HoltesThoughts: To Govern utilities well local government must be involved

Governing Utilities well has requirements

To Govern utilities well:

Local Government must be involved in their management.
Utilities need to be part of Emergency Management.
We need republican forms to ensure they are well governed.
Republican Government is not "Socialism

Local Government is application of Principles of Subsidiarity

The Principle of Democratic Subsidiarity is based on the notion that:

“Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.”

In Application in democratic societies, it is why the Constitution guarantees a "Republican form of Government to the States" and why the states should guarantee republican forms to local government. In application to public utility it why large monopolies and centralized utilities fail to deliver well. Utilities should be organized on republican forms with local governance. Central Governance is good for general, universal principles, but not for their specific application. One of the drawbacks of centralization is the converse of subsidiarity principles, that central government is often incompetent to handle local matters.

The pejorative "socialist" is a dog whistle and propaganda term, but not much use in fashioning good government of utilities or dealing with monopolies of any kind. Using it as a pejorative is a tool of our grifter pirates in their desire to loot US common folks. Far left Socialists misuse it too. The issue with socialist government versus "capitalist" government is who governs business. "Capitalist" becomes code for piracy. Modern pirates want to govern vital public goods privately so they can "extract maximum value" from them — i.e. loot them.

But the real issues left and right are:

Centralization

Bureaucracy

Both of which are exacerbated by both thoughtless socialism and privateering Monopoly Capitalism.

This post reinforces earlier posts, including:: Healthcare as a Utility; Principles of Federalism; Principles of Subsidiarity; Community Policing

Utilities are Part of Emergency response

A utility is, by definition, a public good. Vital public goods are so vital that their disruption harms people's lives. Indeed when utilities fail people die. Sustaining and restoring public utilities should be a function of emergency management, local management, as well as government at more general levels.

Communications is vital for survival, especially in this age when lives can be saved by emergency health care treatment.

It's vital for security, as when bad things happen emergency response can't respond to what it doesn't know about it.

Communications can even improve health care delivery, as telehealth saves lives and lets providers leverage expertise to assist other health care providers to be more effective.

Energy, water and transport have the same vital role in society, at all levels, from the neighborhood to the Nation to the world.

Vital Public Goods

These are all vital public Goods and thus utilities, whether they are treated as such or not. Communications and Entertainment has a public entertainment component, which can be charged for and can be used to support the vital components of, but it also has an emergency, vital, survival component! Communications is also vital to the management and government of our societies.

Thus communications and this whole list have to be treated as public utilities, and the entertainment part not used as a tool to censor political content or suppress information. It can be used as a tool to fund the system.

All these utilities have to be:

National Systems,

Territorial and regional systems,

State Systems, county and metropolitan systems, and local systems.

They have a neighborhood component!

They are vital to all of US!

Therefore their management should include components at all levels of government down to the neighborhood.

Everyone is impacted so Everyone should have a say

If any piece of those systems, consumer, manager or the guys maintaining them, is impacted the other parts are impacted and people are harmed. FEMA is the most important agency of the US Government when it is needed. Police and fire departments are the same. One is local and the other National, but all have a local component. This is common sense. They should be governed for the common good. When they are governed for private separate profit, they are being governed by pirates. It is amazingly deplorable when rural neighborhoods or urban neighborhoods are excluded from our communications, energy, water and health grids. That people think that these are merely "privileges" to be enjoyed only by millionaires and billionaires is unconscionable. It is both a moral and a proper functioning system issue.

And when there are no doctors in Kalamazoo Hollow, this reflects failure:

To respect Local Government at neighborhood or village level
To run the Federal Government as a Commonwealth [See Locke]
To provide the resources necessary to meet basic requirements for human survival.

Part of the principle of Economic Subsidiarity is to realize that all communities nationwide need to have available currency and resources sufficient to their maintenance and the nation needs to provide a reserve to restore communities to full functionality when they start to fail, including the means for local communities to govern and restore themselves.

Local Governance and Action is vital

Whether we are talking about;

health care,
schools,
or our electrical Grid,
Communications,
or even Policing.

Unless the principles of "Democratic Subsidiarity" are applied, it won't work. The Constitution gives the people basic rights.

The First Amendment:: "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Is only an effective right if people have that right in their neighborhoods, villages and settlements, even before they exercise that right with more centralized levels of government.

Effective Government Requires Local Government

At levels of centralization we are talking about republican and federation principles. But for higher levels of government to have the attributes of a well constituted Republic or Federation local people need effective representation, a voice and to be consulted and give their feedback to general decision making.

