The Powers that Be

In his article, Sovereignty and Trust: A Historical Note on English Political Theory, Mr. Powers unearths a forgotten metaphor about the origins of the Law of Trust in England and applies it the question of When is it Just to Resist The State.

The metaphor is interesting and worth expanding upon. It needs further development, which could be easily accomplished by deleting the lines starting with "There was the Cuban revolution ..." to "Hobbes's views comported with his royalist position in the English civil war, and he fled England for the continent with the ascent of Cromwell and his parliamentarian forces in the middle 1640s" or moving them else.

These are "weedy sentences", possibly alive with great life but obscuring the central pearl of his insight:

The question of when voters elect government officials they repose certain decisions which affect them to 3rd parties, elected officials; how do we revoke these decisions when those decisions produce injustice can be usefully understood as natural expansion of the forces which gave rise to Trust Law in England, during the 12th Century.

The central legal or political question is: why cannot we just vote the buggers out, when they are acting in an unjust manner? Why would we need a separate mechanism like the development of the Court of Equity to return the country's assets to the voters when the elected politicians are acting in an unjust manner by retaining or exercising power over these assets?

Personally, I find the idea that we could develop a balancing mechanism -akin to the Court of Equity - an exciting idea and wish to see it developed further.