The Trouble With State Government
I was talking to a libertarian-minded fellow at the Kaufman Foundation conference I was attending on Friday, and he asked me something like why does all this big government stuff have to be done at the federal level? Couldn’t we leave it all up to the states? That way there’s be a kind of “policy competition”—states could try different things, people could leave policy regimes they didn’t like, and we could see what works:
The most obvious problem with this proposal is that in the areas where the case for government activism is the strongest, it just wouldn’t make sense to take action at the level of a small sub-unit of a large economically integrated country. Rhode Island can’t regulate air pollution since it can’t help air wafting in from neighboring states. And Kentucky can’t do macro stabilization policy—there’s too much economic leakage into the rest of the country.
But probably the more profound problem here is that it doesn’t seem to work in practice. In the context of the normal political debate, I obviously come down on the big government side of the equation. But at the same time, I wouldn’t disagree with the observation that there are some elements of our economy that are badly over-regulated. It’s much more difficult to start or expand a business than it should be and this is one of the reasons why our economy has gotten so dominated by cookie-cutter chains that have enough scale to amass expertise and legal clout needed to navigate this thicket. There’s more occupational licensing than their needs to be. There’s too much regulation saying that buildings have to be short, or can only occupy so big a percentage of the lot, or have to have so many parking spaces. At the same time that I think the country’s overall policy dynamic is too tilted toward the automobile, the actual vehicle registration process is weirdly cumbersome, and the rules governing auto dealers are positively insane.
But all this malfeasance is done by state and local governments.
Rather than the small scale of the units leading to better policy via competition, what seems to me to happen is that the lack of public attention paid to policymaking at the state, county, and municipal level leads to much more pure interest-group capture than you see on the federal level. Not that interest groups don’t have a lot of clout in federal politics. But the relatively competitive nature of elections and the relatively bright spotlight shown on national politics puts a check on these things. At the state level, bad policy really runs amok. So I wind up being skeptical that you could really improve much of anything even in those areas when I think the libertarian perspective is broadly correct by devolving more authority downward.
63 Responses to “The Trouble With State Government”
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February 28th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I don’t think libertarians and conservatives are sincere when they suggest that big-government experiments be conducted at the state level. They know, of course, that almost all state governments have resource and constitutional constraints that prevent them from conducting big-government experiments.
February 28th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Given what proceeded it the last sentence of your post could really use some explaining.
February 28th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Nevermind… I can’t read…
February 28th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Another problem with doing too much on the state level is that, since there is free movement between them and it’s unconstitutional to discriminate against new state residents, there’s potential for a huge free-rider problem. Some of this already happens, but it’s only because so much (especially floors) is set at the federal level that it’s not an unbearable problem.
February 28th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
“Rhode Island can’t regulate air pollution since it can’t help air wafting in from neighboring states.”
Another classic example of this is beaver management. Minks and muskrats might belong under state jurisdiction in some special circumstances, but you have to have feds in charge of the larger rodents. Come on. Like Wyoming can control gargantuan, tree-gnawing hampsters? Please.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
You can also toss in that a series of factors (the non-portability of health coverage is a really big one) makes “voting with one’s feet” rather difficult. The result is that to the extent states compete with each other at all, it is in being “business-friendly” (which, I suspect, is why Republicans and a lot of Libertartians are in favor of more local control of government).
February 28th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
They know, of course, that almost all state governments have resource and constitutional constraints that prevent them from conducting big-government experiments.
This is a feature, not a bug. The states can amend their constitutions or get more resources if they really want to implement things.
Which dovetails with my comment on this: “there’s potential for a huge free-rider problem”. In addition to the new state residents*, it happens on the state level anyway with border arbitrage (e.g. everyone goes to Jersey for gas if they can help it), which is enabled because of uniform federal standards on most things.
