Recently I have been writing on two topics, limited government and the inappropriateness of comparing government power to "economic power". They aren't obviously related, but there is a connection. Not only is there a connection, but it is one they share with another favorite topic, federalism, as well as a topic I rarely address, international governing bodies.

That topic is whether power is to be concentrated or diffuse.

Now, let me start by saying that I do not accept that individual economic power is in any way comparable to governmental power. As I argued in "Economic and Political Power Revisited" and "Power - Political and Economic", the government's power is the ability to use deadly force, while individual power is to produce and trade. Still, if we simply limit it to the ability to make choices, and generalize all decision making ability as "power", then we can conceivably compare the two.

And looking at all of these choices, private control versus government control, state power versus federal power, nations versus super-national government, the issue always comes down to whether power will be concentrated in a single body or will be distributed over many bodies.

And that question is more important than most understand. For a number of reasons.

First, there is the question of freedom. The more concentrated power, the more likely people are to be enslaved. And you can see this. Imagine two situations, one with a single world government, and one with various nation states. If you live in a single oppressive nation there exists the hope of flight, as well as the possibility other nations may one day liberate you. If you have an oppressive one world state, where do you go? And it is the same when we reduce the scope. If the entire US is ruled by an oppressive government it is much harder to flee than if a single state were to turn into a tyranny.

But it is not only in the broader, more obvious slavery that this matters. When power is distributed to smaller units, even if a larger government exists it is less likely to oppress as it must answer to those smaller units. For instance, prior to the Civil War, the United States government exercised much less authority, as it was answerable to the states, a reality which quickly evaporated following the war, until we reached the present situation, where states are bullied into following federal policy through the threat of withholding funds. Similarly, the UN, for all its failings, is much less harmful than it could be because it si answerable to member states. Were the UN entrusted with full governmental authority, do you think it would care about member opinion?

Even going beyond questions of freedom, individuals are also more pleased, in general, by distributed authority, be it state power, local control, or individual autonomy*. Clearly, leaving more choices in individual hands would please an individual because, despite absurd literary claims to the contrary, people do enjoy freedom, and more significantly, know their own desires better than any remote authority. So, leaving power in their hands allows them to make choices that please them more.

But it goes beyond that. The smaller the unit of government exercising authority, the more responsive it is, the more voice an individual has in local government. In addition, it opens up the option of moving to a more amenable location should one find himself truly upset with local government. When power is national, one has to leave the nation itself, when it is exercised by a township, the distance one must move is much shorter.

And that brings me to my final point. Distributed power allows for error checking. When you have only one power, and one policy, you cannot see what is right or wrong. Just look at the debate on drugs or abortion. Having only one policy, we must resort to hypothetical examples or inexact historical analogies. If we had state policies, we could compare 50 different policies in actuality and see which was correct. And the policy which performed best could then be adopted by other states, allowing the best policy to win out not by legislative fiat, but by proving its worth.

On the other hand, if we make a mistake, if a single national policy exists, and that policy is in error, we will never know. If you impose one uniform policy on a whole nation, or the whole globe, how are you going to realize it is a mistake? Unless the results it produces are so clearly destructive and so clearly linked to the topic at hand**, it can persist for a long time without anyone questioning the policy. When power is in the hands of many states, or even more localities, or even in millions of individuals' hands, then the chance to prove what is the best path is easier to determine.

Which brings me to my final point. I don't want this to sound like  paean to federalism or local control. Clearly those are preferable to big central government, but I only use those as examples as many readers still believe, despite their conservative position, that the state must do this or that. In reality, I would prefer to see almost all power taken from the state entirely, and restored to the millions of individuals. After all, a single individual has even less scope to exercise his power than even local government, and with 300 million laboratories of right and wrong behavior, we could probably learn even more than with 50 states or hundreds or thousands of localities. Leaving as much as possible in individual hands is clearly the best solution of all.

But I believe that is the logical outcome of consistent federalism. The US, despite the best of intentions, never had a consistent federalist system. Too much remained of both Montesquieu's Roman fixation and common law centralization in our policies, not to mention the explicit centralizing plans of Hamilton's Federalists. So the US was, even from the beginning, set on a centralizing course. Were we to consistently adopt a policy of devolving power to states and states to adopt a policy of distributing power to counties, and counties to townships and cities, then we would see a gradual lessening of government without explicit intervention to do so. As I believe those states which provide the maximum freedom would reap the most benefits, I believe a truly federalist system would favor libertarianism over time (see "Why I Am Not A Libertarian").

So, I suppose that is the biggest vote of confidence I can give to both my theories and to people in general. I believe that my theories are beneficial enough that, given a federalist system where they could prove their worth, they would win out. On the other hand, many seem to have little confidence in either their theories or their fellow man, as they insist that we must have a strong central government to force their ideas on everyone. Either they think their theories are of so little benefit no one would adopt them, or else they believe everyone else is so foolish they can't recognize a good thing when they see it.

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* Those who find satisfaction in forcing others to conform to their will are the one exception, as distributed power gives them little scope to live out their authoritarian fantasies, but other than that small group, localized power tends to produce mroe satisfaction.

** For example, federal monetary policy has been clearly linked by hundreds of economists to the repeated crashes of the economy. Even today one can see the harm it has created. Yet, despite that, the centralized monetary policy continues. In contrast, the "land banks" of the colonial era were often closed down as the harm done to "land bank" states and their neighbors was clear when viewed in contrast to states which did not presently have land banks. But having no non-inflationary, non-central-bank models with which to compare our policy, we cannot see clearly the harm it does. And since it is in the interest of the government to be able to spend without limits, they persist in a destructive policy with public approval. (See "Overlooking the Obvious", "The Rubber Yardstick" and "Government Efficiency II".)

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POSTSCRIPT

I wrote in favor of federalism in "The Benefits of Federalism" and "Why I Am Not A Libertarian", among others. My general view of government is found in "My Vision of Government" and "My Vision of Government Part II". And my arguments for individual autonomy can be found in "Greed Versus Evil", "The Triumph of Good", "The Most Basic Argument For Limited Government" and "Planning For Imperfection".  Finally, my argument that so long as we view our fellows as competent rational individuals, we will favor freedom and limited government, while viewing them as irrational or incompetent will lead, inevitably to totalitarianism, can be found in "The Citizen Dichotomy", "Man's Nature and Government", "In A Nutshell", "Inescapable Logic", "In Defense of Discrimination" , "The Nature of Evil" and "Cognitive Dissonance Part 2".