Null Hypotheses and the Value of Popular Consent

As we approach the mid-term elections, the value of a popular consent is being assessed. The assessment occurs by demonstration of public process (the empirical value of the vote) and methods designed to delimit the value and define mandates for the legitimate exercise of power.

Spending on the election process measures the value of popular consent, and in many cases wealthy candidates spend millions of their personal wealth.

What candidates are essentially buying is legitimacy that empirically defines and delimits the value of the risk (default of expectations). More specifically, expensive elections are a process for limiting the risk of liability (accountability) both public and private.

The expense tends to be a barrier to entry. While candidates are seeking public service, there is a tendency for self-service that defaults expectations. Thus the need to buy popular consent and the legitimacy of power (the extension of value) it confers. It becomes more like a game, seeing who can pick up the most pieces to apply an unpopular agenda.

A process evolves that extends the value (delimits the risk) across the public-private spectrum. Mandates are defined so that private outcomes have the force and legitimacy of public authority--or the value of popular consent. (Essentially, the legitimacy is a loosely constructed Hamiltonian hypothesis in which what is not a well-defined prohibition is loosely allowed and technically legitimate. The result is a complexity of rhetorical argument that reduces consent to the judgment of elite control, Bush v. Gore being one of the most extreme, and heavy-handed, examples. Self-fulfilled prophecies are then easily shammed as confirmed hypotheses, especially with the assistance of Citizens United.)

Mandates gain empirical value through the popular vote, confirming or disconfirming the value of previous elections. Since elections are cyclical, the risk has recurrent value that must be controlled, or governed. Current election cycles, which define the future value of the risk, are systematically controlled by the party system to present the value of a popular consent (self-determination in the representative form, having the present value of a mandate).

The most potent measure for delimiting mandates that govern a representative form of government is to null hypotheses (confirmation by disconfirmation).

If, for example, the current mandate is for reducing the budget deficit, the Republican Party is prepared to deliver the mandate without reducing the need. Expectations for deficit reduction will, then, "default." The mandate is nullified and takes the alternative, re-presentative (binomially recurrent), form by consent of the governed. Budget deficits, then, occur by default.

While President Obama says voting Republican is going backwards, he fails to describe and explain (or perhaps fails to understand) how this happens by default. Democrats have supported the need for deficits, supporting too-big-to-fail financial firms with bailouts, quantitative easing, and financial reforms that rely on the wealth to trickle down (a disconfirmed hypothesis). Democrat or Republican, creating jobs, going forward, is for the purpose of paying taxes, which reduces the demand needed to reduce deficit spending, by default of process.

Nulling hypotheses is immediately observable as we analyze the mid-term elections. Its value to limit the risk of extending unpopular (disconfirmed) mandates is readily apparent. Democrats, struggling with legislating an unpopular healthcare mandate, now face disconfirmation. Republicans, then, of course, now claim confirmation of an agenda--tax cuts for the top income class, for example--that are completely disconfirmed hypotheses. The value of the nullification is so extensive that the risk of being wrong (disconfirmed) is virtually none. The worst that can happen is a switch back to Democrats in disconfirmation of the fact accomplished.

Otherwise known as rigging the market by extension of the risk (a leveraging scheme), the value of this public disconfirmation process is, in this particular case, close to a trillion dollars.

Although the value of the Republican agenda is a confirmed detriment to the middle class, its extension will be absolutely devastating. Extension of the detriment (the risk) simply indicates (measures) one thing: a lack of legitimate consent.

The Democratic/Republican agenda raises taxes, increases deficits, and supports the tendency to deflation--confirmed hypotheses to be rejected (nullified) by the legitimate means of a popular consent.

A binomial party system is intended to derive a negative vote that disallows the empirical proof (the value) of a positive popular vote.

A two-party system is a process for nullifying alternative political hypotheses by denying access to the legitimate means of popular consent (like the crown), conserving the accumulative value (the extension) of economic risk (the value classically known as the extension of the rents, and a value we now know as QE).