Building a Government

zerohour

Well-Known Member
#1
So since the presidential election is over and about to come to fruition, lots of people continue to bitch about things, and so on.  Rather than get bogged down with real world politics, I thought it might be more fun to play around with the idea of what would make for a good government.


So I'm interested in designing a government from the ground up.  Doubt it will be perfect, and I'm more concerned with coming up with something interesting than functional.  Hopefully any strange directions it goes in will give some insight into things.


So what aspect of this theoretical government would be best to discuss first?


*If this is too political for the board, let me know.  I'd rather delete this than kick off a major flame war.  Think this falls safely outside of those borders, but you never know,.
 

T.L

Well-Known Member
#2
It's always best to start from the top and work your way to the bottom
So at the the top what are you looking for?
President/Prime minister/Dictator/Monarchy/???

Never having lived under a presidency, living in a commonwealth country,
I find that people get confused here, as they keep forgetting that they are voting for a party, and not a leader.
 

daniel_gudman

KING (In Land of Blind)
Staff member
#3
We pretty much already know what makes a good government: representative democracy. You can keep your royal family as figure heads if you want, personally I think it's pretty goddam weird. Dictatorships are only better than sectarian civil war; to put it another way, they're worse than everything except bloody murder chaos. Ditto Communism; it's better than nothing but not by much.

Good things:
Rule of Law
Independent Judiciary
Separation of powers (judicial, executive, legislative)
Bicameral legislature (two unequal houses)
Elected Legislature

A lot of these are obvious, but you have to get them out of the way.

Parliamentary systems are best if you're starting fresh -- an executive presidency like the USA is too susceptible to coups we find, until democratic social norms become entrenched.

If you asked me what the biggest change I would make to the US system is... I would put the judges in charge of drawing up electoral districts, with a mandate that they redistrict according to two rules: 1) equal populations per district, 2) minimum practical perimeters.

Parliamentary systems work best with threshold-bounded proortional systems. First past the post pushes you to a Party duopoly, pure proportional tends to fracture into too many small parties (eg Israel).

We're starting to get into the technology to really make systems like Anarcho-Syndicalism work or maybe Democratic Anarchy (Demarchy), but they're still undeveloped and mostly theoretical, I dunno if they'd work.
 

T.L

Well-Known Member
#4
Some other things to consider are religious freedom,
Hand in hand with that is the true separation between church and state.

Parliamentary systems are good, but to think that it leads to a two party state is ignoring the mass disconnect that populations are currently having with a two party state. as seen here in Australia with the rise of the green party.
 

Schema

Well-Known Member
#5
daniel_gudman said:
Good things:
Rule of Law
Independent Judiciary

Separation of powers (judicial, executive, legislative)
Bicameral legislature (two unequal houses)
Elected Legislature

A lot of these are obvious, but you have to get them out of the way.

I'm being explicit here, and color coded what I thought was obvious in green  :D

Recently I've become more and more unsure of a 3 branch government where the 3 branches are judicial, executive, and legislative
 

seitora

Well-Known Member
#6
Well, some people consider the fourth branch to be the civil class, ie. your bureaucracy, who would nominally be well-trained, non-partisan professionals.

The biggest issue with the 3-branch system is how much power you give each other, and the extent to which they can overrule one another or veto one another's decisions. There's a little bit of worry about judicial activism, wherein judges will interpret laws far more liberally than they normally do, sometimes stretching semantics in the case.
 

~NGD OMEGA~

Well-Known Member
#7
Yeah it's the overreach you have to worry about for each of the branches. The US currently has the problem of a lot of people resorting to the Supreme court to decide social issues, because frankly it's entirely too hard to organize it through the legislative. Despite the fact that drafting and responding to social issues, at least in terms of redefining laws anyway, is entirely a legislative power.

