Oddbean

"The problem with democracy is that everyone gets what a majority deserve." We could solve this problem differently by maximising decentralisation, so that BANANAs have no veto over other communities and NIMBYs are only a blight on their neighborhood. In general and on average, women have closer social horizons than men, and are more conformist within them. But if the vote becomes "do you want your neighborhood to have load shedding at night or do you want to permit nuclear?", then some women in some places will give the decision some thought. Those populations will benefit economically, and their women will have more shiny and more social visibility.

Contrary to Churchill’s take, I believe Democracy is perhaps the worst form of government to exist. 100,000 Lichtensteins is the model I think can work at scale. Lots of smaller autonomous communities who are not beholden to the whims of people hundreds or thousands of kilometres away let alone on the other side of the planet, with localised leadership of people who have skin in the game. This accounts for social/cultural differences between areas and peoples. The people of Broome shouldn’t be beholden to the Socialists of Melbourne - in fact they should share zero governance between them. And the people of Broome and Melbourne should have absolutely nothing to do with edicts from cunts like the WHO or IMF or any other supranational body. Decentralising will force those with a collectivist mindset to focus on their own backyards rather than being enabled to virtue signal about the poors that they have zero interaction with. Seeing chuggers successfully go around collecting money mostly from women to purportedly send to some poors overseas whilst there are homeless people sitting 10m away, junkies all over, kids down the street who don’t get regular meals and men forced out of work by immigrants who those women supported importing, that really drives home the need for decentralisation and localisation over these retarded globalist socialist forms of governance.

What happens if a tyrant starts gobbling up these small Lichtensteins? I agree it would be better to have many microstates but history shows you also need a way to prevent forced consolation. Or maybe with Bitcoin you can reduce the incentives to invade?

Serious risk, and an ongoing one. Tyranny is monopoly, and monopolies are synergistic with one another. The more monopolies we can make structurally impossiblev the less tyrants can hope to grasp. (Enter Bitcoin)

With our modern lens it’s easy to forget, but traditionally people would go and cut the heads off people like this. This modern period where politicians get away with all sorts and never have to face the reality of themselves being sacks of flesh and bone is an anomaly that won’t last, it is perpetuated precisely because optionality doesn’t exist in the modern world. Back then you didn’t need passports and visas to leave a tyrant like you do today. You didn’t have to traverse oceans. Didn’t have permissioned money that you couldn’t take with you. Didn’t have mass surveillance and Intelligence agencies infiltrating every nook and cranny where people might organise etc etc. There is always a risk of an evil king, no doubt about it. Taking out one person is a lot easier than the hydra of a liberal democracy where no-one is accountable for anything though. The key is to build wealth and prosperity through specialisation. Germany had this during its city state period (and it largely remained although bastardised thereafter), as did Italy before them. You can even see it in places in Asia albeit their culture is a bit different. Allowing smaller regions to excel at certain things and having to compete is how the remaining principalities/city states have flourished whilst larger countries deal with non-stop internal and external conflict caused by trying to homogenise radically different groups into some incoherent mess of a society. https://i.nostr.build/zdYYz.jpg

A high rate of gun ownership among the population might deter an invader or at least drive up the cost significantly if you know that on every street behind every window could be a granny with a rifle.

This is a given for decentralisation to work. Relying on centralised security whether that is police or military leaves the people vulnerable. They don’t need to be well-trained militias, they just need to be well-armed enough that the MAD of any invader is sufficient deterrent that conflict is avoided in most scenarios.

Society will always have layers of aggregation and centralization, as they are downstream of the natural forcing function (economies of scale). What is most important is what services at what layer... The wrong service at the wrong layer leads to abusive relationships.