To be clear, I wasn't arguing whether policy should be one way or the other or what anyone should do, just whether or not people do commonly trust central authority.
You bring up a fair objection: the Progressives' big pushes for central planning were around 100 years ago, and there's no reason the same goals couldn't be met with a distributivist approach, and many novel programs rely far less on central planning.
All true, and you're going to find hundreds of people on HN who could go into far greater detail.
Outside this techno-libertarian bubble, most people have no notion of distributed anything. If you ask most people, "how can we do a major program," their conception will be a big government agency planning it out.
And they'll have reasonable arguments for why, such as economies of scale and standardization.
Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city.
I think this hits at a problem with the original concept of "trusting a central authority" as you bring up what is a smaller central authority, but nevertheless somewhat central.
Comments
To be clear, I wasn't arguing whether policy should be one way or the other or what anyone should do, just whether or not people do commonly trust central authority.
You bring up a fair objection: the Progressives' big pushes for central planning were around 100 years ago, and there's no reason the same goals couldn't be met with a distributivist approach, and many novel programs rely far less on central planning.
All true, and you're going to find hundreds of people on HN who could go into far greater detail.
Outside this techno-libertarian bubble, most people have no notion of distributed anything. If you ask most people, "how can we do a major program," their conception will be a big government agency planning it out.
And they'll have reasonable arguments for why, such as economies of scale and standardization.
I think this hits at a problem with the original concept of "trusting a central authority" as you bring up what is a smaller central authority, but nevertheless somewhat central.