Like Roe vs. Wade is a contentious debate, but even putting aside how you feel about abortion, there is literally no way possible to interpret the base liberties defined in the constitution as in anyway defending abortion, baring the case where the mother's life is at risk either way obviously. It's for that reason, as well as the fact that the base question of how you feel about abortion depends on where you personally believe a baby counts as a human life that this remains a debate to this day where, unlike say Same Sex Marriage, opinions haven't moved basically at all since it was decided. Trying to redefine it as an issue of privacy was so utterly moronic that several legal dissertations on the thing have pretty much torn it to shreds, and even those supporting it think it went about the 'correct result' the 'wrong way', and it shouldn't have been a semantic wrangling of the 14th amendment's privacy clause at all.

Also, to show this is something that can go both ways in terms of the Left Right Dynamic and to avoid people who for some silly reason think Roe V Wade is an entirely sensible decision and not a wrangling of what was intended by the 14th amendment while giving them something more agreeable to chew on, a similar legal stretch can be found in the decision that basically determined that corporations can be defended by free speech to allow the creation of super pacs that basically came out of Citizen's United. While I think the effects of this are far less than what people think came from it (Hillary lost after all despite spending almost double Trump along with all the other massive advantages she had), there's a pretty massive distinction to be made between funding Political Activities and Political Speech. Organizations and Unions could talk up a candidate all they want, directly funding them however is a different matter entirely, even if it's with no actual coordination with the candidate, just funding massive campaigns is a separate matter frankly. Though granted I'm someone who prefers corporations and stuff to disassociate from politics at all where it doesn't directly affect them (In terms of a policy change in their industry or whatever, candidate support being a separate matter entirely from actual rule changes that could affect their bottom line and their employees), particularly when weighing in on contentious debates they have no place in.

To be clear, I agree with the Citizen's United Decision, as the case itself was directly referencing a movie against Hillary Clinton that was basically propaganda, much like Michael Moore's bullshit does similar stuff against say Bush and the like (He even did a Trump Movie before the election) and was similarly ruled in favor of when brought up to a court. That's fine because it's shit people have to actually want to go see and pay for themselves, so the only people who bother with it actually want to see it. Both of those are entirely fine, because I can choose to just not pay to support either and it's no skin off my nose. It's when it's directly adds that people can't really choose to not see that it's a problem, particularly when it sets skewed opinions in front of others that could affect election results, if not decide them as this election proved. My issue with the court case is that it defends those as well thanks to its redefinition of the First Amendment, and that's not something we want happening.

In a far less thorny debate, there's also the issue of the Executive's power to wage war that we've also been dealing with the US. The one with the real legal power to declare war is generally done through the Legislative and then approved by the Executive, but since Bush signed that one law that let him try to deal with the whole middle east situation (Another can of worms in itself), it's been stretched further and further since under both him and Obama to let them act in countries without having to get further approval from Congress. And now this same abuse of power has been placed in the lap of someone like Trump.

Suffice to say this is why making sure there are sufficient checks and balances is key and why overreach should be shot down wherever it starts to rear up. In terms of the US's core framework, baring the Judicial branch which in terms of the Supreme Court doesn't really have any checks in itself what we have is good provided it's used in the correct way. The Problem is with everything being so partisan it tends to lead to far more overreach unless we reach a gridlock situation. So really the government functions best when it can't do anything at all, it's when the powers align that people are screwed and the abuses start to pile up. Doubly so with a Judicial branch massively reinterpreting things to serve there own interest in increasingly vapid ways, that just leads to trouble no matter how you slice it.
 

ThreadWeaver

Beware of Dog. Cat not trustworthy either.
#8
In a technological age two things we don't need anymore:
1) Lobbying. This should be illegal. Lobbyists were of an era when getting in touch with your representative and letting them know about an issue took weeks, not the seconds it takes now. Now, Lobbyists exist to buy politicians for the highest dollar.

2) Electoral College. While I recognize the need for the less populous state to have a voice, it also lets the undereducated/underinformed/easily swayed have TOO MUCH of a voice.

Some things you have to keep in mind:
1) Medical/social welfare. America has proven that while having for-profit health care and insurance may bring about big explosions of advancement, it --like the nazi experimentation of WWII (yes I went there)-- turns the populace into guinea pigs. Mixed with lobbying, there's little we can do to stop them now, and the costs of medications have gotten so out of whack that it's literally, "Your money or your life sucka!" So, a good government must see to the medical and retirement welfare of its people. It must also have provisions for those that are near end of life and don't want a long painful death. We're willing to put our pets out of their misery, but in most states it's illegal for you to want that for yourself.

