8. Checks and balances

The main objective of the distributed govlet system is to protect the liberty of small groups of people to form new governments, and to enact and enforce their own laws among themselves. However, the liberty to swing your fist ends where my nose starts; equally important is the needs to protect others from being harassed by and burdened with unnecessary and frivolous laws and regulations. Therefore the checks and balances between competing and conflicting govlet are extremely important and warrant careful considerations.

To understand why we need checks and balances between govlets, let's consider the following scenario: An anti-pollution govlet outlaws all automobiles, and sends its law enforcement after foreign drivers despite the questionable jurisdiction. By "foreign", we mean citizens who are not directly affiliated with the govlet where the law is enacted. As we discussed in the previous blog, a govlet can only claim jurisdiction over a foreigner or foreign business if their actions affect home citizens or businesses. This anti-pollution govlet is claiming jurisdiction over every living driver based on the potential harms through the shared atmosphere we all breathe, as the air pollution is detrimental to its citizens' health and well-being. Even though there are some merits in its arguments, the anti-pollution govlet has clearly abused its jurisdiction. To prevent such abuses, a necessary measure is to require all arrest warrants or court orders issued by a govlet against foreigners to be checked and signed off by a federal court before it can be executed. The federal court only checks the validity of the jurisdiction, it should not judge the merits or the appropriateness of the law itself.

Ensuring valid jurisdiction is not enough, much stronger check and balance measures are needed to prevent govlets from abusing their power. The fundamental philosophy behind is that a govlet should always have the power to enforce any laws on its own citizen, after all the laws are the will of its own citizenry; but the bar has to be very high before a govlet can enforce its laws on foreigners because foreigners never sign up for these laws, thus deserving every protection from the harassment and abuse by potentially evil-willed rogue govlets.

The federal government should hold a govlet accountable for wrongful harassment or conviction of foreign govlet citizens. Federal court should have the power to charge the govlet's officials for criminal offenses if they knowingly harassed and wrongfully convicted foreigners. This measure is likely to safeguard against rogue govlets' abuse of its law enforcement power; it also creates a strong incentive for govlets to cooperate with one another in crime investigation and prosecution. For example, even if the victim's govlet has the priority in jurisdiction and solid evidence, it may want to share the evidence with the offender's govlet and have the case tried in offender's home court, to avoid potential future liabilities for wrongful convictions.

In addition, the federal government should set a minimum standard before a particular law can be used against foreigners. A reasonable minimum standard could be that the law must have been successfully enforced in the home govlet for 5 continuous years; and it must have successfully convicted 500 home cases. The minimum standard helps weed off frivolous laws and regulations that were inadequately enforced in practice. Let's look at a concrete example: Supposing a govlet's main political objective is to fight illegal drugs, it enacts a law mandating that any possession and trading of illegal drugs automatically receive the death penalty regardless of the quantity and circumstances. It is an extremely harsh punishment to its own citizen but the law is clearly the people's will within its home govlet. As a matter of the fact, countries like Singapore does have a less dramatic version of the death penalty law in place. However, before sending foreign drug dealers to the death row, the law has to meet the minimum standard. In another word, the govlet cannot execute a single foreigner before it executes 500 citizens of its own. The particular number of 500 is certainly up for debate and adjustment, but the overall idea seems only fair. A govlet should not be allowed to use a law against foreigners unless the law has been used extensively on its own people. If the automatic capital punishment does manage to meet the minimum standard (in a very brutal manner), then it will surely deter foreign drug dealers from selling illegal drugs to the govlet's citizen, or carrying illegal drugs on the premises of businesses registered in the govlet. To prevent people from unknowingly walking into a death trap, all the laws that meet the minimum standards should be published and registered by federal government, so that people can take precaution of potential legal risks when dealing with certain govlets' citizens, or in the areas where the govlets have jurisdiction.

The minimum standard ensures the political freedom of a small group of people does not end up with harassing and interfering with the general public. The threshold of 500 convictions seems to be very high for small govlets, but this is intentional because a good law can and should naturally find its way to the big stage since bigger govlets do have the incentives to copy good laws that have worked well in smaller govlets. The minimum standard thus encourages the smaller govlets to experiment and the bigger govlet to adopt; leading to quick discovery of good laws, and automatic abolishment of bad laws.

You may be wondering why we need to go through so much trouble to allow a govlet to use its own laws to prosecute foreigners, it may seem that the general public is best protected if all charges have to go through a citizen's home govlet. There are several problems, the first is that the criminal organization could take advantage of this rule and form their own govlets, and use the govlet to shield criminals from ever being prosecuted. Secondly, to effectively fight crimes, a govlet does need the power to charge whoever involved regardless of its govlet association. For example in the drug trafficking case, the capital punishment on foreign drug dealers is a much stronger deterrent than otherwise.