A New Map for America
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The author neglects entirely the fact that these city-states arose without any central plan to create these economic zones. They are the result of the market and political processes we already had in place. Did some technocrat wizard in Washington say, "We should target the Northeast Corridor to produce 20% of our GDP"? No. That result was organic.
Here's an alternate proposal: decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies. Reduce the federal take of taxes, leaving the money in the hands of the people who actually innovate, employ, and make economic decisions.
The primary fallacies in this central planner's thinking is that some new National Economic Planning Board will be a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit, b) able to out-perform the decentralized economic decision-making mechanism of the market (prices), c) not be subject to the lobbying that so corrupts the Congress now.
Are you suggesting that the federal government doesn't innovate or employ (which would be wrong), or that the states are better at those things than the federal government (which would require a citation)?
However, the author of the article does get at a very interesting and relevant point, which is that the political system in the U.S., at both the state and federal level, is now badly out of date and does not reflect the contemporary realities of where the population centers are and how their economies work. It does seem like our country would greatly benefit from a broad reorganization of political-economy amongst the states and at the federal level as well.
Wasn't the Interstate Highway system a boon to the US economy? Wouldn't infrastrucure projects between the meta-urban regions fall into much the same pattern?
That's not the type of central planning described in the article, this is the Federal government correcting a legitimate failing of a confederation. What was in the best interest of each state was opposed to the interests of the country as a whole.
It's exactly analogous the position of a classical economist, except the states are the individual actors. Yes, markets sometimes fail, and it ought to be the duty of a central government to correct those failures when they happen but economic intervention should be rare and only when absolutely necessary.
central planning has a role to play. for certain types of projects it is appropriate and sometimes even necessary. however, the idea that central planning should be the starting point for economic development is wrong-headed in my opinion. it should be considered the exception, used when needed and not otherwise, not the rule.
additionally, I challenge the notion that interstate infrastructure projects are actually examples of central planning. they are more like examples of networks of mutual development and collaboration between diverse partners. adoption of shared technical standards, agreement on shared funding models, and legal compacts to ensure shared responsibility for maintenance and upkeep are what drives projects like the interstate highway system.
I'm super impressed. What a great example of the power of centralized planning.
I disagree. As examples, the U.S. didn't get going until the Articles of Confederation were replaced with the strong central government of the Constitution. Devolution of political power is what led to the Civil War, segregation, and now attempts to legally discriminate against gay citizens and deny votes to many more.
Devolution is generally advocated by people who don't like being democratically outvoted in the current arrangement.
for devolution to occur there must have first been a strong central authority to devolve those powers in the first place. the lack of a strong central authority can be problematic, as the situation with the articles of confederation demonstrates. that is not the situation I'm discussing though.
the example of the institution of slavery and the noxious "states rights" argument made by southern slavers at the time is a historical outlier. its such an exceptional (and not in a good way) that I really hesitate to hold it up as typical of any situation at all. its very sui generis.
the current situation where southern states (the same ones that used to be slave states, it seems), are trying to pass laws to institutionalize anti-gay bigotry is an interesting discussion that I'm willing to have on this issue. you make a good point. there are definitely people in those states who are putting forward a pro-devolution argument in favor of their stance.
as a counterpoint though, I would say that the movement for gay marriage itself began using exactly the same strategy. gay marriage advocates (and I was one in New York) lobbied their state governments to pass laws that supported their position. they were willing to do this without the support of the federal government and in fact for many years the gay marriage movement was deeply hesitant to elevate the issue to the federal level for fear that a federal circuit court, or congress itself, would shut them down. it was only once critical mass of cultural change had occurred that the gay marriage movement was willing and able to successfully make their case at the federal level and win the supreme court decision.
my point is that devolution is just a methodology for governance. it is neutral with respect to policy. which policy the people want is determined by their culture. devolution of authority allows cultural movements to work with relatively less impediment from distant central authorities that might want to shut them down. we should still participate actively in our local cultures though, in order to transform society into what we want it to be. less bigotry. more love. those are my goals for cultural transformation.