A common critique of the federal system lately (one with which I agree, btw) is that all the red states are ‘free-riding’ on the blue states, in the form of receiving a lot more from the federal government than they pay. And yet, the people whom make this critique are the same ones who are in most in favor of federalizing everything – which in turn will likely accentuate this difference even more.
*I actually wouldn’t mind a modification to the 14th amendment that allows states to create limits to ‘citizenship’ (e.g. voting rights, preferential treatment by some programs) in a state that are similar to the limits that the federal government can implement for newly arrived immigrants. The reason for instant universality and reciprocity – to avoid dicking over newly freed slaves – is long since past.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
There’s also the simple fact that even if it’s all well and good now to aggregate as much authority as you want to the federal level, you’re not going to keep the Republicans out of power forever.
Imagine if over the last eight years if the Bush education department ran every single school district in America. Imagine if they ran every single medical clinic. Imagine if a state wanted to manage greenhouse gases but was overruled by the federal government – wait, you don’t have to imagine that last one, *that’s what actually happened*.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
That critique isn’t leveled at the federal system, but at the red state advocates of self reliance.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
We have almost the perfectly match3ed political district, the Congressional one.
So, if I said, “Let the Congressional districts have a per share of the loot”, many, on both sides would protest for all sorts of reasons, except one, passing out money fairly is not what any particular group intended, they all want a special deal.
How big a special deal is anyone going to get? A bad deal if the yield curve keeps acting the way it has the past two days.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
One last thing
But all this malfeasance is done by state and local governments.
Equating ‘excessively bureaucratic’ with ‘malfeasance’ is a bit a stretch, but even accepting this premise, at least the malfeasance is geographically limited at the lower level of govt.
The overly bureaucratic and ‘regulatory capture’ arguments are fair enough. (although you’re slagging on AFSCME by doing it so sweepingly). Even so, the advantage of having multiple parallel systems is it’s still easy for good government types to be able to apply lessons learned of what works and what doesn’t. Point out how France or Finland or even Canada is doing something and there’s a decent argument that those examples don’t apply to the US. Point out how Cedar Rapids, IA is doing something and it’s a lot harder to say that it doesn’t apply to how Cary, NC (a town with roughly the same population size, density and demographic makeup per wikipedia)
February 28th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
Todd Zywicki, a blogger over at Volokh, has written a number of law review articles on this, not to argue for more power at the federal level, but to note that state governments are indeed often the object of such regulatory capture. This was also the most classic complaint of the Jacksonians, I believe, and the one area where Justice Marshall agreed with them.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Matt,
I don’t disagree in general, but take the case example of public education to see why federalism is ultimately important. The two leader nations in developing public education were the US and Germany, two federal countries in the mid-19th Century. The federalism is important because the majority of the country did not support public education for quite a while, but a majority of many states did support it. If you have a unitary country, you cannot have progress until a majority support it, whereas in a federal country, some states can adopt early and then when a national majority is attained, it can spread it the rest of the way. And because of the ability to “test” cases, this diffusion of support can happen quicker than if no states were able to act.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
There’s more occupational licensing than their needs to be.
Christ, not this again.
February 28th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
states could try different things, people could leave policy regimes they didn’t like, and we could see what works
WTF. I’m supposed to pack up and leave my friends and family behind and drag my own family through the rigors of displacement so that I can prove I hate my state government’s new policy regime. That’s a retarded and unworkable system of social experimentation.
February 28th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Kolohe- You’re making my point, I think. Yeah, let’s shift to locus of big government to the states, where it would require a massive legal/constitutional shift…that’s much better than doing it at the federal level, where everything is already in place both institutionally and attitudinally. This is the argument of someone who doesn’t want big government, disguised as agnosticism that merely wants to reap the best information from big government’s experiments. I’m unmoved.
February 28th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I’ll take the Federal Govt or state govt any day of the week. Why, you say? I live in Georgia.
February 28th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Oops. “or” -> “over”. Sorry.
February 28th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
You know there is a very strong argument to be made that because states face a collective action problem on some important issues, you need the federal government to step in.
