To your first point about materialism as a core principle, I think the preponderance of self-care rituals and memes is proof that people are struggling to remain embodied in, well, their bodies. When you start to believe that language is reality, that the Internet represents life, is there any wonder so many people are so deeply unhappy?
To your first point about materialism as a core principle, I think the preponderance of self-care rituals and memes is proof that people are struggling to remain embodied in, well, their bodies. When you start to believe that language is reality, that the Internet represents life, is there any wonder so many people are so deeply unhappy?
Also, genuine question: if the nation state was eliminated, how would that not yield the tyranny of structurelessness? I’m not sure I agree that nation-statehood itself is a product of capitalism and imperialism exclusively; seems like it’s an inevitable apex level of organization.
It also leads to people trying to push the river up stream. We didn't address poverty among the elderly by changing the terms we use to describe them or deconstructing the notion of age. We did it through social security, which gave them a bunch of money.
Yes, it becomes simple when you split the problem. Short term homelessness is due to financial difficulty. Long term homelessness is due to mental/drug issues.
When you have energy inflation, people lose the ability to pay their expenses, they lose their homes. When you have general inflation, people lose the ability to pay their expenses, they lose their homes. When you have people sent home due to lockdowns, they lose the ability to pay their expenses, they lose their homes.
We have a trifecta of causes of homelessness: Lockdown poverty, energy poverty, food poverty. The political leadership does not think these are problems. As someone who was long term unemployed and right on the cusp of homelessness as a young guy, I not only know these things, I lived them.
In retrospect, the only good thing Obama did was expand Medicaid. People were simply given health insurance. It's not complicated.
The more the Left panders to alienated and deranged intellectuals, and tries to give credence to their esoteric critiques, the less likely it is to be successful.
Also raising the age a child can stay on their parent's plan to 26. But, yeah, I agree, the technocratic shit is useless. Trump repealed the super controversial individual mandate and nothing happened.
Sure, a toothier mandate would have been better, but a weak mandate is still better than no mandate.
Also, there's a small, but reasonable risk that even a young, healthy person like yourself could have a serious medical issue or major accident and be left destitute or worse if you eschew health insurance.
Right, but if you presume that markets are rational to some degree you're going to have people buying in more likely to get services back. I don't think anyone from the policy side thought the mandates were set up well.
ACA also allowed people who didn't qualify for Medicaid to buy their own health insurance. Prior to that, there were a lot of people who were simply unable to buy health insurance at any price due to pre-existing conditions.
The health care system in the USA is a huge, unruly mess. It's a mish-mash of private and state-run entities, confusing and contradictory regulations and bad incentives.
Expecting that anyone or anything would able to unfuck this whole thing in one go is just ridiculous. It's especially so given the dysfunctional nature of our political system where Joe Lieberman was able to block some very basic things like a Medicare buy in or public option.
Any large and transformative piece of legislation like ACA should go through an iterative process where results are evaluated and legislative changes and corrections are made. But the its opponents refused to allow any such corrections to be made and did everything to break it.
Even still, ACA has improved the lives of millions of Americans in very real ways. Many people have health insurance and access to care that they didn't before. People don't have to worry that their claims will be denied due to pre-existing conditions.
Aside: I'm an active advocate for single-payer health care largely because it seems to be the one left-wing cause that non-leftists are willing to sign on to (also it would be a profoundly transformative improvement to American society).
Consider the efficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles. When you get to single payer, you basically turn the medical system into the DMV, for all it's faults.
Part of the current supply chain problem in California, is the state stopped processing new commercial drivers licenses. Long haul truckers have a high turnover rate, fortunately with a high input ... until the input is blocked by inefficient civil servants, IT departments run by civil servants, and inflexible government regulations. The state anti-pollution laws outlawed all commercial trucks older than 2011, and engines older than 2010. The trucks got sold off to operators in other states, and can't come back. Oh, by the way there's supply chain issues and new trucks can't be assembled due to missing parts.
Well I can't tell you that ... but I can tell you the most profitable product New York Life sells is Cross-Border Health Insurance to Canadians who don't trust their country's health system.
"Do you want your healthcare to be run like the DMV" is an old old right-wing talking point about the potential horrors of single-payer healthcare.
To which my answer is, "Please and thank you"
My wife has several, chronic health conditions, so I see a lot of machinery of the US health care system on a regular basis. It's some combination of disorganized, capricious and opaque on pretty much every level.
The DMV, on the other hand, works pretty well. At least it does here in New York. Everything generally is well-organized and efficient. I have found the staff to be pleasant and helpful as long as you courteous and follow instructions.
