Jim, Which paper are you referring to - your piece on Schweickart? I don't really know what you are driving at with this, but it doesn't warm my heart either. I mean, what does it mean to say that "the central power should be subordinated to true democracy"? That your erection should be, where your two balls are? As it stands, it's just a vacuous formula.
Would you ask a parliament to design a bus timetable for the busline in your neighborhood? Most likely you wouldn't, you would say that decisions ought to be taken at the appropriate level, implying that some decision-making processes ought to be centralized and others decentralized, at different levels or areas. But that is just exactly where the problems start, and where thinking people start thinking. After all, if everybody has to decide everything, you don't have any viable organization. From what perspective should centralization and decentralization be viewed? Why should so-and-so have a say in the decision, while another doesn't get to have a say? How can there be governance, if nobody can agree about who the real stakeholders are? How can there be good decisions, if "democracy" permits any kind of dork to meddle in important decisions? When the starry-eyed Left starts chattering about "the need for more democracy", I reach for my revolver! Because the blather about democracy is usually just so stupid! And I say that as a democratic citizen! Here is Europe, we have plenty experience with "democratization processes". They are a growth industry for self-enriching bureaucrats, corporates and the petit-bourgeoisie, because for every decision there are suddenly 10 or a hundred times extra people with a finger in the pie, and they all need professional support services naturally. Funded by taxes. Here in Amsterdam, the socdem functionaries decided more than two decades ago that they would make local government more democratic, and bring government closer to the people, by cutting up the council into district councils, each with near-total power over their own district. which they did. What you get then is a costly, endless duplication of non-standardised processes and rule systems, and so many extra politicians, that it becomes inordinately difficult to reach any good decision for the city, quite apart from decisions taking much longer to make. The taxpayer, who doesn't have any better access to politicians than he had before, ends up paying a quarter to a third more tax than he should. What happens? Well, the city government decides in 2010 that decentralization is not such a good thing after all, because it costs the council too much money and it's not efficient, so what do they do? Yes, they fuse 14 district councils into 7 bigger units! Instead of taking a good hard look at what ought to be centralized and decentralized, they re-centralize everything half-way... when everybody knows that in the end they'll most probably get rid of the district councils altogether. Meanwhile, the city council budget ends up with expenditure between a quarter and a third more than it would, if it organized things properly, a good chunk of the local govt is just a gigantic additional make-work scheme! Point is, while all this is going on, citizens are not even significantly better served than they were before, except that e.g. they can travel five kms to an office which is also staffed in the evening, while the operative council staff get to do more work with less staff! Naturaly, there is an expansion of "interesting" jobs at the top end, and jobs are "revalued" so that academics are paid more! I am not saying this because I hate the Amsterdam council, or because I believe that these things do not happen in the private sector (they do) - the point is just that such processes are executed in the name of "democratization" although in reality citizen participation in government is drowned in a jungle of legal stipulations, and "democratization" is mainly just a gravy-train for tertiary-educated professionals! But anyway let's dump this discussion for now, Jim, I think it just goes nowhere. You are a good man, but I don't think this discussion is going to lead us anywhere. I tell you what - I will just not write anymore on this thread, others can have a go. That's democratic, isn't it Jurriaan PS - if you crunch the numbers on US debt deflation and the US stimulus packages, you will see that the "Keynesian stimulus" is only tiny compared to the total amount of debt that is being got rid of. It is more a political gesture, than something with a genuinely strong economic impact _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
