The fragile USA

[Final-Fan]

TheRealMafoo said:

Final-Fan said:

^ Corporations have plenty of real world power. When you "remove" things from govenmental control, private concerns will of course snap them up.  Boycotting a company doesn't always mean it can't hurt you. 

In this case however, you’re arguing the extreme. With government, I am arguing the norm.

I will take the odds that corporations care about my money over governments caring about my feelings, every time.

As far as scaling and government, it’s not really a matter of personnel, as much as it is a matter of authority. People are already in place to run things more localized, just thanks to the problem (people want more power), the ability has been taken away from them.

Well, I agree that it's rare for something to happen like, oh, those small towns that get their water supply poisoned and everyone gets cancer or whatever.  But there is plenty of stuff that corporations do -- and would do even under your model -- that impacts people's lives ... negatively. 

With scaling, I had in mind stuff like one bureaucracy being better and smaller than the sum of ten bureaucracies covering the same area. 

A different aspect -- here I have an actual example -- would be something like the regulation of the Great Lakes.  Zebra mussels and quagga mussels are a terrible invasive species; they hit the Great Lakes system in 1989 and just exploded all over; they're spreading through the whole US, it seems, through personal watercraft.  Anyway, in reaction to this sort of thing happening, the Great Lakes states have all seperately come up with regulations to try to stop ships from bringing in these ... unwanted immigrants (heh).  And it's a hodgepodge, because all the states generally have come up with something different from (or at least not quite the same as) any of the others.  Companies would like having just one set of rules to follow, but they're afraid that any federal law passed at this point would just stack on the state rules instead of replacing them. 

All this in spite of the Great Lakes states having (IIRC) some kind of alliance to try to coordinate and cooperate with regards to that watershed. 

Of course, if regulatory laws aren't among the things you want to decentralize, then this sort of objection might not apply.