Honestly, a doctor's office that ran like the NYS DMV would be amazing.
My friend's wife was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. They're in Kaiser, which is a mini-model of Single Payer System. She went through several rounds of treatment, kept getting worse and worse. Then they were having the 'end of life' discussions. She was 37 years old. Then my friend got her into a Fibromyalgia study, the first thing they concluded was she didn't have Fibromyalgia, but Rheumatoid Arthritis. However the Single Payer system has a test (80% correct BTW) and doctors were tied to that test only as a diagnosis, mandated to that test by their management. It took several letters from the study doctors to convince the Kaiser system to alter her course of treatment.
This is how I picture a single payer system.
Likewise, at the age of 14, I was (am) very tall, I developed appendicitis, went to the pediatrics (peds) ward of Kaiser, sat on the floor in delirium for a few hours, got my 6 minutes with a Dr., got shuttled off through the prescribed rounds, urine, blood, ... then a nurse came racing up and took me to emergency, five hours after entering the hospital. After surgery, they couldn't put me in a bed, because by their management practices anyone under 16 is in peds, all beds in peds are short child's beds, I'm over 6'. Finally they found a single bed room in the adult side where they could place me. I was out of it, but still.
Big management off in Lala land is no different than big government off in Napa partying without masks, whilst the children are fully masked up.
There are other social structures than nations. City states, communes, weird viking anarchy. Feudalism. Not all are even the slightest bit structureless.
I think the commonality of self-care rituals also speaks to how challenging it can be to live in our capitalist society, though.
Regarding the nation-state, though, I'm not sure I would say it is the "apex", but I do think it has its merits, unless I knew what Freddie was proposing as an alternative.
For a very simple of example of why nation states are silly, I’m just going to look at the EPA vs what we could be doing instead.
Let’s say we abolish the EPA along with the nation state, and instead we now have the Lake Erie watershed commons and the Mississippi River watershed commons that are managing the resource at the level it makes sense. And now instead of having multiple states, and even multiple nations in the case of a Great Lake managing a water resource, it’s a group that just encompasses that specific natural resource commons. For things like the air and the ocean; ideally the whole world has a say.
To organize between regions, you use some version of federalism.
Furthermore, just because Lake Erie should be managed as one single common resource, it doesn’t mean that everything else public needs managed at that scale - like roads should probably be pretty localized.
Maybe the public library system should be as worldwide as possible to have the best book sharing capabilities, but the local collection should be chosen by people living close enough to utilize the library. The point here is that multiple governance structures can (and I think should) have overlapping districts, based on the region that makes sense for that function. And those regions should be fluid in the case it makes sense for one to expand or shrink.
None of this stuff requires structurelessness, or not electing leaders: it just doesn’t require some ultimate authority, with a monopoly on violence, ruling over an arbitrarily selected chunk of land - a state. Instead govern things at the level that makes sense, and use federalism and dispute resolution bodies to coordinate between regions and governance organizations.
Probably not what FdB has in mind as state abolition, but it’s hopefully an example to show how it might work.
Yes kind of, but borders and the violence they inspire are pretty bad. And the mono-centric governance schemes we use are not the most effective way we could be organizing.
Lots of other problems with nation states in my opinion as well. Maybe later I will expand on this comment to add more detail/sources.
And why can’t we have a federation of bodies of overlapping jurisdictions instead of Congress and a nation state, with a rigid definition of the size and scope of governance body? Why should we have the executive branch and similar bodies from other governments who can just unilaterally do things that override local governance, without having to get approval from the congress?
You’re right we can’t eliminate human nature - and that makes it even more pressing to have checks on power beyond borders.
I look forward to it! I like the idea of organizations around regional resources that are governed by stakeholders. That makes sense and is far less arbitrary than say state lines.
You make it sound easy, and I agree we could make some changes along the lines you suggest and things would make more sense. A Lake Erie Commission that doesn't answer to the separate state bodies would probably make more sense, but it should always answer to some higher power. Everything eventually flows to the sea, after all.
So, should we put all ultimate authority under the control of a single global government that can step in and punish any locally governing Commission that gets corrupt?
The problem with that, of course, is that individuals almost invariably succumb to avarice, and so if there is just a tiny group at the top with ultimate power, they will do anything they can to crush dissent. But we desperately need dissent, because that's how we learn about injustices at every level of any given system.
Perhaps the most universal and most dangerous human failing is our craving to be right, and so we must encourage and listen to those who are willing to tell us we are wrong. That becomes a bureaucratic nightmare, of course; the potential arguments against any given human activity are functionally infinite.
