Centralized government or city-states?

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I noticed in the thread "How to end wars", http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp2600043.html#2600043 , there was an argument about the centralization of power aiding in the cause of corruption (paraphrased, of course). So, is it true that centralization of power aides in the cause of corruption? I think so. If one governing body controls all the rest and if they are corrupt, then the policies, dictates, mandates, etc., which come from them are likely to be according to their own ideas of right and wrong and their own agendas will tend to be empowered. Moreover this is the case in the reign of an absolute monarch.

But are multiple smaller governing units any better? I think the United States would seem to be a good example in part that it works to an extent, to the extent that each state is actually "free and independent". However, I think the freedom and in dependency of the states in the USA is limited by the Federal government. Consider the city-states of Greece in ancient times. Athens, Corinth, Sparta, etc. How much level of independence did they have compared to the states of the USA? The Greek city-states were more independent. At times they fought with each other, and at times they also fought against each other. While they could send messengers and diplomats between each city state, they did not control one another (excepting the reign of Alexander of Macedon.) Is it better to have states or city states? Or is the factor of federal control the issue?

In terms of corruption, however defined with regard to the legal system, which is better with or without federal control? To an extent, it depends on the amount of federal control and how universal laws are and the consequences of breaking laws for each praetor/prefect/governor/mayor. If the federal control is high enough, then whoever controls the federal government controls how corrupt the overall system is. If there is loose federal control or none, then each city-state may make its own rules and each one may be quite different. City rulers then have control of how corrupt their city is.

What does corrupt mean? Well, it is usually an aberration or violation of a law or a general state of character which disregards laws. Some people prefer this type of corruption in some cases, such as absurd arbitrary policies which are written just to waste paper. In other cases this is frown upon, especially when it affects people negatively. If a policy says, "you are not allowed to help a customer when you are off the clock", and a customers asks you, while you are off the clock, "where is this item?" and you tell them where it is, then you are breaking a policy, by the letter. This form of "corruption" is good, in that it helps a customer and it benefits the ALL-IMPORTANT COMPANY OF DOOM. If a policy says, "Drive on the right hand of the street here" and instead you drive on the left hand side of the street, then you are breaking a policy (or convention/law) that is important even though it is arbitrary.

In the case of a centralized government, they can affect the laws of all the cities, states, provinces, etc, under their control. In affecting the laws, they can affect how people regard the law. If the main governing body provides quantities of unreadable tomes of sometimes contradictory laws with massive amounts of loopholes, then people tend to disregard the laws and thing of them with scorn. If the main body provides general guidelines with a few example of how it is to be interpreted, then people may regard the law as more respectable and not meant to be used as a tool for producing income for the justice department.

In the case of multiple small units with absolute control, the case would be the same, basically, as for the centralized government, except that each smaller government body would be independent of the other ones. In this way, citizens could have more freedom to select which leadership they approve of and move there.

In terms of warfare though, a centralized government provides somewhat more protection against constant skirmishes between city states.

As a former New Yorker I have been keeping tabs on the state government there. If it's an example, it's one of the most corrupt inefficient disastrous governments in the west. Every other day the NY Times cries for the whole bunch of legislators to be turned out of office.

Be it city-state or federalist - if there is a lack of oversight, then people will get away with... well... murder.

Political evolution.

Nomadic caveman -> Nomad on horse -> Settled village tribal society -> City state -> Feudal state -> Federal/Centralised state -> One world Federation -> Galactic Federation -> Galactic Empire.

XD

Bigger country = bigger problems = bigger government = bigger mistakes.

