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Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

And here I am wondering what the fuck happened to freedom.

Both the right and left have become supremely prescriptive in their own ways.

I want stronger local government. I have no way of trusting any of these assholes at the federal and state level. Why do they get to set standards for schools, infrastructure funding, or social policy? We have grid lock in part because there are different opinions on what's best.

So be it. We'll all do what we want, and time will prove what works best. Then we can use the federal/state levels for their intended purpose: handling externalities and international affairs.

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Reading NextDoor completely disabused me of any notion that smaller government is better. It seems like everyone involved in local politics is an absolute crank. You can see this clearly in New Hampshire were the goofy libertarians who moved from other states gang up to defund public schools.

At least with the Feds they are under a constant microscope. The most heinous corrupt shit in America almost always happens at the local level because they can get away with it

Not just defund public schools, but legalize things like child porn and underage sex [1]. Purely local government is often shitty in the absence of any guardrail laws from a higher level. Small towns are filled with people who care for absolutely no one beyond their tiny group and can often have way more time on their hands than reasonable people who have work and family responsibilities and care about people around them.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/30/libertarians-took-c...

Wow I didn’t realize that. I only got the sanitized version of the story from Ira Glass

And yet I find that what triggers the worst attitudes on Nextdoor is any discussion related to national politics.

> I want stronger local government.

Please, no. I get the rationale. It's the local knowledge problem, combined with state/federal being more likely to be populists.

But local government irrecoverably sucks for systemic reasons that I've just started to notice.

With local governance there is no way to resolve dilemma like incentives that cause negative sum decision making, i.e. locally good but globally bad policies. For example, restrictive planning laws. Good locally, terrible globally. So terrible that it is the kind of thing that is a threat to the stability of society.

Another reason is that the competence of local governance is significantly lower than state/federal governance, who have budgets to hire actual intelligent experts. I don't know if you're interacted with local government officials. If you have, you will notice what I'm talking about.

A third reason is that corruption is worse in local governments. It flies under the radar because they're not under the microscope of journalists. There's no good mechanism to decorrupt them.

Good federal governance is the way forward.

I would argue that "good federal governance" is outright impossible in a country where, at any given point, ~half of the population will hate whatever that government does.

Now you can argue that it's not actually half, and so long as it's less than that, a functioning democracy would allow you to steamroll over them. However, once enough people in a democracy consider it illegitimate, it stops functioning really fast.

You don't avoid this by reducing federal scope and giving it to local. Say you achieve that goal, and then a populist gets in anyway. What happens then? Obviously they increase the scope, as all populists have done once they achieved power. The way you avoid this altogether is by creating good material conditions for people. One way you create good material conditions is by removing corrupt, vampiric local governments that contribute the opposite. Local governments are creating the conditions for populism by causing negative sum policies to add up to global tragedy.

Also, goodness isn't a binary switch, and goodness needs to be compared with the alternative.

I'd add that reducing local government doesn't mean that federal government has to be large and bloated. I still want a lean federal government.

I can also never pin down exactly what advocates of larger local government actually want. What powers and capabilities, specifically, should be removed from federal and done by local?

The way you avoid this altogether is by having a decentralized structure of governance such that the compromise of one node doesn't bring the rest down. If you want some specific arrangement to criticize, let's start with this:

https://internationalistcommune.com/social-contract/

No. Just go attend a school board meeting, and even run for school board. If you think only half your local citizens are kooks, consider yourself lucky. When standards are left up to them you get things the Lost Cause myth taught in school for 75 years. County school boards have the ability to strip history books from content they simply don't want taught, because it's politically inconvenient knowledge. How else are people worshipping Robert E Lee rather than referring to him as a traitor who waged war on his country to preserve and expand slavery in perpetuity, and got more Americans murdered than any other bad guy in American history? That's what local school boards gets you.

It's a nation, and students are nationals. There needs to be some national standards.

Don't forget Good-ol-boy nepotism. I've lived in SmallTown America and it's not great when BillyBob, his brother, his kids, nieces and nephews all run the town government, because BillyBob owns the car dealership and everyone in the town is financially connected-to or dependent-on him. Local power is accountable to so few people. We need less local power, not more.

Those "local citizens" are not some kind of different species from Americans at large - they also vote in state and national elections. So what makes the governments produced by the latter better?

Stronger local government would be great if people actually had the agency to move to any state they'd like. Instead, moving can be extremely difficult and time-consuming, so people are more likely to restrict their job searches to their closest metro area or at least stay within the same state/region; this is especially the case with Florida (population 20MM) where getting from South Florida (population 6MM) to the next metro area, Atlanta, is an 8 hour drive with no traffic.

Local generally means county level. Something like maximum 1M people (exact number to be determined), and if it grows more than that it gets split.

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