I'm not dismissing local potential to do good work. I am dismissing local potential to protect you from incompetent or malicious central elites, which was the key contention of the diary.

If you want to vest enough power with local warlords that they are able to offer effective protection from malicious central warlords, then you will not have electricity.

Because your local regions won't share the same set of rules and dispute resolution systems which enable trade. Which means you will be unable to draw upon a supply chain (of both commodities and technical specialists that you cannot feasibly train at the local level) robust enough to sustain industrial production. And even if by some miracle you have the raw materials readily at hand, and you are willing to expend a disproportionate amount of effort training specialists, you will not be able to deploy the products of advanced industry into a large enough market to recoup the fixed costs of establishing the industrial production and supply chain.

Now, if you are talking about localism in the sense of the local authority being empowered to support bottom-up initiatives, then that's perfectly fine and proper. But it's not a bottom-up, local system of governance. It's a top-down, centralist system of governance which leaves room for local, bottom-up initiatives.

The key difference, and the way you tell the difference, between the two is that in the latter system the center can kill any local initiative that is deemed seriously contrary or disruptive to the center's planning or interests. (Imagine, if you will, a local authority establishing an excise on non-locally produced products. This is something the center will come down on like a ton of bricks.)

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.