Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site l5.uucp Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!ucbvax!ucdavis!lll-crg!well!ptsfa!l5!laura From: laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.politics.theory Subject: Re: Day to day life Message-ID: <207@l5.uucp> Date: Mon, 21-Oct-85 19:19:55 EDT Article-I.D.: l5.207 Posted: Mon Oct 21 19:19:55 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 24-Oct-85 00:33:36 EDT References: <139@mck-csc.UUCP> <179@l5.uucp> <147@mck-csc.UUCP> Reply-To: laura@l5.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Distribution: net Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco Lines: 77 In article <147@mck-csc.UUCP> bmg@mck-csc.UUCP (Bernard M. Gunther) writes: > >I hate to sound like the devils advocate, but this sounds very much like >the situation we have presently, except for the fact that the 'neighborhoods' >are somewhat larger than you imagine (ie countries). Is this then then only >difference between the two societies? It seems you are advocating city >states. Am I totally offbase in interpreting what you said or what? > The reason that this sounds a lot like what we have now, is that there are only so many ways to build a hammer. The problem of ``my neighbour plays his stereo too loud'' can only be solved a few ways. I am not advocating what most people mean when they say ``city-state''. What I am proposing is that most of the necessary ``government'' is local agreements that can be worked out by contract. The resulting contracts may indeed divide one into city units but I think that it is the patterns of thinking that need to be changed the most. I do not think of a government official the way that I think about an insurance adjustor, or the landlord or my apartment. This is strange. My insurance adjustor has a claim on me that I will not house flammables near a source of heat, my landlord has a claim on me that I will not make structural modifications on my apartment without consulting him. Why do I resent the government's claims on me and not my landlord's? It is quite simple. If my landlord, or my insurance comapny, or anybody else who has a contract with me wants to stick it to me, they have to go through me. If my landlord decided that it was not going to allow pets tomorrow,he could not force me to kill my kitten. (This is in contrast to the government of Scarborough (or Etobicoke - I forget) Ontario which passed a local by-law which said that no resident could have a snake as a pet 2 years ago.) If my insurance company decides that it does not want to insure people who smoke, it cannot retroactively deny coverage to any smokers that it is now covering. On the other hand, Jesse Helms and a bunch of Senators can try to define Satanism and start a witchhunt which will seriously impact all my Wiccan friends. I am getting screwed by the government again. The problem is that when I phone up my landlord and say you are trying to screw me, he listens -- when I try to phone my federal government representatives, they don't have to. My vote is not as important to my rep as my rent is to my landlord. What this means is that thge government is too far removed from the people. You now have to lobby to get anywhere with your government, which means that people who are getting screwed in a hurry (like the Wiccans) and people who are too busy to lobby will simply get screwed. There is no way to fix this without decentrallising government. So, if you consider this a large problem, what you have to do is identify those things which should not be done locally (say national defence, national justice) and then have everything else done as ``locally'' as one can get. I think that 10,000 people neighbourhoods make a nice unit of government. The 10,000 people who live closest to me may have legitimate claims on me. The 10,000 people closest to where I work and hang out may have legitimate claims on me. But I find it hard to believe that I owe Jesse Helms anything... But he is too far away from me in terms of personal power and ability to express it for me to keep him from hurting me. He can get to me and I can't get to him. He is *important* and I am not. Bingo. We have non-representative government again. It matters not that the structure of government is theoretically representative -- the current implementation is *broken*, and it is broken in a very fundamental way. The attemtpt to govern something as large as the USA or Canada is doomed to failure, because it cannot be responsible to the people. I have my doubts that it is possible to govern something as large as California, or even something as large as San Francisco well. So I want radically decentrallised government. City-states are more decentrallised than empires, but I think that it is only to that extent that I want city-states. Life in the City-state of Florence during the renaissance does not strike me as an improvement over what I have now. -- Laura Creighton sun!l5!laura (that is ell-five, not fifteen) l5!laura@lll-crg.arpa