4) infrastructure. Must keep this in mind or you can't move goods, people, or military around to protect the nation. Decisions on infrastructure must be made without the monetary input of major transportation medium providers. For example, the robber barons of the rail industry could and did hold entire towns hostage. In my own state, streetcars-- which were very efficient and cheap for the majorly populated areas-- were bought up and decommissioned by the bus companies back in the 60's, which had worse service and higher costs. America has proven that the car is really a dumb way to get around for most people. See the "Adam Ruins the car" episode of "Adam ruins everything" if it's available on the net in its entirety for an explanation of this.

I'm sure there's more, but I'm tired.
 

~NGD OMEGA~

Well-Known Member
#9
One can also argue the welfare itself as part of why costs are rising and hence why things have been getting worse and worse since it had been expanded, rather than reduced like everyone who pushed Obamacare said it would be. If you know the government is going to cover and pay for something, then you also know there's nothing stopping you from jacking up prices to make greater profits. It's why colleges have the exact same problem, too many subsidies and the government basically being asleep at the wheel/gridlocked/trying to get the people's support by hyping up more free tuition (not realizing that there is nothing really free in this world of course but that's another can of worms) letting the system go out of whack until these problems stack up to the point that the problems become too big to feasibly resolve without massive changes again. Really college in itself is getting increasingly useless anyway with too many jobs these days requiring a bachelors degree requiring too many people to get one, thus diluting the market of job applicants further with a bunch of people with no 'real' experience competing all with roughly the same degrees on the same market.

Suffice to say there's no real ideal solution for anything, you just have to pick the one you can get through that has the least bad options that can reasonably be managed balanced against the most positive results, and what that is really depends on the person and their priorities. For example, one way shown to resolve crime is to literally determine people who are likely to commit crimes, and then literally pay them not to do that. Seriously it's been experimented in cities and it works apparently. It's also stupid, and I'd never support that level of moronic bullshit. Working or not, paying people to not commit crime is plain dumb no matter how you spin it and exactly the kind of bullshit the government should not be wasting funds on when there's so many better options to deal with the same issue without creating a way for people to game the system even harder.

The electoral college too is some of this similar give and take as well. While some people are rallying against it because their candidate lost when everyone going in knew what it took to win, there are actually decent arguments for and against the thing. It's part of the reasons it was hotly debated on its creation. That being said, trying to boil it down to letting the so called 'undereducated/underinformed/easily swayed' you kinda look the fool when a big part of the reason no one saw it coming was because people were so stuck in their bubbles in the city they largely didn't realize there was rash of problems outside it, thought the election was a sure thing, and didn't think there was a need to vote. So it would seem there's reason to suggest that the 'undereducated/underinformed/easily swayed' side here could easily go either way depending on what angle you're looking at it from.

Moot point either way, if you can't appeal to a broad enough spectrum in all the states for federal office, under the current rules anyway, you lose. Everyone knows this going in, but this isn't to say that changing the rules to a different system isn't a discussion worth merit depending on what angle you view it from. Should the federal office really be chosen by the people as a single whole or by the individual states, as the president is indeed supposed to represent all the states? Do our current allocation of population rules make sense when not everyone in that population can vote and thus isn't part of the people who need to be represented? Should it really be winner take all state by state or be allocated based on percentage win? And if so how do you fairly distribute the electoral votes without disproportionate proportioning taking effect? And so on and so forth, nibbling details like that are a great discussion to have with no obvious answer that tends to vary depending on your priorities or indeed which candidate you want to win, not realizing of course that if you change the rules you also change how people vote and indeed how people campaign thus the system isn't guaranteed to work how you think it will work.

