In modern life, we must decentralize by profession, not by geography
People nowadays move often, so they have only a weak claim to be true citizens of whatever districts they temporarily inhabit
I’m responding to a comment that Franklin wrote:
"It states that power should be delegated to the most local level wherever possible."
Perhaps in some cases the most local level possible can be thought of as being local to some issue or expertise, rather than local in the geographic context? As an example, school teachers devote their lives to understanding what school children need, therefore we can delegate a large amount of responsibility to school teachers, when it comes to deciding what the curriculum should be. I'm trying to think of a single case where it was a asserted that a small geographic region had specific educational needs, without the result being deeply reactionary. More so, we live in a highly mobile society in which people bounce around from region to region and even country to country, so how could we justify a government that delegates to small geographic units? The argument in favor of delegation-based-on-geography was stronger a few centuries ago, when society was mostly agricultural and people were tied to the land -- in those days a single family might stay in the same village for 300 years, and so their claim to a right to govern that village in some unique way was a strong one. But nowadays, in American suburbs, people buy homes strictly as investments, they accumulate some equity, then sell the house, then move to a different town and buy a slightly larger home. Few people stay in place for more than 20 years. It's become a natural life cycle for Americans to be born in one town, go away to college in a different town, settle down to raise a family in a third town, and then retire to a place like Florida, or perhaps Portugal. Such people have a very weak claim to be true citizens of whatever districts they temporarily inhabit, and their loyalty to the local place is almost non-existent, aside from a temporary loyalty to the local schools, while they have children in those schools. Given the lack of loyalty to local areas, the argument in favor of geographic delegation has become weak. But in any large, complex system delegation is essential, so we need to look for other dimensions along which we can decentralize. The specialization of skills is an obvious axis of delegation in modern life. If we abolish local, city, and state governments and concentrate all power in the national capitol we can then carry out a program of radical decentralization, delegating all powers to highly specialized committees, and leaving the legislature/executive a hollow shell of its former self, with no power save the power to appoint expert specialists to the committees.
To put this differently, the law-interpretation function has an independent branch of government, which culminates in the Supreme Court (whether appointments to the Supreme Court are done correctly is a separate issue). Likewise, over the last 100 years, worldwide, economists have seen their influence consolidated into the concept of independent central bank. We can take such independence as a model and extend it — an education council as independent as the Supreme Court (with some fixes to the appointment process). Likewise, an independent medical council, an independent council of accountants, an independent council of law enforcement, an independent council for the construction trades (carpenters, welders, architects). Many of these groups already have powerful groups that are already powerful elements in the civil society of each liberal democracy, but we can imagine consolidating these civil groups as actual parts of the government, with the level of independence that we associate with the Supreme Court or the central bank.