> I do not believe we have enough control over our government.
You're right. We don't and the reason for that is centralization. The way the country was originally designed, an all powerful behemoth of a federal government was never intended to be a thing.
A combination of 2 things has allowed it to happen over time: Federal consolidation in the aftermath of the Civil War and the creation of Federal Reserve.
Those two things set us down the path where we are today and it's why a more decentralized government is advantageous. You can personally influence things that are more local do you. You can get involved in city or county government. You can call your mayor or you councilmen. You can join a school board or run for Sheriff, city/county council. All of those things are possible.
But an individual has almost no power to influence federal policy and when people disagree with federal policy, they have no escape. If you don't like a law in your city, you can work to change it or you can simply move to another city. Same thing with states, even though it's more of a task...but at this level you always have the ability to vote with your feet.
It's not so easy to just leave a country and it's the reason that constitutional amendments are supposed to require 2/3 votes instead of 51%. The country need to be in significant agreement over federal policy...or we will be at each others throats about what is / isn't being imposed on people.
That might be an obsolete notion. It was possible 100 years ago as an agrarian society to talk about decentralization and local government.
But with 450M people in the US for instance, and wages and work the way it is, admit that the vast majority of people don't live in some village or small town. They live in metropolitan cities. With about the same hope of affecting their 'local' govt as the federal one.
And who has time in their life to go politicking at city hall? Average folks barely have room in their lives to go get an official ID so they can vote at their polling place.
This is a middle-class argument that doesn't apply to most citizens in most places.
There are many cities and people certainly, even in a populous city, have more of a chance of effecting change there than they do at the federal level. They also have more of a direct vote in the offices of those cities.
The state of California has a higher population than Canada...there's very little reason that California shouldn't be able to almost entirely self-govern. At the same time, there's very little reason to assume a policy that makes sense in California and will likely be popular with the people there...will make sense in other parts of the country.
Yet we constantly see people unwilling to simply settle for state level policy wins and instead feel the need to force policy nationally. We don't need that any more than we need politicians from South Carolina trying to force national policy that will affect California.
We'd all be a heck of a lot happier if we could stop at the level of just talking about how backwards we all think each other to be rather than constantly fighting to keep the backwardness away.
Not to mention that centralization makes it easier for the electorate to monitor the details. If you look for egregious corruption gone unpunished you find it in the most petty of places for lack of oversite.
I suspect more centralization could help with accountability ironically but there are other issue there including harmonizing different needs and values by region and deciding "who is right".
The three things to optimize and balance are "sensitive to local demands" (treating water by conservation needs in the desert or by great lakes or demands of road salt by road area regardless of climate would be a terrible idea), "ability to scale and administrate effectively" and "respectful of rights" - and all three may clash or agree.
I find that true in my rural community. We're governed by the county and state. And they are vastly more concerned with the opinions of city dwellers than us villagers.
So we are subject to strange rules about parking, shooting, building, water and power that make little sense in our small community.
The answer is de-federalization. There's no need for a 50 state union, IMO. US could have a joint armed forces (if it desired) and a monetary union with independent states. Similar to the EU IMO.
You're right. We don't and the reason for that is centralization. The way the country was originally designed, an all powerful behemoth of a federal government was never intended to be a thing.
A combination of 2 things has allowed it to happen over time: Federal consolidation in the aftermath of the Civil War and the creation of Federal Reserve.
Those two things set us down the path where we are today and it's why a more decentralized government is advantageous. You can personally influence things that are more local do you. You can get involved in city or county government. You can call your mayor or you councilmen. You can join a school board or run for Sheriff, city/county council. All of those things are possible.
But an individual has almost no power to influence federal policy and when people disagree with federal policy, they have no escape. If you don't like a law in your city, you can work to change it or you can simply move to another city. Same thing with states, even though it's more of a task...but at this level you always have the ability to vote with your feet.
It's not so easy to just leave a country and it's the reason that constitutional amendments are supposed to require 2/3 votes instead of 51%. The country need to be in significant agreement over federal policy...or we will be at each others throats about what is / isn't being imposed on people.
That's where we are now.