First, to expand on one point, note that the devolution also is or was used by segregationists, by pro-life advocates, and by Obamacare opponents, to name a few. But to the heart of it:
1) Consider these questions: Name your local state Representative, state Senator and their opponent(s) in this year's election. How about the leader(s) of your state house(s)? Maybe you know, but I think you'll agree that probably <10% or even <5% of voters can answer even the first question.
2) Is there a real chance those incumbents will lose? If like (most? many?) people these days there is not, then to whom are those representatives accountable?
3) If citizens have no awareness of and often no choice about their state representatives (or their activities), then state legislatures are not democratic, de facto. It makes them much easier targets for influence by the well-funded few and I know that some, such as the Koch organizations, have pushed devolution for that very reason, and conduct much/most of their activity at state and local levels.
Regardless of the principle or theory behind it, most advocates use it when it serves their purposes: When they are being outvoted in Washington and so they seek a different forum, and when a powerful few want more political control, as described above (including people left-of-center, as you point out, though my impression is that it's less common).
Personally I think it's a political tool, good for some things and bad for others, and I look at the outcomes: Which gets better results? My highest principle is people's health, liberty and welfare, not abstract theories of government.
And yet the people all but demand that they do more, more, more.
Please! Take more of my money and more of my individual liberty! And in return please send me more regulation, bureaucracy, inefficient waste, and general mismanagement! I can't get enough!
/s
Take for example national infrastructure, it's hard to imagine a way for private corporations to be incentivized to create roads to even the smallest communities. The individual roads aren't going to be profitable enough on a reasonable timescale. However the value of the whole network of roads is greater than the sum of its parts.
Even if you had a private corporation that was willing, in infrastructure you have essentially natural monopolies. It's very valuable to build the first road from A to B. It's far less valuable to build the second. Look at how we've done internet infrastructure, and how little competition there is to a single one or two providers in most areas. Observe how it's hard to get high speed internet to rural locations. Tons of problems fit this structure, probably the best example is water infrastructure. Build once, use forever, structural challenges to competition.
Government is essentially the only solution to these kinds of natural monopolies that ensures that more than a tiny population benefits from their services at a reasonable price.
Other things government does that no private system is able to replicate at the same scale:
- Funding of basic (not obviously practical in any timeline) research
- National defense
- Enforcement of contracts
- Mitigating environmental externalities
Government sucks. But let's make it better. We need good government not minimal government, those two things aren't always the same thing.
But the federal government is distinctly different in one major way: private corporations must make money. The federal government is immune to going out of business.
The first thing that comes to mind is environmental issues. These have national implications that it's hard to see how even coalitions of states can have the same kind of impact. And if they did, you'd end up with a patchwork of regulations that makes it harder for business to work.
I'm a proponent of relatively stronger central government, but I know that's not a universal belief. After all, the national government is a coalition of all the states :)
I agree with your broad point. Which is why we should let the gov do whats necessary, and get it out of everything else because of how wildly it is inefficient. We need to get it out of:
- health care
- education
- providing pensions
Its no coincidence that the areas were there is the biggest mix of gov and private are also some of the worst industries to deal with.
For healthcare it's hard to see how a system that is even more privatized than the one in the US would do well. Healthcare is an area where there are massive information asymmetries and where price discovery is hard to do. If I need a trauma surgeon or a broken leg fixed, then I'm not going to "shop around" for the best one. For less time sensitive problems you end up with issue 2:
It's a sector where it's not obvious how to measure quality. Is the doc with the fewest patients that die the best one? Maybe he's the guy who gets the sickest patients because he's actually the best at handling the complicated cases, so more of his patients die because they start out sicker!
Education faces some of the same problems. It's notoriously hard to measure great teaching, though I'm sure we've had great teachers and "we'd know it when we see it". It's also an area where the feedback between the service you buy and the result of the service is highly decoupled in time. It can take years after you've finished your education to figure out if it was a good deal or not.
Now I'm sure there are ways in which government should leave these sectors. I have heard interesting arguments (though personally I don't agree with them) about getting out of financing student loans, or doing it differently (those I'm usually more in agreement). It's harder for me to see how I would want less government in my healthcare, I think we have a far too private system as it stands, but maybe in terms of HIPAA. I think medical data should have strong privacy protections, but I've definitely seen how the protections currently enforced are counterproductive. I also think it makes it way too hard to get a hold of your own data for personal use.
