Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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The founding vision of the US was one where the further away government was from the people, the less impact it would have on their lives. The Federal government was to have an extremely limited role in society, largely tasked with things such as international relations. Your day to day would primarily be affect by your state, and ideally on downward with a further delegation of responsibilities getting closer and closer to you.

This also helps curtail corruption. It is ostensibly easier to coerce/bribe/etc a state than a nation, but you have to do this for every single state and then try to keep them all under your thumb. A federal government may ostensibly be harder to corrupt, but once corrupted they can affect your whims on a national level and be relatively easier to maintain control of.

This decentralization of power seems to be the easiest way to have a functioning political system. It's always the same decision. Centralization paired with selflessness, benevolence, and competence will trend towards utopia. Centralization paired with selfishness, greed, or incompetence will trend towards dystopia. Decentralization will always just trend towards mediocrity as a mish mash of the averages of society.

The founders were also deathly afraid of a standing army. This is why a defense authorization bill is passed every two years. People might debate how much money should be put toward defense spending, but few people would argue that we should dissolve the military and call up citizens only when conflict happens.

They also explicitly dismissed the idea of one person, one vote.

And this all ignores the fact that there wasn't a singular, cohesive founding vision. Alexander Hamilton, for example, argued for a strong federal government.

With all that said, we shouldn't be hamstrung by what a deeply flawed group of people decided in the late 1700s.

> With all that said, we shouldn't be hamstrung by what a deeply flawed group of people decided in the late 1700s.

Bringing this back to the discussion at hand, your point seems completely off the mark and basically irrelevant. The current copyright regime is nothing like what was created by those men hundreds of years ago. In the late 18th century after the country was founded, copyright was limited to 14 years plus another 14 year extension if the author was still alive. Going back to that would be a great idea.

Americans use the supposed will of the founding fathers to justify quite random stuff. It's just an excuse yea.

If given a choice, I think I would opt for the "decentralization with a mishmash of the averages of society" over a dystopia. The "centralization with selflessness, benevolence, and competence" path toward utopia seems like wishful thinking to me. You can never legislate morality, and without a non-secular religion as a guide, a default moral people is not a reasonable expectation.

Don't forget that decentralization trends toward inequity too. A key function of 'centralized' government is protecting individuals from the tyranny of their local majority.

> the further away government was from the people, the less impact it would have on their lives

the corollary being the further away government is from the people, the less accountable it is

Exhibit A: Brasilia

It's almost as if the framers of the Constitution knew what they were doing when they created a decentralized federalized system and we've screwed it up pretty badly by centralizing power in the Federal Government.

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