Feathered Quill Book Reviews

 #Authorinterview with Laurie Thomas Vass

Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Ephantus Muriuki is talking with Laurie Thomas Vass, author of Beneficial Economics: A Red State Citizens Guide to Crafting A Better Constitution When the Government Fails the Citizens.

FQ: Congratulations Mrs. Vass, on completing such an ambitious and bold work. Beneficial Economics is not just a book but a blueprint, and that takes an unusual amount of conviction and intellectual courage. What moment or series of experiences convinced you that Madison’s 1787 Constitution was beyond repair, and pushed you to undertake the enormous task of drafting an entirely new constitutional framework?

VASS: Part of the explanation for writing this book concerns my work as a capital market advisor to small technology companies in the Research Triangle, N. C. The social/business networks for venture capitalists were heavily tilted in favor of the VCs, and against the interests of the entrepreneurs and small companies. The more that I investigated the rules of raising capital, the more I realized that the rules were unfair, and that to balance the scales of fairness, new rules would need to be created. Eventually, this line of thought led me back to Madison’s rules, of 1787, and the contrast between Madison’s unfair rules and the much better rules for common citizens in the Articles of Confederation.

FQ: You use the term civil dissolution instead of the more common national divorce. Can you explain why you chose that language, and how you see dissolution unfolding in a way that is both peaceful and constructive?

VASS: I deliberately chose the term “civil dissolution,” to avoid the more inflammatory term “civil war.” In a civil war, the winner continues to rule over the losers, while in a civil dissolution, the two sides peacefully part ways.

FQ: You describe the last few decades as a period of “The Great American Betrayal.” Can you walk the reader briefly through how you have personally witnessed that betrayal taking shape, perhaps in the economy, politics, or culture, and how that maybe influenced your thinking?

VASS: I had been involved in a political conflict in North Carolina, in the 1980s, over the strategy of using tax dollars to recruit large multi-national corporations to North Carolina. I was a plaintiff intervenor in the John Locke amicus brief in the N. C. Supreme Court case of Maready v. Winston Salem, and our side lost that case. As a part of that political conflict, I became involved in trying to avoid the consequences of the first NAFTA agreement, which devastated the small towns of North Carolina. The forces behind NAFTA and the WTO were then, and are now, very well organized, and those forces betrayed the financial interests of ordinary common citizens in North Carolina. That betrayal was aided and abetted by the transition of national politics to what Zywicki describes as crony corporate capitalism in Washington.

FQ: It is rare for a writer to go as far as including a full draft of a new constitution. What was that process like? Did you model your draft on historical texts, or did you start with a blank slate and let your ideas evolve?

VASS: The historical model I used was an updated version of the Articles of Confederation, plus my vastly increased use of citizen grand juries in each new national judicial district. What I added was moral values and fair rules, especially in the emerging threat to liberty from the corporate deployment of artificial intelligence.

FQ: Your book rests on the conviction that if fair rules are created and agreed upon, a stable social order will naturally emerge. Do you see this as an idealist’s faith in human nature or as a realist’s confidence in historical and scientific evidence?

VASS: Neither option. The emergence of stable beneficial order is grounded in the evolutionary changes in the human brain, that allow humans to anticipate the behavior of other humans, and also on the work of both Prigogine and Polanyi on how quantum physics works to create order in the natural environment.

FQ: You write directly to “red state citizens,” placing them at the center of your vision. What first steps should they realistically take?

VASS: In each red state, citizens must agitate in their state legislatures for the creation of study commissions on the relationship between the states and the national government. Those legislative committees are the launching pad for crafting a new constitution.

FQ: You bring in neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory to support your economic arguments. How do you see these scientific ideas deepening the reader's understanding of how societies either thrive or collapse?

VASS: In a very direct causation, I say that nothing bad will happen if citizens pursue their happiness, and something good will emerge when all citizens follow fair rules that they made for themselves.

FQ: You argue that America has transitioned to a form of predatory state capitalism. How would you describe the difference between that and ordinary "crony capitalism?" Why is this distinction important for your readers to grasp?

VASS: I describe the immediate prior economic era (1945 – 1992), as monopoly capitalism, as described by Baran and Sweezy. President Eishenhower called this era as the military-industrial complex. As I describe, around 1985, the U. S. corporate executives had a collective “eureka moment” when they realized that they did not need the United States to remain a sovereign state. The transition to global predatory capitalism replaced the concept of a sovereign nation with the global “rules-based-order, which is entirely disconnected from the will of the citizens. What the global corporate executives needed, after 1992,  was for the U. S. military power to enforce the global rules on behalf of central banks and large corporations.

FQ: You invoke not just economics but also moral values like trust, reciprocity, and honesty. Why was it essential for you to ground your vision in morality rather than leaving it purely at the level of law and economics?

VASS: Fair rules and moral values are the primary factors for citizen allegiance to obey the rule of law. That allegiance to obey the rule of law depends on citizens believing that the fair rules are applied equally to all citizens.

FQ: If your constitutional vision were adopted in even a few red states, how would everyday life look different for an ordinary family within one generation? What changes would they feel most immediately and most powerfully?

VASS: The family social unit is the fundamental building block which instills moral values in children. Under the new constitution, families and the next generation would be free to pursue the future that their brains are imagining.