Thus spake Marcus G. Daniels circa 10/06/2008 11:46 AM: > Special interests with money would then just have to exert less energy > manipulating any given local government. Without an encompassing > government, there's no ready mechanism for enforcing regulation or a way > to force large companies to break into pieces.
Hmmm. I think I disagree. My first reaction is that mechanisms for "enforcing regulation" don't have to be artificial or explicit. In other words, there may be ways of constructing very local government so that aggregates of local governments have "natural" or implicit mechanisms for enforcing regulations. The same might be true for limits to certain types of corporate size. But my second reaction was that your response seems to indicate that you inferred my suggestion objects to big government. It doesn't. My suggestion is simply that the problems aren't _specific_ to any particular level of government. My suggestion is that the problem is with the way government accumulates (or aggregates). E.g. perhaps if state government was a direct, "natural", cumulative consequence (and _only_ a direct consequence) of city and county government, it would still exist as a big government, recognizable and identifiable, but then perhaps there would be many fewer "loopholes", nooks and crannies in the regulation and law through which its co-evolutionary population (us humans) could fit. >> I would suggest that the myriad problems with our government don't lie >> in any one identifiable cause, but are instead peppered throughout the >> accumulation... > > Likewise for the inefficiencies in any large organization, whether it be > a company, church, etc. True for any _artificial_ large organization. But is it true for a natural organization? I tend to think "no". It seems to me that the inefficiencies (loopholes, nooks, and crannies in the organization) of an organism provide a capability for balancing the fuzzy distinction between adaptive advantage and graceful failure. To a large extent, the more local the government, the more you see a similar balancing act. The peppering of problems throughout the "government stack" seems to be due to our crufty patchwork of explicit and naive applications at any given level. Perhaps we could come up with a set of integrative methods that helped ensure that any given band-aide (a.k.a. legislation) we applied would analyze downward and synthesize upward in a nice way. Do we do that already? When we pass a law (that's not ramrodded through like the Patriot Act or this $700b bailout), do we spend any time analyzing it to see its effect on lower levels of government or synthesizing it up to higher levels (UN?)? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