"But we desperately need dissent, because that's how we learn about injustices at every level of any given system."
Not just injustices, but failures of knowledge, too. See the discussion above about science. Crushing of dissent = Lysenkoism (among other bad outcomes).
Absolutely, I almost wrote "dissent is how we learn, full stop". Listening to people who disagree with us and realizing that they actually have information we don't...that's how learning happens, man. :D
In the Lake Tahoe basin, 75 different NGOs/agencies could tell homeowners they couldn't cut the overgrown pine trees, sweep up the beds of mulching pine needles, nor clear brush ... yet none of these agencies were responsible for the resulting unstoppable Angora Fire which burned 200 homes.
Complicated systems are always hard to manage and benefits and costs are often unevenly distributed among those impacted. That shouldn't rule out the possibility of change for the better, just make us humbler when we consider it. California has always had wildfires. The Angora fire was started by an illegal camper, there is no reason that removing debris would have stopped it, other than your assertion. Do you have any evidence for your beliefs?
Californians have foolishly build a large number of homes in high fire danger areas. Who should pay the cost for when they burn down? Should we continue to provide subsidized insurance so that they can continue to do so?
What about people whose homes have been more likely to burn due to climate change? What should the remedy be for these people?
I don't have all the answers for sure, but when you are in a hole, the first thing you should do is to stop digging.
Yes, yes, yes. I live in an Oak Woodland Forest in the Sierra Nevada Foothills, I know these things, I live them.
But, we have several problems with governance. First off, environmental groups go out and dictate how much tree harvesting we can happen, how much power line clearing, how much debris cleaning. These thing, trees, forest litter, trees too close to power lines are fire ignition and fire fuel. Fires don't burn without fuel.
Climate change has a role too. Actually the Sierra Nevada has cooled, but CO2 has caused greening, about 40% world wide. Add the greening with the reduction of tree harvesting, the reduction of private forest management, the reduction of public forest management, these add up to increased fire danger. In the 70s and 80s, when I was a teen, rangers then we saying the reduction of forest management will create exactly these problems. These management plans were put in place by the people of the State of California. Mostly by activist environmental-political groups, The Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, etc. Of course, its more likely driven by their Lawyers, who stand to make serious bank on suing the state/counties, but that's serious bank that the people paid up front, and now we pay one hundred times more with the results of poor forest management ... driven by big city environmental lobby.
TL;DR: if an environmental org can dictate you can't thin the forest, and fire climbs to the crown (unfightable), who is to blame? I'm pretty sure its not the people who were the root cause of the problem.
It is most likely in most situations that the people closest to the problem have the best answers. There is room in any debate for the voices of experts but ultimately I think decisions should be made closer to the problem, not in Washington or Sacramento.
Not that the award means much, but Nobel prize winning economist Eleanor Ostrom and her husband spent their entire careers theorizing and doing empirical studies on the politics of polycentricity and commons resource management. First, what they found is that much of the time a single center of power or privatization are not the ideal solution to a problem. And second, that the “tragedy of the commons” is a myth, and that they are really only worse than state management or private property if you don’t govern the commons correctly.
In your example, it sounds like principles 3, 4, and 8 were not followed when creating the system, and since we are talking about NGOs I have a feeling it’s even more of them than that.
And also, I’m sure I could dig up individual cases of private property owners or the EPA making horrible environmental decisions. That doesn’t prove that on average, these systems are worse than the alternatives.
A key benefit of states is that they provide GENERAL services. For a given (often, admittedly, arbitrary) piece of territory, the state provides both an external security apparatus and the internal enforcement apparatus.
The external security apparatus is important to prevent people who are not party to the national agreement from coming in and free riding. (E.g., by polluting.)
Internally, there is one state mechanism that provides dispute resolution (courts), one mechanism of punishment (prisons), and often one investigative machine (though in practice sometimes policing is broken up into different agencies). Because they are general in nature, these internal tools can be used over and over again for a variety of problems -- pollution, but also bribery and child abuse and traffic regulation.
So, take Lake Erie. Your proposal seems to be that we abolish Canada and the United States (two countries that haven't gone to war with each other in almost two centuries) and instead form some kind of Lake Erie commons. But you haven't really said what such a body is. Is it just an agreement? Who enters into it? (And what if a relevant stakeholder doesn't want to enter into it?) Who enforces it -- both internally and externally? I.e., does the Lake Erie commons have an army to prevent outsiders from polluting Lake Erie in ways contrary to the agreement? (Who commands that army?) And does it have its own courts, etc. to deter and punish bad behavior by its members?