Ultimately though chalking it up to it being down to the 'undereducated/underinformed/easily swayed' is a lame excuse when no one even realized there was a problem in those regions in the first place to the degree that they didn't even see the results as even remotely feasible. And indeed changing it also doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people are 'undereducated/underinformed/easily swayed' anyway no matter how you spin it, it just depends on what group your in and how you view other groups, so no matter what morons have the greatest weight vote wise anyway. It's why people keep voting for the same people to solve the same problems and keep getting no real results until the person in power pisses them off enough to vote them out, and you see this same shit happen on all sides of the spectrum. Until you make them mad enough they don't care by and large. :p
 

ThreadWeaver

Beware of Dog. Cat not trustworthy either.
#10
~NGD OMEGA~ said:
Ultimately though chalking it up to it being down to the 'undereducated/underinformed/easily swayed' is a lame excuse when no one even realized there was a problem in those regions in the first place to the degree that they didn't even see the results as even remotely feasible.
This pretty much sums it up. (If I embedded it right)

[video=facebook]https://www.facebook.com/gq/videos/10155623514558098/[/video]

The reason I call them easily misled/uninformed is because all the tendencies Trump had were BLATANTLY evident to anyone that was willing to actually look.  There were tells ALL along his campaign telling us he was/is unstable and people still followed him.  The environment was misread because the other parties-- hell even the Republicans-- thought that the people had enough common sense to see what he really was and NOT vote for him.  They gave them too much credit.  And people STILL (my brother in law included) staunchly refuse to admit that they might have made a mistake.  I prefer to believe that a person who is willing to do that despite blatant evidence to the contrary, is misled or uninformed.  The alternate is too frightening.
 

~NGD OMEGA~

Well-Known Member
#11
That video went off the rails when it was using innocous tweets as evidence. Like the shit? There's plenty wrong with Trump, but if that's the best evidence you can scrounge up that there's something wrong with the guy you are a blind moron. Tweets are irrelevant, his meandering on policies and constant flip flopping alone should provide more than enough material to work with, much less his conspiracy theory bullshit and constantly reusuing false statements despite being proven wrong repeatedly.

Similarly Michael Moore has the better statement there in regards to what happened (all the more on point because he saw it coming because he wasn't ignoring everyone else), and make no mistake I tend to disagree with him on usually everything. People knew what Trump was when they voted. There was plenty of evidence for it. He was the Change Candidate in an election where he was the only one noticing their issues. He had massive, massive problems, but a vote for him was a massive middle finger to everyone who was not seeing the issues the status quo was causing. And it worked, because people sure as hell are noticing it now.
 

seitora

Well-Known Member
#12
Also, figure out how entrenched you want everything.

In Canada, former PM Trudeau (the father, not the current PM) gave us a new constitution in 1982. 4 provinces with about 8% of the population gets 30 / 105 seats, 2 provinces get 24 seats each, and the remaining 4 get 24 / 105 seats with 32% of the population. That's not close to being an equal amount of Senators for each province or rep by pop. That system can't be changed without a referendum with at least 50% of the vote and at least 7/10 provinces representing at least 50% of the national population voting at least 50%+ for it. Given the four provinces with 8% of the population would be losing representation, there's basically absolutely zero percent chance of any one of them voting yes when at least one is required (or if we do equal Senators for each province, Ontario and Quebec would vote against it, and since they combine for more than 50% in flames, the referendum again goes down in flames).

Getting into a bit of a rant now, but what's galling is that while some provinces are already vastly overrepresented by their Senators, it's the same for the lower house level of Parliament. A person in Wyoming has 3 times the vote of a person in California, but that's only for electoral votes for President. Their lone representative represents about 80% the population of an average California riding, and the vast Representative disparities is offset by equal number of Senators. In Canada, the smallest province has 4 MPs for 150,000 people, while the most underrepresented province has 34 MPs for 4.3 million people, about 125,000 people per MP. Again, the overrepresentation at the lower level is also grandfathered in, and provinces with grandfathered overrepresentation definitely won't vote to end it.

