| > Compare those centralized powerful governments with the not so powerful governments in large parts of Asia and Africa and tell me where you'd rather live. I think that's a false dichotomy - but for the record, I was thinking USSR and Nazi Germany as powerful centralized governments, and thinking of Rome, Height of Britain, America before Spanish-American War/World War I/World War II as decentralized governments. The last powerful centralized African government was Shaka Zulu's bloodbath. By contrast, the two most successful African Empires I'm aware of were much more decentralized - Cartage and Mali. > Longer term there may be a solution to some of this as we find (finally) a successor to democracy that improves on what we've got, but a democratic world government would be an improvement over the silly nation states that we have today (which, even in their most advanced forms are a holdover from a time when there were more kinds of people). This I agree with entirely, yes. > Corporate domination of politics is one of the hardest things that we need to take care of, this planet is not here for corporations, it is here for all of us, including other species. Here's an interesting thought experiment for you - try replacing "corporations" with "organizations" in any corporate-bashing you read for the next week: You'll find all the statements pretty much hold true. Voting blocs, political parties, religious organizations, even nonprofits often do as much to corruptly impose their agenda on other people as for-profit corporations do. I agree with you that organizations, coalitions, and other blocs of people shouldn't be able to trample individual's rights - but I think power should be primarily start at the level of individual people, and be reserved to them first and gradually upwards. So authority on decisionmaking goes first to individuals, then to communities, then to towns and city districts, then to large cities, then to states, then and only then to countries - from small to large. Large shouldn't be able to impose on small, whether it be Whole Foods Corporation, or the New York Yankees, or PETA, or the Conservative Party in England, or the Democrats in the USA, or labor unions, or General Motors, or anything. Individuals are the way. > His taxation scheme would be a very large step in the right direction. I like some of the ecological merits of it and I agree that taxing productive work is a stupidly bad idea. I bet there'd be some really nasty unanticipated secondary effects with that idea, though. Still would be an improvement over taxing people for doing productive work, which is just crazy on almost all levels. |
> I was thinking USSR and Nazi Germany as powerful centralized governments, and thinking of Rome, Height of Britain, America before Spanish-American War/World War I/World War II as decentralized governments.
Rome was pretty centralized, so was the British empire at its peak.
America not so much, and even today there is a healthy struggle between federal and state level to determine where the boundary lies. And federal seems to be winning that battle but not in a way that I can understand.
Also it is difficult to compare historic governments with current ones in the same sentence because the circumstances those governments operated in were so dissimilar.
For instance, the 'nation' of Greece back then had a populace that would comfortably fit in a mid sized town baseball stadium. So methods and techniques used in antique times have relatively little bearing on what we can do today.
Agreed on the rest of what you wrote and a nice eye opener about the 'organizations', indeed, individuals are the way, but then individual education is a very big problem on the horizon, and one that so far has not been solved in a way that is satisfactory so that you could put significant power in the hands of individuals by democratic means. It would lead to ruin quite quickly and dramatically so I would imagine.