Let's say it does have some form of external security and internal enforcement. Does it govern everything that happens in and around Lake Erie -- for example, building roads between Toledo and Buffalo? Is there a separate "roadshed commons" in the Lake Erie area? Does it focus only on roads around the Lake? If so, isn't there some arbitrary point where that commons must end? -- which gets you back to arbitrary physical boundaries. And if there is a dispute about roads, does the roadshed commons have to have a police force, court system, and prison system that is separate from the one used for the Lake Erie commons?
If the answer is that each function of government has to supply itself with its own enforcement mechanisms, that starts to sound quite cumbersome and ineffective. It also sounds like a recipe for constant war, as there will be all these little micro-states asserting power in "overlapping" (i.e., potentially conflicting) areas.
If the answer is that they would pool their resources and submit to a higher authority... that starts to sound like a state. "Federalism" could be the answer -- but it's also the one we already have. Any federalist system strong enough to be effective is essentially a state. And a federalist system that can't exert the powers of a state is... the League of Nations. Or the US under the Articles of Confederation.
I see that below you cite to Elinor Ostrom's work. But that work has to do with small, local communities where you have to face your neighbor's disapproval. There is no reason to think that the mechanisms of hyperlocal social pacts will scale -- and, indeed, the very existence of pollution suggests they do not. Perhaps most crucially, those examples also tend to take place within the context of larger states that provide a safe environment within which a certain amount of spontaneous self-organization is possible.
I guess what I'm saying is that nation-states evolved to solve a large number of problems in a reasonably efficient way, and before we replace them we have to understand how they work and why. If nation-states do many things well but some things poorly, IMO it makes sense to reform them rather than abandoning them. Over time, of course, the reform may be so great that what we are left with no longer looks like the entity we started with. But I think it's incredibly risky to START from the premise that the state itself is the problem, and it should be abolished.
On the subject of nation-statehood, while I don’t think I have a complete answer to whether or not its organizing structures are the best, I think I have some ideas that can elucidate its context.
I don’t see nation-statehood as a product of capitalism, so much as it’s a product of ideology (nationalism, in this case). It is a conceptualization of social organization that has scaled with the level of inter-social technology and communication that has become possible as globalization has increased over time. Obviously geography and culture and such things play a part, but in the past, the overriding ideologies of social cohesion have been tribal families, religion, race, etc.
Check out Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities”, if you haven’t before. Huge influence on my thoughts on the matter.
I’m inclined to agree with you that on a level of inevitability, the current nationalistic form or social organization is our current apex, despite how much I disagree with nationalism as an ideology. My curiosity lies with what organizational structures would come after the “dissolution of the state”, in lieu of “the terror of bureaucracy” that would still need to exist within organizing structures in a post-capitalist, globalized world.
I think it's also worth noting that nationalism had a role in the break-up of empires and anti-colonial movements. The relationship with imperialism is fairly complex.
An anecdote I've returned to in my head so many times I think it might just have replaced all my other opinions about current capitalism: A few years ago I had a job interview for a state government lawyer position. One of their interview questions was how I handled "self-care" when work was very stressful. I told them that I worked best when I had a strict work/home balance - I'd stay late at work if needed, work the 14-hour day on a big case deadline, etc., but in order to function I needed work to be work and home to be home, and to leave work at the office whenever I finally left. They straight-up told me that I was supposed to say something like "yoga on lunch break" or "taking a bath." Then implied that I'd told them I didn't intend to work more than the bare minimum.
Message taken! "Self-care" only counts if it's stuff you're buying. Embodiment through consumption!
To your first point about materialism as a core principle, I think the preponderance of self-care rituals and memes is proof that people are struggling to remain embodied in, well, their bodies. When you start to believe that language is reality, that the Internet represents life, is there any wonder so many people are so deeply unhappy?
Also, genuine question: if the nation state was eliminated, how would that not yield the tyranny of structurelessness? I’m not sure I agree that nation-statehood itself is a product of capitalism and imperialism exclusively; seems like it’s an inevitable apex level of organization.
It also leads to people trying to push the river up stream. We didn't address poverty among the elderly by changing the terms we use to describe them or deconstructing the notion of age. We did it through social security, which gave them a bunch of money.
Yes, it becomes simple when you split the problem. Short term homelessness is due to financial difficulty. Long term homelessness is due to mental/drug issues.
When you have energy inflation, people lose the ability to pay their expenses, they lose their homes. When you have general inflation, people lose the ability to pay their expenses, they lose their homes. When you have people sent home due to lockdowns, they lose the ability to pay their expenses, they lose their homes.
