No man shall sit in congress longer than two years successively, nor be capable of reelection for three Years afterwards: and no person who holds any office in the gift of the congress shall hereafter be elected to represent this commonwealth in congress.
Pennsylvania enacted term limits for its congressmen in its constitution. That is what Bryan is referring to.
...but I believe the inherent problem with large government is that it separates the legislators from the citizens to a great extent.
This is a critical point. Were we to adhere to the rule of 30,000, then we would have 10,000 congressmen in the House today. This is why I've begun to think that we should maintain the House of Repesentatives on the Internet and actually have those 10,000 congresscrittters. They would never leave home, would be available to their constituents 24/7, and would work via secure server. Bribing that many congressmen would be much more difficult than bribing 435.
Technically, your senator should be reporting to your state legislature, and you shouldn't need to see him.
I happen to be of the opinion that it will take something big (near revolution or major economic depression) to bring about a return to the love of liberty.
A collapse of the economy and the currency might suffice, with the forced return to a hard currency of some kind, perhaps gold, silver, oil, or a basket of commodities. Whatever it is would require that people no longer look to goverment to provide their daily bread.
The citizens of the Soviet Union faced that challenge when their nation collapsed. An entire generation had been brought up under Brezhnev, relying on the government to provide everything. Once the system disappeared, they had to survive by learning new skills. Today there is more economic freedom in Russia than the US, but the Russians still don't have the rule of law.
I've worked through this argument several times and abandoned this premise. It would take more effort to bribe so many officials, but the bribes would be much smaller and therefore more difficult to discover. For one thing, there would be 10,000 possible sources of corruption to investigate. I return to the belief that the Congress should have more members not because of the economy of bribery. The economy of scale in the current system makes it unworkable. How can one person represent half a million people living in up to twenty different towns?
The suggestion is ridiculous. It also costs a fortune to run a legitimate campaign against the incumbent. Politicians quickly learn the value of photo ops and speechifying. It gets their names out, and people rarely question the validity of the news story. The challenger has to create these media exposures for himself. This takes time and money, which eliminates many potentially good candidates. He has to convince more than 250,000 people that he is the right person for the job.
If the district contains less people, it is easier to do this. The district is not one of the gerrymandered abortions we currently use, so the people actually have things in common. If the district only has 30,000 people, or 50,000 (my preferred number) then it's much easier to reach them. You'd be surprised how many hands you can shake standing outside Wal-Mart on a Saturday morning. I can do that, even driving my little Chevy and working full time. You can do it, too. Even if our campaigns rely on BS, we have to stand in front of a group of people and smile while we deliver that BS. If we deliver enough BS, our neighbor BilltheDrill might also decide that he can run for the office against both of us.