City-State

[Thoreau]

Hey I have been studying ALOT about these stuff, aligned with my History teacher that is also from the counterculture and antisystem, he is not a capitalist by any ways nor a comunist or an anarchist. He, as I, think that things must be adapted to the situation your faced with, no one size fits all or any ideaology, its all hibrid.
So my question is, do you think City-States can work? And i mean medium-large cities, idealy with a maximum of 1milion inhabitants.
So cities would be preferbaly self suficient at least in food and water so one city cannot buy another off. And well they would trade betwhen them, they may create their currencies, idealy trade by trade.
Have you seen Zeitgeist movies? Maybe like that, but withouth the computer that does the decisisons, becouse that does not seam viable at the moment, but of course as much more tecnology better, and people would only be in charge of the city's maintence and improvement, the rest of the time and aim would be, well freedom, no individual gains whatsoever, in terms of money or owning lots of stuff liek houses or whatever.

Discuss please, it may be feazable in some countries, even in the US after its (hopefully) implosion and separation
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[Pheonix]

What's this city-state thing you talk about it sound like Confederacy with a hippie twist. It seems like City-States is another way to describe confederacy without saying "confederacy" kind of like "State-rights".

 

[Thoreau]

Well it would basicly be cities with their own government, let me give you an example, the US, it has a federal goverment, but in case of dismebrament, what would be left were states, that are now independent countries. The city-state concept goes deeper than that, since a state in the US is usually about the size of an european country, it must divide itself further, to a point of, for example, the city-states before the italian unification. With about the same size and withouth all the battles in beetwhen.
I believe that something like that would be the maximum of democracy, and where democracy could really work. Becouse the more persons you have in your country, the more likely opinions, ways of life and world views are diferent.

 

[Pheonix]

It would just separate the states even more, California would be super liberal and Texas would be super Republican and eventually states would start going to war with each other. Who's going to protect Michigan from Ohio?

 

[Auto]

Aristotle said that if a city-state reached more then a 50,000 population, freedoms would be lost. I like the city-state idea, masses of people are easily manipulated into wanting things that are not in their best interest, it would be much better to have a smaller populace, you would most likely personally know most of the people that are running things. Lew Rockwell often talks about the city-state idea if you are interested.