned.

Plato laid out the following as alternative forms of government, from the best to the worst:

1.       The Ideal State (kallipolis): everyone is doing their respective jobs well; philosophers with knowledge of the good are in charge of making decisions pertaining to public policy.

2.       Timocracy: (e.g., Sparta): people who love honor, social status, and competition are in control. In other words, a military. 

3.       Oligarchy: producers (or suppliers) of goods and services (i.e., business executives and or companies) are in control. That is business runs the government.

4.       Democracy: the “mob” is in control. Direct democracy. Such “mob rule” is volatile, with enacted policies swinging back and forth. This does not include representative democracy, which is better, but not as good as having a philosopher king rule because reason should control the passions in a mind and a city.

5.       Tyranny: a tyrant is in control. This is the worst form of government, for obvious reasons, as an autocrat faces no worldly constraint in unleashing suffering and death on a population. In 2023 through at least 2025, the Israeli government was a tyranny in Gaza.

The three highest Hindu castes fit the three highest Platonic forms of government, with Brahmins, who are ideally priests (or philosophers), soldiers/generals, and merchants in descending order in Hindu society. The “mob” in Plato’s scheme corresponds to the laborers in the caste system. That business managers (including CEOs) running (and thus controlling) government are higher than direct democracy may sound strange to modern ears in the West, even in the E.U., in which Greece is a state unless the difference between well-paid modern elected representatives and a mob of mostly uneducated (i.e., unprofessional) laborers in ancient Athens is grasped. Even in modern representative democracies, complete with terms of office to buffer the momentary passions of the people—passions that can contradict a people’s long-term best interests (i.e., the public good)—corporate interests likely view themselves as superior and thus legitimately at the helm in what is known as a plutocracy, or rule by wealth. The moneyed interests could cite Plato’s hierarchy of government-types without bothering to point out that Plato had mob-rule rather than the U.S. Senate in mind as democracy. We need not pit the reasoning, albeit skewed by self-interest, of CEOs on public policy against what a disorganized mob might come up with as the public good (over partial interests), but we might want to consider whether corporations and individual CEOs should have so much monetary sway with elected representatives and their appointees that a representative democracy is de facto a plutocracy serving the relatively narrow interests of capital. The pecuniary interests of American defense-contractor companies in manufacturing and selling weapons, planes, and tanks to the U.S. Government for use in Israel as it pummeled 2 million residents of Gaza in 2024 and 2025 were not necessarily in the best interests of the United States, which might have been more accurately represented and instituted by the American electorates than business political-action-committees helping representatives get re-elected. Not that any member of Congress cares about that, of course.

Or take the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the Republican lawmakers in both chambers of Congress and signed by President Trump in 2025. The projected economic impacts on the different economic tiers of Americans supports Adam Smith’s fear that company managements and government officials would work together at the expense of workers and even competitive markets themselves. On August 11, 2025, the Congressional Budget Office made public its estimates “that the 10% poorest Americans will lose roughly $1,200 a year as they experience restrictions on government programs like Medicaid and food assistance, while the richest 10% of Americans will see their income increase by $13, 600 from tax cuts. Overall , American households will see more income from the tax cuts in the legislation, including middle income households, but the largest benefit will go to the top 10% of earners.”[1] Such a distributional impact could be expected in a plutocracy, even in the form of a hijacked representative democracy. Very poor disabled Americans living on Social Security (SSI) of less than $1,000 a month already faced reductions if they negotiate a good deal on rent, or a friend or relative helps out with utilities or rent. That the U.S. Defense Department budget was increased, with corporate defense contractors set to reap additional profits as a result, illustrates the questionable ethics in taking from the poorest of the poor, who cannot work, and giving more to wealthy corporations (with higher bonuses, everything else equal, going to executives). Additionally, just for added fun, roughly “2.4 million people won’t be eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [i.e., food stamps] under new work requirements” for poor Americans who have not been declared disabled by the Social Security Administration.[2] Food has thusly been declared not to be an unconditional human right. As the work requirement applied to Medicaid, the government program that funds healthcare for the very poor, access to medical services—and thus good health—was also declared to not qualify as an unconditional human right.

In short, the American social contract between the federal government and its people was changed in ways that stood to make many of the poorest Americans poorer while defense contractors could make even more money from that government. The new social contract reflected a plutocracy or oligarchy in the guise of a representative democracy. Although arguably superior to mob rule, such a trajectory for representative democracy may trouble a good many people, financially or otherwise perhaps in conscience. A person need only read John Rawl’s Theory of Justice to realize that a plutocracy gearing public policy to the narrow interests of a part rather than the whole of a society is diametrically opposed, or antipodal, to a system of government and economy in which the poorest of the poor are looked to first such that they can survive and lead decent, albeit not wealthy, lives before other, increasingly better off tiers are taken into account. In a school yard, only a bully goes after the kids with the least to eat for lunch so to enrich himself and his buddies.

