Restraint Is Not Design
There is a kind of defense of power that you hear most often. It goes like this: "You can trust us, because we are good people."
This is usually true. The people who say this are, most of the time, actually good people. They actually have real goodwill. They are actually earnestly doing what they believe is right. The problem is not whether this sentence is a lie. The problem is that as a piece of institutional design, it is wrong from the start.
Restraint is a personal virtue. Institutional design is a structural constraint. These two things cannot be swapped, because their effective lifespans in time are different.
The Roman Republic had an unwritten rule: a consul would not cross the Rubicon River with an army into Italian home territory. This rule worked for several hundred years. It worked not because it was written into any law, but because for several hundred years, every general who commanded an army chose to obey it. Caesar was not the first person with the capability to cross the river. He was just the first one to take the idea that "this line is an option, not an obligation" all the way to the end.
Caesar was not a tyrant. He was a man with a real political vision, with massive popular support, and who truly believed he was doing the right thing. The Republic was not toppled by a bad person. It was toppled by a good person, using a reason he believed was just, who stepped over a line that had only ever been held by restraint.
Once that line fell, it never stood again.
Restraint is a personal virtue. Institutional design is a structural constraint. A person who practices restraint will exercise restraint when they practice restraint. Switch the person, switch the era, switch the interests at stake, and restraint takes a different shape. But institutional design — if it is designed well — does not care whether that group of people are good. Its function is precisely to set an upper limit on damage when people are not so good.
This is not pessimism about human nature. This is the most basic requirement of institutional design: it must hold true even in bad circumstances. Otherwise, it is nothing.
So when someone says "trust us," the correct response is not to doubt their goodwill. The correct response is to ask: Is your goodwill bound?
When goodwill is bound, that is institutional design. When goodwill is not bound, it is only the restraint of this group of people, at this moment in time — and restraint, by definition, is not design.