Arnold Kling argues for a more representative democracy with smaller political units. Doctor Thomas discusses.

It is always costly to ensure that agents [government officials] act on behalf of the citizens and that they do not use their power to extract rents from their constituents...

The costs of monitoring agents increase not only with the geographic size of the collective but also with the number of people in the collective. This is because in a larger collective each member captures a smaller share of the rents created by collective enforcement and therefore has less incentive to monitor the agent...With the stake in the collective inversely related to group size, we can expect less monitoring and more rent seeking and rent extraction as group size increases. -- Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West, p. 30

Terry Anderson and Peter Hill make an argument that suggests that democracy does not scale well. As the size of the constituency group gets large, the politician becomes less accountable. Politicians find it easier to extract rents and abuse powers.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=081505A

Doctor Thomas:

Just a quick point. The concept of "economic rent" is, I believe, not well-defined in the absence of defined (what I will call)"policy-property rights". Stripped of its intellectual sounding justification, "economic rent" can possibly be substituted with "the accrual of advantage to a group of persons that the speaker doesn't believe are morally justified in receiving", usually a group of which the speaker is not a member.

Indeed the "consumer surplus" is (I believe) technically the equivalent (analogue) of producer "economic rent". Civil libertarians whinge andwhine about bureaucrats and governments--- but in democracies they can'tbe that bad. If these alternative ideas of political organisation wereso good, why not run for office and implement them? (This is theanalogue of the argument "nothing that business does can be wrongbecause otherwise their customers would buy from somewhere else/employees would go work for someone else). [Alternatively - bureaucratsmay have it so much better than you, but they deserve it because theywere smart enough to pick that as a career, its a free country and youhad every equal opportunity to be in their position].

One of the things about so-called "special interest groups" which critics of existing political processes seem to fail to acknowledge isthat they are composed of individuals, who presumedly, ought to have aright to pursue their own interests (according to almost all westerntheories of political economy). For example the so-called "specialinterest group" that one of the following diatribe criticises, includes unionists, feminists, lawyers, financiers, intellectuals, entertainers, journalists, public sector employees, employees of organisations assisted by government, people who receive government benefits. That's apretty sizable proportion of the population. If (and I emphasise IF)they form a majority then they aren't some illegitimate "specialinterest group" - they are the mainstream, and meeting their interests is just the "proper" functioning of democracy.

But the following does give some food for thought. Part of the problem with lots of states is that its difficult to achieve co-ordination when required. This has similar ideas with the notions of direct democracy and participatory governance (which suffers from similar challenges regarding co-ordination). A semi-practical way of getting this sort of idea going is to start small and scale up slowly, one step at a time.Presumedly the distributed nature of the political organisationsuggested would not require uniformity across the entire nation (and ifit did, then what particular form of political organisation does theauthor suggest would be able to implement and maintain that sort ofcoordination, if not a centralised one?).

Patrick Henry:

What about a definition like:

An economic rent is a parasitic income. A robber baron is a parasite: he takes but does not contribute. A normal baron is not parasitic. He takes, but he organises defence, creates laws, arbitrates disputes, etc.

Perhaps there is also an element of illegitimacy. A public servant's salary is not 'rent', the bribes he collects are.

Doctor Thomas:

I don't know about your definition, unless we can have a well-defined distinction between a positive act and a negative act.

A robber baron is not a parasite, he takes, but in return he contributes by not beating the fuck out of you.

A factory may collect a payment from the townspeople in the countryside, but in return, it contributes by not polluting their air.

If NOT doing something can be considered a "contribution" then we are stuck... And then it just seems arbitrary and to be resolved as the outcome of argy-bargy political bickering.