OK, this will sound a little weird, maybe even a little scary, but just bare with me a few minutes. We clearly have a problem with government, each generation the ideals of good and evil are recast and reformulated with the effect that each time around things get better at being polarized. At this moment one half the country hates the other half, and people don’t want to listen anymore. I think a good step in the right direction would be to examine this notion that a strong central government is needed, which it is. The idea I propose sounds communist, or even libertarian, but at its core it is fundamentally capitalist. If you don’t like your phone service from Sprint, you can switch to T-mobile. If you don’t like Pizza Hut you can go to Dominoes. If you don’t like your Zen mp3 player, you can buy an Ipod. In the consumer arena every persons vote counts, and those votes are called $DOLLARS$. Our central government has no competition, they’re the only game in town, and when that happens, you get bloat, and waste, and laziness in government. When your bank or cable company gets lazy and doesn’t care what you think anymore, that’s when they lose customers and eventually die, and all of a sudden that no name upstart alternative competitor of theirs starts to gain clout, and then guess what? They start to care about customer service again. Government is a service, and we are its customer, simple. So what we need is competitive government. Our current federal government is a perfect example of a badly run business, that is in dire need of a bailout. In Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash he tackles this idea, and it implies a fragmented society, but don’t we have that now? The problem we have right now is that some of the slightly less popular ideas are still good ideas, that need to done, but they don’t get done because they were voted down by a 51% majority, how does that make any form of sense? If we allowed a slightly less centralized government, and gave citizens a choice of where their tax dollars went, we could increase our citizen satisfaction by an order of magnitude. The forces of polarization and the strength of the fabric of our society to hold us together are at odds, by allowing a more flexible fabric we just might get through all this mess, and be better for it. What this would mean is that you would have a choice of a couple of federal governments to be a part of, your leader could really be your leader, the guy you actually wanted, you could be proud of where your tax dollars go, I never met a person who wasn’t glad for the option to get, and yes, even pay for, what they thought was a good service. I have communist leanings in my philosophy of society, I have always felt that nature was meant to be our model in all things, and I find cooperation dominates in nature. The very purpose of forming a society is to work together so that greater goods can be accomplished that individuals cannot accomplish alone. To my way of thinking this implies atleast some communist ideas. Now don’t get me wrong I’m no staunch communist, when I was at university I lived on a floor with other mathematicians, some of whom were Russian, and they told me that they felt they never actually had communism, and further, that communism in its real sense has never existed, just a pale authoritarianism. If I could choose my government from a list, to find the one that matched me best, I would be more than happy to pay taxes to be part of it. I don’t really think this a new idea, it’s already happening all over America, churches are asking for tithes again so that they can be a political force, gated communities are springing up left and right like cracks in a damn. People want to live in smaller, like-minded communities, and to some extent that’s what we do now, but the existence of an Uber-federal government that no one likes or thinks is a good leader is just too ominous to think of or comprehend.