But that’s not the argument you are making, some states do stuff you don’t like (”malfeasance”) and you think that if you have a very strong federal government it’s much easier to get them to stop doing this stuff. If you want to have a national policy much it is much easier to win one election then fifty…On the other hand if you weren’t such a hack you might entertain the idea that some of the regulations you call “malfeasance” are actually popular with regular voters and not just special interest capture. And some of the policies your opponents consider “malfeasance” are just regular old popular policies. And there really is no bridging this divide. Which is why it makes sense for Iowa and California, or on a smaller scale, Los Angeles and Modesto, to have the freedom to have differing policies. But apparently they don’t teach civics in Dalton…
February 28th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
MY’s analysis agrees with that of Hamilton and Madison. They feared corruption at the state and local level more than the federal level. They had slightly different theories, but the conclusion was the same. Roughly, in a small population an imbalance of power among interest groups was more likely to occur, and it would capture the government.
In addition to purely local corruption, some serious federal level corruption involves picking low lying but obscure state level pickings. Witness McCain’s facilitation of suspect federal land sales for his Arizona cronies in his home state.
And, as a commenter above note, there is the beaver management problem, which even the greatest minds of our generation have difficulty comprehending. Large rodents and sloths are an ever present menace. Luckily for California, all of its mammoth ground sloths were caught in the tar pits years ago. But for that, even the mighty Golden State would lie prostate before their onslaught today.
February 28th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Sorry to veer off-topic, but this story is pretty interesting if true: Playboy Magazine is claiming that the Santelli CNBC rant was planted by the right-wing noise machine. Has anyone heard anything about this?
February 28th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Matt:
There’s more occupational licensing than their needs to be.
Chris D:
Christ, not this again.
The bad spelling, or the moronic non-argument against occupational licenture?
February 28th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
You make a solid point here…but for whom is this any kind of news or revelation?
Libertarians, I guess.
But it’s such an obvious point to anyone with an interest in politics. And such an old story. Leaving aside Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, (etc etc etc) a big slogan of the Reagan years was “statehouse democracy”…anyone looking even broadly at, I don’t know, the history of US environmental politics or urban development or whatever, the corruption of local politics leaps out at you.
Libertarians don’t see this stuff because they don’t want to. It’s inconsistent, inconvenient, too much an a priori refutation of the whole schtick. It’s a blindness born out of a Lakoff-esque bad frame of reference. Or what’s the quote of Upton Sinclair about a man not understanding things when his paycheck depends on that misunderstanding?
February 28th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
I forget who came up with the single-sentence refutation of those states-minded folks like Yglesias’s interlocutor:
STATE CAN’T BUILD FUCKING *ROADS*.
That has always seemed an adequate argument to me.
February 28th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
I’d say there is another reason for interest group capture on the local level. The interests protected by the regulations you don’t like are those of homeowners (keep housing supply down to keep the price up) and incumbent businesses who want to keep competitors out.
For housing it is obvious. The people who would benefit if housing were cheaper in a locality include many people who don’t live there but would move there is housing were cheaper. They can’t vote for local government. There are relatively few absentee homeowners.
It is rational for a community to do things which reduce overall wealth if they increase the wealth of members of the community (here it is only really rational for homeowners if they plan to sell the home and move away or if it is valuable to them to use it as collateral on loans but come on homeowners aren’t rational about property values).
February 28th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
If it were upto the states, we’d have slavery lasting well into the twentieth century and segregation into the twenty-first.
Only in very few issues does a state government or two seem to be ahead of the Federal government.
February 28th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
>That way there’s be a kind of “policy competition”
That’s just it! That’s also called the “race to the bottom.” Be as grudging and miserly with human services as you can, so the poor people who depend on these services will move elsewhere, and it will be cheaper than ever to run the state.
