if we look at a night image of england from space:

http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/78000/78674/london_lights_2012087_lrg.jpg

notice that the biggest population splotch isn't london and "the southeast" - it's the large circular belt of cities crowded around the peak district (a grand old english park with lots of "ramblers" ambling around in it):

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/50/9d/5d/peak-district.jpg

it's a triangle anchored by birmingham/coventry/leicester in the south, liverpool/manchester in the northwest corner, and leeds in the northeast, with lots of sizable smaller cities like sheffield and stoke and nottingham on the sides.

those places add up to well over 20 million residents, which is more than the 19 million or so in the expanded london region. but in terms of social/economic influence, it's not really comparable; london dominates everything.

this was not nearly as true during the EARLY and MIDDLE stages of the industrial revolution, when liverpool (shipping), manchester (textiles), and birmingham (manufacturing) were all reasonably independent of london's "ambit."

but modernity in its later stages has demanded polarity and centralization. others have noted how the "promise" of the internet to decentralize things was a big flop, but the trends are broader; they include "policy choices" such as the structure of governance and bureaucracy.

this is one of the reasons why decentral doctrines like libertarianism are doomed; they are out-of-phase with the emerging order of things. a large central bureaucracy is an emergent property of a large populous nation. it arises to service and manage the needs of its most influential clients, who are themselves increasingly centralized.

diffusion lacks power. aside from england, look at germany, where a blob of western cities called the "Metropolregion Rhein-Ruhr" (cologne, bonn, dortmund, dusseldorf, essen, etc.) is technically the country's biggest metro area.

http://www.targetmap.com/ThumbnailsReports/14648_THUMB_IPAD.jpg

but since these places are scattered around the landscape, they lack power and influence relative to smaller but concentrated areas like frankfurt, munich, and berlin.

"small-government conservatism" is probably not even possible in a technocratic modern society of sufficient size. not at the national level. even if you symbolically pared away some of government's structures, they would quickly re-emerge under other guises.

sorry, conservatives. but that's how it is.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2680253&forum_id=2#26368140)

there is no way to stop this in the future. england/scotland have a lot more in common than Alabama/Mass.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2680253&forum_id=2#26368207)

an extreme example would be some of the post-soviet states. decentralization and independence did not result in a stronger and "more manageable" moldova than the Moldavian SSR had been.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2680253&forum_id=2#26368222)

in a modern society, that doesn't really work. you impose the laws, and then they get molded around the contours of society.

in some sense this is the same malfunction that the sovereign citizens have - they are OCD-level CONSUMED by structural legalism in which very bizarre behaviors and actions are compelled if the law says they are compelled.

compulsion doesn't work like that in the developed modern world. that model is backwards.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2680253&forum_id=2#26368182)

i would say that even if we implemented a libertarian-looking system for those sorts of things, the gravity of population/wealth dynamics themselves would still pull toward centralization and therefore "bigger" government.

you can't reduce "the size of government" without a successful frontal attack on a lot of modernity itself, and that's the sort of thing that would happen after a caldera eruption or some other really undesirable happenstance.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2680253&forum_id=2#26370427)

That's a really impressive and concise argument. I could not say it any better.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2680253&forum_id=2#26370460)

in the past, many of these guys could have saved up some money and withdrawn to their cabins and been relatively stable, if still mad at the government.

but now, they lack the resources to do so, and have instead developed entire parallel "legal" structures which purport to allow them to cast off what they perceive as an overbearing and illegitimate state.

while they tend to be nuts, they aren't typically "crazy" in the sense of behaving inconsistently from day-to-day. they are, instead, misfits.

they actually exist in most western nations, but the ones in the US have a lot more firearms and thus get themselves into the news more often on that basis.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2680253&forum_id=2#29964075)

this is easier when a community is "rooted," and lacks transience. which in turn is more probable when communities are economically-viable by themselves.

modernity has altered the economy so that this is simply not true in a lot of areas, and there is a high degree of migration and residential "churn."

devolving federal control to a local area full of shifting economic nomads would just be chaotic, since your admins would tend to become self-serving grifter types. this is a terrible problem in parts of the country like south texas where locals don't really DO "civic participation."

this kind of incompetence will tend to invite re-centralization anyway if a central government exists, since outsiders will be called in to assist with the consequences of local maladministration.

american libertarianism is such a sad fantasy, but i don't see it being refuted very often in these kinds of structural-determinist terms. it's usually attacked on more normative or preferential grounds.

i'm just straight-up saying that it doesn't have the right structure to work in the type of society we now inhabit.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2680253&forum_id=2#29964186)