Big or Small Government

[jmpeer]

I'm just curious, do most of you guys support a strong, centralized government, or a weak, decentralized government, similar to how the US argued between federal versus state rights in its early years?

EDIT:

When I say centralized government, I don't mean centralized in the hands of a few, I mean, like the US, a centralized democratic republic, as opposed to the previous attempts to maintain highly independent, mostly autonomous states.

[Robespierre Richard]

It really depends on who you ask. I'm for a poweful centralized government in order to enable decentralization of the economy into more manageable and democratic segments, but most people here probably aren't.

[The Man]

I'm just curious, do most of you guys support a strong, centralized government, or a weak, decentralized government, similar to how the US argued between federal versus state rights in its early years?

I'm in support of a government run by the people to make collective decisions and defend the freedom of the individual. Now, I don't know if Direct Democracy is "Big" or "Small" because all people have a say in what happens in their community. Anarchists, like I, don't usually support a centralized government. We usually support a series of Workers' Syndicates/Councils that decide what happens in the community.

[Rooster]

I think most people here would rather challenge the concept of government. Personally, I'd rather get rid of all forms of representative democracy and have direct democracy from the work floor to building associations, to street, to city, and so on. So this is neither big nor small government in the sense that I think you're meaning. It could be big because the number of people actually working or participating in running the place would be everyone or it could be small because the people running it wouldn't be paid or anything. I don't think a top down perspective of things would remove exploitation.

[ChampionDishWasher]

I'm just curious, do most of you guys support a strong, centralized government, or a weak, decentralized government, similar to how the US argued between federal versus state rights in its early years?
Well, there ain't no government like no government...
But if I had to pick between the two I'd go with as decentralized as possible.

[jmpeer]

So, why do you think decentralized government and economics would be any better now than it has in the past? How would you survey needs, distribute resources, and organize work efficiently as a whole? Where's the coordination? Better yet, standing with nothing to gain, why would representatives be corrupt in the first place? For fun?

[smk]

So, why do you think decentralized government and economics would be any better now than it has in the past? How would you survey needs, distribute resources, and organize work efficiently as a whole? Where's the coordination? Better yet, standing with nothing to gain, why would representatives be corrupt in the first place? For fun?

Why would an ultra centralized government be better now than it has been in the past?

Everyone always has something to gain by utilizing their comparative advantages. Why are senators and representatives corrupt today? Power corrupts always. If there is no hierarchy, there can be no possible exploitation.

[Rooster]

So, why do you think decentralized government and economics would be any better now than it has in the past? How would you survey needs, distribute resources, and organize work efficiently as a whole? Where's the coordination? Better yet, standing with nothing to gain, why would representatives be corrupt in the first place? For fun?

I think you might be thinking about this upside down. None of that really matters. What matters is how we run the places where we work. As soon as we sort that out into our democratic cells (or soviets) then we can sort out all the things after that.

[jmpeer]

smk -- You didn't answer my question. But to answer yours its more efficient and less risky. Like I mentioned, the federalist vs antifederalist precedent, the fact that most governments are centralized, and the fact that deregulation or a lack of regulation have played a role in contributing to most major financial crisis is pretty good reasoning supporting centralized government. With no abundance of wealth to gain, what specific comparative advantages could possibly make politicians corrupt?

rooster -- Society is becoming increasingly interdependent on resources and skills. It can't afford to have a lack of central regulation. Without centralized government establishing regulation, the system functions on the summation of the individual choices of the organizations of the workers, which is highly inefficient and risky. You don't create a great society with the summation of individual ideas, you bring the people together around one idea and one system. The most important aspect is the central framework upon which they can develop and organize themselves regionally. If we eliminated the financial industry, replaced some of the more pointless jobs, allowed people to choose what they want, tried to bring millions upon millions of people out of poverty, and etc, there would be massive shifting in the labor force and increased demand, and I doubt they'd be able to handle that by chance.

Again, I'm not advocating a centralized government as the only government, planning everything, but there must be a centralized government.

[Magón]

The bigger the government, the better it burns later on to keep the people warm. :cool:

[mohamed bouazizi]

Institutionalist that I am, I believe in working class institutions, run by each community, so in effect I call for a united working class to run autonomous institutions that make up a large decentralised free government, with no party of father figure.

Why do we need a Government in the way we see places run now, they are bloody inefficient, repressive and no fun to live under.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

No government. All power to the soviets!

[ChampionDishWasher]

So, why do you think decentralized government and economics would be any better now than it has in the past? How would you survey needs, distribute resources, and organize work efficiently as a whole? Where's the coordination? Better yet, standing with nothing to gain, why would representatives be corrupt in the first place? For fun?
Well, decentralized government is better-in my opinion- for a variety of reasons i.e its closer and more accountable to the people it governs etc.. The rest of your question, correct me if I'm wrong, seems to imply federalism, which is not what I'm talking about.
But, to be clear, I believe in replacing government and all other kinds unnatural of hierarchy with democratically run organizations (for reasons you imply in the last part of your question), I just feel, given between the options of centralized v decentralized that I'd prefer decentralized.

