One of the arguments often put out in the discussion of nationalisation versus privatisation is this argument of accountability. The idea being that if something is in the control of the Government, they are accountable, because you can vote the Government in or out based on the performance. Meanwhile, businesses often aren't accountable (or, are only accountable to their shareholders). Sure, you can vote with your wallet, but some people are richer than others, with nationalisation, everybody is equal.
Well, I have some problems with this kind of reasoning, and I invite those who support it to answer my qualms. My post is going to be divided into two parts, one on the subject of the topic, and the other on the ideas of states rights versus centralisation.
Democracry and Accountability
How accountble, really, are politicians? If a politician breaks his promise to you... what recourse do you really have? Sure, you can vote him out next election, but if he's kept his promises to the other 51%, and broken a promise to you, that's going to do nothing. We all know that politicians are liars, and we know that 80% of what's on a manifesto won't be achieved... and the remaining 20% is probably the stuff that we didn't want. And yet these politicians seem to get re-elected over and over again.
And that's if you wait until, you know, they say it's time to be accountable. Very few places allow for the right to recall. In some countries, the Governing party even gets to determine exactly when the next election is going to be (within a time frame), and they can also redraw districts and pass other laws to block out as much challenge as possible.
By law, politicians don't even know who voted for them... and so how can you say that they're accountable to you? How can they even know if they're breaking a promise to you, if they don't even know they made that promise to you?
And this is also all assuming a perfect-world democracy. The real world is even bleaker, the fact of the matter is, the people that are presented to us to vote on have already been chosen. They've been bought and sold by lobbyists. This brings in this argument about everyone's vote being equal... everyone's vote ISN'T equal. Lobbyists clearly have more influence over politicians than voters. It seems to be that the "rich" benefit even more, in this sense, than the poor. At least a rich person can't FORCE you to buy his product, but he can pay off a politician to pass a law that does.
It really concerns me that you have more recourse from a seller lying to you about an iPod on ebay, than you do against a President who promised to, say, stop murdering people in the Middle East and then changes their mind.
States Rights versus Centralisation
Now, this argument is an appeal to a different crowd. This isn't an argument for or against nationalisation/privatisation, this is an argument about where the most power of Government should be.
Let's assume, for a second, that all of my problems in the first part turn out to be false. Politicians are accountable, people do have a right to recourse, everybody's vote is equal, lobbying doesn't occur, etc., etc. Why, then, do so many people on the left promote greater centralisation? This isn't the old left, this is the modern Democrat party.
If everybody's vote is equal, and politicians are accountable to their voters, shouldn't it be the case that there smaller the group of people that a politician represents, the better? After all, if we want accountability, it'd be better that my vote was one of 10,000, rather than 1 of 10 million? If we want greater accountability, we should push things down as far as possible: from federal to state, from state to local (the Rothbardian in me wants to say "from local to individual", but this isn't that sort of thread).
Why is it that in the way the Government is structured, those who control 90% of the power have the least accountability, and those with the 10% have the most accountability?
Well, I'm going to posit the following: it's precisely because the Federal Government is the least accountable, that it has the most power. Because when the individuals don't have enough to keep the Government in check, it grows out of their control. Meanwhile, states and local Governments are more "accountable" (in the democratic sense) and so the people keep the Government in line. States with larger populations tend to have more centralised Governments, too. Such as California. City Governments also tend to grow large, as the individual grows as a smaller and smaller part of a collective.
