If You Had to Give Up One Election, Give Up the City

Here is a thought experiment I find clarifying. Suppose you were told that elected government had become too expensive to run at every level, and you had to give it up at one. You may keep elections for the city council or for the national parliament, but not both. Which do you surrender?

Almost everyone answers the same way, and quickly. Keep the national one. Let the mayor be appointed.

That answer is worth taking seriously, because it tells you where people actually believe government matters, and it points at where direct democracy should be aimed.

We Already Ration Representation

The premise of the experiment is less artificial than it sounds. We do not use the same system of government at every level, and nobody proposes that we should.

Nobody elects a representative for their street. Very few countries elect representatives for a neighbourhood. Counties and regions are elected in some places and administered in others, and the difference excites no one. Representation is used at one or two levels, and the rest of the structure is run by appointment, civil service, and custom.

The reason is that any system of government has a cost. Elections consume money, attention, and the goodwill of a population that has to be persuaded to vote. Campaigns are paid for from somewhere. A system that is expensive is used sparingly, and it is used where it is thought to matter. We already ration representative government to the levels we consider important, and the ration has been settled by practice rather than by argument.

So the experiment is not asking a hypothetical. It is asking you to make explicit a judgement your society has already made.

Why the Answer Is National

The reason people keep the national level is not sentiment. It is that the things that go catastrophically wrong in a society go wrong at the top.

Wars are declared at the national level. The decision that sends a generation to die is taken by a few dozen people in one building. No city has ever started one.

The great economic disasters come from the same place. Currency collapses, banking crises, hyperinflation, the credit booms that end in a decade of unemployment — all of them are produced by decisions about money and regulation that only the national level can take. A city can mismanage its budget and produce potholes. It cannot produce a depression.

The same is true of the slower harms. Who is admitted to the country, what children are taught, which industries are protected, how the surplus is divided between labour and capital — the national hierarchy decides, and the city administers what it is handed.

The worst things that have happened to human beings throughout history came from the highest level of control, and they came from the concentration of that control in few hands. That is the philosophical version of the point, and it is vaguer than I would like. But it is hard to look at the record and conclude otherwise. Famine, war, persecution, and ruin have a common address.

What the Historical Trend Suggests

There is a second half to the observation.

Moving from monarchy to representative government distributed the top-level decision across more people, from one to several hundred. That distribution coincided with a reduction in the frequency of the worst outcomes: fewer dynastic wars, fewer famines caused by policy, fewer decisions taken on a single man's whim.

I do not want to claim more than the evidence supports. Representative states have started wars and produced crises, and the causal story is contested. But the direction is suggestive. Spreading the highest decision across more hands appears to have reduced the damage that level does. If more distribution has helped, the natural next question is whether still more distribution would help further.

That is the case for direct democracy at the top, stated as an extrapolation rather than a principle.

Where the Effort Should Go

The practical consequence is about priorities.

Advocates of participatory government often begin with the town. It is small, the issues are concrete, participation is easy to organise, and a success is easy to point to. I understand the appeal, and I have nothing against a participatory town.

But the thought experiment says it is the wrong target. If we could only afford to democratise one level, nobody would choose the town, because the town is not where the damage comes from. A perfectly run city inside a badly run state is still subject to the state's wars and the state's currency. The reverse is not true.

I have argued elsewhere that organised extraction has to be corrected at the highest political level because that is where it lives. This is the same conclusion from a different direction. Ask where the catastrophes come from, and put the public's hand on that lever first.

The mayor can be appointed. It is the parliament I want to replace.