The government of the United States was further divided up among the states, which were to have more effect on the lives of the citizens than the federal government. The benefit of having stronger state governments was that each state could set up its own rules, and the citizens of that state could then choose to live in the state that most suited them. The states were further divided up into counties, and into town and city governments. There was a hierarchy of political power, with those governments closest to the people having the most power, and those farthest away having the least. Those with the most power would be the individuals, and whatever organizations they volunteered to join. The founding fathers of the United States stumbled upon the concept of power laws centuries before they were formulated in contemporary chaos theory.

What are power laws? Imagine that you are piling up sand one grain at a time. With the addition of each grain, there will be some stability, but quite often there will be avalanches. The vast majority of avalanches will be small ones – one-grain avalanches. Many will be just a few grains. There will be fewer small avalanches, fewer still medium-sized avalanches, and only very rarely will there be very large ones, with an entire side of the sand pile collapsing. As it turns out, there are many things which obey power laws – all of them systems of some sort. Extinctions follow power laws – there are many single-species extinctions, a few extinctions that take out several interrelated species, fewer that take out many species, and the rarest of all: mass extinctions. The same is true if we look at the economy. We have many small businesses, fewer medium-sized businesses, and fewest megacorporations. The lifetimes of corporations in an economy also follow power laws: many last only a short time, some last decades, very few last generations. The United States government too was set up to follow power laws. The individuals have the most power, and have the most effect on their own lives; families too have power, but less overall than individuals (though they affect the place and position of those individuals); voluntary organizations, such as churches, have less power and effect; city governments have less still; county governments even less; state governments less than even county governments; and finally, the federal government was designed to have the least effect of all, with the Senate and the House of Representatives designed to be fighting all the time with each other, so they could not get much done (recently they have been getting along altogether too well – though we got a glimpse of the founders’ intentions when President Clinton had to govern with a Republican Congress, during which time, very little was accomplished, and we also incidentally had some of the strongest economic growth in American history).

So it seems that the government of the United States of America was set up according to the laws that govern nature – particularly the growth of systems in nature. That is the very reason of its success. So why is it that New Jersey’s Governor John Corzine is proposing to eliminate the smallest towns in his state and force them to consolidate? He says that multiple layers of government are wasteful – and for that reason we should beware of his intentions. The U.S. government is precisely set up in layers, as previously noted. To eliminate layers would be to eliminate the hierarchy that naturally evolved. Unhappy with the way nature works, it seems Corzine is determined to try to legislate away the laws of nature. Population distribution is a naturally-occurring system, and Corzine is trying to do away with power law distributions of population by consolidating the small entities into medium-sized ones. It's the kind of nonsense the Communists tried in the USSR and China. In the end, this is all part of the dictatorial drive inherent in people like him. They think they can and should override the very laws of nature. When you do, you get disaster. If he succeeds, I predict we'll get to see what a political collapse looks like. Either that, or it will result in what amounts to a political dictatorship within the U.S. -- which is really the same thing. Further, our federalist democracy was quite wisely designed along power law structure. Again, Corzine is trying to completely undermine this system. How many times do liberals have to learn that you can't legislate away nature?

Federal democracies work best because they are precisely the form of government that most accurately matches the way the world itself works, according to power laws. Thus, it is in fact the most natural form of government. So why do we have politicians trying to undermine this system? Perhaps we have been reading too many philosophers in the Franco-German tradition, and have forgotten about the Scottish philosophers, who our founding fathers were reading. We should be reading less Marx, Heidegger, and Rousseau, and reading more Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith. The former seek to make everyone the same; the latter realize we are not all the same, and seek to take advantage of that to form better forms of government. The former think if we can just get everyone to love one another in brotherhood, everything will be fine; the latter realize you can’t get everyone to love one another, but you can set up a system wherein those factions learn to get along, because it is to the advantage of each individual to do so. And now we not only have Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith, but we also have the new science of chaos theory, self-organization, and power laws to back them up.

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