Hehee, a great horse story - thanks for sharing! And it nicely illustrates that when a horse spooks or resists entering an area, it is not always because of them being afraid of things like a tarp flapping in the wind - sometimes it is because they sniff or hear a predator.

And what comes to politics; I think that generally speaking I pretty much agree with your views on federalism. (We are facing similar questions here in the EU, too.) But, from my personal experience, one little addition: I don't think a small-scale local government would somehow inherently be "better" than a distant federal government. For example, we used to have municipal adminstration of a local area with population ca. 5500 people. And in Finland the state-wide legislation sets kind of a framework for some questions, leaving it up to the local municipalities to decide the details which fit the local circumstances. OK, but in some questions I saw the local rules being pretty stupid - which was in a no way forced by the state legislation, but just decided here on the local level. Because, apparently, we have had some stupid people in the municipal adminstration making stupid decisions.

Also, when I lived in a countryside collective of about 6 - 10 adults (it varied from year to another), there were a lot of small details we had to decide by ourselves. For example, if we decided that once a day there is a common meal for everybody, and someone cooks that common meal - the state legislation says absolutely nothing about such arrangements, so all the details were left for us to figure out autonomously by the group itself. And, if you ask me, we pretty much failed to reach sustainable agreement in so many questions, and the system didn't feel that functional. Not because of any outside regulation, but merely because our lack in skills of communication.

So, that's why I take it down to the small-scale grass roots. Trying to understand and to improve the way I personally deal with other people (or horses) when I interact with them. Or, to rephrase; In some ways I think that the size or the distance of the government doesn't matter that much - what matters is the degree of idiocy and bigotry of the said government - be it an autonomous adminstration of 8 adults, or a global summit of world leaders.