A lot of small countries would be a lot better, imo. If you look at the world GDP/capita ratings, a lot of the top countries are really, really small.
Top 10 GDP/capita nations (2009)
1 Qatar 87,717
2 Luxembourg 78,723
3 Norway 53,269
4 Brunei 50,103
5 Singapore 49,433
6 United States 46,443
7 Switzerland 42,948
— Hong Kong 42,574
8 Ireland 39,441
9 Netherlands 39,278
10 Austria 38,896

Besides the United States, all of those nations are small in size and/or population.
Here are the stats of some much larger countries:
51 Russia 15,039
77 Brazil 10,456
97 China, People's Republic of 6,546
121 Indonesia 4,149
128 India 2,932

Also, how would you compare the freedom in these much larger nations to those of the rich, smaller nations? Nobody would argue that China is even close to being some sort of bastion of freedom. The same thing goes with Russia. Larger nations also tend to have a lot more deep-rooted social problems. With such large landmasses, there tends to be large cultural and ethnic diversity. Russia has problems with some of their smaller ethnic communities. China has social problems with the Uighurs in the western part of the country. Indonesia has had places secede. Different geographic sections of the United States also have large differences, which affects social cohesion (partially caused by a lot of political stalemating). The Deep South and the Pacific Northwest? Very, very different places.

Conclusion: I would much rather live in Cascadia than the United States of America anyday.

Fantasy Island.

ruveyn

i agree, and if you break it down even further, into basically "tribes," it's even more so.

that's why my facebook political view is tribalist.

We did cover that in political sciences in cegep at some point, did the pros and cons. =/ Suffice it to say that right now, i doubt countries would want to give up their sovereignty to a "world" government. Because let's face it, the UN is a joke that's underfinanced and thus lacks the capacity to do much of what it would want (most of that money is used for paying their employees iirc). =/

Many of these small countries have become specialised financial/service industries. But they rely on the productivity of other countries to survive. There's no point of have a financial centre if no one produces anything.

I think that is exactly correct. Both in terms of macro and micro economics. If a nation's main "export" is service, then it is reliant upon others who have money to need their services. In microeconomics, there are general terms of "households and firms" and all that spiel, but apart from all the circular flow of income and labor, if there is no production, or rather "input", into this circular system, then it will eventually die down.

In my highschool level economics textbook, it gave the example of agriculture as being such an input. We don't actually "produce" the food, but we provide the right conditions for the plants to grow and provide food. The process of photosynthesis in plants providing an energy input into the "economy" of the food chain, taking in energy from the sun. The input into the system, via plants, is the light from the sun. Without plants (and algae also) allowing for such an energy input, there would be no ability to sustain most forms of life on this planet. Similarly, without natural resources, whether plant, mineral, etc, there can be no production. Without production, there would only be the current limited items already produced only available for resale, recycling, or dwindling away. As per "production" of food, if there were no production, then there would be only the limited supply of perishable and slightly less perishable foods. After that supply is worn away, there would be no ability for a chef to make complex arrangements of food, say a cake, because there would be no ingredients. Therefore, the cake would be a lie.

On the basis of your definition of agricultural production nobody ever produces anything, it's all natural processes. We input energy to a hammer and the hammer, by natural forces smashes a rock or whacks ore from a tunnel. We merely squeeze the trigger of an electric drill and natural forces spin the drill bit where natural forces make a hole. It's all natural forces.

Not quite that simplistic.... The energy a person inputs into the motion of a hammer comes from the food the person eats, which either directly or indirectly comes from solar radiant energy via photosynthesis. The solar radiation, of course, is derived from the nuclear reactions in the sun. In terms of the energy of electricity used to cause the operation of the motor via Faraday's Law, this also came from a natural resources. The energy the construction worker uses comes from photosynthesis, etc. The energy used by the drill to rotate the axle and bit is from stored chemical energy or from a power plant. The energy used is transferred through multiple mediums in multiple forms, such as the strong binding energy between nucleons, thermal energy, light energy, chemical energy, kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy, etc. Now, what is your point exactly? You have chanted "natural forces/processes". OK.

