4 ms·

There are many nice pragmatic ideas. But which king will give away the throne for greater good? For example Germany is federation with 16 states and 16 administ

by lnsru 8mo ago

There are many nice pragmatic ideas. But which king will give away the throne for greater good? For example Germany is federation with 16 states and 16 administrations. The country could shrink to two administration areas like South and North and become 8 times more efficient. Never gonna happen! To have this on continental level is even more never gonna happen probability.

alansaber 8mo ago
Agreed, there needs to be an immediate existential threat for European countries to give up their autonomy
TitaRusell 8mo ago
Every country in the EU was created through warfare. Germany only unified because Prussia had the guns. And the compromise was the Federation of Germany.
- marcusverus 8mo ago
  Basically all centralization of political power in human history has been accomplished by force. See Rome, Persia, Germany, USSR, etc. etc. etc. Even the USA's transition from a union of united States to The United States occurred under force of arms. Sadly, this centralization of political power has been a disaster for mankind IMO. Even as we've transitioned from monarchies to democracies over the last few centuries, the trend has largely resulted in the replacement of actual, determinative choices with merely having a millionth of a share of a choice. Not a determinative choice, but a say. Consider the holy roman empire, for example. [0] Under this scheme of decentralization, people had an actual choice of their government. Say you were a merchant in Mühlhausen circa 1700, and you found yourself in opposition to your local government. You could simply move a short distance to a different area and be beholdened to an entirely different government. You'd have 50 choices within 100 miles! While it's true that the HRE was all under the administration of one government, but it was extremely weak. It lacked, for example, the ability to levy direct taxes. After unification in 1870, the same merchant would've had to move much further to escape his government, and his options had been diminished by 95%. After European unification, he would have to travel to another continent! While democracy has given us control of our governments in theory, in practice the "choice" it offers is much less empowering than the determinative choice afforded by decentralization. The larger our political entities grow, the more diluted our "say" and the fewer full choices are available to us. In the United States, we have less than 1/100,000,000th of a share of the choice in our chief executive! While democracy is obviously preferable to Aristocracy/Monarchy/Tyranny, on it's own it is still only a marginal improvement. At worst, you can still end up with 49.9% of people living under a government they oppose. Decentralization solves this lingering problem, because it allows people to self-sort in and out of countries they don't like, allowing for people who truly despise their governments to choose themselves a new government. In the absence of such a safety valve, people are forced into a zero-sum struggle for power. It is rule or be ruled. Dominate or be dominated. We're seeing this in the United States right now. We're not at each other's throats because we hate each other. Not even because we hate each other's politics in the abstract. We're at each other's throats because neither side is content to be ruled by the other. The same reason that centralized entities only arise by force is the same reason they fall apart in the end. People don't want them. They don't want to be dominated. Centralization of political power forces people into an inescapable struggle for power. It is the enemy of peace and tranquility, and a blight on humanity. [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Droysens-26.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Droysens-26.jpg
  - ethbr1 8mo ago
    How do you account for the increased competitiveness of economies of scale in a globalized economy with free international trade in your recommendation?
    - marcusverus 8mo ago
      I'm not quite sure what you mean by "economies of scale", which is normally a benefit of mass production. It's true that centralization of political power can bring economic benefits, but the economic benefits stem from the elimination of economic/trade friction, not directly from the centralization of power per se. Which is to say that (most of) these economic benefits can be had without incurring the non-economic costs of political centralization.
      - ethbr1 8mo ago
        100 separate political units, each with their own version of an industry, are by their nature less economically efficient than one entity that's 100x as big. Consequently, industry in 1 of those 100 units is always going to be outcompeted, at scale, by industry in the 100x as big entity. Given more or less global free trade, that leaves the smaller entities economically competitive at... what? Why wouldn't business inherently flow to larger entities?
        marcusverus 8mo ago
        Luckily we don't have to figure this out from first principles, we can just look at the data. 9/10 countries with the highest GDP per capita have populations under ~7 million, and the vast majority of the top 20 do as well. This is true both in PPP and nominal dollars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
  - tornadofart 8mo ago
    I believe your view of what democracy is tainted by what USA democracy looks like. Quite a few countries have more or less successful parlamentary democracies, where winner-takes-all situations are avoided by design. In these, a party rarely has the upper hand and coalitions are the only means of reaching power. The agreements these coalitions forge to govern are a proxy of the compromises all societies have to agree on to function.
aktenlage 8mo ago
> The country could shrink to two administration areas like South and North and become 8 times more efficient In Germany, we call unsubstantiated calculations like this "Milchmädchenrechnung" (milkmaid calculation).
- PurpleRamen 8mo ago
  It's not unsubstantiated. The federalism is a well known expensive hindrace for any progress. Everyone doing their own shit also means everyone has to fight it out with everyone on how they work together. There are good reasons for this, but the price is also obvious.
  - aktenlage 8mo ago
    Thinking the number of federal states is equivalent with an efficiency factor is utterly unsubstantiated. There may be a correlation (or not, I don't claim anything here), but `efficiency_gain == federal states before / federal states after` is pure fantasy.
- mbirth 8mo ago
  Is it, though? What’s so different between Thuringia and Saxony that they both need separate administrations? Why is it, that when you move between states, your tax office needs to print out your records, send them to your new state's office, only for some poor soul to type them into their system because each state uses a different system without any common exchange format? Make it make sense!
  - lnsru 8mo ago
    And there is Saarland too… And there are hundreds of electrical grid operators with different hardware requirements. In my eyes efficiency looks different.
  - aktenlage 8mo ago
    > Is it, though? Yes it is a Milchmädchenrechnung. I do not want to argue whether fusing states makes sense or not. This isn't even a moral condemnation of the original poster. All I say is that the equation `efficiency_gain == federal states before / federal states after` is completely made up.
fileeditview 8mo ago
So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption. How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they? Sure, federalism produces some overhead and inefficiencies. But it also has many benefits. Especially to avoid too much power in one hand but also others. E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better and adapt the other systems (if you actually do that is another question). People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states. Just merging all into one is just a recipe to fail epically.
- ethbr1 8mo ago
  Afaik, the bulk of the US' federal centralization of commerce is based on the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution [0], which based on reading (and more so on precedent) grants the US federal legislature the ability to regulate commerce between states. As most commerce crosses state boundaries, this de facto allows the federal legislature to define and enforce regulatory standards. In practice, it's more nuanced and subject to continual back-and-forth arguing. E.g. California and Texas trying to decide their own standards, by virtue of their economic size, then hashing it out with the federal government in court. I'm not sure what the EU regulatory cornerstone equivalent of the Commerce Clause would be. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause
- PurpleRamen 8mo ago
  > So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption. The division is on purpose, to divide power and make it harder for a second Hitler to rise again. And the calculations are no assumption, it's a common topic in Germany how much additional time and money this all costs. > How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they? Why do you assume they are different? Or better? > E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better You can also have this without federalism, without maintaining a dozen different administrations which are all doing the same in different flavour. > People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states. Compared to Europe, people in the USA are not that different per state. At least not on the level where individual administration is necessary. The different groups are mainly independent of the state they are living in.
BSVogler 8mo ago
The federation in Germany is one lesson from the Nazis. Centralised power makes it easier for fascism or totalitarian governments to emerge. Recent example is the US with the instrument of executive orders. So it is deliberately designed to keep Germany small.
nicbou 8mo ago
I work around German bureaucracy, and the loss of efficiency is real. Every state creates its own bureaucracy and its own software. Different people, departments and offices that rarely combine efforts, barely talk to each other, and never share data. I was told that this decentralisation of power was a deliberate effort after Nazism, but as far as I know such issues were endemic in the Nazi government and military. Germany really is a union of small states, and perhaps never fully changed that. This is slowly changing though. There is a visible effort to build software and processes at the federal level.

