@mpjgregoire

Lots of good stuff in that essay, but this bit here really jumpd out:

It is why, historically, the first pass at producing a political philosophy – whether it be in Plato or Confucius – came back with the same idea, that the law should be used to enforce morality and promote social cohesion, by rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked.

Furthermore, there are many small-scale societies in which this basic approach is quite successful. Unfortunately, there’s a reason that we talk about small close-knit communities, where everyone pitches in to help one another out; it’s that there are no big communities in which these norms prevail. That’s because these high-trust social formations are not scalable. The only way to extend the cooperative system to include more people, once it reaches a certain size, is to introduce formal authority, hierarchy, written laws, and specialized enforcement (i.e. the state). This leads immediately to the “good king” problem, which is that the system works well enough if those who occupy the new positions of authority happen to be motivated to promote the public good, but it can become calamitously bad when they are not.

The above is why I think one of the main notions of Distributism [1] makes sense; that the smallest unit capable of organizing and governing each part of society should be the goal. We are constantly moving in the opposite direction to where those making the decisions are far removed from both the particular situation and the people involved! For an easy example, consider our GTO and 'Greater Vancouver' and other mega-merging things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism?useskin=vector