February 28th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
another reason why the power of the states is withering, should wither, and cannot wither too quickly for my tastes?
because people move around. i’ve lived in ten different states as an adult. most people will live in about five different states.
i’m an american. if my job requires me to live in state x for awhile, that’s great–i’ll see new scenery and eat slightly different food.
but i’ll be damned if i want to be subject to the legal vagaries of some two-bit state govt. i want the protection of consistent, unvarying, federal law, from sea to shining sea.
federal standards for drugs. federal standards for highways, construction, every thing else.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
What libertarians really want, of course, is to do away with Federal Civil Rights Laws. So people can have their rights back, of course. It was a dark day for this country when indentured servitude, slavery, and discrimination by race and creed was abolished. If I am capable of enslaving another man (well, I’d start with women, it can be easier to beat them into submission) why does our tyrannical Federal Government deny me that right? It’s just another case of hobbling the capable, of denying rights to men who have the superior abilities to build a slave pen, or put bars on their basement windows. I won’t even get started on the damage done to motivated, smart and forward-looking children by those stupid child-labor laws. No wonder we are having a depression.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
If we “leave it all up to the states” then “the relatively bright spotlight shown on national politics puts a check on these things” and “state governments have resource … constraints that prevent them from conducting big-government experiments” are not relevant arguments. There would no longer be a national politics to hog the spotlight or a federal government absconding with large shares of states’ resources.
I am afraid of what might happen without 2nd amendment protections at the federal level though: the tree-eating hamster cataclysm can only be averted by a large gun-toting public.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Is that just a random map of the US, or does it show something interesting, like the number of hours of apprentice work required to get a barber’s license broken down by state? The resolution is too poor for me to tell, and there doesn’t seem to be a higher-resolution link.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
I think it is too simple to either give power to the states or to the federal government. The key point is that allowing states to act where federal action isn’t present is it lets those who have public support to move ahead to do so, helping to bring the nation with it quicker.
That doesn’t mean that once the federal government majority on an issue comes (on civil rights for example) that we must sit by while laggard states remain behind. Once the federal government has a majority to act, they can then force the remainder states to follow suit. The theory is that states should be able to be ahead of the federal government (on various issues of freedom or development) but never behind the federal government.
Call it limited federalism. If you remove federalism completely, you lose the benefit of it to gaining progressive majorities around an issue more quickly. If you move completely to federalism, you live with too many laggards for too long. Split the difference.
February 28th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Why not federally-coordinated “policy labs” at the state level. Instead of state and local policies growing like weeds in the absence of a centralized federal policy, you could have federally-instituted local policies.
There’s no reason why amassing power in Washington needs to entail a lack of policy chimeras. There would certainly be constraints to this model, but this is probably a more reasonable expectation than the “local big government” oxymoron proposed by MY’s libertarian peer.
Federalism by commission, not omission is what I’m sayin’, in a soundbite. This perspective allows a consideration of policy chimeras based on the merits, the default position being one of centralism (for all the reasons enumerated in the post and in comments).
February 28th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Was the person you talked to a “libertarian” or just “libertarian-minded”? Hmm? Which was it, Matt? Curious how you liberals sometimes say a person is one thing, then later back down and say they are another.
February 28th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
almost all state governments have resource and constitutional constraints that prevent them from conducting big-government experiments.
And the federal constitution is different how, exactly?”
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
February 28th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
b9n10nt @ #33–
interesting point.
if you follow out the “laboratories of democracy” idea, then it makes no sense to have completely uncoordinated experiments.
the current state system is like trying to run drug trials by having fifty different patients take whatever chemicals they feel like taking, and then see if any of them get better.
there are no controls, there is no way to tell what made a difference.
whereas, under your proposal, the federal govt could support the states in being “laboratories of democracy”, but by actually instituting something like experimental protocols, with case/control design and some ability to screen off confounders.
so, yeah, you make a good point: experimentation does not have to be haphazard. it can even be highly organized, and planned by a central body. indeed, in this day and age the vast majority of productive science *is* highly organized.
