In A Galaxy Far Far Away...

Let's look at a little hypothetical situation.

Let's say an isolated group of people started a civilization. There isn't all that many of them so at first they work together to make sure everyone is surviving and provided for. People that aren't very skilled in simple areas of survival would quickly have to learn from people that are better than them and eventually people would figure out ways to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families. Eventually though, people would realize that certain things they are especially good at. If everyone started specializing in things they are particularly skilled at, services could be exchanged and overall less effort would be put out to achieve the same amount of services they collectively had before.

As the civilization grew and grew, certain groups of people would be particularly good at providing the services needed and the economy would grow as well as the standard of living. Eventually though, people wouldn't necessarily know the people around them as well as they did before because of more and more people living in the civilization. Crime would start to occur as you had people trying to free ride off the success and wealth of other people they don't know. The people decide that they need to enact rules and laws for the people of the civilization to follow in order for everyone to stay happy. At this point, the group is small enough that each person could be involved in each major decision being made and provide their input. Collectively the laws would be a direct result of the feelings and needs of the people.

At some point, the group would grow enough that it wouldn't be feasible for each person to provide their input on every decision being made so the group chooses certain people to act for them, and make decisions on their behalf. This works great as these people can directly find out from their constituents just what is wanted and act accordingly. The size of this government would eventually have to grow proportionally with the population to accommodate more and more people in the civilization. At some point, however, this would stop because the people wouldn't have a clear view of just how much power they each individually have over their representatives. So as this continued, the power of each person to dictate the governments actions would get smaller and smaller. Eventually, there would be so many people being represented by so few, that the individual's power over the government would approach zero.

This, it seems to me, is exactly what has happened with democracy in America. We have so little power, our government is so big and powerful and ruled by a vast public, with each person having no ability to contribute. So, you in effect have a huge government that is governed by a powerless group of people. Just a thought.