5 ms·

They do have one of the last truly representative governments left in the world though. Really cool system that hasnt been captured by big money interests and s

• larsiusprime 10y ago
  As a dual Norwegian/American citizen, I would posit that a lot of that has to do with scale (ie, scale is necessary, though certainly not sufficient). The Norwegian government is on the same scale as many American municipal governments! And then you have local governments under that, that are obviously much smaller and thus even more hyper-local than many of their American counterparts. The larger your state gets, the more layers of abstraction and distance you get between the ruling class and the population, the more you dilute the power of an individual vote, and decrease the sense of connection between ruler and ruled.
  • sametmax 10y ago
    Indeed, and this is why natality is an important topic for democracy. It's not just a matter of resources. Everything is easier to manage with less people, meaning more transparency, fairness and equality. The fact that we are not over populated doesn't mean we should not think seriously about decreasing our population size. It's probably a requirement to make the system evolve.
    • larsiusprime 10y ago
      An alternate interpretation is that devolving political control to the smallest possible unit is an available option regardless of a land mass' total population size.
      • aedron 10y ago
        Exactly, yet somehow larger and larger entities are naturally assumed to be the goal. Probably driven by the same capitalist logic the drives business.
      • sametmax 10y ago
        Then you stack levels of indirections, which is another source of problems.
    • dagss 10y ago
      However well Norwegian government works, it cannot do much about profits increasingly escaping to multinational megacorps who are taxed in a tax haven. Since corporations are global and sometimes more powerful than states, there are real disadvantages with going for more power to local governments.
      • sametmax 10y ago
        A more just society means a harder life for profit driven structures. That's just the way it is : the more you want to benefit all, the less you can concentrate resources.
  • digi_owl 10y ago
    And why many of us are fearful of becoming a EU member, and strongly dislike how much our politicians bend over backwards to implement EU directives via the EEA agreement.