The Constitutional Problem

Every institution faces the same decisive moment: the moment when the interests of its governors diverge from the interests of those it was founded to serve. The question is not whether this moment will come. It is whether the institution was designed, before that moment arrived, to survive it.

After Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons

The greatest political philosophers of the Western tradition were united in their understanding of the central problem of institutional design. The problem is not finding good rulers. The problem is building systems that remain just even when governed by people who are not good. This is why Madison wrote, in Federalist No. 51, that if men were angels no government would be necessary. The genius of constitutional design is the recognition that governance is ultimately not a question about people. It is a question about structure.

Providence claims that extraction destroys the Currency of Presence it means to mint. Any governance choice that rewards extraction threatens the substrate the institution depends upon. The constitutional task is to expose such choices to participants and give them authority to challenge and reverse them before they harden.