You nailed it, Fox: The electoral college is an institutional mechanism for overcoming slow communication speeds. In engineering terms, the electoral college is a "store-and-forward" communications architecture, in which packets, made up of bundles of paper instead of bits, are aggregated and forward on to a central location.

It's interesting to examine our assumptions about government and in general how humans organize, using the perspective of 21st century systems analysis. It's not just the electoral college which is a consequence of communications capabilities, but, I'd say, most features of government that we take for granted. The must fundamental feature of all is the basic pattern of hierarchical delegation of authority to overcome communications latency by distributing decision-making closer to where it's required.

I'd postulate that humans self-organize because of our primate heritage (not a risky postulate on its own), and that the form that these organizations take is primarily governed by available communications speed and bandwidth. Up until the 20th century, the default form was based on a simple rule: People feel the most affinity with those physically closest, and the affinity diminishes gradually with distance, in direct proportion to diminished communication ability. From this emerged naturally a hierarchical tribal organization based on geography.

Exceptions illustrate the principle too, such as the global tribe formed by the Catholic Church. It's always had to work hard to maintain cohesiveness across long distances, and its primary technique has been tireless proselytizing and preaching: A massive effort at communication. Even its dogmatism has an engineering rationale: To guard against transmission errors through erratic organic communication channels. The tribe of Catholicism is held together mostly by communications.

Tribalism has historically been territorial tribalism because territory is defined by the range of effective communication, i.e. the range of effective control; and the history of the growth of nations and governments has been about the development of better ways to extend the range of communication and control.

The ramifications sprawl every which way, so I'm making a conscious attempt to keep it brief. I think this might be worth a thread on its own. But consider:

The reason why "big government" is the natural state of affairs is really quite simple. It's the same logic behind natural monopolies on such things as electrical utilities, because in fact a government is a utility too, one that provides the communications and control structures that maintain a society. If you need to accomplish something on a national scale, it make sense to add the function to the existing governmental structure rather than to create a new parallel national structure. Economy of scale really does justify much, but not all, of the tendency to governmental elephantiasis. (I realize that Conservatives disagree vehemently that it must be so, but the very history of the growth of government about which they complain so bitterly suggests that I'm right.)

At least, government can be said to have a natural monopoly as long it has utility to overcome communications latency in the organization of human affairs...

But now it's the 21st Century and we got Net. The same analysis says that the institutions that evolved and flourished in a communications desert might have a hard time submerged in an ocean of near-instantaneous communication, and wadda ya know? That's sure what I see. Governments no longer have a natural monopoly on communication, and all the power that naturally comes with it. This might be the century that we really do see the nation-state wither away, delighting both Marx and Brosz in one go.

But humans self-organize, so I'm afraid Tom will be disappointed if he was hoping the Net will usher in an anarchic individualistic utopia. But a consolation prize is that I predict that the kind of organizations that will arise in this environment will be diverse and specialized, and the economies of scale that once justified the monolithic state will disappear. Yes, Tom, the era of big-government will be over, inevitably and naturally.

In fact, when I think about, we might actually see something like Libertarianism, as specialized organizations arise out of common interests to deal with specific aspects of human affairs, without the centralization and aggregation of power that's an inevitable side-effect of the general-purpose government.

Not so delightful will be the inevitable chaos that will accompany the transformation. The "disintermediation" of government has many dark sides, including terrorism. Nation-states used to compartmentalize extremists and rendered them powerless, but now they can organize independently of geography, and thus we have al Qaida. (That explanation beats hell outta "they jes hates us", don't it?)

Some examples come to mind...but then I see that I've written a whole bunch of paragraphs in response to your one sentence, Fox, and I realize that I'm running off at the fingers again. If this is interesting to anybody, best to continue in a new thread. Or not.