Anyway, these are issues where plenty of people have different opinions. It's good to talk them out and debate :)
Its a public private mix. Not nearly as private as say the restaurant industry, tech industry, or even airlines industry, etc. Definitely very high up there on the 'regulated' scale as well. It's funny you admit the government is inefficient, but want it to run all of healthcare? Why? What is fundamentally so hard about having a competitive healthcare economy?
You bring up a good point about information asymmetries. I think private audit and review companies would do very well in this information economy. Perhaps the government if anything could disseminate this information freely.
ECU perhaps needs to be handled different though the majority of healthcare spending is not ECU.
I think with regards to healthcare, the private insurance market has proven to be insanely inefficient. We have a patchwork of insurance laws across states, profit motivated insurance companies, and just overall opacity at every level of the system. All this and if you look at more centralized government managed systems, overall outcomes seem no worse and in some cases better. It's hard to measure quality in healthcare, as I mentioned above, but by many of those metrics the US system isn't doing radically better than, say, European systems which are largely single payer government organized or close to it. All that despite paying as much as 30% more.
There are lots of questions and issues in healthcare, it's a really complicated question. One thing that's pretty clear is that as much as 50% of your entire lifetime healthcare spend will be spent in your last 6 months of life. At that stage how can a private market work? "Hey, I'm dying let me shop around for the best ICU"?
All of the alternatives involve tradeoffs, usually in autonomy in deciding care (single payer can become a huge HMO) and difficulty in ensuring appropriate supply (waiting months for a CT scan you actually needed yesterday). I believe there are ways to solve those even with a centralized system, and I'm fairly convinced that our private market has done a poor job serving the majority of patients (unless you're fairly wealthy, and even then the structural inefficiencies of a fragmented system get in the way).
Re. private audit and review companies: It turns out a lot of docs are on Yelp and other similar services. I'll admit to looking at them when I look for a provider. But those systems have really perverse effects as well. People usually don't know what the is best thing for them to do medically, but they love it when the doc agrees with them. As a result a doc is pushed toward being more agreeable, prescribing what the patient wants instead of what they need.
Patient says, "I want antibiotics". Doc says, "but it's likely viral". Patient says, "I want antibiotics". The doc who caves gets better reviews.
Good medicine is hard to evaluate, and a patient is poorly equipped to evaluate relative quality, but he/she is also poorly informed as to what is a good price. You could say, "let's get rid of opacity." But one of the drivers for opacity is the private insurance system. No insurer wants what they're paying for X procedure to be known by their competitors, that complicates their negotiating position.
You could force regulation that would open all this up, but then aren't you just growing government involvement in healthcare regulation?
With so many asymmetries and so much opacity it's hard to see how a private system does better. That said, it's worthy of discussion and a complicated topic, so I really enjoy learning of other opinions.
- health care
First, we effectively have government mandated healthcare now: hospitals aren't allowed to turn people away. Would you like to change that? Have people dying in the waiting room if they can't prove insurance? Or people not being picked up by an ambulance because they were out for a run and didn't have their insurance card on them (or worse, being profiled about whether they're likely to pay)?
I think most people, when it comes down to it, think some level of healthcare is a service everyone in the U.S. is entitled to, just because we can provide it and nobody wants to see people dying on the streets or in hospital waiting rooms.
If you disagree with that, then I guess we can just agree to disagree.
But assuming you agree that everyone should be guaranteed some level of care, then it's just a matter of efficiently providing it.
Here we get to where "insurance" is a fundamentally flawed system for delivering health care. With insurance, risk is spread out so everyone pays (cost of healthcare) * P(need of health care). The issue is everyone has dramatically different P's so it's impossible to pool the risk effectively. If you have a pre-existing condition, then your P is 100% and no insurer in their right mind is going to want to accept you.
If you get diagnosed with something, you won't be able to change insurance providers, you'll be desperately tied to your current provider, etc.
