[voakbasda]

Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels.

Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies

How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.

[MathMonkeyMan]

I haven't studied history or political science, but I suspect that a bunch of cooperating individual local municipalities can as easily lead to war as to federalism.

The Federalist Papers talk a lot about factionalism versus tyranny. On a larger scale, look at how long it took what are now European Union members to stop warring with each other.

[jleyank]

Greek city states and German petty kingdoms suggest conflict and failure to unite vs external threats common.

[andyferris]

One problem I see is even in representational democracy (I'll use the Westminster system for concreteness) we get a lot of indirection leading to policies people don't actually want. Even more indirection is bad.

Assume members of parliament are chosen fairly (popular vote approximates number of seats etc). The winning party (or parties) form a cabinet - their own little hierarchy. What we tend to see is a majority of cabinet members voting in cabinet for a policy, a majority of their caucus voting to support their policy (relying on cabinet solidarity to get the numbers across the line), then a majority of parliament passing a bill (using the solidarity of the party to get it across the line). The agenda may have been set by just a few parliamentarians (say just 9 out 17 cabinet members in a parliament of ~100) and an unpolular policy comes to pass.

I'd fear having local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives would have even worse outcomes in terms of representing the individuals at the "bottom" of this process. There is a reason representatives are voted for directly at each level of governments in our democracies - this wasn't a "simplification" it was a deliberate choice by our forebearers who had seen how politics shakes out in practice.

[perilunar]

> local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives

You don't have to have that though. You can still have a local population electing local, state, and federal representatives. But you need the taxation, and thus the financial power, to flow upwards from local government, not downwards from federal governments.

[perilunar]

> Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up...

Works well with Georgism. If all tax is land and resources, it makes sense to collect locally. If most of your tax is income and company tax, it's bound to be collected at state or federal levels.

I've always believed that power should be devolved to the lowest level possible, but you're right that powers-that-be will not willingly give up centralised power.

[maxerickson]

In the US, local governments are often far worse than state and federal governments.

In general, it's because it's harder for the larger entities to get away with playing favorites (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying that it happens a lot more in smaller units).

Paying all your taxes to the corrupt local judge (county official) is in fact not a win.

[LordGronk]

It’s also that, with the current system, a person who is young, talented, and ambitious who is interested in public service has little to no reason nor incentive to work outside the beltway or a state capital, leaving local governance to retirees and incompetents.

[mrkstu]

And developers

[perilunar]

But local governments are much easier to leave than state or federal governments. And easier to influence if you decide to stay.

[interludead]

The more interesting question is whether you can make higher levels of government depend more explicitly on lower levels, instead of the other way around

[jimbokun]

Probably need to motivate people to vote in local elections before you can convince them to risk their lives in a bloody struggle.

[wolvesechoes]

Reminder that Greeks were right and representative democracy is not democracy at all, but another form of oligarchy.