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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

These cyclical democracies really need a way to easily Ctrl/Cmd+Z the damage done during a despotic episode.

Maybe we could reset a democracy every N years (50?) and basically say "Out with everything" and start from scratch.

How on earth would this work? Would you throw out all of contract and business law? Any permits people have get reset? Is the military disbanded and restarted from scratch?

Works for government funding

> How on earth would this work?

Maybe something similar to what the French been doing could do the trick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republics

Basically a bit more large scale changes every now and then, shake up the status quo.

Originally, Jefferson imagined a state where all acts of legislation came with sunset dates. The idea being that a State would cap out and auto prune itself through the inherent friction of having to reapprove only the most important foundations of itself. Instead of accruing cruft, it'd allow for an equilibrium of law and liberties constantly returning to the public, and only the most unanimously supported measures to stay in force. A government for the living, rather than one of the legacies of the dead, which was favored by Madison.

And every other Founding Father rejected the idea as completely unworkable.

The current shutdown demonstrates why Jefferson's idea was a bad idea.

No it doesn't. We've got so much cruft and deadlock because we've operated in a Madisonian regime. With that cruft comes selective enforcement, and with that both contempt, and loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the populace. It is enough that the younger generations feel hemmed in by a gerontocracy to see that something has gone horribly wrong, and that the direction we've been going is part of what got us to the current situation.

> And every other Founding Father rejected the idea as completely unworkable.

I went looking for more information when parent left their comment, and I found some letters:

- Jefferson to Madison, Sept. 6, 1789 ("earth belongs in usufruct to the living" 19-year term, expiry by default)

- Madison to Jefferson, Feb. 4, 1790 (three classes of laws; stability, property, tacit consent)

- Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816 (periodic constitutional conventions every 19–20 years)

You said "every other Founding Father" but I can't find any letters to/from anyone else, could you please share with me the source(s) you got this from so I could continue reading about this? Very interesting subject I hadn't hear about before.

The Constitution...

There is an obvious solution but unfortunately it only seems to work on good Presidents.

Now, now. McKinley's record was mixed at best.

(And no matter what you think of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt must count as an upgrade, right?)

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