~Basil

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/08/kirkpatrick-sale/looking-at-this-nations-mess-small-is-more-beautiful-than-ever/

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By Kirkpatrick Sale
August 9, 2023

There is one and only one conclusion that I should think everyone alive during this last few years of shutdowns and “vaccinations” and election chicanery and a sham (and crooked) presidency and a ridiculous election season and unprecedented government intrusions, would come to is this: the government we have in this country is too incompetent, inept, corrupt, wasteful, and inefficient, too centralized, undemocratic, unjust, and invasive, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities, and all because it is too big. Simple as that.

The reason that more of us don’t come to it is that as a nation we have long been fixated on the value of bigness, size, super-this and colossal-that, immensity, bulk, quantity, greatness, Big Macs, Whoppers, Green Giant, big-box stores, king-size mattresses, global trade, mass production, mcmansions, high rises, double-wides—and the smallest olive size is jumbo. We’re just not trained to see things in terms of scale, proportion, adequacy, appropriateness. As a nation we killed nearly a million of our own people to reinforce the value of oneness and largeness, and to punish the idea of division and separateness.

But the simple fact is that a nation of more than 300 million people, covering nearly 4 million square miles from ocean to ocean and beyond, cannot be governed, by any system, by any agency, despotic or democratic. And certainly not by a system where 535 people are supposed to legislate for all—one for 58,000 people!—and it takes 4,430,000 to administer to them at the federal level. That is beyond human capability, beyond even angelic ability.

This truth stares us in the face every day, and yet we never admit it, never enunciate it. Why, that would be a confession that the nation is a failure, the American experiment at large-scale republicanism is at an end, and we’ve got to step back and do something very, very different. And as a nation, even one in such deep political, economic, financial, and cultural trouble, we don’t seem to be able to face that.

And yet it is only by admitting that nation is too big to work that we stand a chance of ever getting out of the deep mess we’ve created. That is the first step toward thinking about the alternative. It’s not elections, of course, for that doesn’t change anything, certainly not size. It’s not amendments to the Constitution (the document that inevitably got us where we are today), for that only tries to reform a system that has grown so far beyond the Founders’ conception (they had a nation of just under 4 million people) that it bears scant relation to the original. And it’s not any sort of rejiggering or reorganizing or reworking or even revolution.