Do we ever produce anything? Yes, we do, but it is in terms of the organization of the finished product that we produce items, and not in terms of the input of energy alone. If we were to just input energy alone, the finished product would be a mess. Set it on fire. We do utilize energy in its various physical forms to produce products, but it is not the energy that we use that causes items to be produced but the method by which they are. Our unique input is the intelligence by which we design the finished product. The energy we use is energy that we do not create ourselves, but merely use. The final goal of a design is to be produced using the energy in the correct methods, whether there is one method alone or if it is a state function like Hess' Law. We use our minds, our intellect, to design the intended finished product as well as the method used to produce the product. But or input is not enough to make the product alone, we need both the materials and the necessary forms of energy as well. Without the natural resources of the forms of energy and materials, such designs and planned methods would be unfeasible. But, without the input of intelligence to design the product and method of production, the materials will sit where they are and the various forms of energy will act randomly as the normally do.

They don't act randomly, they just act differently.

In many cases, you are correct. The various forms of energy do act differently and are not completely random, such as there are limits to the randomness in thermal energy. The individual molecules in the air frequently change their direction component for every inelastic collision. For elastic collisions their vectors are combined. These things at their own level appear quite random. On a macroscopic level, there are certain thermodynamic laws which they follow quite well. Boyle's law, for instance, that if you decrease the volume of a gas, then you increase the pressure of that gas. If you increase the volume of a gas, then you decrease the pressure of that gas. When you compress a gas, a mixture of molecules in gaseous phase, you decrease the distance between each of the molecules and this increases the frequency of collisions. If you expand a gas, then you increase the distance between each of the molecules and this decreases the frequency of collisions.

However, (though the motion of the individual molecules is either random or has the appearance of randomness due to our necessitated inability to track each one,) the form of energy each molecule in motion has, a.k.a., kinetic energy, is very orderly. It's affected by gravity, in terms of the component defined by the radius line from the center of gravitation, and by the molecules own inertia, in terms of the components in the other two spatial dimensions defined by the perpendicular to the radius line. This form of energy, kinetic energy, does not behave randomly.

Kinetic energy lost due to friction is somewhat random though, in terms of it being caused by the molecular cohesiveness of contacting surfaces. Which molecules of which surface attach, which ones obtain energy to overcome latent heat and change phase, etc, is fairly random. The coefficients of kinetic and static friction are calculable, certainly, so this form of randomness is within parameters and is thus not completely random but chaotic.

Light energy is quite orderly in its motion as a particle and its behavior as a wave. In terms of its propagation, light oscillates as a self-contained electric and magnetic field while it has a velocity vector in spatial dimensions. The faster the rate of field oscillations in a photon, the more energy is contained in the photon and the shorter the wavelength is and the more like a particle the photon behaves. The slower the rate of field oscillations in a photon, the less energy is contained in the photon and the longer the wavelength is and the less like a particle the photon behaves. So, light energy is quite orderly in its behavior.



So, yes, you are right that they act differently and not randomly. The forms of energy will proceed according to their normal order. It is due to this order which the forms of energy and properties which materials possess which allows them to be utilized to form specific products. If the energy or materials did not have such order to them, then it would be impossible to design a product or plan a method of construction, as both the functionality of the finished product and the ability to construct the product depend on such order.

Additionally, I'd like to add that even though, in consideration of manufacture, the engineer(s) who design a product may not be the ones to assemble them en masse, the agents of construction still have to utilize intelligence to produce the finished product. The correct materials need to be used and the correct forms of energy applied in proper amounts in proper sequence. There may be some flexibility in construction, some amount of tolerance to be allowed for aberration from ideal that the finish product will still work and not be completely defective, which is good to have actually because it is nearly impossible to build two products identically. But even with aberration from the ideal design of the finished product, the product still requires some level of intelligence to design and build. Whether constructed by robots, which are products of intellect themselves, or by human labor. The intelligence of the engineer is conveyed in the finished product as well as in the methodological construction via the plans and procedures developed to construct the product.

Thanks for profusely illustrating my comment but what's your point? That there is no intellect involved in agriculture?

Well, my initial point concerned the dependence of service industries upon the use of natural resources to produce goods (an thereby, income). I was trying to agree with mjs82 in regard to the statement that "There's no point of have a financial centre if no one produces anything."