[eru]

What is the 'citizenry as a whole'?

As a simple example, Finland's national government just passed a smartphone ban in schools. That's fine by the criteria you brought up, but I think it's utterly moronic.

Not because I disagree with the Finnish people, or their elected representatives on the issue itself: that's for them to decide. I disagree that this should be handled at the national level at all!

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level".[1] The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, neuropsychology, cybernetics, management and in military command (mission command). The OED adds that the term "subsidiarity" in English follows the early German usage of "Subsidiarität".[2] More distantly, it is derived from the Latin verb subsidio (to aid or help), and the related noun subsidium (aid or assistance).

In this case, I lack the imagination to see the reason why this issue couldn't have been handled at eg the city level, so that the good people of Oulo get the policy they want, and the good people of Helsinki get the policy they want.

Or even lower: there's no reason to even go as high as the city level, each school individually can decide what they want.

But just to give you the limits of subsidiarity here: I can see why you'd want to have a unified policy per school instead of per teacher or per class: the logistics are easier, and the individual teacher doesn't have to use their own judgement and authority on this. (Of course, individual schools should be free to let the teachers decide, if that's the policy they want.)

You can surely create your own example that cover more familiar territory, eg legal drinking ages in the US (which are ostensibly a matter for the states, but have been hijacked by the central government.)

[Sharlin]

I'm not sure if national legislation is the correct place for the ban either, but consistency is sometimes better than flexibility. The Finnish school system has always (well, since the 70s when the current system was designed) been big on equity and everybody following the same basic rules (though at the same time giving individual teachers quite a lot of freedom to organize their teaching – there are almost no standardized tests, for example).

Students would understandably think it's unjust if their school had a stricter phone policy than their friends in the next school over. On the other hand, the new legislation only forbits phone use during classes, and gives individual schools the authority to decide if they want to restrict it during recesses too, so there will in any case be policy differences between schools. shrug

[likeclockwork]

There are fewer people in Finland than there are in Dallas, Texas.

"National level" sounds like a big deal but in real terms it's the same effect as your city wide rules for larger cities.

[eru]

Well, that just goes to show that national level for bigger countries is even more overblown than for Finland.

You can generate your own examples, if that convinces you more. Eg there's no reason to forcible coordinate national minimum wages in the US, when that can be handled at city level. (Or at most at state level.)

[txrx0000]

> ...but I think it's utterly moronic.

It could be because the general population is genuinely moronic in this matter, and actually do want to implement smartphone bans for kids at the national level, or it could be because their government is not a perfect democratic system so the bill has motives unrelated to its stated purpose that are designed to be convenient for the government at the people's expense.

Even if we assume all democracies operate the way they're supposed to all of the time, some moronic policies will still be favored over wiser alternatives when most of the population hold the same moronic opinions. That is just democracy working as intended.

One important difference between an authoritarian society and a democratic one is that the democratic one makes everyone feel like they're making very important decisions for themselves at the societal level. People with new ideas convince everyone else to voluntarily implement their ideas, rather than force everyone else to implement their ideas. Societal change in a democracy does not happen until the majority has internalized the ideas associated with those changes and want them to happen. And I think this is really nice because life is miserable if all you do is go through the motions. Being able to control your own destiny is a good feeling and source of motivation.

There are many pillars of democracy that must be supported by the majority of the population at all times, otherwise the democratic system will degrade or even collapse. But this is simply the people getting the government they deserve. The democratic system does not deny the populace the choice of replacing it with an authoritarian regime by voting that way. If the people regret it later, they will have to relearn what they forgot and rebuild what was lost through hardship.

Circling back to private ownership of computational resources: this is one of the many necessary conditions for online freedom of speech, which recently became a necessary condition for democracy to continue to exist. The recent surge of authoritarianism around the world is largely due to the centralized moderation and ranking mechanisms used on social media platforms, which encourage the formation of large echo chambers. If we want to reverse this surge, we must move filtering and ranking mechanisms to the client-side (so that each user can decide what they want to see without affecting what others can see), and then popularize decentralized protocols for social media. And that, coincidentally, would also address the root cause behind the smartphone ban you mentioned. These things are impossible to do if individuals can't own compute. Writing the right to own compute into law slightly decreases the likelihood of a dystopian future where every consumer device is a SaaS terminal that can't run anything on its own. And in that future, all democracies around the world would collapse or be severely degraded.

[eru]

Just to be clear: I'm not against a smartphone ban in schools (and not for one either). I'm just against a ban on the national level.

So assume the vast majority of the population wants to ban smartphones. Then I wouldn't call every town deciding to enact a smartphone ban 'moronic'.