So barring a new Constitution, that's stuff that's perpetually entrenched. Of course, you can be certain people in Canada who complain about the electoral college in the States will plug their ears and go 'lalala not listening' if I talk about how it's even worse in Canada :)
 

~NGD OMEGA~

Well-Known Member
#13
The California to Wyoming comparison is overused honestly, doubly so because looking at actual number of people who vote rather than overall population, California is actually overrepresented given its number of electors. Not enough of the people in California actually vote to actually make that distinction apt.

Granted that could also be because of the electoral system, but that's literally only used for the President. Reps an senators have even lower turnout than that, and those are decided purely by popular vote in the state or district, and don't even get me started on local government elections. Of course the President electin overall is a bigger deal, but it"s hard to say if overall turnout would be much better if it were decided by popular vote instead, especially as other countries have simlar crappy turnout problems we do even with that.

Of course given the fact that the states that tend to be overrepresented in the electoral system based on actual voters to electoral tally tend to be swing states, who knows. Is that driven by more people knowing there vote is more key in those states, or more people who know their vote is less key in others? Or is it both so changing it instead creates a balance where the overall turnout might not change, just who does vote, so you fix one problem only to not get the results you want anyway, just introduce a new set of issues with cities being overly represented instead of the swing states, and a least swing states change over time and represent a greater variety of people than cities tend to.

It's part of why I think the electoral college debate is a solid one that has a lot of good points by all sides. Depending on your perspective there is a lot of different ways to look at it that are valid, it really boils down to your priorities.
 

daniel_gudman

KING (In Land of Blind)
Staff member
#14
According to the 2014 Census the state populations (/ Electoral College Voters) were:
Wyoming: 584k / 3 ECV
California: 38.8m / 55 ECV

Resident / ECV ratio is 3.6

I'm on my phone so I can't link, but Voter turnout:
Wyoming: 108.7% (from Wyoming Tribune Eagle website; above 100% because Wyoming has same-day registration)
California: 75.3% (from The Sacrimento Bee)

Voter-turnout weighted resident / ECV ratio is 2.5

There's actually a case before 11th Circuit expected to go up to the Supreme Court debating whether electoral districts should be apportioned by population or voter registration. Leaving aside low attendance, it means that states with lots of children (i.e. Cali instead of Wyo) get screwed out of counting citizens that aren't voters yet. OTOH the Census counts raw people because they also need to get a handle on consumption of public services, so so the pop count includes immigrants. And prisoners are complicated; they're not allowed to vote but they're counted so rural counties with jails have much much "heavier" vote than cities, for example.



More generally, the Electotal College never operated the way it was "supposed" to. Read the Constitution and the supporting documentation and the state governments were supposed to appoint the Electoral College, who were "supposed" to do a search and then among themselves elect a President from that search, kinda like a Board of Directors hiring a new CEO for a company. But since literally Adams (2nd President) they've just been a rubber-stamp on the state popular vote, that's why it's never really mattered who "your" Electoral College Rep has been.

Personally I think we should stop messing around with the EC and just go to straight popular vote, but that requires a major Constitutional rewrite, which is basically impossible as a practical matter. And I'm deeply worried that the current Congress would fuck over the country if they started monkeying with the Constitution. So I'd prefer it changed, but not enough to actually risk the change process.

Even more generally, I question the wisdom of geographically determined Districts anyway. What if you just sliced everyone up into random segments based on, say, SSN? So your "district" is all the randos with the same divisor on their SSN. Every district is averaged out to the same size and represents a diverse slice of the country that way, they're all equal pretty much by default. It would basically require a national electronic voting scheme but whatever.
 

Lawra

Well-Known Member
#15
daniel_gudman said:
Personally I think we should stop messing around with the EC and just go to straight popular vote, but that requires a major Constitutional rewrite, which is basically impossible as a practical matter. And I'm deeply worried that the current Congress would fuck over the country if they started monkeying with the Constitution. So I'd prefer it changed, but not enough to actually risk the change process.
Doesn't actually require monkeying with the constitution, merely enough states to reach 270 all make laws that whoever gets popular vote, the EC voters in their state will be required to vote to match. 

Bigger issue is voter suppression efforts that seek to fix a problem that doesn't exist. Various states have disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters this past election and they almost all lie on one side of the political spectrum. 

