One Level Down: Mechanism Design, the Veil of Ignorance, Ulysses Contracts, and Arbitrary-and-Capricious Review, Tested Against the Governance Paradox's Extension from Prohibition to Regulatory Design

This corpus's The Sovereign's Death Warrant establishes, from three premises — universalizability, the official's own biological mortality, and evolutionary kin-selection drives — that genuine, universalized prohibition of personal access to longevity technology is psychologically and politically unsustainable for any mortal, constitutively attached official trying to enforce it. That paper documents four empirical escape hatches by which attempted bans get evaded without formal reversal, and closes its own argument by distinguishing prohibition, which it shows fails, from regulation, which it holds escapes the same critique because a regulated queue leaves the official's own access intact, on the same terms as everyone else's. Together with this corpus's They Who Remain, which establishes that uncoordinated hub-building is not a sufficient substitute for coordinated governance, this completes an elimination argument for F2: prohibition fails, laissez-faire hub-proliferation fails, and coordinated regulation is what remains. This paper tests the joint at which that elimination argument closes. It asks whether this corpus's Governance Paradox — the general claim that an actor with constitutive attachment (A5) to a governed technology cannot design impartial governance for it — was ever restricted, on its own terms, to the binary decision of whether to ban. If it extends to the design of a regulatory mechanism's internal architecture — queue order, pricing tiers, priority criteria, the boundaries of expedited review — the move that closes The Sovereign's Death Warrant's own argument may have cleared prohibition off the table only to leave the identical structural problem sitting one level down, inside the design of the alternative it recommends. The paper tests five candidate rescue mechanisms, verifying each against its primary literature before use. Mechanism design theory (Vickrey, Hurwicz, Myerson) assumes a disinterested social planner and does not straightforwardly rescue an interested designer, because it was not built to model one. The Rawlsian veil of ignorance and Buchanan and Tullock's constitutional-stage device are tested against a distinction this paper develops directly: other-veiling, which blinds a decision-maker to an applicant's identity and is well precedented, against self-veiling, which requires the decision-maker to bracket knowledge of their own future position — the operation the corpus's problem actually requires. Self-veiling is shown to fail in practice, on two independent lines of evidence: this corpus's A5's Black Swan, finding A5-self unusually resistant to hypothetical suspension, and Frohlich and Oppenheimer's (1992) experimental finding that subjects reasoning under an actually constructed veil did not converge on Rawls's own predicted maximin principle. Precommitment (Elster) is tested as the more promising candidate, since it requires binding rather than forgetting, but is shown to recur one level up: the rigidity, timing, and amendment procedure of any commitment device is itself a design choice, made by the same attached actor. Stigler's capture theory is shown to diagnose a related but distinct mechanism — interest-group capture from outside, rather than constitutive-attachment capture from within. A fifth candidate, U.S. administrative law's arbitrary-and-capricious standard, is shown to test for a different failure — whether a rule has any articulable, rational justification at all — than the one the Governance Paradox describes, since a discretionary priority criterion shaped by constitutive attachment is typically fully reasoned and therefore fully defensible on conventional administrative-law grounds. The paper's conclusion is precise rather than either alarmist or dismissive: exposure to the Governance Paradox tracks the density of discretionary, case-by-case decision points a regulatory architecture contains, not the prohibition/regulation distinction itself, and not the presence or absence of judicial review. This does not refute F2's necessity; it identifies a specific, testable design constraint any adequate F2 architecture must satisfy — minimizing rather than maximizing discretionary allocation surface — without specifying F2's institutional form beyond that constraint.