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1. Stephen Groves, “Trump’s Tax Law Will Mostly Benefit the Rich, While Leaving Poorer Americans with Less, CBO Says,” The Associated Press, August 11, 2025.
2. Ibid.

Sustenance: A Human Right in America?

In the fall of 2010, the following was said on Fox News: “The government should spend more on the war in Afghanistan in order to fight terrorism. The problem is that the government has gotten into entitlements.”  The latter presumably includes food stamps, public housing, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  To say that government ought to be engaged in defense and not in supplying needy citizens with food, shelter and health-care is distinct from saying that the federal government should concentrate on foreign policy and defense, while entitlements are formulated and funded by the state governments as their domestic programs. In other words, advocacy for a certain priority in government and for less government is distinct from advocacy for restoring balanced federalism.

Most Europeans in the E.U. undoubtedly view the redistributive right for sustenance resources as founded on human rights and thus as a legitimate part of government.  In contrast, Americans do not typically apply a human rights justification to entitlements for other Americans even as foreign aid may be justified in part on this basis.

For example, on June 3, 2011, Donald Trump told a forum in Washington, D.C.: "A certain Republican representative, two nights ago -– I watched on television -– Representative Cantor, who [sic] I like, said we don't want to give money to the tornado victims, . . . (a)nd yet, in Afghanistan we are spending ten billion dollars a month but we don't want to help the people that are devastated by tornadoes -- wiped out, killed, maimed, injured. We don't have money for them but we are spending ten billion dollars a month in Afghanistan. We are spending billions of dollars in Iraq where they have the second largest oil fields in the world … and we can't help people that got flooded in Mississippi that got hit horribly by tornadoes." The U.S. House Majority Leader was holding up funds for basic necessities at home as leverage in debt-ceiling negotiations with the Democrats, while allowing billions of dollars to continue to flow in foreign aid (and to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan).  Canter’s antipathy toward government aiding citizens who would otherwise be left to the state of nature represents a rather warped understanding of a social contract.

People such as Eric Canter believe that the market mechanism trumps any right to have one’s basic needs satisfied. Resources are viewed as commodities produced and distributed by private enterprise, even though the market does not guarantee that every citizen’s basic needs are met. Even so, it can be asked whether the right to survival (i.e., life) is part of the American social contract. If so, then relying on the market mechanism alone is not sufficient.

If life is not part of the social contract, then the hungry and homeless, as well as the untreated sick, are (and can legitimately behave as if) in the state of nature. As much as some of the rich do not want to be taxed so the least fortunate can survive, the prospect of the latter behaving as if in the state of nature must surely be even less palatable.

James Madison writes in Federalist #51, “the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger” in the state of nature. Nor is the weaker secured against starvation and sickness.  Without the police to protect their property, are the rich sufficiently strong to ward off the hungry and homeless? Who is the strong and who is the weak in a dog-eat-dog contest between two human beings—one with a bank account and the other with a left hook? Life, Thomas Hobbes writes, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” in the state of nature are all equal in the sense that any one of us can be killed in our sleep. Suddenly having some of one’s tax directed on a human-rights basis may not sound so bad.

What keeps those whose survival is so tenuous from simply taking from the rich is of course the funded social contract that protects property with police force even as there is no guarantee for survival. Such a warped social contract is an aberration in terms of social contract theory.

  The social contract undergirding a political society is meant to alleviate the fear of the want of necessities (and self-defense) while working for the happiness of the members.  In other words, there is a right to shelter, food and medical care. Otherwise, the society is only marginal or partial in obviating the insecurity that exists in the state of nature.

Therefore, to say that government should merely defend citizens from the insecurity of foreign invasion does not go far enough from the standpoint of why government is instituted as part of a social contract that takes people out of the state of nature. However, to say that an empire-level government ought to be charged with protection from foreign invasion, while the individual republics are tasked with ascertaining their citizens with protection from starvation, the elements, and sickness. Without anxiety, foreign or domestic, every citizen—rich or poor—would be freed up from a basic insecurity that without a viable social contract is simply part of life.

Sources:

The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke, Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Press, 1961.

Sam Stein, “Trump Takes Aim at Cantor, Krauthammer, U.S. Foreign Policy,” The Huffington Post, June 3, 2011.

Happiness: A Matter of Prosperity or Economic Security?

