Federalism in the United Kingdom
In an earlier post I alluded to my federalist stance, so I thought I would take the time to expand on this a little.
Firstly, I am not a militant federalist - there is no danger that I shall be laying my life down for the independence of Hull or Derby - but I do believe that the smaller the groups in which we are represented, then the better represented we are.
Let us say we have 4 people. Lets also say there are 10 possible things a person might want their government to do, and each of our 4 people choose the 5 that are the most important to them:
As we can see, the government representing these 4 will only ever pursue policies 'g' and 'h' as those are the only commonalities. The people get less than half of what they want.
Now suppose that the people are split into 2 groups:
With less amalgamation, then we get less compromise. The people get most of the polices they want.
So surely the best bet is that we operate as individuals - that way we get everything we want? And here we come to economies of scale. There are some wishes that are either impossible, impractical, or much less efficient without aggregation. For example 'i' might be "Protect my house if it catches fire" - it would not make sense for each person to have their own Fire Department, so people's wishes are much better served by centralising this function.
Taking our example further, lets assume 'g' is "Tax funding for the local government", and 'h' is "Defence" - those being common to both Groups of people. The latter would not make sense to localise - it infeasible for every city in the UK to have their own aircraft carrier and fleet of nuclear submarines (not only because Birmingham's would be confined to Blithfield Reservoir). As such, this 'wish' may be delegated to a central government.
However, whilst 'g' is also common to both Groups, it is much more appropriately handled at the Group-level, it being the funding for those very Groups. The point being commonality should not default to centralisation.
Maybe I can summarise like this:
"Power should start in the individual, and be centralised only to the extent that economies of scale can be leveraged."
It is best that I bring up my children, that my village provides the school for them to attend, that the resources to operate the school come from my city, and the school educates to a curriculum set by my country.
