King Trump shows why we should be wary of overly-centralized government
On account of the fact that the federal government sent troops into southern states during the 1960s to protect school-integrating students, the left has tended to mistakenly believe that “states rights” is reactionary/indefensible and federalism is superior.
There are some times when that may be the case, but as a decentralist my inclination is to distrust the concentration of power and authority in the leviathan-scale government of the hypertrophied U.S. nation-state. This nation-state is too big, it’s too enamored of geopolitical hegemony, its seat-of-authority is too remote. I’m not crazy about sending a quarter of my income to slosh around in vats somewhere under Washington, DC, siphoned into some good expenditures, yes, but also into some terrible ones (like militarism). I’m not anti-tax, but I’d rather see allocation decisions made closer-to-home.
The U.S. president is way too much like a king. The surreptitious lobbyists who infest D.C. have way too much influence. Congressional legislation of thousands of pages contains pork that none of us could conceivably track, no less resist. It shouldn’t be surprising that economic interventions tend to favor the wealth/power elites.
I agree with E. F. Schumacher that we should decentralize into bioregions and get back to community-based economics . . .
[below paraphrased from the Introduction to E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful]
Schumacher’s work belongs to that subterranean tradition of organic and decentralist economics whose major spokesmen include Prince Kropotkin, Gustav Landauer, Tolstoy, William Morris, Gandhi, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Goodman. It’s based on a communitarian ethos, distinguished from orthodox socialism and capitalism by insisting that the scale of organization must be treated as an independent and primary problem. While closely affiliated with socialist values, it nonetheless prefers mixed to “pure” economic systems. It is therefore hospitable to many forms of free enterprise and private ownership, provided always that the size of private enterprise is not so large as to divorce ownership from personal involvement and community oversight, which is, of course, now the rule in most of the world’s administered capitalisms. Bigness is its nemesis, whether the bigness is that of public or private bureaucracies, because from bigness comes impersonality, insensitivity, and a lust to concentrate abstract power. Hence, Schumacher’s title, Small Is Beautiful. He might just as well have said “small is free, efficient, creative, enjoyable, and enduring.”
Reaching backward, this tradition embraces communal, handicraft, tribal, gild, and village lifestyles as old as the neolithic cultures. In that sense, it is not an ideology at all, but a wisdom gathered from historical experience. In our own time, it has reemerged spontaneously in the communitarian experiments and honest craftsmanship of the counterculture, where we find so many resourceful efforts among young dropouts to make do in simple, free, and self-respecting ways amid the criminal waste and managerial congestion. How strange that this renewed interest in ancient ways of livelihood and community should reappear even as our operations researchers begin to conceive their most ambitious dreams of cybernated glory. And yet how appropriate. For if there is to be a humanly tolerable world on this dark side of the emergent technocratic world system, it will surely have to flower from this still fragile renaissance of organic husbandry, communal households, and do-it-yourself technics whose first faint outlines we can trace through the pages of publications like the Whole Earth Catalog and the Mother Earth News. And if that renaissance is to have an economist to make its case before the world, E. F. Schumacher is the man. Already his brilliant essay “Buddhist Economics” has become a much read and often reprinted staple of the underground press. It would be no exaggeration to call him the Keynes of postindustrial society, by which I mean (and Schumacher means) a society that has left behind its lethal obsession with those very megasystems of production and distribution which Keynes tried so hard to make manageable.