February 28th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
kid bitzer Says:
See my 35. The federal government is properly limited in its powers by the 10th Amendment. The powers of the fed are, by law, restricted to those enumerated.
The authorities (powers) of the states decline because the states and the people allow the fed to expand its power over the states without question.
February 28th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
well of course the 10A puts some restrictions on the federal govt’s power. this is not a startling discovery on your part.
but the constitution makes provisions for its own improvement, in cases in which it is deficient. that’s covered in article V.
when people are debating federalism, one of the questions they are debating is whether the restrictions in the constitution as currently written are good ones, well-adapted to the needs of the country.
i personally think the current structure of the constitution could use some improvement in this regard. if you disagree, then you can explain why no changes would improve it.
that way you will be actually discussing a matter of substance, instead of just saying “but the constitution says…!” we all know what the constitution says.
February 28th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
“But all this malfeasance is done by state and local governments. ”
And if the federal government wasn’t trying to destroy free speech (campaign finance), destroy the 2nd amendment (Eric Holder), rip out the 4th and 5th (drug war) – and so on, and so on – then perhaps there would be time to get involved in the stupid activities being undertaken by state and local governments. There are a limited number of hours in the day though, and the best you can do is get incensed about the worst abuses.
So yes, Matt – “big government” does lots of harm, much of it accidentally
February 28th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Anderson Said:
STATE CAN’T BUILD FUCKING *ROADS*.
Oh they can when they are motivated. .. The official story of the interstate highway system is that General Eisenhower saw the utility of the autobahns in Germany and wanted the same for the U.S. There is some truth to that. There’s also some truth to the theory that by the mid 50s people were seeing what was happening in California and what was happening in the Midwest and Northeast and wanted some of that limited access high speed roadway for themselves, They then figured out how to get the Federal government to pay for it instead of using tolls or state revenue. For instance Boston to Chicago could be done mostly on Interstate or close to Interstate quality by 1958. New York City to Youngstown Ohio in 1954. There were gaps but there were big chunks of what is now part of the interstate system built before the first spade of dirt was turned for the Interstate system.
February 28th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Randy: There’s a big difference between limiting powers to those enumerated and having explicit restrictions. With the former, people will take vague concepts like “commerce” or “neccesary and proper” or “general welfare” and extend them as they deem fit. When you have something explicitly saying that a government is not allowed to do something, then that’s a lot more cut and dry.
February 28th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Matt, you are so totally right. I also think that when people talk of governmental incompetence or the evils of big government, they are likely thinking not of the federal bureaucracy, which they rarely encounter (and which, in my experience, is quite competent), but rather local officials, who are likely incompetent and unduly pesky.
March 1st, 2009 at 12:40 am
My understanding of most of the federal ‘encroachments’ on state rights concern whether the individual state will fall in line with certain policies in order to obtain access to federal funding agencies: grants, federal matching funds for construction projects, etc.
So… if the state government understands that all these transfer payments, regulatory interference with uncontrolled market magic, dismal interference with a solitary worker’s rights of contract are really impediments to prosperity, they are free to do what they want, they just can’t get get off the federal teat… er… turn down wasteful federal spending and refuse federal interference.
A recent bill comes to mind, which contains some federal funding. The state governments can turn it all down, if they want, and speed their own economic recovery.
So… Sanford… Sanford..? Jindhal… Jindahl….? Palin… Palin… PALIN!? Bueller? Bueller? …. Bueller….?
March 1st, 2009 at 1:06 am
“But at the same time, I wouldn’t disagree with the observation that there are some elements of our economy that are badly over-regulated. It’s much more difficult to start or expand a business than it should be and this is one of the reasons why our economy has gotten so dominated by cookie-cutter chains that have enough scale to amass expertise and legal clout needed to navigate this thicket. There’s more occupational licensing than their needs to be. There’s too much regulation saying that buildings have to be short, or can only occupy so big a percentage of the lot, or have to have so many parking spaces. At the same time that I think the country’s overall policy dynamic is too tilted toward the automobile, the actual vehicle registration process is weirdly cumbersome, and the rules governing auto dealers are positively insane.”
