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Re:The End of Industrial Society by zozbot234 on Sunday May 08, 2022 @06:38PM (#31308716)
The separation of powers could be expanded to a far greater extent. In particular the modern bureaucratic state, with its long-term sinecure positions at the highest levels, is entirely antithetical to the whole idea of checks and balances, or "ambition being made to counteract ambition". This is where former aristocracies might provide a better model.
Re:The End of Industrial Society by nostrademons on Sunday May 08, 2022 @06:48PM (#31308768)
I'd agree with that.

There's a tension between full capitalism, which often becomes inefficient because entrenched interests prioritize persistence of the institution over fulfillment of the institution's mission, and full competition, which often becomes inefficient because it cannot generate the institutional knowledge needed to run things efficiently. Bureaucracy and mature big companies are on the former side of the scale, bullshit startups and "artisan" (read: overpriced and poor quality) small businesses on the latter.

My ideal social system would make this tension explicit and create automatic mechanisms to break up large institutions and re-form them out of the skilled individual contributors at the bottom. Something like the California labor laws, where you cannot enforce non-compete agreements and it's very difficult to prove that the startup which just spun off stole your trade secrets. Probably even moreso, and applied to the government itself, as CA business climate has recently become relatively hostile to startups as well.