[Phantom Lord]

To return to a House of Reps with a rep for every 30,000 people would give us a House of nearly 10,000 members! You think we have gridlock and special interest coercion now, imagine the mess that a House with 10,000 reps would cause.

[hedgetrimmer]

This is interesting. One argument against the Eurpean Union is that the individual has less representation precisely because the number of people an official represents is greater in the EU, than in a sovereign government. Same argument applies for world government.

[TexasNative2000]

George Will had an excellent piece on this subject several years ago. Allow me some time to find and post.

[SwinneySwitch]

I don't see any country on this table I'd rather live in. Let's just leave it alone for now!

[Elliott Jackalope]

My wife and I were talking about this very subject earlier this morning. I was making the case that when governments of any type get too large they become indifferent to the needs of the people they are supposedly serving. It's like buildings that get too big, such as the giant glass towers of so many major cities. The ugliness and indifference of those edifices eventually led to a new way of thinking in architecture, called the "human-scale" movement, which means buildings designed to serve the needs of the people who use them daily, instead of the ego's of those who build them.

I submit that the real answer is not to add more representatives, but to break up the U.S. into about twenty or so smaller nations, each with its own independant government. Face it, when you are a part of nation of three hundred and fifty million people, you are as relevant as a grain of sand on an endless beach. If you are a citizen of a nation of ten or twenty million people, you might at least have a chance of being slightly relevant to the ruling elite. We need human-scale government!

[dogbyte12]

The reps are protected by the fact that they represent so many.

The fewer people in the district, the more important you are.

I think we should personally set it to the smallest state size. Whatever that number is in the census, that should be the size of the district. It also helps larger states in a sense. If a state has 100,000 or 600,000, they still get the same pull in the house. The senate is supposed to accomplish that task of equal representation by each state.

I know Wyoming was 493,000 in the 2000 census, so use that as a baseline. Divide the national population by 493,000, and apportion accordingly. 567 or so seats would work.