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Could Town Hall Electorate work better then big government?

Originally posted by Time-Immemorial
Could Town Hall Electorate work better then big government?

Nope, it doesn't scale up well enough. If you have a very large thing like a country, and you don't spend enough effort to organize it, you simply end up with poor and insufficient management that lacks the ability to properly multi-task and handle all of even the serious problems it faces, let alone day to day stuff, before even getting into people purposefully trying to disrupt things.

Town halls are great for small-scale stuff and getting the pulse of a community, but you can't have a town hall that represents 300 million people's issues spread over a third of a continent very well.

It will work

Originally posted by Time-Immemorial
Could Town Hall Electorate work better then big government?

Do you mean relocating funding from nation wide services and giving it to local government to spend on the same services?

Originally posted by Time-Immemorial
It will work


Based on what? How is an open forum supposed to allow efficient governance? Can you name any example where it's been tried successfully?


I can't think of any state or government that's tried it.

Originally posted by jaden101
Do you mean relocating funding from nation wide services and giving it to local government to spend on the same services?

Yes, and reducing federal taxes by reducing the size of the federal government.

someone wanna explain what town hall electorate means?

Originally posted by Time-Immemorial
Yes, and reducing federal taxes by reducing the size of the federal government.

In that case there's a few different ways of looking at it.

You'd need some form of national taxation for things such as the military. I would also keep any large infrastructure projects even if they are localised, in national government hands as local governments tend to be less capable of project management and private contractors can too easily exploit that (I'm seeing this first hand in my city where the local council are managing a billion pound redevelopment and a 1/5 of the budget has already been spent without a single building being built and they haven't even finalised a contractor for the showpiece building).

On the other hand you would minimise debt as local governments would have to live more within their budgets than the national government as they wouldnt be able to borrow as much. There would also likely be a reduction of taxes not because of less spending but because local authorities would be competing for investment in their areas and for people to move there. Only issue with that is that huge corporations will be far more able to coerce favourable tax laws from local authorities than at a national level.

In relation to another of your threads is the issue of stupid spending when too much is given to local authorities and that's seen in examples of small town mayors and police chiefs spending money on tanks are armoured cars for their police forces. You'd end up with much more of that if you devolved more tax and spend powers to local areas

I like your thoughts, I agree with them.

I am all for national taxation involving the military.

Moving on,

Things like education, which was never supposed to be handled by the government.

If you notice we have a department of education, yet all the schools are funded through local taxes via property tax, so why do we need a department of education?

The only federal schools are the three Military Academy's, West Point, Airforce Academy and the Naval Academy.

There is no need for the department of education. Its a complete waste and pretty much a fraud.

Originally posted by Time-Immemorial
Yes, and reducing federal taxes by reducing the size of the federal government.

And increases the size of all local governments, as some stuff that needed to be done once on the Federal level, now needs to be done 50 (state) or thousands (city/county) of times.

Now each local government needs additional apparatuses to deal with each other more directly, as you're getting rid of their common conduit through which they can talk with everyone.

And additionally, if some have trouble, they're in a much worse position to handle whatever trouble they're in, as other parts of the country are less set up to respond collectively, resulting in more scattered response.

It turns out that removing the central organizing part of a large system doesn't make that system any less large or complex.



To make sure schools are actually teaching, are facilitated with what they need to teach, and, like, no-one is leaving off biology because it offends their sensibilities, or teaching math by route memorization because it's more 'traditional.'

Without an umbrella for schools to fall under, you'll see education standards in many areas drop like a rock, and furthermore, it becomes much harder for higher schools and companies to judge how much someone actually knows- how'd you like to come out of 6 years of schooling in order to discover that your curriculum was garbage and no-one will hire you in the field you're interested in?

Originally posted by red g jacks
someone wanna explain what town hall electorate means?

A town hall meeting is something a lot of early New England states used, where things were a lot looser and free-formed in discussion, used to communicate with the leadership on what should be done.

And with a town, it works great.

What you fear is giving states and local authorities to handle more local matters.

Originally posted by Time-Immemorial
I like your thoughts, I agree with them.

I am all for national taxation involving the military.

Moving on,

Things like education, which was never supposed to be handled by the government.

If you notice we have a department of education, yet all the schools are funded through local taxes via property tax, so why do we need a department of education?

The only federal schools are the three Military Academy's, West Point, Airforce Academy and the Naval Academy.

There is no need for the department of education. Its a complete waste and pretty much a fraud.

I agree with that. A standardised education system is out dated thinking. A localised system would be far more beneficial to local economies as you could link education to the types of employment you either have or want to attract to your area. The only problem being that the curriculum would be at the mercy of local vested interests so there would need to be some form of consensus especially on more controversial issues such as the whole creation v evolution issue

Originally posted by Time-Immemorial
What you fear is giving states and local authorities to handle more local matters.


Not really, I just think it's really inefficient.


What's the actual benefit? What are we supposed to get out of making everyone have to do massive redundancy?


Remember, things used to be a lot more separated, but they moved together because it was just more efficient.

Consider things like interstate highways, which'd be far more difficult to build and maintain when a hundred jurisdictions all are responsible for their patches of the same road, and no authority to straiten things out.




Note that education wise, there's no reason to ever teach creationism outside of a theology class. Any school that went that way would be shooting itself in the foot.

Also note that locals would be vulnerable to having companies step in and direct students so they're heading towards them, and turning schools into corporate feed schools that don't set people up for a general education, just for what the local companies find useful.

You'd additionally have different groups with different ideas on education try and take over various schools, and they'd only have to gain the support of a fairly small number of people to get in- even if their curriculums sucked.

Why do we have a department of education Q99. Lets see you talk your way out of that one.