> Interesting discussion this!

Indeed!

> Rome was pretty centralized, so was the British empire at its peak.

You think so? I'm rather under the impression that the Crown set a loose grand strategy, and then let their high ranked officers and local personnel run things as long as things were going according to plan. If taxes were coming in and nothing too crazy was happening, they wouldn't get in and start micro-managing. Rome... lots of different eras of Rome, again I think Rome was more hands-off in its local provinces and would let the local people keep their customs, worship, morality, and rough template of local laws so long as the taxes, infrastructure, supplies, and garrison were generally in order.

> And federal seems to be winning that battle but not in a way that I can understand.

Cyclical - the federal government collects much higher tax revenues and then makes the states pander to get the money back. So the states are forced to set up the education programs the federal government wants, the driving laws they want, etc, etc. Nominally education is state-run, but in reality it's all handed down by the Board of Education (which is also why it's dysfunctional and ill-catered to individual students). For all the love Reagan gets, a lot of people overlook how he expanded federal powers in morality laws and took that decisionmaking away from individual states. Things like that. If federal taxes went down, I think a number of states would raise local taxes and provide their own services to people who want them. A relatively small reduction in federal taxes could have a huge cascading effect on federal power and give it back to state power.

> Also it is difficult to compare historic governments with current ones in the same sentence because the circumstances those governments operated in were so dissimilar.

Yes, very true. Also, the modern historical record is often flawed and misrepresented so you have to dig around in archaic primary sources to get a real idea of how things really happened at different times. It's quite a challenge to understand how things even really were back then, and then extrapolating them to now is a burden too.

> For instance, the 'nation' of Greece back then had a populace that would comfortably fit in a mid sized town baseball stadium. So methods and techniques used in antique times have relatively little bearing on what we can do today.

Yeah, good comment. Looking at history more carefully, I was amazed at how small some of the historical battles were. Oftentimes an elite unit of like 400 troops were the backbone of one a conqueror's army. I think Tokugawa Ieyasu had less than 600 troops for the first half of his career, something like that. Kind of puts it into perspective.

> Agreed on the rest of what you wrote and a nice eye opener about the 'organizations', indeed, individuals are the way, but then individual education is a very big problem on the horizon, and one that so far has not been solved in a way that is satisfactory so that you could put significant power in the hands of individuals by democratic means. It would lead to ruin quite quickly and dramatically so I would imagine.

Yeah, education is quite the challenge. I always wonder why Americans wanted direct election of senators instead of indirect election? The ability for corruption, lobbying, and bribery skyrocketed, so did the emphasis on short term decisionmaking. Before that, the people would elect the state legislature, and the state legislature would elect the Senators. A state legislature would have many representatives that were much harder to bribe/lobby... now that money can go directly to senators' campaigns. If you want democracy, why ignore all the lessons of democratic government through the years? Having two layers of elections (people elect state legislators, state legislators elect senate) means the people don't need as much education, as long as even 1/3rd of a state legislature are competent, they can discuss and persuade another 20% and get a competent, uncorrupt senator in, who reports directly to the more-educated-than-average legislature. Why they changed that, I don't know, the results have been predictable - massive increases in lobbying and official and unofficial corruption, much more short term thinking, much more emotional-based unthinking politics...

Anyway, good discussion and lots to think about, cheers.