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/r/fednews is going wild about what's going on with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This is in-line with this executive order. If this really does goes forward and a significant chunk of federal funding is cut from museums and libraries nationwide, I might really just start go kick a rock somewhere. I love libraries, I love museums, and I really don't think they're that wasteful either. I've read and somewhat understand where other posters are coming from with regards to institutional-ideological-capture, but on this I am struggling to see how that weighs so much compared to the good being provided.
Literally over the weekend on a day trip, my wife and I stopped at the local town's library for a midtrip break and I was absolutely astound at the many services this small town library provided. There was weekly notary service, children activities, a display of locally important quilts, a plethora of tax-season offerings, etc. Personally, in my childhood, my school library was open on Saturday and it was common for my mum to unload us kids there for the day and let us roam the stacks as we please. As a middle schooler, the library was great for a socially anxious kid. And in adulthood, on every exploration walk I've made, if there's a library open, I'm walking in.
For any trip to any world-class city, museums are the first thing on my list. The artifacts, the stories, the experience of seeing things you've only seen in books or through the internet with your own eyes, letting those electrons hit those retinas. Washington DC would be a lot less inviting or exciting without the many museums that dot its map. Even the small libraries can be a great experience as they often document a subject I've never thought of before.
The US greatest treasures are its national parks and forests and public land. Thankfully at least that nature would survive when there are less humans, though I still fear for the actual long term consequences. Not so the libraries and museums. Can someone explains to me why this is a good thing?
I’m firmly in favor of publicly funded museums, opera, theater, art. But this stuff should be funded by states and cities, not by the federal government! There’s an extraordinary obfuscation in this kind of thing being funded federally.
All this agency dismantlement will have negative consequences in many ways. But the principle of it is fair, that this huge expansion of the federal bureaucracy occurred without the consent of the public and for no good reason other than that people involved wanted to expand their fiefdoms and preserve their sinecures.
A federation of states! Why not? Why shouldn’t it be so?
why the distinction?
Because America is too large. If you look at other nations of comparable or greater size (India, China, even Brazil) regional governors and politicians often have far more control over the local political economy than in the US. Chinese provinces vastly differ in terms of economic and social policy, for example.
Very interesting. I'd have expected China to be way more centralised because it's, well, China. Maybe the much larger population plays a role?
According to Wikipedia, this decentralization was instituted by Deng Xiaoping back in the 1980s. Quoting various books published since 2008:
Laboratories of
<del>democracy</del><ins>socialism with Chinese characteristics</ins>The recent "laboratories of socialism with Chinese characteristics" is correct. As far as I understand, regional governors have great latitude to experiment with policy, with successful cases transplanted into other provinces (as with the original "laboratories of democracy").
But the heightened autonomy also makes sense, looking back further in history. The division of China into its provinces goes back a long way; though the modern system (with adjustments) dates back to the Mongols, many of these territorial units trace their origin to antiquity; going into the 20th century, provincial feeling within China would have been much stronger and more deep-rooted than e.g. the same between US states. IIRC early observers of republican China thought that China would most likely be heavily federalised in large part due to this; even with Maoist destruction of China's cultural heritage, some of this still stays.
And historically while imperial China was theoretically totalitarian, in practice -- especially late into the imperial era, where the bureaucracy was increasingly lean and population increasingly large -- regional leaders had quite a lot of freedom as long as they were sufficiently obsequent to the Dragon Throne. (When central power was weak, of course, even that didn't apply -- see how the Beiyang fleet was snubbed by the other three Chinese fleets during the first Sino-Japanese war, or how during the Boxer rebellion governors of the southern provinces refused to heed the declaration of war on the Europeans and Japanese and withheld knowledge of the edict from their populations.)
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