by lnsru 8mo ago

alansaber 8mo ago

Agreed, there needs to be an immediate existential threat for European countries to give up their autonomy

TitaRusell 8mo ago

Every country in the EU was created through warfare. Germany only unified because Prussia had the guns. And the compromise was the Federation of Germany.

marcusverus 8mo ago
Basically all centralization of political power in human history has been accomplished by force. See Rome, Persia, Germany, USSR, etc. etc. etc. Even the USA's transition from a union of united States to The United States occurred under force of arms. Sadly, this centralization of political power has been a disaster for mankind IMO. Even as we've transitioned from monarchies to democracies over the last few centuries, the trend has largely resulted in the replacement of actual, determinative choices with merely having a millionth of a share of a choice. Not a determinative choice, but a say. Consider the holy roman empire, for example. [0] Under this scheme of decentralization, people had an actual choice of their government. Say you were a merchant in Mühlhausen circa 1700, and you found yourself in opposition to your local government. You could simply move a short distance to a different area and be beholdened to an entirely different government. You'd have 50 choices within 100 miles! While it's true that the HRE was all under the administration of one government, but it was extremely weak. It lacked, for example, the ability to levy direct taxes. After unification in 1870, the same merchant would've had to move much further to escape his government, and his options had been diminished by 95%. After European unification, he would have to travel to another continent! While democracy has given us control of our governments in theory, in practice the "choice" it offers is much less empowering than the determinative choice afforded by decentralization. The larger our political entities grow, the more diluted our "say" and the fewer full choices are available to us. In the United States, we have less than 1/100,000,000th of a share of the choice in our chief executive! While democracy is obviously preferable to Aristocracy/Monarchy/Tyranny, on it's own it is still only a marginal improvement. At worst, you can still end up with 49.9% of people living under a government they oppose. Decentralization solves this lingering problem, because it allows people to self-sort in and out of countries they don't like, allowing for people who truly despise their governments to choose themselves a new government. In the absence of such a safety valve, people are forced into a zero-sum struggle for power. It is rule or be ruled. Dominate or be dominated. We're seeing this in the United States right now. We're not at each other's throats because we hate each other. Not even because we hate each other's politics in the abstract. We're at each other's throats because neither side is content to be ruled by the other. The same reason that centralized entities only arise by force is the same reason they fall apart in the end. People don't want them. They don't want to be dominated. Centralization of political power forces people into an inescapable struggle for power. It is the enemy of peace and tranquility, and a blight on humanity. [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Droysens-26.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Droysens-26.jpg
- ethbr1 8mo ago
  How do you account for the increased competitiveness of economies of scale in a globalized economy with free international trade in your recommendation?
  - marcusverus 8mo ago
    I'm not quite sure what you mean by "economies of scale", which is normally a benefit of mass production. It's true that centralization of political power can bring economic benefits, but the economic benefits stem from the elimination of economic/trade friction, not directly from the centralization of power per se. Which is to say that (most of) these economic benefits can be had without incurring the non-economic costs of political centralization.
    - ethbr1 8mo ago
      100 separate political units, each with their own version of an industry, are by their nature less economically efficient than one entity that's 100x as big. Consequently, industry in 1 of those 100 units is always going to be outcompeted, at scale, by industry in the 100x as big entity. Given more or less global free trade, that leaves the smaller entities economically competitive at... what? Why wouldn't business inherently flow to larger entities?
      - marcusverus 8mo ago
        Luckily we don't have to figure this out from first principles, we can just look at the data. 9/10 countries with the highest GDP per capita have populations under ~7 million, and the vast majority of the top 20 do as well. This is true both in PPP and nominal dollars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
- tornadofart 8mo ago
  I believe your view of what democracy is tainted by what USA democracy looks like. Quite a few countries have more or less successful parlamentary democracies, where winner-takes-all situations are avoided by design. In these, a party rarely has the upper hand and coalitions are the only means of reaching power. The agreements these coalitions forge to govern are a proxy of the compromises all societies have to agree on to function.