We have a trifecta of causes of homelessness: Lockdown poverty, energy poverty, food poverty. The political leadership does not think these are problems. As someone who was long term unemployed and right on the cusp of homelessness as a young guy, I not only know these things, I lived them.
In retrospect, the only good thing Obama did was expand Medicaid. People were simply given health insurance. It's not complicated.
The more the Left panders to alienated and deranged intellectuals, and tries to give credence to their esoteric critiques, the less likely it is to be successful.
Also raising the age a child can stay on their parent's plan to 26. But, yeah, I agree, the technocratic shit is useless. Trump repealed the super controversial individual mandate and nothing happened.
Repealing the individual mandate caused insurance rates to rise. Not catastrophic, but a real and negative effect.
Many of the Obama "technocratic" reforms had real, positive effects for a lot of people.
Designing the system poorly also caused insurance rates to rise.
Nonsense
If you look at European models that this was predicated on, they have teeth and you have to buy insurance.
The forced markets were designed to fail.
If I am a healthy 25 year old and the penalties are minimal for not buying in, the market disincentivizes me from subsidizing the olds.
Everyone acknowledges this.
Sure, a toothier mandate would have been better, but a weak mandate is still better than no mandate.
Also, there's a small, but reasonable risk that even a young, healthy person like yourself could have a serious medical issue or major accident and be left destitute or worse if you eschew health insurance.
Right, but if you presume that markets are rational to some degree you're going to have people buying in more likely to get services back. I don't think anyone from the policy side thought the mandates were set up well.
ACA also allowed people who didn't qualify for Medicaid to buy their own health insurance. Prior to that, there were a lot of people who were simply unable to buy health insurance at any price due to pre-existing conditions.
Yeah but it's still a mess. 'Designed to fail,' as one health policy *expert* said to me.
The health care system in the USA is a huge, unruly mess. It's a mish-mash of private and state-run entities, confusing and contradictory regulations and bad incentives.
Expecting that anyone or anything would able to unfuck this whole thing in one go is just ridiculous. It's especially so given the dysfunctional nature of our political system where Joe Lieberman was able to block some very basic things like a Medicare buy in or public option.
Any large and transformative piece of legislation like ACA should go through an iterative process where results are evaluated and legislative changes and corrections are made. But the its opponents refused to allow any such corrections to be made and did everything to break it.
Even still, ACA has improved the lives of millions of Americans in very real ways. Many people have health insurance and access to care that they didn't before. People don't have to worry that their claims will be denied due to pre-existing conditions.
Yup, I agree. I just think the Medicaid expansion represented >80% of net benefit.
If Dems have another chance I would hope that they could further expand Medicaid to get us close to 100% coverage nationally.
Saying this as someone who does not consider themselves left wing.
The medicaid expansion was huge, but probably not more than 50%.
If I were to choose one thing to add to the ACA, it would be a Medicare buy in/public option.
Aside: I'm an active advocate for single-payer health care largely because it seems to be the one left-wing cause that non-leftists are willing to sign on to (also it would be a profoundly transformative improvement to American society).
Consider the efficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles. When you get to single payer, you basically turn the medical system into the DMV, for all it's faults.
Part of the current supply chain problem in California, is the state stopped processing new commercial drivers licenses. Long haul truckers have a high turnover rate, fortunately with a high input ... until the input is blocked by inefficient civil servants, IT departments run by civil servants, and inflexible government regulations. The state anti-pollution laws outlawed all commercial trucks older than 2011, and engines older than 2010. The trucks got sold off to operators in other states, and can't come back. Oh, by the way there's supply chain issues and new trucks can't be assembled due to missing parts.
There's government efficiency in a nutshell.
Tell me, how efficient is the private health insurance industry?
Significantly more efficient than the NHS, recent horrors of which I could enumerate.
I also have older family members in Canada, the country Bernie stomps his feet and points to.
When they were younger and only needed primary care they would go on and on about how wonderful it was.
Now that they need specialized care for real problems they think Canada is atrocious.
Well I can't tell you that ... but I can tell you the most profitable product New York Life sells is Cross-Border Health Insurance to Canadians who don't trust their country's health system.
"Do you want your healthcare to be run like the DMV" is an old old right-wing talking point about the potential horrors of single-payer healthcare.
To which my answer is, "Please and thank you"
My wife has several, chronic health conditions, so I see a lot of machinery of the US health care system on a regular basis. It's some combination of disorganized, capricious and opaque on pretty much every level.
