I was thinking of some general rules of thumb to use when deciding what paths to take towards our future America, but I think I would have to spend too much time explaining one of the bullet points. So I'm going to go into that explanation first.
There is something almost organic about how groups or organizations develop, and I think they are affected by two countervailing trends.
It works a bit like centripetal and centrifugal force. For those of you who need a physics refresher, centripetal force is the force that moves something towards it's center and centrifugal force pushes something away from its center.
In a similar fashion, as collections of individuals grow, there's pressure to centralize it and a countering pressure to decentralize it.
There is no 'good' or 'bad' here. It's more a matter of strength and weakness. For example, centralizing can lead to consistency and interchangeability. Standardization. Picture nuts and bolts that are all standardized so that you can easily go to a hardware store and pick the right size, as opposed to having to custom-make each nut and bolt for whatever you're trying to use.
On the flip side, centralizing means losing flexibility and customization. It tends to create one-size-fits-all solutions, which may loosely fit most situations but are imperfect and don't do so well for more extreme or rare situations.
There's more to it than that, too. Consider organizational structures...
While we now have the technology that allows one person (like a CEO) to communicate with hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people at once... human limits prevent the reverse from being true.
By which I mean, that CEO can not easily read through and respond to everyone if they replied to his or her e-mail.
The reason I bring that up?
It's because organizations generally require some sort of hierarchy. Not in the sense of 'better' or 'worse', but in the sense that one person can not directly manage everyone. There's a limit to how much we can manage at once, and part of the reason the military has the structure it has is that we know (through experience) that that limit is somewhere around 7 objects. A platoon leader may have three or four squads, a company commander may have three or four platoons, a battalion commander may have three or four companies, and so on and so forth.
When you add in additional units (such as a headquarters staff or attached special support units) each command will roughly be managing at that limit.
So... we need hierarchies and layers in order to properly manage large organizations, but doing so has it's challenges.
Each additional layer is another potential block in getting a task done. It's another place where someone might be away on vacation and a petition is sitting on their desk. Or maybe they deliberately block something they don't like. Basically, it can slow down the speed at which an organization can respond.
There's also an element of 'telephone' in play, and communication can get garbled as it moves through those layers.
So centralization tends to make an organization slow, inconsistent, and if too much is pushed towards the center than the center can get overwhelmed and start dropping things.
On the flip side, decentralization comes with it's own problems. Like lack of coordination. Situations where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and two groups might be duplicating the same work or working at cross-purposes.
The general solution, though this has it's own difficulties and is more suited to some situations than others, is to blend the different styles together.
That is - keep some form of coordination and centralization, but try to delegate and push decisions down to the lowest level possible. That also keeps some level of customization, improves response times, etc.
I think that's pretty much exactly what the American government is supposed to do, in an ideal environment.
Let decisions be made at the lowest level possible. Cities can do whatever the citizens of that city want, and if it's something that requires state-wide decision making it should be done at the state level, and if it requires nation-wide coordination it needs to be at the federal level.
That does cause problems sometimes. That's part of why you might have to brush up on state-specific laws when you move to a new state. But it also allows us to customize our lived experiences. Like how Illinois has legalized marijuana and Indiana has not.
The Constitution lays out what our Founding Fathers thought should be handled at the federal level, and they pretty much left anything else up to the states.
That's part of why states run their own elections. And states decide the speed limit of their highways.
But, as I think many of you may have noticed by now, there is pressure to centralize everything, and it's not just because it's inconvenient to have fifty different sets of rules.
It almost seems psychological. People want some decision made, and they almost naturally seem to want it made at the highest level possible. Or rather, they want some big and powerful person with authority to make the decisions and enforce it on everyone else. Which is great when they're making decisions you agree with, and terrible when they make decisions you don't... but the real problem is that you're putting all the decision-making on that one, single person.
And so people clamor for the federal government to dictate the minimum wage, or healthcare, or the legality of certain drugs, or speed limits, or educational standards. And they fight over who controls the power to dictate those things... rather than trying to empower lower levels to make their own decisions on such matters.
The funny thing is, this is what the conservatives I grew up with always seemed to complain about. That the federal government was doing all these things that weren't actually supposed to be handled at that level, and that these decisions should be left up to the states. (States rights... has it's own long and sordid history, and yet again we're touching on racism... but I'm leaving that for later).
What Trump and his allies are showing us now, however, is that they don't actually care about that. By which I mean - they are trying to use federal power to dictate what states should and shouldn't do.
Big government at its worst.
They've shown this in other ways too. Like Florida trying to use state power to override city-level decisions.
There's more to this topic that I can't really remember right now, but it all feeds into one of the rules of thumb I wanted to mention -
Let decisions be made at the lowest level possible.
And a bit of a corollary -
You can add to, but can't take away.
For those who have never heard that before, that's another thing I heard in the military, and the gist of it is this.
A higher command may set a certain policy... like the policy on blogging back in Iraq. A subordinate commander can't remove any of the parts of that policy. They can't overrule their higher command and decide that their soldiers can disregard that part...
But they can add on to it.
The way I picture that is this:
We believe our citizens have certain inalienable rights, and that's at the national level. It applies to every US citizen, and no lower level of government can take away those rights. A city or state can't decide that they can restrict speech in a way that the federal government can not.
On the other hand, a city or state may decide for themselves that they want to fund public healthcare even if the federal government does not. We've already seen that with certain states from before the ACA.
States can add laws restricting the sales of alcohol on Sunday, even though the federal government does not.
This allows us to customize our rules and laws at a lower level, allows people to have their cities or states make decisions that differ from others... while also ensuring that national level decisions are enacted across the nation.
A few weeks back someone asked me why their city couldn't set up some funds to create an emergency stock of food and my answer was that there is absolutely no reason why they couldn't.
It's just that we have generally done such stockpiling at the federal level. I suspect that it's cheaper and easier to do so, since one large stockpile is probably easier to manage than thousands of them (as well as the inconsistency I mentioned above with decentralization - i.e. if you left it to each individual city than there's going to be duplication of effort, as well as some cities that never develop a stockpile in the first place).
Anyways, I wish people focused on this more... because there's quite a few policies we debate as a nation that I think we should really be asking - at which level of government should this decision be made?
And with slightly different nuance 'if we really want X, can we make it happen in our city or town?'
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