Rhinocrisy

For the past eight months, since spending time in Washington DC, I have become increasingly aware that the $2-trillion U.S. government is an empty shell. For all the machinery and manpower its money buys, few of the machines work and few of the workers support its mission — if they can even identify it. There’s a reason why do-it-yourself culture routinely outperforms bureaucratic culture, from Firefox vs. Explorer to blogs vs. NY Times to terrorists vs. armies.

So I say it’s time for more DIY government. What do we need from a government? Physical protection (writ large to include everything from firehouses to clean water and child welfare), a conflict resolution system and a system of democratically selecting decisionmakers. I’m sure I’m forgetting something here but those are, to me, the crux of it. They can all be done better by grassroots than by our current tottering, incompetent systems up top.

Some of the most desperate needs are in child care, emergency preparedness, schooling and policing. All of these tasks could be better performed by democratically controlled grassroots groups than they are by the state. Just to take schooling as an example, a lot of rebellious types pull kids out of public school and either send them to private school or home school. If all these people got together and pitched in the same amount of money they currently throw at the problem, there might be a whole range of much more effective schools that would have room for even more kids.

For disaster preparedness, what if instead of disaster insurance, people all pitched in to prevent disasters?

For policing, many people are loath to call cops, either out of a “stop snitching” mentality or out of direct experience with the useless idiocy that passes for a criminal justice system. If there were an alternative number to call, one that would bring out conflict-resolvers who could overpower a violent person but wouldn’t end up destroying that person’s life out of spite, that number might get dialed fairly often. I think it would be particularly attractive for domestic violence street fights where the criminal prosecution system is particularly ill-suited to helping the various victims involved.

I think with the central government in the U.S. so widely hated (Bush’s approval in the 20s as of this week, Congress’ in the teens), it would seem a good time to start such systems locally. If they worked out, they could team up into confederations, federations, alliances, whatever, and take on ever-more-ambitious projects.

The ostensible reasons for a central government — national defense and management of international trade — are being so effectively mangled by our current government that it would be hard to have a less functional system, at least for regular schmucks who don’t happen to own a maquiladora or some United Technologies shares on the side. Plus, in the modern world, defense is better accomplished through a combination of cooperation (in normal times) and non-cooperation (in war) than through any resort to violence. And trade? Again, a motivated and well organized citizenry will be a more formidable trading partner than any rank of bayonets.

Thoughts?