[Ultimate Newbie]

Originally Posted by Dante Hicks

Policing, education and health are already administered at a local level in most countries.

In australia, police is a state matter except the Australian Federal Police which administers the commonwealth territories and breaches of federal law etc. Education and Health are nominally State (middle) issues as well, however they rely quite strongly on commonwealth (highest) funding to work, to the extent that education and health are both state and federal issues and thus interesting.

I'm not sure what you mean treasury - obviously financial control exists throughout different levels of government. Some monetary decisions exist outside of central government anyway (e.g. interest rates in the UK).

I mean the huge apparatus that has arisen in order to accomodate the huge numbers of taxes, their complexity and quantity etc that would have to be copied to a smaller scale but in every single local council around the country - its another big 'economy of scale' thing. Plus, ofc, treasury provides a very large advisory role for all other departments and ministries regarding pretty much everything they do - that expertise cant really be fractured to every little level of government either.

I would abolish much of the miltiary and scale back on any foriegn policy.

personally, i wouldnt. Isolationism's attractiveness looks good on paper, and to some degree it works in the real world, however i dont think that its all that cracked up to be. Global trade (and associated institutions like creating standards) makes foreign policy issues more important: because your goods are sent to places and you receive (sometimes critical) goods from other countries, its in your national interest to become involved in those countries in order to make sure they can provide that continuity of trade - at a minimum - even if you ignore the other (military/diplomacy) issues.

So there's not a great deal I would see as the exclusive domain of the central government.

Australia's constitution (s52 iirc) specifically identifies areas of exclusive commonwealth (central) control, and s51 identifies areas of co-operative commonwealth/state control. So in that sense, there are areas of exclusive central control .