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.

There must always be oversight or companies will run wild. However, the federal government is full of idiots. Case in point: Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug.

First of all, democracy is not perfect but it's the only way accountability has genuinely happened that is also stable.

I feel accountability comes through media pressure. If a huge issue is front page news for days on end, politicians will do anything to fix it unless they're ideologically fixated (which is why we should not vote those people in). Also they do listen to calls to senators etc. but only en masse - see the SOPA retraction that went from near full support to 50 senators dropping it like it was toxic within 24 hours.

The way we can deal with lobbyists is to make every hour of contact written down and public, put much harsher limits on donations, and generally make it very hard for people to be bought without it being very obvious.

I also favour putting nearly every government document in the public domain, on an easily searchable web interface, so that in theory everyone but in practice journalists can look up exactly how decisions were made and whether the motivations were as expected. Currently much of the corruption or incompetence can be easily hidden with the excuse of 'terrorism' or 'confidentiality'.

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For accountability, the power of government needs to be central and direct (that means no QUANGOs, no private partnerships, no subcontracting). When some state function screws up, the Minister responsible needs to be feeling the media heat every second until they fix it, not be able to say: 'oh it's the FCC's fault'.

As for representation, I do feel representing a smaller number of people is important, but when the number of representatives gets too high and in particular when borders are allowed to be gerrymandered so everything is a safe seat like in the House right now, the pressure on individuals is lost and therefore the only good mechanism for overcoming personal biases.

I agree the structure of government is bad for accountability right now, but I don't think it's the centralisation that makes them unaccountable. To the contrary, if a thousand Boards of Education decide the curriculum, there's more scope for one denying evolution in science classes than if Washington set a national one.

I agree with you.

On the second part I would be more open to a bigger government if that government was located in my city, or county, once you get up to state and national levels I feel there is no accountability. They dont see the direct result of their actions as they live far away, and you cant go see them in person to protest as they live far away. Yes you can call, but be hung up on, you can write, but not get a response. But if you live down the street and I can drive by and remind you how your bad decision affected me, it may make you think twice about what is good and bad for the nation, or if you also have to deal with your decision because you reside where it will have effect.. I think the biggest problem in politics is the disconnect between ordinary citizens and washington (or their state capitols).

Yes but what happens when the media doesn't apply pressure? Fast and Furious comes to mind for me. The media is pretty biased.

Edit: Along with no pressure on increased drone usage, etc. Issues that would of been raised under bush seem to be gone from the media, so wheres the accountablity than. But they do play a big part, and they do have an effect. Until this president i thought they were pretty even too, maybe only slightly biased, but lately I see their bias more and more.

I forgot the US media is broken and always pushing a narrow political agenda. The BBC and the collective newspapers here are good at it.

But on the two issues you mentioned - I don't think PEOPLE care about them. You and I do, but we're a tiny minority who're safe Democrat.

Could be just that areas with bigger governments correlate to areas with bigger populations because you need more government if you have a bigger population. Unless we want to venture into the realm of fantasy, the best hope that minarchists could have is still for a government larger (not taking proportionality into account) than even the most tyrannic government 200 years ago. The advances in population size and technology mandate larger governments.

Proportional representation could fix some of the problems that you outlined, although it removes the ability for politicians to directly represent their constituencies, it also allows minority opinions a place in government, and often forces very unwieldy governing coalitions, which stymy the ability of any one particular party to dominate discourse (thus minimizing accountability)

I won't vote in the USA again until it is proportional representation. Voting for another party yet seeing a democrat or republican win pretty much every time makes voting feel worthless.

I'm more interested in the first part so I'll respond to that.

For the very first point, it's true that if the politician convinces only 51% of the population, a large part of the same population is screwed, but there's two problems with that argument. Firstly, this is a generally unlikely scenario; it's unlikely for a politician to get such a weak majority (except in cases like the US and that's actually because they have a rather bad democracy).

More importantly, though, even if only 51% of the population is satisfied, as you, yourself, mentioned, in the absence of democracy and the presence of a "vote with your wallet" system, only the rich will be satisfied. For the most part, wealth, in any kind of nation, tends to be concentrated in a hell lot fewer than 51% of people, which means that, with democracy, even though not everyone's happy, more people are likely to be happy.

As for lobbyists, in real life, there are a lot of successful democracies in the world where lobbyists don't have significant influence over the government. Sure, the US doesn't, but I'd say that's more the fault of specific circumstances in the US than an inherent flaw in democracy.

For your second example, I tend to agree. In general, larger scale governments are able to offer more governmental services than smaller ones (ex: four people can't arrange for a fair and unbiased court of law, but an entire city can do it easily), especially with stuff like economies of scale and mass production, but I think, with the comparatively enormous wealth of most individual cities in modern times, the benefits brought by increased accountability would easily trump all of this.

A lot of issues here. I'm going to focus on the American system for simplicities sake.

1. As you even mentioned, not many people are going to argue that democracy is perfect.....just that its the best among alternatives. For instance, they won't argue that democracy is perfectly accountable, but that it is more accountable than other governmental systems.
2. The fact that a politician supports the 51% over the 1% is how the system is set up (the idea of majority rule). Once again, its not perfect, but I think you can imagine the stale mate that would ensue if 60% was required (just look at Congress), let alone unanimous consent.
3. Politicians actually do have a pretty good idea of who voted for them, hence, why they represent those who voted for them much better than those who did not vote for them. A lot of stuff is public info....for instance if you voted in the general or the Dem/Rep primary election.....just not who you voted for. Needless to say, they also have access to public opinion polls, communication with constituents (email, phone calls, letters), the news media.
4. As for lobbyists, I think its a problem as well because organized interests are going to have a louder voice unorganized or under-resourced interests, however, the truth is that there is very little research to suggests that lobbyists actually buy votes from politicians. The causal connection you are claiming just doesn't have much empirical support.....not saying lobbyists don't have influence, but its not as drastic as you claim.
5. As for your second argument, the problem is that the system would become unwieldy. If democracy was pushed back that far, you wouldn't really have a collective United States. With a lack of central power, you would also have the problem of discrimination at the local level (just think about Jim Crow laws in southern states up until the 1960s/1970s when the federal government stepped in).
6. I also think you drastically underestimate the power of state and local governments. Contrary to popular presentation, they are still very active in people's everyday life.....I would argue more active that the national government, particularly when looking at the dispensation of government resources, even those funded at the federal level.
7. I don't even know if I would agree that the national government is the least accountable. There is a system of checks and balances in place. Just for instance, the president, Senators, and House members all serve a different body of constituents.....the House representing the local level. Its not like the national government is just concerned with representing the collective whole.....just think about pork-barrel spending.
8. As for people keeping local government's more in-line, I think the argument has some intuitive appeal, but the truth is that there is still a lot of corruption and inefficiency at the local level as well. Also, the quality of local politicians tends to be pretty low. They tend to be well-meaning, but they often don't know the first thing about navigating the governmental system.