The DMV, on the other hand, works pretty well. At least it does here in New York. Everything generally is well-organized and efficient. I have found the staff to be pleasant and helpful as long as you courteous and follow instructions.
Honestly, a doctor's office that ran like the NYS DMV would be amazing.
My friend's wife was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. They're in Kaiser, which is a mini-model of Single Payer System. She went through several rounds of treatment, kept getting worse and worse. Then they were having the 'end of life' discussions. She was 37 years old. Then my friend got her into a Fibromyalgia study, the first thing they concluded was she didn't have Fibromyalgia, but Rheumatoid Arthritis. However the Single Payer system has a test (80% correct BTW) and doctors were tied to that test only as a diagnosis, mandated to that test by their management. It took several letters from the study doctors to convince the Kaiser system to alter her course of treatment.
This is how I picture a single payer system.
Likewise, at the age of 14, I was (am) very tall, I developed appendicitis, went to the pediatrics (peds) ward of Kaiser, sat on the floor in delirium for a few hours, got my 6 minutes with a Dr., got shuttled off through the prescribed rounds, urine, blood, ... then a nurse came racing up and took me to emergency, five hours after entering the hospital. After surgery, they couldn't put me in a bed, because by their management practices anyone under 16 is in peds, all beds in peds are short child's beds, I'm over 6'. Finally they found a single bed room in the adult side where they could place me. I was out of it, but still.
Big management off in Lala land is no different than big government off in Napa partying without masks, whilst the children are fully masked up.
I would state that as "we forcibly took money from the people, with a promise to repay it later."
And it was paid later and somewhat redistributed in a way that greatly reduced poverty among seniors.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-lifts-more-americans-above-poverty-than-any-other-program
There are other social structures than nations. City states, communes, weird viking anarchy. Feudalism. Not all are even the slightest bit structureless.
True. I guess we could try weird viking anarchy on in the U.S. and see how it works.
I think the commonality of self-care rituals also speaks to how challenging it can be to live in our capitalist society, though.
Regarding the nation-state, though, I'm not sure I would say it is the "apex", but I do think it has its merits, unless I knew what Freddie was proposing as an alternative.
For a very simple of example of why nation states are silly, I’m just going to look at the EPA vs what we could be doing instead.
Let’s say we abolish the EPA along with the nation state, and instead we now have the Lake Erie watershed commons and the Mississippi River watershed commons that are managing the resource at the level it makes sense. And now instead of having multiple states, and even multiple nations in the case of a Great Lake managing a water resource, it’s a group that just encompasses that specific natural resource commons. For things like the air and the ocean; ideally the whole world has a say.
To organize between regions, you use some version of federalism.
Furthermore, just because Lake Erie should be managed as one single common resource, it doesn’t mean that everything else public needs managed at that scale - like roads should probably be pretty localized.
Maybe the public library system should be as worldwide as possible to have the best book sharing capabilities, but the local collection should be chosen by people living close enough to utilize the library. The point here is that multiple governance structures can (and I think should) have overlapping districts, based on the region that makes sense for that function. And those regions should be fluid in the case it makes sense for one to expand or shrink.
None of this stuff requires structurelessness, or not electing leaders: it just doesn’t require some ultimate authority, with a monopoly on violence, ruling over an arbitrarily selected chunk of land - a state. Instead govern things at the level that makes sense, and use federalism and dispute resolution bodies to coordinate between regions and governance organizations.
Probably not what FdB has in mind as state abolition, but it’s hopefully an example to show how it might work.
Isn't this kind of what we already have?
Yes kind of, but borders and the violence they inspire are pretty bad. And the mono-centric governance schemes we use are not the most effective way we could be organizing.
Lots of other problems with nation states in my opinion as well. Maybe later I will expand on this comment to add more detail/sources.
And why can’t we have a federation of bodies of overlapping jurisdictions instead of Congress and a nation state, with a rigid definition of the size and scope of governance body? Why should we have the executive branch and similar bodies from other governments who can just unilaterally do things that override local governance, without having to get approval from the congress?
You’re right we can’t eliminate human nature - and that makes it even more pressing to have checks on power beyond borders.
If I had a nickel for every time someone fought a battle over Toledo. Lets just move forward people. Leave the toledoans in peace.
ROFL.
I look forward to it! I like the idea of organizations around regional resources that are governed by stakeholders. That makes sense and is far less arbitrary than say state lines.
You make it sound easy, and I agree we could make some changes along the lines you suggest and things would make more sense. A Lake Erie Commission that doesn't answer to the separate state bodies would probably make more sense, but it should always answer to some higher power. Everything eventually flows to the sea, after all.
