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To: Cyro who wrote (44539)	1/15/2006 11:20:15 AM
From: shades	Respond to of 116555

Public ''authorities" that answer to no one? Yah that pretty much sums up a good part of our gubbment eh? I have posted on this issue before - democracy simply doesn't scale well. techcentralstation.com We Need 250 States By Arnold Kling Published 08/15/2005 "It is always costly to ensure that agents [government officials] act on behalf of the citizens and that they do not use their power to extract rents from their constituents... The costs of monitoring agents increase not only with the geographic size of the collective but also with the number of people in the collective. This is because in a larger collective each member captures a smaller share of the rents created by collective enforcement and therefore has less incentive to monitor the agent...With the stake in the collective inversely related to group size, we can expect less monitoring and more rent seeking and rent extraction as group size increases." -- Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The not so Wild, Wild West, p. 30 Terry Anderson and Peter Hill make an argument that suggests that democracy does not scale well. As the size of the constituency group gets large, the politician becomes less accountable. Politicians find it easier to extract rents and abuse powers. The end-of-session legislative victories for President Bush and the GOP illustrate the problem. CAFTA passed, but with large concessions to special interests that threaten to undermine the trade benefits. The energy bill was an exercise in pork, as was the transportation bill. To anyone outside of the political/lobbyist complex, it was an all-too-typically dismal legislative performance. Lack of accountability is one political characteristic that is clearly bipartisan. For example, take my government in Montgomery County, Maryland, which has been controlled by Democrats for decades. The nine-member County Council answers only to special-interest constituencies, primarily public sector unions. I see little hope of changing that. My county is a poster child for what Steven Malanga described as The Real Engine of Blue America. "What makes these cities so Blue is a multifaceted liberal coalition that ranges from old-style industrial unionists and culturally liberal intellectuals, journalists, and entertainers to tort lawyers, feminists, and even politically correct financiers. But within this coalition, one group stands out as increasingly powerful and not quite in step with the old politics of the Left: those who benefit from an expanding government, including public-sector employees, workers at organizations that survive off government money, and those who receive government benefits. In cities, especially, this group has seized power from the taxpayers, as the vast expansion of the public sector that has taken place since the beginning of the War on Poverty has finally reached a tipping point." Thanks to these interest groups, we enjoy a high bureaucrat-to-student ratio in our schools, a "living wage" law to protect public-sector workers, and anti-Walmart zoning to protect other union members. The County Council even wants to provide public workers with imported low-cost pharmaceuticals from Canada, notwithstanding the fact that one of the most important private-sector industries in the County is biotech research. I would like a government that is modest in its exercise of power, and in which special interests are not excessively powerful. Instead, at all levels of government, I see the opposite. What can be done? I think that Anderson and Hill offer a clue. The sheer size of modern electoral constituencies makes politics a matter of financial muscle and mass marketing. Only with smaller electoral constituencies would the incentive structure change to reduce the arrogance and rent-seeking of elected officials and powerful interest groups. We Need 250 States In 1790, the largest state in the union, Virginia, had a population of under 700,000. Today, Montgomery County has a population of over 900,000. Our nine-member County Council answers to about the same number of registered voters as the entire House of Representatives of the United States at the time of the founding of the Republic. We cannot have an accountable democracy with such large political units. We need to break the political entities in the United States down to a manageable size.