Representative government: When you bend over, it's not too hard for someone to kick you in the ass.

Inherent in the idea of representative government, is the rule by a small number of people over a large number of people. Inherently, they must have enough weapons on their side to maintain law and order over a vastly larger group of people. The only thing separating a republic or a "representative government" of any other type from oligarchy or tyranny generally, is the intent of those in power.

I trust not the intent of people who rise to power, nor should any person self-governed by common sense.

The Soviet Union was created with the intent of creating the most fair and democratic order in the world, but inherent in its power structure was its failure: a seemingly never-ending tower of power, with various levels of power from the local workers soviet all the way up to the top. This structure worked as well for the opposite of its intent, enslaving Russia to bureaucrats, as it did for its original intent, democracy.

We must understand that any system that shall not be subject to the flaw of "capture" (the bribery or in general coercion of public officials charged with regulating society) should not have pyramid scheme at its heart. We should not have higher levels of more concentrated power, we should have no higher levels of power at all. Localities should be the pinnacle of power in and of themselves, and in those localities all must participate in governance and law enforcement.

A disorganized mess is our surest form of security against tyranny.

...in a five pound bag :yoiks:

over the last 28 years.

Local government is not supposed to be efficient but it is supposed to be fair. That was in response to candidates promising to "run the county like a business". The problem we have now is that government is run like a business with all the secrecy favoritism and selfishness that is implicit in the term.

As I learned in the many years since I heard that phrase I saw evidence of its truth many times. And I still believe it. And I discovered that the people who wanted to run the county like a business were actually scared shitless of what the actual citizens wanted.

So I'm a firm believer in bottom up, grass roots level initiative in public policy formation.

but what's the mechanism for abolishing your 'tower of power'?...can you imagine a society of humans where nobody desires power? I can't..

I'm saying that we should abolish the structures that allow that urge to come to fruition. Even if a dictatorship is inevitable, it would be far more difficult to achieve that in a disorganized mess, than to take the machinery previously used for the people's benefit and use it for the dictator's own benefit.

Anarchy or disorganized/localized democracy might be the only way to achieve the abolition of the tower of power.

Nice in theory, but do you really think a society as complex as ours could function through direct democracy? Plus, there is simply no way to implement it now. It would have to have been established that way from the beginning. The best we can do now is to try to control the corruption as best we can.

Most people will not sell themselves up the stream, but public officials are only too happy to do that.

I started out thinking that we just needed to make the representatives more representative, but the problem is not the lack of representation, it is the idea of representation. We cannot be represented by such a small number of people, it is simply impossible for 435 people to represent 300,000,000.

They don't know me, they don't give a damn about me, and I'm not going to buy this bullshit we were all propagandized with back in HS civics, that we live in a "representative democracy" no such thing exists. Either it is a representative republic, or it's a democracy, not both.

I allege here that, eventually, all republics will fall in much the same way Rome fell, their levers of power will be captured by tyrants.

It is what is/has happened in our system. Just look around a little, this place is beautiful, but beneath the surface a whole bunch of dirty shit is going on.

We know it worked for the Greeks in Athens, why not try that?

We've looked to the Romans, but we forget most Roman accomplishments occurred during the Roman Empire, not during the Roman Republic.

The laws we have in our system must take into account a ton of different situations, as the jurisdiction of the law shrinks, the number of different situations should also shrink as well. Laws would be simpler to understand.