Sacramento is a much larger threat to your liberty than D.C. How has its location changed any of that? The people in the Californian State Government are like the Feds on steroids.

After third day in jail Billy the Hawkeye has realized the cell doesn't have a wall.

@answering the question, of course it is, tamed oligarchy surely, remembering Putin's "get over here, sign here, gimme my pen back" addressed to, if my memory serves me well, Deripaska, but oligarchy. Not perfcet, but what'd you want? It's capitalism.

The candidates for your local election are picked by the party donors. For Labour, primarily the large national unions. For Conservatives, primarily other special interests in finance, defense, and other corporate lobbyists.

You get to choose from candidates who have been selected for you.

The year before last I actually asked Michael Fallon why the Conservatives don't move to an open primary system for selecting candidates for election, his response was quite simple: "We have to give the donors something for their money".

BTW I do remember not so long time ago there was a thread "America is not a country" over here (a quote from some recent movie with Brad Pitt has been posted), it didn't pick up and was mislead with comments like "of course it's not, it's a continent".

It kinda fits the topic isn't it?

Well, it's not about physical proximity, of course. Cities are so unfree because there's a ton of people all living on top of each other, trying to tell each other what to do and live at one another's expense. That rapidly becomes a spoils system. Doesn't help that western cities are so balkanized, either, as it's easy to carve out your little coalition of ethnic voters and keep exacerbating tensions so that identity politics trumps real issues.

Singapore, Inc., has a very peculiar type of freedom. I imagine it'd be a great place to live if all you cared about is business and an orderly existence, but I hear horror stories about resentful natives. Sometimes things that don't seem like they should work do work, especially in Asia, but it doesn't really seem like a tenable situation.

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.

It's an easy topic to derail I guess, kind of a shame but well it's not like the politics discussion, in the forum, is well structured.

To say big companies rule the USA is pretty dumb. Sure, you have people like Bill Gates who is a big influence to the world but actually controlling the USA?

The problem with these articles are that people think the 1% are the biggest people who influence and control everything and not your average person. Who has a bigger impact on the company, the workers or the person owning it?  Business men in America are usually portrayed as the big evil men smoking cigars and oppressing the poor because all they care about is their own greed and money when in reality the people are the actually the ones doing the work. Without the workers = no company. The people run the economy and the world; not the rich 1%.

And the reason why people think there's only 2 political parties is because they're the more popular ones.

How is it dumb? Look how much power Russian oligarches have, as an easy example, you don't think American oligarches can do the same? And no they can't directly control the US but they can have massive influence on the government. Would Saudi Arabia and Israel create lobbies in the US if they knew they didn't have influence? Of course not. Those are just foreign countries, you should check out the lobbies huge corporations have.

Now your workers example is technically true but it is much more complicated than that. For many coporations, the workers live in countries such as Bangladesh and Cambodia and work at the factories there. Those people have little rights and no influence what so ever at what happens at the companies they work for, they can't strike because it's the only thing keeping them alive and they're expendable. Now, Starbucks is a bit different because they employ many Americans and have good pay. And that's exactly the problem, try convincing the Starbucks workers to quit their jobs and protest, they won't. Especially since for example here in Canada many of those workers are young people who just need a bit of money, they really don't care as long as they get paid, especially since the working conditions are fairly good.

Some countries are better than others in that regard. In Canada companies do not have as much of an influence as in the US but its still there and it will always be there because they are a fundamental part of the economy. The US happens to be home to the biggest and richest ones and they want their interests to be protected, and if the system allows it, they will.

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.