Re: democracy?! (fwd)

[Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>]

Forwarded message:

> Date: Sat, 1 Nov 1997 19:55:02 -0800
> From: Steve Schear <azur@netcom.com>
> Subject: Re: democracy?! (fwd)

> >If it's so damn good how come it doesn't exist anymore? If it provided such
> >a superior governmental system providing the maximum return on investment
> >why did it go away? Why did they instead elect to go with a king? Futher,
> >explain how such an anarchic system can be expanded without demonstrating
> >the exact same sorts of scaling problems consensual democracies such as
> >ancient Greek ran into? It's one thing to rule a few 10's of thousands of
> >people who are related, share world-models and have limited resources and
> >quite another to rule 4+ Billion people who speak hundreds if not thousands
> >of languages and concommittent cultural beliefs?
> 
> So, a solution is to encourage (e.g., through technological means) the
> break-up of nation-states into smaller geo-political groupings.

Technological, societal, political, religous, whatever non-confrontational
(ie avoid the use of force unless physicaly attacked) mechanism that is
present in human societies. 

Exactly! See that is the aspect of our democracy that so few people seem to
understand. The relationship between the fed's and the states is supposed to
be as equals. If the fed's want to do something they have to get a lot of
the states to go along with it or else they don't get the resources. The
states can't get too far out of line because of their ability to represent
the other n-1 states.

The problem now, fundamentaly to my view, is that the states are seen as
chatels or sub-servient to the fed's.


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