| badgenome said: 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. |
If time was frozen, then true federalisation "works" in the sense that you're talking about. The thing is, the oligarchs (or want-to-be) know this... and so it becomes their target. This is what I meant in my very first post about the current situation being "inevitable".
Small government will always turn into big government. Hell, the US started off with the principles of being the smallest government imagineable, and just two hundred short years later, we're now looking at the largest government monstrocity in human history. Not that it even took that long for big gov't to rear its ugly head... how many years was it before a President Washington marched troops down to Pennsylvania over a tax?