Right now we have this going on: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth
So, should we put all ultimate authority under the control of a single global government that can step in and punish any locally governing Commission that gets corrupt?
The problem with that, of course, is that individuals almost invariably succumb to avarice, and so if there is just a tiny group at the top with ultimate power, they will do anything they can to crush dissent. But we desperately need dissent, because that's how we learn about injustices at every level of any given system.
Perhaps the most universal and most dangerous human failing is our craving to be right, and so we must encourage and listen to those who are willing to tell us we are wrong. That becomes a bureaucratic nightmare, of course; the potential arguments against any given human activity are functionally infinite.
"But we desperately need dissent, because that's how we learn about injustices at every level of any given system."
Not just injustices, but failures of knowledge, too. See the discussion above about science. Crushing of dissent = Lysenkoism (among other bad outcomes).
Absolutely, I almost wrote "dissent is how we learn, full stop". Listening to people who disagree with us and realizing that they actually have information we don't...that's how learning happens, man. :D
Here's the disaster in that idea.
In the Lake Tahoe basin, 75 different NGOs/agencies could tell homeowners they couldn't cut the overgrown pine trees, sweep up the beds of mulching pine needles, nor clear brush ... yet none of these agencies were responsible for the resulting unstoppable Angora Fire which burned 200 homes.
Complicated systems are always hard to manage and benefits and costs are often unevenly distributed among those impacted. That shouldn't rule out the possibility of change for the better, just make us humbler when we consider it. California has always had wildfires. The Angora fire was started by an illegal camper, there is no reason that removing debris would have stopped it, other than your assertion. Do you have any evidence for your beliefs?
Californians have foolishly build a large number of homes in high fire danger areas. Who should pay the cost for when they burn down? Should we continue to provide subsidized insurance so that they can continue to do so?
What about people whose homes have been more likely to burn due to climate change? What should the remedy be for these people?
I don't have all the answers for sure, but when you are in a hole, the first thing you should do is to stop digging.
Yes, yes, yes. I live in an Oak Woodland Forest in the Sierra Nevada Foothills, I know these things, I live them.
But, we have several problems with governance. First off, environmental groups go out and dictate how much tree harvesting we can happen, how much power line clearing, how much debris cleaning. These thing, trees, forest litter, trees too close to power lines are fire ignition and fire fuel. Fires don't burn without fuel.
Climate change has a role too. Actually the Sierra Nevada has cooled, but CO2 has caused greening, about 40% world wide. Add the greening with the reduction of tree harvesting, the reduction of private forest management, the reduction of public forest management, these add up to increased fire danger. In the 70s and 80s, when I was a teen, rangers then we saying the reduction of forest management will create exactly these problems. These management plans were put in place by the people of the State of California. Mostly by activist environmental-political groups, The Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, etc. Of course, its more likely driven by their Lawyers, who stand to make serious bank on suing the state/counties, but that's serious bank that the people paid up front, and now we pay one hundred times more with the results of poor forest management ... driven by big city environmental lobby.
TL;DR: if an environmental org can dictate you can't thin the forest, and fire climbs to the crown (unfightable), who is to blame? I'm pretty sure its not the people who were the root cause of the problem.
It is most likely in most situations that the people closest to the problem have the best answers. There is room in any debate for the voices of experts but ultimately I think decisions should be made closer to the problem, not in Washington or Sacramento.
The problem is the Sierra Club Lawyers based in San Francisco want to earn money by suing the state in Sacramento.
Not that the award means much, but Nobel prize winning economist Eleanor Ostrom and her husband spent their entire careers theorizing and doing empirical studies on the politics of polycentricity and commons resource management. First, what they found is that much of the time a single center of power or privatization are not the ideal solution to a problem. And second, that the “tragedy of the commons” is a myth, and that they are really only worse than state management or private property if you don’t govern the commons correctly.
Unfortunately, as far as I know all of their work is pay walled in academic journals or requires buying a book. But here is a link to her 8 principles for effective commons governance. http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons
In your example, it sounds like principles 3, 4, and 8 were not followed when creating the system, and since we are talking about NGOs I have a feeling it’s even more of them than that.
And also, I’m sure I could dig up individual cases of private property owners or the EPA making horrible environmental decisions. That doesn’t prove that on average, these systems are worse than the alternatives.
A key benefit of states is that they provide GENERAL services. For a given (often, admittedly, arbitrary) piece of territory, the state provides both an external security apparatus and the internal enforcement apparatus.
