| Centralization? In America? You mean how the tax authority distributes the work to Intuit and HR Block? How housing is distributed to private owners, financiers, and realtors? The problems we’re experiencing are due to the opposite of centralization. Arguments against it are ideological conservatism. Post office was a model of efficiency and distribution for an org that size until the GOP saddled it with debt. In fact MOST human need centric social services in the US historically did great work on a dime budget. And consider how much duplication of effort we get instead. Instead of NOAA sharing accurate weather data, we get Accuweather who takes NOAA data and wraps it in story mode for the innumerate masses who still believe in literal human hierarchy dictated from top down. Utilitarian centralization of needs can and has in recent history, worked fine. It’s limbic systems riddled with memes of the past, that can’t express motor agency outside a restricted norm that are the problem. The concepts themselves are just that. Connect to the mindset of local and you’ll see central shared effort is how local thinks. It’s where those broader ideas of federal centralization grew from! Centralization can work. What we have is a terrorist political organization fighting against the end of their ideology in the form of Republicans and Democrats who prefer fealty to the past story they know and read about all day. Not the emerging one thanks to shifts in technology and social agency. Imagine just getting a slip of paper in the mail with taxes owed? Or not pricing 5 different package carriers? This uncentralized waste playing ideology whack a mole is infuriating. It’s to prevent the centralized work habits, to enable authoritarian desire to grift on our work and game our agency. “If the public were allowed to collectively build agencies that were successful, I might not be a rich important person!” |
Let's start with housing. We have this idea of property laws and property rights. Before the rise of civilization, we didn't have such laws. People squatted and lived off of the land as needed. There are also blended model. The Homestead Acts allowed people to claim territory, which, after certain requirements are met, would pass into their hands as legal ownership.
Property, then, is an example where the registration of ownership is centralized to the legal mechanism of the government.
Or, let's take a tomato. Like the kind I can get from Wendy's. That tomato probably came from California or Mexico. (Or during the winter, from the hothouses in Canada). It is grown there and then shipped unripen across country. There are multiple actors involved. You can argue that, because the government is not involved, this is not centralized.
The kind of decentralization I am talking about is a tomato that I grow in my backyard. That can be watered from rainwater harvesting. That can be fed by compost from other parts of my garden. Whose seeds I can save, and I can replant. Every generation, those tomatoes become more adapted to my biome (low desert). After the initial setup, there is no money involved to intermediate between me and the tomato. It is between myself and the land, and the local ecology.
> Connect to the mindset of local and you’ll see central shared effort is how local thinks. It’s where those broader ideas of federal centralization grew from!
I have no idea what you mean by this. I don't consider shared effort at the household or neighborhood level to be that centralized. That speaks more about coordinating efforts, and cooperating together.