A macro-economist would probably assume that the percentage of people rating their lives positively enough to be considered thriving is positively correlated with real GDP per capita. Yet evidence suggests that this is not the case. The key to happiness, I submit, is having the sense of foundational economic security—that come what may, even in the case of rich people, you won’t fall through the cracks. It is difficult to thrive over a continuous, subterranean (i.e., subtle) anxiety, whereas a sense of security, such as most children feel while still living in their childhood homes, is a sturdy foundation on which a sense of thriving can grow and survive. I think most people, particularly Americans, take this point for granted, and thus are all too willing to make staples like housing, food, and health care conditional on having money.

In Britain during the two years leading up to the referendum to secede from the E.U., Gallup found that the percentage of people who were happy in the sense of having the sense of thriving fell 15 percent.[1] Meanwhile, GDP per capita (PPP) in current international dollars increased from $38,873 to $41,499.[2] Egypt, likewise, went from 29 percent “happiness” in 2005 to 8 percent in 2012, while GDP per capita increased from $8,123 to $11,210. Clearly, something other than the level of prosperity is behind changes in happiness as a sense of thriving.

That Norway (7.537), Denmark (7.522) and Iceland (7.504) led the pack among countries in terms of happiness as thriving in 2017, with the Netherlands coming in sixth and Sweden tenth may suggest that having an economic safety-net may be important. The United States stood at only 6.993, and the safety nets in those states are partial. To be sure, the state of France in the E.U. came in even lower, at 6.442, and Italy at 5.964, so we cannot conclude that the stronger safety nets in the E.U. necessarily translate into more happiness. However, even within the E.U. Denmark and the Netherlands were known for their well-fortified socio-economic infrastructures, whereas in the U.S. only Massachusetts and California were known to have relatively encompassing social policies in comparison with the other American states. Unfortunately, Gallup lumped all of the American states together while distinguishing the European states, so we cannot tease out differences within the U.S. 

Even so, the high marks of Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands suggest that having a solid social-welfare safety net for the most vulnerable in matters of food, housing, and medical care is at the very least consistent with a broad sense of happiness in the sense of not merely surviving, but thriving in life. With less of the existential, conditional angst, people rich or poor can feel more stability upon which they can step out onto striving, venturing, into the unknown, with paradoxically a higher chance of sustainable self-sufficiency.

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1. Jon Clifton, “The Happiest and Unhappiest Countries in the World,” The World Post, March 20, 2017.

2. Source: The IMF

Big Soda Campaigning against a Proposed Tax in San Francisco: A Vested Interest Thwarting Democracy?

With a proposed 1-cent per ounce tax on sweetened beverages such as soda-pop on the 2016 ballot in Oakland and San Francisco, the effected industry reserved about $9.5 million in television-ad time.[1] As of August 10^th, the American Beverage Association had already spent $747,267 on campaign consultants and advertisements against the proposed tax in Oakland, whereas supporters of the proposal had spent only $23,297.[2] The imbalance itself could mean that business was subverting democracy by overwhelming voters. If big-soda’s ads were unethical as the pro-tax camp contended, the subversion would be especially harmful.

We’re “up against a campaign that’s willing to lie,” Campbell Washington, an Oakland Councilmember said.[3] As if the industry’s massive ad blitz were not enough of a problem for people like her, the industry was claiming that the tax would increase the prices of eggs, bread, and milk. “It’s an incredibly painful and unethical lie,” said Oakland Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan. “People worry about having to pay for their groceries. To threaten that their groceries are going to be taxed when it’s not true is a totally despicable tactic from the soda industry.”[4] Hoe Arellano, a spokesman for groups opposing taxes, retorted that grocers “have shown repeatedly that they will pass on those costs to their consumers.”[5] He was assuming that the grocers would not up the price of sugary drinks, but would do so on other foodstuffs.

With the proposed tax being only 1-cent per ounce, Arellano’s assumption that consumers would see a significant increase in the prices of other foods and drinks seems a stretch. The industry’s strategy does seem to include scare tactics, which are unethical. The question of whether grocers would up the prices of soda to fully capture the tax increase is more difficult to answer. The evidence from Berkeley’s tax from 2014 shows that consumption of soda, energy drinks, and other taxed items fell by 21 percent in some neighborhoods after the tax took effect.[6] So People would likely cut down on their purchases of soda. It is possible, therefore, that grocers would not try to capture all of the tax with price increases on the drinks. Even so, the grocers’ profits could take a hit instead of prices of other foods and drinks being affected. I must conclude, therefore, that the industry’s advertising campaign contained untruthful fear-mongering and hence was unethical.

The broader question is whether the huge imbalance in advertising spending was getting in the way of the will of the people being found by democratic means. That is, aside from the fear-mongering, does a large imbalance of campaign spending cause voters to lean too far in one direction when they would otherwise weigh both sides as each having a point. Put another way, such an imbalance can keep a side from getting its message out. To be sure, the pro-tax camp was relying on a grass-roots approach, but that has its limitations in reaching the mass-electorate which has been saturated with ads from the opposing side.

