| > This just sounds like one of the libertarian greatest hits, and this line of political philosophy is how you end up with bears taking over your town[1]. No, it's the way of avoiding having the "bears" take over your town. > I think on the contrary, centralized power is necessary, and the solution to the problem of corruption is extreme transparency. Seems very speculative, given the lack of any effective extant mechanism for ensuring extreme transparency; nor does this seem sufficient to counter the inevitable abuses of centralized power should those abuses simply be undertaken transparently, as many of the worst regimes in modern history have done. > Balkanized decision-making is entertaining, but not a sane way to organize a society. Quite to the contrary, the only way to effectively organize a society is to make sure that the principle of subsidiarity is respected, since societies can only form and be sustained on the basis of mutual trust negotiated among individuals, and the constant threat of having local decisions overridden by distant strangers inevitably erodes that foundation of trust. The fundamental mistake you're making is taking society-as-a-single-entity for granted, and not recognizing it as an emergent pattern of ever-fluctuating relations among diverse individuals. > Pick competent people, give them the authority to make the decisions that are best for society There are no people competent to make uniform society-spanning decisions, and the idea of encouraging any society to embrace uniform, singular decisions creates massive risk exposure by creating single points of failure that are non-adaptive to change. Evolutionary resilience is a product of variation, and variation is maximized through decentralization. > It's not like corruption and abuse of power doesn't exist in small towns, on the contrary I'd say it's worse. All concentrations of power inevitably become corrupt, which is why it's so important to ensure that those concentrations of power are (a) maintained only for matters where it's absolutely necessary, and (b) limited to bounded contexts. Heavy corruption is bad when it's localized, but much worse when it's universalized, and has enough resources to reach into every gap and beyond every frontier which would otherwise be a refuge away from abuses. |