Local Judges, Mayors, Councils and Policing

Informal leaders can plead for justice, but a local justice can adjudicate a community issue justly for the people within that community. Local Judges and Mayors can do informal adjudication and resolve disputes before they become serious. Local Executives can ensure that the laws of the broader community are respected and keep local order. Local Representatives can ensure that mayors and judges understand the needs of their neighborhoods. Genuinely local = neighborhood, settlement or village and should involve the right to assemble of the people who live there. All this is First amendment related and denied unless people have a right to local government and that right is privileged by law rather than optional.

Towns, Cities, Metropolitan and Metropolitan government

People should have a right to genuinely local government, and appropriate representation in all higher levels of Government. Effective representation is best effected if people can send representatives to those government bodies governing them from such local government. Subdivisions should always have a government that they are part of, that their services are integrated with, and that their officers are accountable to. The fact that mayors and towns are not even an option for thousands of zip codes in this country is a symptom of poor execution of constitutional principles.

Only at local levels does direct democracy even make sense. Individual initiative is usually locally executed. At the local level executive, legislative and judicial functions are more accurate for restoring local order and securing justice if local communities have the attributes of democracy and commonwealth.

Shared Resources

Communities should have a right to representation at a general community level, such as town, city, borough. A Town should have mayor, judiciary and legislature and that should represent all the subdivisions in communication with it. The idea that a huge metropolitan like St. Louise should have dozens of separate governments is bad government. We should define the levels of government and assign them based on geography and census. When a Government grows, either the county should be redesignated a Metropolitan or if the place has multiple metropolises, there should be a megapolitan government to coordinate the activities of people across a region. The criteria should be contiguity and shared resources. A River Basin should have some level of government over the entire river basin. Our Present States and Counties need not be done away with. But these divisions should have authority over shared resources and the revenues needed to administer them -- and representation from all who share those resources. When resources are well shared for the common good, that exemplifies the true principle of commonwealth as envisioned by Locke.

General Government

General Government is for shared resources and disputes between communities or between individuals across communities. To integrate government well across our country and effectively represent the demographics, we need to integrate government across our country according to basic principles applied rationally. Delegating local decisions to local authority is the principle of Subsidiarity, and can restore the properties of genuine common-wealth to a society. When General Government takes on work that is best done locally, the result is usually bureaucratic governance, periodic failure, poor decision making and misallocation of resources.

Benefits

Police

The reality is that in order to provide utility to the system as a whole it must be well governed. A collaborative system gives the resources to locals to self govern and then can effectively measure that self government. Systems that are too centralized tend to lose track of reality. Systems that depend on complete unity or are too top down tend to develop poor decision making. A systematic separation of powers between local and general government and distribution of those powers can have many benefits. For example if law enforcement at a town or metropolitan level are supplemented by officers who are able to handle local matters, or are able to know everyone in their jurisdiction they can do informal adjudication, intervention and instruction. They can then use the more general police officers as backup or emergency resources. The more professional police can do investigations, forensics, go after corruption, etc... and leave locals to people who know them. Police Brutality doesn't occur when police are members of a community and not occupying forces.

Community Policing As Part of Democratic Subsidiarity

Emergency Response

Most disasters are local. There are a series of thresholds of time constraints on saving lives. If it takes an hour to get someone to a hospital they are more likely to die than if they can get good treatment right away. The same goes with rescues. A good government system should have reserve capacity. There should be medical personnel who can perform emergency treatment. There should be people and tools available to jack up fallen walls or restart a stopped heart and those resources should be widely distributed even if it is more economic to centralize the paid professionals. Reservists can do other things when they aren't doing emergency services, or be cross trained to do emergency services. At one time Barbers and hair stylists also did basic medical care. At one time butchers served as surgeons during emergencies. We are so specialized that we forget that it is a national security issue to be prepared for anything. We should have reserve hospitals and clinics available for emergencies.

Sustainability

This also applies to the electrical grid and our communications. A single point of failure means a longer recovery time than otherwise necessary and misinformation during disasters. Our communications system should be so robust that if a central city fails communications can be routed around them. That if the satellite fails, communications can travel by cable through routers distributed in the countryside. The benefits of local government apply to the robustness of our country. Centralization not only robs local people of resources it robs the country of its sustainability.

Utility for All Versus Luxury for the Few

I know people who pine for a swimming pool. Others have one in their back yards they never use. It's not feasible under our current allocation system for communities to put in a public pool anymore, yet they used to be common. You can find enough water in the average millionaire's neighborhood to field an olympic team. With quality local government clean, safe swimming pools can be available to people who want one in their neighborhood, or at least their city. It is cheaper to build a single pool to benefit a thousand people than to build dozens of pools for twelve families. This is an allocation problem. In a robust society a single pool is easier to maintain. When the economy goes south that pool in your backyard becomes a home for snakes and frogs. A pirate life style is not sustainable. Portable wealth can flee the country, or be looted. A society with good will spread around need not worry about looters.

