Governance is like a business ...

Much too long. Only read if you swing political. This is about the theory of government, not about party lines.

Too small:
The smallest business is a one-man team. He is manager, store owner, clerk, and cashier. He opens the store and he closes the store. He does the finances, he does the maintenance, he does the cleaning, he does everything.

Government at this level has a name: anarchy. It is when each man is his own government. He decides what is and is not legal. He decides what is and is not moral. He decides when punishments are due and when they are not and forgiveness is a better option.

A one-man business is awful, anyone will tell you, because it places too much burden on one fellow. It's much easier to run a business when you have division of labor. So too is it with governments.

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Too large:
The largest business is the international conglomerate. It has tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of employees around the world. Necessarily, the headquarters are located in some city in some country on some continent, but if those headquarters were to go up in a poof of smoke it would hardly mean the death of the company. In fact, the headquarters have very little to do at all with day-to-day business as usual.

The problem with a business becoming this large is that the men at the top are too far removed from the customers to truly understand what is going on. We saw it happen with Sam Walton and Wal-Mart. We saw it happen with Papa John's, born right here in Indiana. We saw it happen with McDonald's, and with Coca-Cola, and with all of the big companies. Some entrepreneur had a goal of giving customers great service. He realized his goal so well that people flocked to him and business boomed. With this came growth, and before he knew what had happened, the entrepreneur had been all but replaced. He was a figurehead. He didn't really run the board meetings. And board meetings? When the hell did this happen? When did he quit interacting with the customers? the people who really mattered?

When this model is applied to government, its name is a republic. A republic is like the Russian doll, the matryoshka, with each egg-shaped woman containing within her a tinier doll than before. The problem is not the nesting of the eggs, but rather the number of nestings that take place. When a government's ultimate rulers become too far removed from the governed populace, it is like when the artwork on the largest of the matryoshka pieces is so exquisite and intricate that it bears almost no resemblance to the tiniest of the dolls with a simple red backing, red front, and peach-colored circle where the face is supposed to go. The largest stage should be within reach of the smallest stage. Any farther is too far.

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In 1783, it made sense to have a nation of states. The population in each state was on average less than 1 million. The total population of the nation was less than 13 million. A large national body governed the 13 million, while local state governments ruled the million, and county governments ruled the hundreds or tens of thousands. It made very good sense.

In 2009, the median state has 1 million or more citizens. The nation as a whole has over 300 million citizens. There is a gross disparity at this exact level. The cities are still manageable, as are the counties, although they too have swelled in size over the past couple centuries. The problem is this:

(1) Certain states ought to be divided into sub-states but have not yet been so divided. These are the states which have populations in excess of 15 million.

(2) There is no way to run a national government over as many people as 300 million. 100 million is pushing it. Most nations today have less than 100 million citizens. The only ones which have more than this are the United States, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia, Japan, and Mexico. (The European Union is listed as having 400 million citizens, but it is not a country. :p)

(3) The European Union is exactly the way to go about it: you have a continental delegation but sovereign nations still exist within that conglomerate. Government like the EU is best compared with a confederacy or union. The nations themselves are still republics, as before, but they are small enough in size to be manageable republics. At the level of international governance, where a republic becomes much too inefficient, they swap tactics and become sworn allies rather than fellow countrymen. Hence, a confederacy or union. Like the original United States of America, a group of like-minded but autonomous states.

No one -- and I mean no one -- can tell Britain what's the law and what isn't the law based on German principles. And vice versa. And ditto for the other member nations of the EU. All the EU serves as is something by which to huddle like a team and figure out the solutions to problems which affect us all: the economy, the climate, the population, shit like that. The EU deals with global warming. The EU deals with embargos. The EU doesn't deal with sex crimes or foodborne illnesses. Those are matters for each nation to figure out on their own.

(4) Two nations can both be part of the EU where one has outlawed homosexuality and the other has not only legalized it but has embraced it. Both nations mutually respect the other nation's cultural decisions. They don't agree with them, but they understand that people often disagree on these matters. They don't go to war over it, an they don't try to force their beliefs on one another.

Ditto for abortion; age of consent; alcohol limits; legality of recreational drugs; taxation of liquor or tobacco; health care; defense spending; and so on. Germany doesn't tell Britain how to run its economy nor does Britain tell Germany. They offer one another help, tips, pointers. But they leave well enough alone when it comes to disagreements over what the best path is towards the same goal: achieving utopia.

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I think that this country is in need of a transformation to something similar to what the EU is today. Today's states need to become yesterday's nations. They need to be allied to one another and prepared to help one another in times of need, but they should otherwise let each state decide for itself what is and is not the law. If one state wants to legalize prostitution, let it. The others can illegalize it. Makes no difference. If one state wants to legalize marijuana, let it. The others can do the opposite if they're opposed.

The only time the states need to really force their own wills upon one another is when one state, or a small group of states, goes rogue and threatens to jeopardize the citizens of the surrounding states. For example, the decision to legalize or illegalize homicide must be a federal one, because if any state decided to legalize it, it would naturally create tension along the state borders. The states must be united in their allegiance with, or against, foreign empires. No state must declare war without putting it to an emergency vote at the national level.

But if one state decides to legalize sales of violent video games and another decides to illegalize it, I don't see the problem. You're always going to have border-crossers, but it's not quite the same to compare homocidal maniacs with video game-obsessed teens. If Timmy crosses the border to purchase Doom 8, whatever. If he crosses the border and is sold into slavery, NOT whatever. MAJOR problem.

Realistically, most neighbor states do not have polar opposite beliefs. The ones which do are in fact separated by a natural divide, like a large mountain range. Even the states on opposite sides of the river, be it the Mississippi or the Ohio, do not hold very different world-views. Kentucky is very similar to Indiana. Not 100% identical! But similar. The two are more alike than either is alike to California or to Massachusetts. Georgia and Alabama may be very different in certain ways -- races, religions, population, whatever -- but their culture is nigh-on identical. You wouldn't find the homosexual capital of the nation in Georgia if the homophobic capital of the nation were in Alabama, no sirree!

I bring this up because it addresses the major criticism I can see levied against my proposal: and that is that neighbor states' disparate laws will create tension no matter how big or small the issues are. My retort is this: that it is highly, highly unlikely that a state would be adjacent to another, and that the two states would have opposite views on abortion or gun control or drug use, and that the two would not be separated by a major geographical divide. California may not agree with Arizona but there's a friggin' desert which separates the two. If Indiana legalized abortion and Kentucky illegalized it, you can be sure that Indiana would only legalize 1st-trimester abortions. It's not going to be as if Kentucky illegalized it and Indiana said "hey, we'll even do infanticide so long as the kid's under 2!" No. effing. way. You could find a state willing to do infanticide, but it's not going to be near any state which is mortified by the very thought of abortion.

Neighbor states are likeliest to pass hugely-differing laws over smaller matters, like the gas tax or the liquor tax. For example, I could see one state being 100% no income tax (just sales tax) and its nearest neighbor being the opposite (no sales tax, only income tax), and it's not going to pervert either state to be situated so closely to one another. Hell, if one guy's model fails, then he's gratefully got a nearby neighbor who can steer him in the right direction. If both guys' models work, great: no fear of corruption from outside anyway b/c it'll be fucking tough for a guy who had his income taxed down to nothing to go shopping in a state where sales are taxed through the nose, and vice versa the sales-tax state's citizens would all flock to the neighbor income-tax state to go shopping and would bankrupt their own society, so either the plan fails or else it balances out healthily. Either people stay at home to shop or else nobody adopts a polar extreme on taxation.