Five Oregon counties vote to leave state, create 'Greater Idaho'
One of the things I periodically mentally noodle with is, what would the world look like if it was a lot easier for units to choose what larger units they would aggregate into? Like, cities choosing a county, counties choosing a state, states choosing their country, etc.<p>I originally was noodling with this in the context of a space civilization, where there is no equivalent of &quot;solid ground&quot;, everything&#x27;s always moving, and everything <i>can</i> move (i.e., even a &quot;space station&quot; can still move places, it just may be slower than a &quot;space ship&quot;), where these sorts of structures are probably inevitable because at the unit of &#x27;space station&#x27; you can&#x27;t hardly <i>stop</i> them from moving around between what various borders there may be.<p>But you can still noodle with the idea on planet Earth, too. Obviously, our current systems have a lot of institutional inertia in the direction of centralization; for instance, the various impacts this will have on the United States due to how we choose representatives, etc. But you can imagine a world in which this gradually becomes more popular, and imagine what the follow-on effects may be. And also consider why it not how things work here. There have also been times and places in history where things did work <i>more</i> like this, such as when and where &quot;city states&quot; were the dominant organizations rather than &quot;nations&quot;.<p>(I present this as an interesting thought topic, not as the solution to the world&#x27;s problems. I think one thing you will rapidly notice if you put serious thought into it is that especially on Earth, the nature of militaries has a lot of impact on why we find it advantageous to bundle into larger collectives than our neighbors. But I do find myself wondering whether over the next century or so we could save ourselves quite a few shooting wars if we were all more willing to break up amicably instead of fighting to the death over who gets to control tho overly-large, bloated collectives. Alas... we almost certainly won&#x27;t.)<p>(Another example... in the space case, your choice of governance might actually manifest as concretely as the <i>operating system</i> your space ship or space station runs on, with its corresponding grants of permission or lack thereof to whatever higher powers your choice of governance has. And then that raises a whole bunch of further interesting possibilities.... on Earth though I would expect geography to still loom large on all discussions of sovereignty, though.)