Drawbacks of Centralization

Systematically enabling local government addresses issues of centralization. Centralization involves privateering and usurpation of what had been local functions to centralized entities and/or private government. Sometimes some functions are best centralized. You get economies of scale when money is made by a Central Treasury or checks are processed centrally. This has to trade off with the need to have enough robustness in a system that there are backups to avoid a central point of failure. However, when private actors or unaccountable bureaucrats misallocate resources for private separate benefit, that is tyranny, by definition. [see Locke]

Bureaucracy Versus Good Government

Bureaucrats tend to ignore principles of subsidiarity and corporate bureaucrats tend to organize their privateering efforts to maximize loot. So if we want responsive government we need to empower local government. Bureaucrats and privateers offer to solve problems, posing as "experts" who then hire assistants to help them. Local government can often more effectively study and solve problems as they arise, when allowed to. It is appropriate that they should be able to turn to central figures for help, but government works best when it lets local people govern themselves and local government lets them do that. Bureaucrats make rules that sometimes force better policies, or when they really are experts, can guide better decisions and policies, but sometimes they only make things worse. Bureaucrats also need resources and when their efforts lead to centralization that drains resources from the locals they regulate. A certain amount of bureaucracy and some functions are best done by bureaucracies, but when they usurp local functions that is no longer true. There has to be a balance between central authority and local authority or central authority tends to hog them. When private actors are involved outright looting of resources occurs.

For example, when locals have a say in their local schools they can make them better. When teachers and students have a say in the running of the schools, that is democracy. A School is essentially a neighborhood. It should be governed by principles of republican government. Often the teachers could make better decisions collectively than a principal by himself.

Militia Clause and Local Government

The reason we have a militia clause in the constitution is because local government can best respond initially to local emergencies. The militia clause vests power with the States and the States in turn vested power with local counties and local governments. The functions of militia are nowadays carried out by Police, Fire, Medics, Hospitals, and essentially utility repairmen and utilities are associated with the kinds of things that militia were supposed to protect. The militia clause, already tells us how how to organize hospitals and Emergency response. Since most emergencies have both a general component and a local component, they are both problems of these United States and of the neighborhoods affected by them. At the heart of the concept of the militia is the concept of volunteering. Militia membership was an obligation, a duty, and a virtuous person was supposed to take on that obligation willingly. In emergencies people still pitch in voluntarily. We just had a shooting in Las Vegas, and it was hundreds of ordinary people who acted as heroes along with police an fire.

Representation By Right

The Federal Government has the power to regulate and coin money. Our countries schema is supposed to be networked an integrated with top down executive functions at the general level. Executive functions representing subsidiarity and centralizing principles need to reflect those principles down to the neighborhood. Whether someone lives in a town or a city should be a census determination. And the right to local government should be a right by census. Other countries do it this way. We should too. Representation should be bottom up, and there is no one man one vote or just representation unless we have a right to local government. Our continental schema is incomplete without it.

The System is a Commons and Belongs to Commoners too

Thus you hear "anti-Socialism" "free market" propagandists talk about how so and so (currently Obama) seek to socialize medicine, or that some other service provided to the general population is an "entitlement", they usually make it sound like "socialism" is inefficient, makes people lazy, or that the beneficiaries are undeserving. But most of the rest of us see these as necessary to our own liberty and long term survival.

Of course many of the anti-socialist folks are also anti-democracy. They confuse democracy with collectivism.

They also ignore the reality that medicine is not the kind of service that can provide service to all through a free market. But more importantly, the medicine market has grown out of public need and security. Medicine made our warriors more effective, our cities safer and is a security issue. The system is as vital as communications, fire and safety, energy and education. Privatizing and looting them is not a valid option. Like it or not Healthcare is and should be a public utility and it should be available thru local government as well as higher level governments. It should be provided, in part, through a function associated with the National Guard and organized to serve the whole country.

Likewise, our issues with the second amendment can be finessed by restoring the integrity of the amendment by remembering that it originally applied to the right of locals to self government, to defend their homes and to participate in defending their homeland. We should have local armories under Sargent control an lock and key associated with the National Guard. If someone wants to fire an AR 15 they should be registered with the militia, keep the weapon locked up in the Armory. If they want a gun at home likewise. The Right to bear arms is tied to the right to be a part of a well regulated militia, which is also a duty with requirements to not use them to shoot up concerts!

HoltesThoughts

Thursday, October 5, 2017

To Govern utilities well local government must be involved