Occam's Razor

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.

In English: Plurality should not be posited without necessity. It's also called the principle of simplicity or the principle of parsimony, i.e. every explanation should be made as simple as possible and no simpler. Almighty God is one such violation of the razor. The God hypothesis supposedly explains everything, but it illuminates nothing and only multiplies the number of entities that must be understood. If you read about God, the Fiction, then you will understand why the Almighty is impossible, too.

Likewise, the quantity of nations should not be increased without due cause. On the other hand, why would you have any more layers of government than are absolutely necessary? Is Washington, D.C., an absolutely necessary layer of government, or is it mostly overhead with a big appetite for tax dollars and a love of corporate welfare? Thomas Jefferson put things nicely in the Declaration of Independence:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Fortunately, Mr. Jefferson wrote in the very next sentence that,

"...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

Can we conclude that the object is despotism when Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and the United States Armed Forces tell you that you are free but your state cannot leave the union because the union is "indivisible"? What about when liberals and conservatives argue for complete centralization of power in the name of democracy and freedom?

Is despotism the object when Congress disobeys the law which reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and then denies it broke the law? What about when multiple Presidents swear to uphold the Constitution but both wage wars as suits their whim and fail to oppose the aforementioned law used to insert a false god into the mouth of every child who recites the Pledge of Allegiance? What about when the Supreme Court and other courts look the other way? We could go on.

O.K., so the charge of despotism is overblown. Anyone who has read the history of the world's feudalisms, dictatorships, and even America's slave-owning past should see that the American people are not being tyrannized as of mid-2005. Fooled, yes, into thinking their nation is a republic, but despotism doesn't apply. A far better specimen is China, nominally Communist but in truth fascist albeit in diapers. If anything, America has been throwing its weight around among non-Americans, but even this hasn't risen to the standard of despotism. Still, a sharp eye on things in N. America you should keep.

By the way, William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349) was an English philosopher and Franciscan monk who popularized the principle that came to be associated with his name. Like most Franciscans, he advocated a life of poverty and self-restraint. He even battled Pope John XXII over the issue of poverty and was eventually excommunicated, big stuff back in the Middle Ages, for salvation was—and still is—supposedly available only through the Church. Those outside it were doomed, or so they were told. What was William's response? He argued that the Pope was a heretic.

"A majority stance on a combination of issues
can be composed of alternatives that
only minorities favor."

"The process of passing democratically from individual
to collective choices is doomed by impossibility:
there is no reliable way of establishing rational collective choices."

John Barrow, in Impossibility:
The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits, p. 241, 244, 247