Local v National Government

[grinu]

Sorry I'll go sit in the corner, take my humble pie out of the fridge and eat it for a while...I way-overacted. I was in a really bad mood yesterday and I think this thread was my outlet. Think I objected to being tarred with a brush because of where I work.

I do agree that there are lots of problems with local govt, central govt, society in general and I'm in no way trying to say there aren't. I also don't think that either could be relied on in the event of a doomsday peak-oil scenario. What people will have to rely on is acceptance, communication and mutual contribution to help make things better - this will require a degree of societal change away from the current road we're on which is leading to smaller satellite households, breaking up of family groups (i.e. grandparents in a home, parents at work, kids in a creche all day, cousins living in a different country etc.etc.), loss of close communities, people spending all evening watching telly in their rooms (seeing other people live life instead of living it forthemselves), loss of core skills, disassociation with the environment etc. etc.

[snow hope]

Yes, I think lots of thinking people are dis-satisfied with where society has got to currently. We seem to have been going downhill or backwards for a while now.

It is terrible the way families are split apart all for the sake of careers/jobs. This situation where the grandparents live in one part of the country and the parents live the other side of the country - both out working full-time to be able to afford the mortgage, the car(s), etc, whilst the kids are looked after all day long by some unknown person(s) is a disgrace and no doubt a (major) part of the problems we see in society with our teenagers / youths today.

But it is also very sad that we have to got to this state of affairs as most people are very unhappy about it! Somehow we have to get back to a situation where the grandparents, parents and children all live close-by or even in the same house or road. This level of support would make a world of a difference to the pressures and tensions that people live under nowadays and I am sure would increase the happiness of most people.

Okay you will always get some exceptions where some family members can't live close together, but generally I can see this happening in the near future as people in the extended family will have no choice but to have fewer houses to live in and share as the economic impacts of PO start to hit hard.

Many grown-up children still live at home now anyway, due to the unaffordability of the first step on the housing ladder. I can see more and more family sharing accomodation and in many respects this will be a good thing! WOW - I have found something that will be better because of PO.

edit - I could never understand why some parents want to kick their kids out anyway (or not look after their aging parents) - they are family for goodness sake - what can be more important that that?? I suppose the importance of some priorities got lost in our age of plenty - PO will soon sort that out....

[MacG]

This is a very interesting thread, and I cant stay away from it!

Right now I'm reading Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, and I think it could be somewhat relevant to take a broader view.


There are two main mechanisms by which Government preserve itself: By providing neccesary coordination and protection to allow division of labour, and by preventing people from taking care of themselves.

When a society is on it's way up, the focus is on providing beneficiary services which everyone gain from, but on the way down, focus often change to preventing people from jumping from the sinking ship.

There seem to be numerous examples of governments who have tried to preserve themselves at just about any cost. The Romans and the Maya raised taxes to a degree that farmers abandoned the land (and they tried to outlaw that!). There are stories from North Korea about government action to put up fences to stop people from fishing to feed themselves, and the often touted stories about Cuba as some kind of post-peak ecotopia fail to mention all the strong government action to keep people in depenency.