Been years and years since I read The Open Society and It’s Enemies, but there’s one paragraph from Book 1 that’s always stuck in my mind:
…if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problem, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘Who should rule?’ is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘good’ or ‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage? [emphasis added]
– Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies Book 1: The Spell of Plato, p 120-121
Readers are free to agree with Popper on this one, or they’re free to agree with Dr. William Fang of the China Post, who breezily dismisses considerations of governmental checks and balances as nothing more than "the balance of power fallacy." It must dismay Fang to learn that KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou himself has become a recent convert to Popper’s point of view, now that his campaign has taken a broadside from public opinion due to the recent attempt by KMT legislators to steal campaign documents from Ma’s opponent. Saturday’s Taiwan News describes Ma’s sudden epiphany:
[Ma] reiterated that the incident stemmed from the legislators having confused their roles as lawmakers with that of law enforcers. The KMT has the advantage of holding three fourths of the seats in the Legislature, but party lawmakers should exercise more self-restraint in carrying out their legislative duties…
Ma vowed that if he is elected president, he will push for political reforms to make sure there was no recurrence of the confusion between lawmaking and executive power.
"I am supported by strong public opinion – anyone who opposes or resists reforms will immediately become a subject of reform themselves," Ma said.
That’s rich. Ma’s gonna twist arms and make the 81 Tyrants voluntarily enact curbs upon the nearly-unrestricted power that they currently enjoy – or believe they’re entitled to.
Him and what army?