Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I like to semi-ignorantly throw things out there for the off chance people will talk about it and I get to learn things:

Less federal and state government, more local government.

After decades of not being involved at all, I was shocked how easy it was to get involved at the municipal level and what kind of difference I could make.

Also: stop depending on government. Want schools to improve? Go volunteer. I cold called a high school and got involved in a FIRST robotics team and it's been amazing.

View on HN

The counterargument is that this fails to address areas where one municipality's decisions impact another municipality. For example, suppose each township has a different order and coloring of traffic lights. This would cause car crashes wherever incompatible road networks meet. Or, suppose each township has its own electric grid, complete with different voltages and AC frequency. This would mean that equipment and training wouldn't translate to the next township over, prolonging any power outages. (See for example, the multitude of voltage standards in Japan.)

Overall, I would say that for any given problem, it should be handled at whichever level results in the fewest coordination/externality problems, with ties being broken in favor of more granular control.

Overall, I would say that for any given problem, it should be handled at whichever level results in the fewest coordination/externality problems

This just makes too much sense for either the "More Local!!!" crowd or the "More Federal!!!" crowd to ever get behind. None of them ever want to concede the common sense fact that most of the time, "It depends."

Should we have more federal control? It depends.

Should we have more local control? It depends.

Control of what?

Are there coordination issues?

Is anyone's human rights trampled?

What are the externalities?

Can local governments other than SF and NYC actually afford the infrastructure and resources required to control whatever it is we're talking about?

Can states other than Cali, Texas, and NY afford it?

On and on.

These are not simplistic issues.

It's also very backward in practice. National governments love demands on municipal and local level, but the funds don't follow. So alot of it ends up in nice talks, but bad implementations where local level try to push back at lack of funding.

The electric grid is going to be determined by what the power company provides. Industry has plenty of incentive to standardize that and they mostly do.

Every municipality (well, at least state, but usually county and sometimes city) does have the option to develop and enforce its own electric code. For the most part they've converged on a standard National Electric Code developed by an industry consortium, without any Federal requirements.

> The electric grid is going to be determined by what the power company provides. Industry has plenty of incentive to standardize that and they mostly do.

This has almost never happened without the threat (implicit or explicit) of regulation. The only time large corporations willingly standardize is when they have control over the entire market, and standards are a tool of cost cutting more than as a means of enabling cooperation with other companies.

NEMA, ANSI, IEC, ASTM, ASHRAE, I could go on and on. There tons and tons of standards independently developed by industry associations. Many of them later get adopted into law by various government, but the government is not forcing these to exist.

I'm sympathetic, but you have to consider free interstate travel and economies of scale.

A local or state government can't provide healthcare or a military, because then everyone else freerides. Just live in the low-tax state and move if you get sick, or bank on them if there's a threat.

Certain things depend on the feds not because they'll do it well, but because they'll do it less badly.

Healthcare in Canada is the responsibility of provinces and each province has their own independent system. You need to be a resident of a new province for a few months before you can switch to a different provider. Healthcare doesn’t need to be federal

I guess I'm overindexing on the bootstrapping problem as an American. Once you're there, it could be localized.

To an extent it's regional too. I don't actually interact with Health Canada or Health Ontario, I interact with Southwestern Public Health when I look up info, get a flu vaccine, look at regional covid info, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_globally,_act_locally

Just FYI - this is terrible advice when it comes to charity. Helping people in the developed countries costs a lot more than helping people in developing countries.

One charity trains seeing eye dogs in the US -- costs about $40,000 per person helped. A cataract surgery in India can cost as little as $40.

Best research on (and framework of thinking about) charities comes from GiveWell - https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities over 10 years of research on this topic.

Good point. In some parts of Colorado there are laws against street handouts, since they tend to cause more harm than good.

I think it was: In the 1840s, someone saw that things looked to be going really well in Nauvoo, Illinois, and asked Joseph Smith how he governed the people there so well. He said ~ "I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves."

He has had much influence on the people of Utah today. Utah gets high rankings from various places about being well-run. I've read repeatedly in state status reports on covid-19, that Utah has among both the lowest death and unemployment rates in the USA, during this pandemic. Here is one article (admittedly this one is sponsored by the Gov's office): https://www.ksl.com/article/50105209/utahs-covid-19-economic... . But I see such things in the news from time to time.

So teaching correct principles and letting the people govern themselves seems to be a valuable consideration, probably among others that have been mentioned here.

I think you got partially there. We need more of both local and Federal government.

Having more people working on providing basic services is a good thing. We are an incredibly productive species: we need to use that increased wealth to improve the quality of life for people. Government is one way to do that.

Volunteering is nice but it’s not the answer to systemic problems. I’m glad that you found a concrete way to contribute and find joy in doing so for your community... that’s great! But it’s not something that can replace Government or public funding.

> Volunteering is nice but it’s not the answer to systemic problems.

Agreed - a prominent example of this in the UK in recent years is the sharp rise in volunteer-run food banks. Which was a reaction to the huge cuts to public services, in both funding and availability, driven by our government's toxic right-wing ideology.

It's great that people stepped up to help, but it shouldn't have been necessary, and indeed wouldn't have been if things were being run effectively and for the benefit of all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com