> You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power. A local power

> You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power. A local power is still a centralized power compared to a system where everyone has to agree on a decision. In this case, priests and local police were instrumental in creating and maintaining the environments where these things happened. And I seem to recall that there was a certain international organization putting people on trial and then burning them. Your argument is basically that we need to set up some people with way more power than other people, so they can protect the least powerful people in the society from abuse. Then we set up rules and hope people in power do what they're "supposed to". Sometimes that works out for some people, but as a general principle it's completely backwards. A better idea would be to distribute power more equally to everyone, so that they don't have to wait around for the favor of the powerful. All these civil rights examples seem to conveniently gloss over the century when our federal government explicitly supported slavery and the decades when that government did nothing about lynching. That's not because the federal government wasn't powerful enough - it commands the armed forces. It was because the constituency affected by these things didn't have enough power to make the government change it's policies.