| SamuelRSmith said: Which is what I mean by how I don't see why local Government is necessarily better, because of concerns you raised about cities here, amongst other things. Accountability is a funny thing... I mean, a politician doesn't even know who's voted for him, or why they did... and yet he's somehow accountable? Leeland Yee case shows how accountable local politicians are. At least the local drug dealer or mafia has some level of accountability, far beyond the most local of politicians. |
Well, they have to be better than the alternative, all things being equal, unless you don't believe that competition works. If a local government becomes too corrupt and too overbearing, the governed can at least revoke their consent by voting with their feet and turning that bitch into Detroit. You can't escape Fedzilla, though, short of leaving the country altogether and renouncing citizenship.
It's no panacea, but then there is no perfect solution. At best, it will forever be a game of whack-a-mole. The nature of power is that those who have it will make those who don't suffer just as much as they are willing to suffer. Not surprisingly, it turns out that a government-educated populace that has never sweated or bled for anything is willing to suffer quite a lot. And once there becomes a well defined class of ruling elites who see themselves as separate from and superior to the plebs, you will always be on the road to disaster. Particularly when they become as effete and inept as the present western ruling class, most of whom have reached that stratosphere by going to the right schools and kissing the right behinds and spouting all the right platitudes. There is no system on Earth that is better than any other in this regard once that level of bifurcation and decadence is reached, and arguably the debased popularity contest that is an advanced democracy is worse than a more meritocratic system of, say, fighting each other to the death for political power in an arena. At least then the rulers wouldn't be such an insufferable bunch of glorified sob sisters.
I just think it's a lot harder to reach that point in a decentralized environment.
