In Bill Maher’s New Rules segment, the comedian/political maven shuffles through several new rules he has come up with that he suggests would solve some of our problems. Examples range from the mundane (“Restaurants have to finish making the salad”) to the provocative (“Stop calling the Tea Party phenomenon a ‘movement'”), and generally are geared at showing how absurd and far from common sense our culture has gotten.

The provocateur has recently launched a Facebook app, which allows users to add their own versions of new rules and lets them compete–the best new rule getting the distinction of being featured on Maher’s show.

The exercise is fascinating for its social networking value alone, but the political economist finds it very interesting in that it proposes a brash form civil society–radical democracy.

A thought experiment is in order. To explore a little more, let us say that each one of these submitted new rules actually went into the law books. If that were the case, certainly, there would be a flurry of new laws introduced by eager participants, sure to improve the world by setting new rules. As a result, there would be a period of chaotic transition where everyone would scramble to figure out what’s the law (in a suddenly much more restrictive country). This would present a situation of conformity without unanimity, the condition of all totalitarian and communist countries, as described by Milton Friedman.

But shortly thereafter, one could speculate, there might be a period of calm serenity. Once everyone figured out that his new rules were affecting other people and that everyone else’s rules were affecting him, he would undoubtedly see the trouble in the multitude of laws  that was initially sought. It is my hypothesis that such an exercise would inevitably lead to everyone limiting the number of laws that he made and, ultimately, coming to a round few that everyone could agree upon–thus forming a society of unanimity without conformity.

It is the speculation of this participant that, if everyone was plunged into this practice wholeheartedly, everyone would actually arrive at the conclusion that only one law could be completely unanimous and nonconforming–the law expressed in Joseph Morse’s political thriller, Gods of Ruin, that law being ‘Vulnero Nemo’ (Latin for ‘Harm no one’).

Maybe we can try it one day.