Obviously, Matt, you have not been around very long to appreciate what all the regulation at the state and local level does. Some of what you are talking about is zoning and land use regulation like lot percentages and parking spaces. Believe it or not, some of these are or were filtered down through the federal government, as in the 1960’s when HUD really set standards for subdivisions through control of lending. And the EPA sets standards for impervious surface through nonpoint pollution runoff standards.
In the areas where the government has experimented with deregulation, like airlines, trucking, telecommunications, natural gas and electricity, the results have proved disastrous or unsatisfactory. So what do you want?
March 1st, 2009 at 1:35 am
Every time a Dem is in the White House, the power to the states argument intensifies especially if Dems also control Congress. It is the little brother of the sudden importance of balancing the budget. With the powers to the states you get a twofer – constrain the Dems on the federal level and perhaps get some coverage for Republican governors implementing “conservative solutions.” In the early 90s it was vouchers, welfare reform and three strikes. Instead of laboratories for democracy you end up with the states just copying each other.
March 1st, 2009 at 2:50 am
The bad spelling, or the moronic non-argument against occupational licenture?
I was thinking mainly the latter. But I suppose both are appropriate.
March 1st, 2009 at 6:46 am
Federalism is nice, but it really falls apart when issues cross state borders. I’ll believe in it when someone can tell me how the Colorado River Pact would be negotiated without federal help. The Libertarian view is that all of these states would just naturally give up their claims and just get along because market forces would compel us to do so. The reality is that we use lawyers, guns and money to secure our water. And Utah and Arizona are our enemies. But they’re the small ones, California is our real enemy. If the Feds didn’t come in and make this pact real, we’d still be in court. If we weren’t shooting each other, of course. East Coasters don’t get this concept because they have plenty of water. We don’t. So we argue and fight over water. Consider this phrase: “Whiskey’s for drinkin’, water’s for fightin’ over.” When you understand that, you’ll have a chance at understanding how the West works. And you’ll understand why we need the Feds to settle our problems. If you just leave it up to us states, there will be war. Water is that valuable. There will always be fights, but we need a referee. Only the federal government can play that role.
March 1st, 2009 at 7:57 am
As a child who attended nine elementary schools, three junior high schools and two high schools in five different states, some standardization of public schools would be nice. I spent many hours “catching up” to each school’s curriculum, some far more advanced (CA) than others (WV). Even moving from one city to another in the same state was an educational upheaval.
Of course, local school boards have become such political targets that I doubt reason will prevail.
March 1st, 2009 at 8:11 am
Matt, the difficulties of starting a business and the consequential existence of cookie-cutter chains must only be partly due to state and local problems. I think the federal regulatory system must play a large role in this, particularly those aspects of corporate law that yield extreme advantages to scale operations. It’s a problem of social organization that is at least as important as the land-use issues you address so often and a problem that I for one wish I understood better and could say something useful about.
March 1st, 2009 at 8:15 am
Read your U.S. Constitution, where the powers of the Federal government are listed and limited in the Articles, and also says that those powers not enumerated shall be reserved for the states. Basically, most of the Federal agencies and their actions are in fact, unconstitutional. VIVA LA REVOLUCION !!!!
March 1st, 2009 at 8:19 am
If it were up to the states, we’d have slavery lasting well into the twentieth century
Bingo. The attractiveness of “laboratories for democracy” (and it’s real) would be greater if “states’ rights” hadn’t been so long deployed in an ugly cause.
Shorter 101st Airborne, Little Rock 1957: “Orval — thought we’d settled this in 1865. As ever, Ike.”
March 1st, 2009 at 8:20 am
SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS !!!!