The external security apparatus is important to prevent people who are not party to the national agreement from coming in and free riding. (E.g., by polluting.)
Internally, there is one state mechanism that provides dispute resolution (courts), one mechanism of punishment (prisons), and often one investigative machine (though in practice sometimes policing is broken up into different agencies). Because they are general in nature, these internal tools can be used over and over again for a variety of problems -- pollution, but also bribery and child abuse and traffic regulation.
So, take Lake Erie. Your proposal seems to be that we abolish Canada and the United States (two countries that haven't gone to war with each other in almost two centuries) and instead form some kind of Lake Erie commons. But you haven't really said what such a body is. Is it just an agreement? Who enters into it? (And what if a relevant stakeholder doesn't want to enter into it?) Who enforces it -- both internally and externally? I.e., does the Lake Erie commons have an army to prevent outsiders from polluting Lake Erie in ways contrary to the agreement? (Who commands that army?) And does it have its own courts, etc. to deter and punish bad behavior by its members?
Let's say it does have some form of external security and internal enforcement. Does it govern everything that happens in and around Lake Erie -- for example, building roads between Toledo and Buffalo? Is there a separate "roadshed commons" in the Lake Erie area? Does it focus only on roads around the Lake? If so, isn't there some arbitrary point where that commons must end? -- which gets you back to arbitrary physical boundaries. And if there is a dispute about roads, does the roadshed commons have to have a police force, court system, and prison system that is separate from the one used for the Lake Erie commons?
If the answer is that each function of government has to supply itself with its own enforcement mechanisms, that starts to sound quite cumbersome and ineffective. It also sounds like a recipe for constant war, as there will be all these little micro-states asserting power in "overlapping" (i.e., potentially conflicting) areas.
If the answer is that they would pool their resources and submit to a higher authority... that starts to sound like a state. "Federalism" could be the answer -- but it's also the one we already have. Any federalist system strong enough to be effective is essentially a state. And a federalist system that can't exert the powers of a state is... the League of Nations. Or the US under the Articles of Confederation.
I see that below you cite to Elinor Ostrom's work. But that work has to do with small, local communities where you have to face your neighbor's disapproval. There is no reason to think that the mechanisms of hyperlocal social pacts will scale -- and, indeed, the very existence of pollution suggests they do not. Perhaps most crucially, those examples also tend to take place within the context of larger states that provide a safe environment within which a certain amount of spontaneous self-organization is possible.
I guess what I'm saying is that nation-states evolved to solve a large number of problems in a reasonably efficient way, and before we replace them we have to understand how they work and why. If nation-states do many things well but some things poorly, IMO it makes sense to reform them rather than abandoning them. Over time, of course, the reform may be so great that what we are left with no longer looks like the entity we started with. But I think it's incredibly risky to START from the premise that the state itself is the problem, and it should be abolished.
On the subject of nation-statehood, while I don’t think I have a complete answer to whether or not its organizing structures are the best, I think I have some ideas that can elucidate its context.
I don’t see nation-statehood as a product of capitalism, so much as it’s a product of ideology (nationalism, in this case). It is a conceptualization of social organization that has scaled with the level of inter-social technology and communication that has become possible as globalization has increased over time. Obviously geography and culture and such things play a part, but in the past, the overriding ideologies of social cohesion have been tribal families, religion, race, etc.
Check out Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities”, if you haven’t before. Huge influence on my thoughts on the matter.
I’m inclined to agree with you that on a level of inevitability, the current nationalistic form or social organization is our current apex, despite how much I disagree with nationalism as an ideology. My curiosity lies with what organizational structures would come after the “dissolution of the state”, in lieu of “the terror of bureaucracy” that would still need to exist within organizing structures in a post-capitalist, globalized world.
Thanks for the book rec. I’ll look into it.
I think it's also worth noting that nationalism had a role in the break-up of empires and anti-colonial movements. The relationship with imperialism is fairly complex.
An anecdote I've returned to in my head so many times I think it might just have replaced all my other opinions about current capitalism: A few years ago I had a job interview for a state government lawyer position. One of their interview questions was how I handled "self-care" when work was very stressful. I told them that I worked best when I had a strict work/home balance - I'd stay late at work if needed, work the 14-hour day on a big case deadline, etc., but in order to function I needed work to be work and home to be home, and to leave work at the office whenever I finally left. They straight-up told me that I was supposed to say something like "yoga on lunch break" or "taking a bath." Then implied that I'd told them I didn't intend to work more than the bare minimum.
Message taken! "Self-care" only counts if it's stuff you're buying. Embodiment through consumption!