[LibertarianSocialist1]

The bigger the better.

[Rooster]

rooster -- Society is becoming increasingly interdependent on resources and skills. It can't afford to have a lack of central regulation. Without centralized government establishing regulation, the system functions on the summation of the individual choices of the organizations of the workers, which is highly inefficient and risky. You don't create a great society with the summation of individual ideas, you bring the people together around one idea and one system. The most important aspect is the central framework upon which they can develop and organize themselves regionally. If we eliminated the financial industry, replaced some of the more pointless jobs, allowed people to choose what they want, tried to bring millions upon millions of people out of poverty, and etc, there would be massive shifting in the labor force and increased demand, and I doubt they'd be able to handle that by chance.

Inefficient in regards to.... what? Profit? We we're wanting isn't profit, my friend. A person working is productivity.

[Q]

No government. All power to the soviets!

You are aware of course that soviets are a form of government, right?

I myself am a supporter of the biggest possible unity of the working class. The rule of our class is best reflected in the democratic republic, a radical democratic form of state which offers the biggest number of working people the possibility to participate in the running of society.

[Tim Finnegan]

Mu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28negative%29).

The question misleading suggests that government is an activity necessarily exclusive to the state, which is not at all the case. A socialist government is both "small" and "big", in that it is, in a very real sense, comprised of the people themselves, and so both hugely decentralised and all-encompassing.

[GPDP]

Talk of "big" and "small" government is the essence of bourgeois liberal discourse, at least under capitalism, so for the most part I question whether there is a point in involving ourselves in debating such narratives within the current social paradigm.

Now, within socialist ideology... well, there is indeed debate over the form and essence of socialist governance, that much can be confirmed, but I don't think the terms of debate around the subject can effectively center around such simplistic terms such as "big" or "small."

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ Putin's bureaucracy is bigger than Brezhnev's.

[jmpeer]

rooster -- Well, with no official coordination, I suppose decentralized government is relatively inefficient in just about every regard. But politics, measuring needs and resources, and organizing productive forces are probably the most important, at least in my opinion. When I was mentioning workers, I wasn't talking about profit or productivity, I was basically just trying to get across the point that there's going to be a mess of workers, and it'd be better if they have a central means to organize than have to organize themselves locally. I mean communists do fight for workers rights eveywhere, not just their own jobs, hopefully, so naturally I would assume you all would support a global democratic republic, which apparently you don't.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

You are aware of course that soviets are a form of government, right?

I myself am a supporter of the biggest possible unity of the working class. The rule of our class is best reflected in the democratic republic, a radical democratic form of state which offers the biggest number of working people the possibility to participate in the running of society.

Yeah, i'm more interested in developing the concept of government as that of an entrenched strata of society. In that sense, I am opposed to government in that entrenched form.

It was the case in the 20th century that the Socialist nations formed revolutionary governments, both centrally, regionally and locally, that then became entrenched forms of government, and thus gathered political power and privilege.

I say 'no government' not from an anarchist POV, but from the POV that the government should be a fluid institution; it should not depend on people and people should not depend on it. It should not come attached to an entrenched, powerful bureaucracy. My idea is that at all levels - local, regional, national and supra-national - governmental positions, whether legislative elected, executive elected, judicial and non-elected civil workers, should be a revolving door. There should be no Stalin, Brezhnev, Fidel or Mao serving at the top for 20 or 30 years. There should be no ideologically/politically-aligned bureaucracy.

The only way to do this is to have a leftist state whose support base is made up from as broad a left spectrum as possible, from Marx to Lenin to Bakunin to Kautsky to Luxembourg to Benn. Multi-Socialist federal democracy, for me, is the only political system that can successfully accompany economic revolution in Britain.

I should make it clear that this belief, for me, only really relates to Britain, in depth. Perhaps for bigger nations, or landlocked nations or whatever, the issues and solutions are different.

[Aurorus Ruber]

The terms "big government" and "small government" are more rhetoric than useful political descriptors in my opinion. I hear them mostly from conservatives who talk about big government intruding in their lives in some vague way. Of course since these same people have no problem with massive military spending, for instance, all this talk of shrinking government just sounds silly or hypocritical to me. I don't find it particularly useful to talk about big versus small government, myself.

[jmpeer]

I think I was pretty clear in what I meant. I was referring to centralized government, that is, government that has a central government, or decentralized government, that is, government that doesn't have a central government, and I likened it unto the early US, in which you should be familiar with the federalists vs antifederalists debates and the confederation vs federation. I wasn't trying to confuse you. Like I suggested in my other posts, I wasn't sure whether you were going for large, or even global, democratic republics or completely locally autonomous governments.