Wisconsin for example was won by ~27000 votes but ~300,000 were turned away because of strict voter ID requirements. (Along with closing polling places or places to even register)
 

~NGD OMEGA~

Well-Known Member
#16
Yeah that's another reason it's a vast nuanced discussion that reasonable people can disagree on. There are valid reasons to prefer a multitude of different options that don't boil down to 'My candidate would have an advantage if it were like this instead'.

Like for me, I think the electors part is stupid, and should not even have the option of overturning the election like those morons tried to do with the Hamilton Electors nonsense. That's asking for our democracy to go entirely caput if a group of elites can just go lol no to a fair election where everything was laid out and on the table beforehand (which it was mind, people just didn't care about Russian implications that were outlined well before results were in).

That said I can still understand the reasons for it and why, for someone as dangerously unpredictable as Trump, it's a card you at least want on the table. I just think the costs of using it are far more dangerous than the alternative depending where the cards fall. Impeachment if he goes over the line instead is a more reasonable check against that problem in my book. At least then you can say you respected the results and followed them through, it's just the candidate broke the rules of office and got kicked out as a result. Reasonable people can disagree with me on that however.

It's why it is a very layered and interesting discussion. A lot of positives and negatives to have no matter what solution you come to.

Also WaPo has a good article outlining the electoral college in terms of vote count. It shows that across all states both California and Wyoming are overrepresented in terms of votes cast in this election to their electoral count. The underrepresented ones, at least those massively so anyway were largely Swing States, as I referenced earlier. I'd link but on Phone. Should be easy to Google.

Edit: The suppression argument is also bunk for one reason alone, Pa had no new laws and still went Trump, and with that and Ohio which he was getting anyway as that we actually saw coming, he already had enough. Besides which that sounds good until you realize why certain individuals were pulled, the numbers are far less hyperbolic when you actually dig into said data, so that's a vast oversimplification of some thing ultimately moot anyway.
 

seitora

Well-Known Member
#17
Yeah, in Canada, only the province of Quebec divvies up electoral ridings by number of electors as opposed to number of people. Everywhere else does it by number of people (and of course, now that Quebec has a declining under-18 population and low immigration rates, a few people want the federal government to allot ridings by electors, not population).
 

zerohour

Well-Known Member
#18
Wow.  This certainly opened up my eyes to how... involved government stuff is.  I'm not particularly political, but even so, seeing all this is a humbling experience.


-I like the idea of Demarchy, but it requires a comprehensive educational system to be effective.  Otherwise, you end up with 1: idiots in power, or 2: Support staff that actually make the decisions, who become the de facto power behind the throne.

-I think there should probably be clear drawn lines between the various levels of government.   Federal, State, County, and Local should be clearly defined, as well as what aspects of law and infrastructure they can influence.

-Expiration dates on laws.  Probably not a huge deal, but there are plenty of laws that don't make sense, no one knows abut, or are horribly outdated because no one cares enough to put the effort it to get rid of them.  20 years seems like a good amount of time, and the laws can be renewed if they're good laws (like no murdering.)
 

~NGD OMEGA~

Well-Known Member
#19
Expiration dates on laws is a good idea, but distinctions should be made on which. You have to expect gridlock which could lead to discord in the legal system that's more trouble than it's worth. Stuff like assault weapons ban and Bushes tax cuts had expiration dates already for example, and the former expired while the latter was extended under Obama in part. Good for some things, not others. Like murder.
 

seitora

Well-Known Member
#20
OK, since we're here on this topic already, I want to present a scenario that I'm entertaining for a story, talk about what I have down so far, and how you would proceed.

The main character is a 'reincarnated in another world' type of protagonist, yes, cliched, I know. But through his personal power he overthrows a tyrant, only to realise he's become emperor of a dysfunctional land with middle-ages technology, full of feudalism and slavery. The main character is unaging, but not full-stop capital I-Immortal. How to proceed?

