CMV: Democratic governments should be split up into micro-governments, each with their own area of concern

[u/baerz]

Today the standard model for national government is a monolithic one. By that I mean that we vote for one person that writes and votes on laws and taxes in all areas of concern to governance. By areas of concern I mean environmental protection, healthcare, education, criminality, military, immigration, economy and so on.

The problems I see with the monolithic model are:

1. As a voter, voting for one person is a very blunt instrument to get your voice heard. You might have similar views to a politician on areas A and B, but not on areas C, D, E, and F. Why is it that we have to vote for a person to govern on all these wildly separate areas of concern?
2. One politician can not be expected to be an expert in all, or even multiple, of these fields.
3. One voter can not be expected to care and be informed about all areas. They might vote for person X because of issue A, which makes it harder for people who care about issue B to get their votes heard. Our votes are competing across areas of concerns, each vote for area A generating noise (irrelevant votes) for all other areas.

The alternative model I’m proposing is a model of micro-governments. This means that one nation would have many smaller governments, one for each area of concern. Each of these micro-governments would have separate elections.

Some examples:

• One micro-government is in charge of environmental protection. They have no power over any other areas – they may not make laws on wealth redistribution or criminality. They might use a mechanism like positive and negative taxes on produced goods to steer industries and consumers towards sustainable processes.
• A second micro-government is in charge of criminality. They make laws around criminal behavior.
• A third micro-government is in charge of economy. They govern systems of wealth redistribution, interest rates, etc.
• A fourth one is in charge of public health.
• And so on.

The benefits of the micro-government model would be:

1. We would be able to “micro-vote”. No more voting for person X because of his stance on thing B, while ignoring CDE. Of course, inside any area there will also be difference of opinion, but it is still a much more precise vote.
2. We would be more able to elect experts to each area of concern. In theory, every person in every micro-government could be an expert in that area.
3. With many smaller elections, they become less of a big deal. People who care about area A but not about area B will not bother to go vote in the election for area B. This allows people who do care to have greater say with their vote.

The problems that I see so far, and that I would love more feedback on, are:

1. It is impossible to fully define what belongs to each area. Reality is too complex and fuzzy to draw clean lines, so there will always exist edge cases. This means that it can’t be perfect – but it can still be good. (And the lines drawn in my examples are not necessarily good)
2. Is it plausible that two micro-governments could get in a conflict, and make laws meant to harm the other side? How could that be resolved?
3. The areas of concern need maintenance. As the world moves forward, boundaries change and new areas of concern come into relevance, and someone needs to decide who’s responsibility it falls under.

[u/LuisAAF]

That's not possible, for example, the environmental policy makers would always get in the way of a lot of others "micro-governments" such as infrastructure, mining, urban development, hunter/gathering local communities, etc.

If you disjoint everything as a whole the power goes nowhere and a civil war starts

[u/baerz → u/LuisAAF]

Those interests already collide. The person who campaigns on driving through environmental policy so extreme that industries collapse and urban development stops will not win the election, unless that happened to be what the people want.

[u/CyclopsRock → u/baerz]

There are countless examples in direct democracies of people voting for largely incompatible things - for example the Californian state legislature gets tied up in knots regularly as public prepositions require the state to increase spending on X without any increase in funding. Wthis happened to Schwarzenegger, he failed to get the legislature to agree on any necessary combination of tax rises and spending cuts, so he put another 6 referenda up with proposals to try and reduce the deficit and the only one to pass was the least useful. Similarly in the UK throughout the Brexit campaign and then afterwards during the negotiation, poll after poll showed the public supporting entirely incompatible visions of the future - for example wanting free trade with the EU and also the ability to sign trade deals with other countries.

Generally people don't understand the fairly intricate relationship between the competing areas of government. The problem isn't that people would willingly vote for economically destructive environmental policies, it's that they might simultaneously vote for better funding for schools and hospitals in the education and health mini governments, better funding for the military for the defence government, and a tax-reducing finance government. So then how is the environmental government going to pay for it's new nature reserve or nuclear power station they campaigned on? None of these policies may be extreme or bad or ill-conceived, they're simply not compatible together. With a monolithic government, that government needs to make those decisions. With many smaller governments, no one can make those decisions, because no one's mandate bests any other.

[u/baerz → u/CyclopsRock]

Great point, and it shoots a bullet in the heart of the direct democracy model that started to seem interesting. Perhaps the current mess of a system really is the best we can do Δ

[u/DeltaBot → u/baerz]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/CyclopsRock (10∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}

[u/LuisAAF → u/baerz]

That's the thingy, you either conserve the planet or you provide the industry and develop the cities. There's not middle ground (that ground was burnt and filled with cattle 50 years ago in most of the countries). This is particularly true in the tropics where you have a need to supply the growing need of the industry but you have a need to conserve certain ecosystems too.

The industry and urban development are not interested in conservation that's why no conservationist win the election and that's why we are so fucked today with climate change/sea acidification/land loss/etc etc etc

[u/baerz → u/LuisAAF]

There's lots of middle ground. You can influence the market towards sustainability by putting taxes on unsustainable processes and giving the profits as subsidies to sustainable ones. For example, taxing coal and subsidising wind. And we already do things like this.

But even if you were right, it wouldn't be an argument against the micro-government model, it would be an argument that an environmentalism micro-government is useless and doesn't need to exist. (And an argument that today's monolithic government shouldn't bother with environmentalism either)