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Comment by alexmingoia | Hacker News Reader

The USA should be dissolved into thousands of sovereign city states. At the very least the existing states should dissolve the federal union.

The size of government should be reduced until its voters can meaningfully participate, and understand the scope of its responsibilities.

People who live in entirely different communities should not be governing each other. One office, like the US President, should not govern millions of people. A legislature of a few hundred should not govern hundreds of millions.

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Unfortunately that poses significant justice issues. If every city-state can impose their own form of justice, you would have an exponential increase of injustices where a legal act in one city-state could be illegal in another. While the current system may be imperfect in that regard, there are more safeguards in the form of federal level standardization that limit the inter-state legal issues. Yes, a common set of rights could be established by treaty, but it would be less likely to be universally applied or accepted when silos have the power to make their own rules and change them on a whim.

" ...you would have an exponential increase of injustices where a legal act in one city-state could be illegal in another."

Yes, this is a problem which has already caused issues, and mostly been resolved under the current scheme. Most states have some laws that preempt local jurisdictions from enacting anything beyond what the state has already enacted on the issue in question.

What is just is not universally agreed upon.

Larger government doesn’t necessarily enforce your sense of justice. China is a large government. The axis powers were large governments. USSR was a large government.

And what of the human cost? Millions of lives have been expended in the quest for justice. War is a path to universal law and one-world government. And what has history shown us? The larger the government, the larger the union, the larger their wars.

Are they allowed to work together, eg they could vote to join some kind of union, maybe it’s just limited to free trade at first but slowly and with popular support gains powers from the sovereign governments?

I don’t think city states will last long. Is there a name for this political opinion? What happens when governing a city state becomes too complex, as you might say it already is for LA or NYC?

Of course they could work together. Governments work together all the time. By maintaining their sovereignty, they would only need work together when it benefits them, rather than when it benefits others. By remaining as small as possible, they can more effectively represent their citizen’s interests.

Another alternative is just greatly reducing the power of the federation. There's definitely some benefit to being a large country, such as loose borders and a common currency.

Another thing to consider is that some states are rich, some are not. In many countries, it's because the big cities are getting rich off the less developed, but resource rich states. You'd have taxes heavily distributed to industrialised or develop highways in an industrial state. The poorer states are used for oil or corn farming. A richer state processes that into soda. And an even richer city has all the CEOs, lawyers, marketers, banks, etc, used to power that soda company.

Anything gained by federation can be gained without it.

It’s interesting you bring up loose borders as a benefit. Some communities may prefer strict borders. Others may prefer to welcome anyone. Why should the entire continent be forced to have one immigration policy? Size makes a mockery of democracy.

You seem to be forgetting the power of economies of scale. Enact your plan and you destroy the power of Federal bargaining and everything gets really expensive really fast.

Also you've unwound the tenuous Federal solution to the tragedy of the commons. Only high level control can come anywhere close to fixing that.

Businesses operate across multiple states, so the size of government doesn’t preclude economies of scale.

I don’t understand why goods would necessarily be more expensive because a government is smaller. The price of goods is mostly a function of economics, not government price controls. Consumable goods in Singapore or Monaco sell at prices similar to other very large governments.

> I don’t understand why goods would necessarily be more expensive because a government is smaller

Because they've lost their leverage. It's an 800 pound gorilla, not an 80 pound gorilla.

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