For example, on the issue of slavery: The main character in this case is inspired by the 'inalienable rights' concept, but decides not to outright ban slavery from the start. Instead, he slowly chokes the slave trade for a century, first by banning the importation of slaves from other nations, then by instituting a 'buy-out policy' where slave-owners have to give slaves freedom if they're paid a certain amount, then making it so any children born of slaves are automatically free, and coming down hard on violators. In doing this, the remaining slaves will age and die off or be bought out, resulting in the end of slavery.
 

ThreadWeaver

Beware of Dog. Cat not trustworthy either.
#21
Your problem lays in the time era.

I am quoting myself here but "every economic boom is realized via the backs of an underpaid lower class."

It's going to be very hard for you to successfully outlaw slavery when there's no tech to replace the workers, and I suspect that the noble classes that own the economy aren't going to want to see their profits dwindled by paying the slaves. So, your leader is going to have to protect himself from assassination attempts and the economic collapse of the kingdom. Like American executives did with China, the nobles may just ship off work to someone that does it cheaper, leaving everyone but themselves in the lurch.

Yes, the loss of the slaves will force technology to be developed, but the middle ages didn't have the tech to build farming implements or production equipment as the 1800's did. There might not be enough time for that to be developed before the economy implodes completely.

The premise is well meaning, but the execution is going to need some thinking through.
 

zerohour

Well-Known Member
#22
Alright, next issue I'm curious about:

How should power/influence be divided between State and Federal levels?  Not really an issue on the smaller scale, since they end up being one and the same, but when you're in a larger country there tends to be a significant difference between the two of them.

Follow up to that is how many levels of government should there be, and how large should each of them be?   Should there be a maximum size?
 

T.L

Well-Known Member
#23
Tough question
We have 3 layers of government here, Like most places would.
Federal, State and Local councils.
In theory its supposed to be good and smooth.
In practice it's a bloody mess.

The biggest issue is who is responsible for what.
That leads into a never ending quagmire of political red tape and arguments.

The biggest issue I see is duplication of process.
Federal Leader, State Leader, Council Leader.
All with their respective staffs and counterparts at the next level below. Ie. Health, Education, Police, etc..

Ideally you would have a Federal Government, State Leader and that's it.
The Federal Government should have a huge staff to sort out what/when/how things happen.
The State Government should have a smaller staff to implement what needs to be done.
Regional proctors to oversee council area's and workers. That should be it.

Take Roads for example.
Federal Government allocates money for roads.
State government then receives money and maybe starts to build/maintain, what we call class 1/2 roads.
Local council has no maintenance of state roads, but through rates builds/maintains local streets class 3
Conflict arises when one part of Government decides that a road is not their problem, and passes it to the other.

Solution, State Government builds/maintains all roads through Federal Funding and local rates.
Almost like quasi State system.
What this will do is remove duplication of process, jobs for jobs sake and get shit done.
 

ThreadWeaver

Beware of Dog. Cat not trustworthy either.
#24
There are, sadly, more than three levels here in the U.S. Generally it's 4, but may be more.
Federal
State
County (Parish if you're in Louisiana or Alaska)
Township
City

Granted the townships generally don't have a lot of power, and they generally only exist in the absence of a city government, but they can still make your day miserable if they have a fiefdom lord wannabe making rules.
 

zerohour

Well-Known Member
#25
Touching on an issue for funding from the federal level down to the state and then local levels.  How does distribution work?  If there are ten states each with 10 cities in them, does each state get 10% of the money regardless of how much they need it, and how much they paid to cover that tax?   What if one state needs lots of roads?   Should cities with a higher population get a larger piece of the funding?


But let's go with somewhere between three and five levels of government

Local
County
Regional
State
Federal

We can probably condense it down to Local/State/Federal to keep things simple for now.  If we need more levels, we can have them, but KISS as they say.


Local:
Taxes?
Local Ordinances

State:
Taxes?
Infrastructure?
Laws

Federal:
Taxes?
Laws?
Military
Foreign Relations


Taxes are always an issue, should we let each level take taxes, have it work Top-Down, where Federal taxes everyone and distributes it to everyone, or Bottom-Up, where local taxes are collected and moved upwards?
 
Top