March 1st, 2009 at 8:36 am
This is, for those who are somewhat Gump, the UNITED “STATES” OF AMERICA, governed by the consent of “We the People”, not the United States Socialist Republic, lorded over by Chairman Obama, Commissar Pelosi, and Comrade Reed. Want to experience what fascist one-party rule is like? Move to Chicago where they have King Richard Daley II and his rubber stamp Politburo, and understand that is where Great Leader Barack learned his craft, as a made member of the “Daley Machine”.
March 1st, 2009 at 8:48 am
mkd already made this point pretty damn clearly, but I think it’s worth restating.
The presumption here is that all people are equally able to pack up their lives and move to states that have policy regimes more amenable to their lives. In fact, that ability is typically a function of class, partially of gender, occupation, family status.
It’s typically libertarian to presume that everyone is a single, upper class 32-year-old with various transferable skills and few family obligations. I’m not sure if this is because they need to imagine a wholly false view of society in order to hold to their insane ideology, or because few libertarians are emotionally developed enough to form lasting relationships.
March 1st, 2009 at 8:51 am
Ignore this comment. I’m just practising this linking business. I hope that worked.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:09 am
Yeah, Elmo. Chicago is a miserable place to live, which is why nobody lives there. They’ve all moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where people are truly free.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:13 am
“Local” in no way automatically implies “more democratic”.
There is plenty of cellular authoritarianism around the nation.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:16 am
One federal regulation I disagree with is the interstate commerce, when regarding Michigan and it’s unwillingness to abide by what it’s citizens desire, in addition to the convenience to use this as an excuse when addressing the hauling and dumping of out of state solid waste. (which isn’t at all solely consisting of solid waste).
Taxpayers in this state are taxed to prevent solid waste landfilling while federal regulations insist out of state (and also out of country) “solids” be allowed to be brought into this state and bargained for by private companies who own the landfills. State lawmakers and policy providers continue to claim there’s nothing that can be done except to allow this trash and garbage and toxic material to continue to be brought here all the while the taxpayers are made to subsidize the private companies through special assessments, which aren’t “special assessments” at all (according to the law) to provide more space for this to take place. We pay so that BFI can have more space to offer, at astronomical prices, landfill space to be engorged with what we all know eventually kills us. Isn’t this the essence of corporate welfare born and burdened on the captive residents backs, through the weak excuse that interstate commerce will not allow us to deny it? Michigan government loves making the tax money on the refuge and federal government is unyielding in not allowing a states residents to decide that it will have no more of this hemorrhaging of this states natural resource and expectation of healthful policy standards, while watching our tax dollars being collected and accrued for an opposite reason. (the health of interstate commerce and private companies ability to bargain their bottom lines)
March 1st, 2009 at 11:20 am
One big problem with doing things on a large scale at the state level is that US states are historical accidents, like Swiss cantons, not rationally designed French departments and regions. So why not group smaller states into regions to deliver say public health care? That’s how air traffic control and the Federal Reserve are structured. I’ve had a first go at a regional health care map here.
March 1st, 2009 at 1:07 pm
I often find local and state government far more inefficient and bureaucratic than the federal govt. Many of the programs people like to rail about which show the incompetence of government are things like road repairs, the DMV, insane zoning laws, or Medicaid, all of which are state-funded or administered. By contrast, Medicare, Social Security, the Post Office, though they have their problems, are often far more efficient and streamlined in their operations.
March 1st, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Instead of state and local policies growing like weeds in the absence of a centralized federal policy, you could have federally-instituted local policies.
I think this is what brought us the 21-and-over alcohol laws. Those are all technically state laws, just instituted at the behest of the federal government’s arm-twisting.
March 1st, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Only in very few issues does a state government or two seem to be ahead of the Federal government.
Except for the progressive movement and just about every single public policy initiative of the last two centuries.
And If america circa 1800 would have actually been able to have a single policy on slavery, would the law look more like Pennsylvania’s? Or South Carolina’s?
March 21st, 2009 at 6:45 pm
Good work on your blog, I love to see the effort and I am just saying keep up the good work.