It may be that business has a social responsibility, being within a democratic system, not to overwhelm it with spending on political ads. When an industry has a vested interest in the vote, it may be best for the industry to limit itself to providing facts to the public discourse. To be sure, election results do not always favor the party that spent most; money isn’t everything. Even so, it seems unethical for business to dominate society simply because the bottom line is affected. Free speech is of course a right, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that spending is speech can be regarded as problematic. If so, the use of public policy to reinforce good social responsibility would be possible and perhaps even advised in the interest of protecting the democratic process from being overwhelmed.

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[1] Michael McLaughlin, “Big Soda Spends Millions on ‘Unethical’ San Francisco Area Ads Fighting Drink Taxes,” The Huffington Post, August 24, 2016.

[2] Darwin Graham, “Big Soda Is Spending Big Money Against Oakland Surary Beverage Tax Proposal,” East Bay Express, August 10, 2016.

[3] Ibid.

[4] McLaughlin, “Big Soda.”

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid. See the following: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303362

Is Daily Sustenance a Human Right?

Should healthcare, foodstuffs, and shelter be treated as commodities subject to the buyer’s ability to pay, or designated as rights because a person’s survival depends on them? In short, is the innate human drive of self-preservation worthy of being recognized societally as justifying a right to sustenance? In the E.U., this point of view tends to hold sway, whereas in the U.S., food, medical care (and medicine), and housing units tend to be treated as commodities subject to a buyer’s ability to pay. This difference in political socio-economic ideology is as telling as it is significant, yet in the U.S. at least the question is rarely debated directly rather than through ancillary issues.

Here is one American politician’s rather direct articulation on the campaign trail of the “commodity,” or “non-right” position:

“We’re looking at Obamacare right now. Once we start with those benefits in January, how are we going to get people off of those? It’s exponentially harder to remove people once they’ve already been on those programs…we rely on government for absolutely everything. And in the years since I was a small girl up until now into my adulthood with children of my own, we have lost a reliance on not only our own families, but so much of what our churches and private organizations used to do. They used to have wonderful food pantries. They used to provide clothing for those that really needed it. But we have gotten away from that. Now we’re at a point where the government will just give away anything.”[1]

The dependence argument and the related perspective that a government gives things away in its entitlement programs both assume that the beneficiaries do not have a right to sustenance materials, or that the stuff provided goes beyond necessities. Furthermore, the “charities” preference over government also assumes that sustenance is not a right, for charities unlike government are not geared to providing items to cover each day.

Just as a market cannot be relied on for a daily provision because procurement depends on having enough money at the time of purchase, so too charities cannot be relied on to provide clothing and food for people such they will not go without for even a day. The possible discontinuity is accepted, according to this view, because sustenance is not something that people should treat as a given; rather, a person’s continued day-to-day survival naturally depends the person’s ability to work. The assumption here is that a lack of work is likely due to some problem in the person, rather than a macro problem in the political economy. Individuals are not victims of a feature of societal organization, such as an economic system, so no right to unconditional compensation is recognized. Besides, charities can pick up the slack—daily sustenance not being a legitimate demand.

Put another way, the moral or religious obligation of the well-off to donate part of their surplus to charities is assumed to cover the occasional short-fall in food and clothing from being laid off in a recession. The moral obligation extends to helping even those people who have lost work due to their own fault, but the expectation is that if they want to survive beyond a temporary period of job-looking, they should rely on their own means of earning enough money to provide for themselves.

My point here is that in not being thwarted by the incendiary “getting free stuff” remark, readers of Joni Ernst’s remarks can know the assumptions behind her ideology and evaluate them. If enough people do so, then perhaps those assumptions can be debated in societal discourse. A societal consensus on the assumptions would ideally lead to the associated public policy being enacted. In other words, the assumptions that most people in a geographical region hold can be made transparent to them such that critical reflection can occur both individually and societally. From such recognition and thought, greater confidence can be had that people really do believe as they do regarding the assumptions, which involve subjective value-judgments rather than being solely based on fact.

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1. Jonathan Chait, “Republican Joni Ernst Admits Why Republicans Really Hate Obamacare,” New York Magazine, October 16, 2014.

Natural Rights in Europe and America: Shoring-Up Each Other’s Weak Spots

The Declaration of Independence made by the thirteen newly sovereign American states in 1776 recognizes “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These rights are not dependent on any government, and thus exist equally so in the state of nature. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, made in Europe thirteen years later, omits any mention of a creator-deity. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The equality here is more limited, being solely in terms of rights, “man’s natural and imprescriptible rights” in particular. These “are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” We can thus compare and contrast the two sets of rights, which important implications for public policy for both America and Europe.

The entire essay is at "Natural Rights in Europe and America."