aktenlage 8mo ago

> The country could shrink to two administration areas like South and North and become 8 times more efficient In Germany, we call unsubstantiated calculations like this "Milchmädchenrechnung" (milkmaid calculation).

PurpleRamen 8mo ago
It's not unsubstantiated. The federalism is a well known expensive hindrace for any progress. Everyone doing their own shit also means everyone has to fight it out with everyone on how they work together. There are good reasons for this, but the price is also obvious.
- aktenlage 8mo ago
  Thinking the number of federal states is equivalent with an efficiency factor is utterly unsubstantiated. There may be a correlation (or not, I don't claim anything here), but `efficiency_gain == federal states before / federal states after` is pure fantasy.
mbirth 8mo ago
Is it, though? What’s so different between Thuringia and Saxony that they both need separate administrations? Why is it, that when you move between states, your tax office needs to print out your records, send them to your new state's office, only for some poor soul to type them into their system because each state uses a different system without any common exchange format? Make it make sense!
- lnsru 8mo ago
  And there is Saarland too… And there are hundreds of electrical grid operators with different hardware requirements. In my eyes efficiency looks different.
- aktenlage 8mo ago
  > Is it, though? Yes it is a Milchmädchenrechnung. I do not want to argue whether fusing states makes sense or not. This isn't even a moral condemnation of the original poster. All I say is that the equation `efficiency_gain == federal states before / federal states after` is completely made up.

fileeditview 8mo ago

So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption. How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they? Sure, federalism produces some overhead and inefficiencies. But it also has many benefits. Especially to avoid too much power in one hand but also others. E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better and adapt the other systems (if you actually do that is another question). People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states. Just merging all into one is just a recipe to fail epically.

ethbr1 8mo ago
Afaik, the bulk of the US' federal centralization of commerce is based on the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution [0], which based on reading (and more so on precedent) grants the US federal legislature the ability to regulate commerce between states. As most commerce crosses state boundaries, this de facto allows the federal legislature to define and enforce regulatory standards. In practice, it's more nuanced and subject to continual back-and-forth arguing. E.g. California and Texas trying to decide their own standards, by virtue of their economic size, then hashing it out with the federal government in court. I'm not sure what the EU regulatory cornerstone equivalent of the Commerce Clause would be. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause
PurpleRamen 8mo ago
> So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption. The division is on purpose, to divide power and make it harder for a second Hitler to rise again. And the calculations are no assumption, it's a common topic in Germany how much additional time and money this all costs. > How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they? Why do you assume they are different? Or better? > E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better You can also have this without federalism, without maintaining a dozen different administrations which are all doing the same in different flavour. > People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states. Compared to Europe, people in the USA are not that different per state. At least not on the level where individual administration is necessary. The different groups are mainly independent of the state they are living in.

BSVogler 8mo ago

The federation in Germany is one lesson from the Nazis. Centralised power makes it easier for fascism or totalitarian governments to emerge. Recent example is the US with the instrument of executive orders. So it is deliberately designed to keep Germany small.

nicbou 8mo ago

I work around German bureaucracy, and the loss of efficiency is real. Every state creates its own bureaucracy and its own software. Different people, departments and offices that rarely combine efforts, barely talk to each other, and never share data. I was told that this decentralisation of power was a deliberate effort after Nazism, but as far as I know such issues were endemic in the Nazi government and military. Germany really is a union of small states, and perhaps never fully changed that. This is slowly changing though. There is a visible effort to build software and processes at the federal level.