I'm not EXACTLY sure I agree, however, what I can say is that we can slash a huge amount of people from governement and simply automate them away.
That won't change anything. The people who like to dick around with other people's lives will just become the people who make and program the automation. You can't fight human nature that way. The ONLY way to fight human nature is with human nature. That's why capitalism works so well, because it pits greed against greed. It's like tying a bunch of dogs together to keep them from going anywhere.
A government that protects against tyranny has to be built so that power-hungry ambitious people work at cross-purposes to each other. They'll spend most of their time trying to kneecap their competition and won't have enough time to worry about the width of your walkway. To put it in programmer's terms, you have to build a honeypot for those sorts of personalities and let them exhaust themselves trying to come out on top.
The only other thing that might work is Plato's idea of compulsory government service in place of elected officials. Think of it like jury duty, but you could be assigned to anything. You could even be assigned to be mayor, or city council. By assigning roles you limit the ability of the sociopaths and ladder-climbers from monopolizing the system.
Even if you accepted government as it is today in the United States, from the federal down to the city, each adult in the United States would only have to do 4 weeks of assigned government service to cover every government employee position there is in the country.
There is room for exploration here. Good points.
And in the case of assigned service, then you would truly have a government of the people. Quite literally.
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