Now the government could step in as it has now with Obamacare in the U.S., and stop insurers from blocking pre-existing conditions, but then to make that economically viable you need to require citizens to pay for health insurance...
So all told, if you come from the perspective that we're a rich enough country to provide some level of health care to our citizens, then the best, most efficient way to do it, is to have the government involved.
Every. Little. Detail. about healthcare is regulated. From the years of doctors education, from where they must go to school, to who can do what procedures, to how many volts your power supply can ripple, to the brand of emergency generator your hospital is allowed to use, to they types of investments your hospital is allowed to make, to the types of antiquated file formats your hospital records must support. I am not even scratching the surface. It's not that the regulations are bad intentioned or even bad ideas, its that following them is huge, huge overhead that prevents innovation and competition. Heck, the state has essentially conspired with the AMA to limit the number of doctors. It's a classic barrier to entry exmaple that professions lobby for. And it's the reason a highly trained doctors still need to perform the majority of simple procedures. Because that how the doctors want it.
Depending on your state, there are between 800,000 and 1,500,000 pages of health regulations. The affordable care act is 20,000 pages alone, and that is just one regulation among hundreds.
Healthcare is the most over regulated industry in the United States. Bar none. And it has been a disaster.
AS for preexising conditions, my stance is that If the taxpayers want that, then the tax payers are more than welcome to foot the bill. It doesn't even make sense to have insurance companies, which insure against risk, to provide it.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
In general very large organizations can be problematic. Very large organizations with massive (universal) scope are at even greater risk.
Unfortunately, what's the alternative? We've tried devolving tasks back to private organizations and smaller governments. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.
I find it interesting how so many people on both side of the "big government/smaller government" debate apparently don't have the word "sometimes" in their vocabulary.
If you parse responsibility down to the states, they're only going to build within their own self-interests, which is not very well aligned with inter-state travel. You'll get a hodgepodge of corridors, if the states even build at all.
For example, Kansas won't build a track from KC to Colorado's border. Instead, they'll route the track south through Wichita and other cities within their border. Or it will turn out like California's project [2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2014/04/california-h...
At the city/county level, Denver doesn't have its own mass transit system -- it cooperates with several surrounding counties to make up the "Regional Transportation District" which runs buses and light rail. This sort of regional organization doesn't somehow disappear when you make it multi-state instead of multi-city.
The question isn't whether or not interstate travel is beneficial, it's how the states will use their self interest to diminish quality, effectively turning the project into a tragedy of the commons.
If your comparing the actual to some ideal then, of course, your always going to see a diminished quality. But that's just a tautology.
We have to ask ourselves does a particular plan work better or worse than some other realistic alternative.
Unfortunately, realistic alternatives almost always require trade offs with special interest groups. Sorry dude, that's just reality.
It's a simplistic analysis to compare something to an ideal optimum point and bemoan how far we've fallen from the ideal. But it's not terribly useful.
You're arguing about the highway system. Not only is it "a realistic alternative" to your state-run theory, it's actually real.
In fact, we've had this debate, in the real world, and your side lost: every state has an extensive network of state-funded highways, nearly all of which are slower and less efficient than the interstate system.
In CA, my understanding that the most used parts of interstate freeways are actually state limited access routes (highways) extended to major national cities. This is in addition to the other state routes (expressways, etc.) and other county routes that permeate pretty much everywhere. Together, this state highway system (the county being an administrative instrument of state government) is by far more efficient than e.g. taking an interstate to a major national city (skipping even large regional cities) and then off-roading everywhere else. "Efficiency" is pretty loose term in this respect, no?
Depending on my origin and destination on either side of this state (it has been less common for one of those to have been in Kansas), I have used several other highways to cross it, and I haven't found them to be slower than I-70.
There are a lot of things to love about the Interstate highway system, but it's not always the superior choice.
If all this hadn't happened so long ago, it would be interesting to see who owned land adjacent to the interstate exits when the interstates routes were decided.
On the other hand, Chris Christie (https://www.propublica.org/article/chris-christies-tunnel-ta...).
For as many benefits of the Federal Government it sure incurs a cost and penalty in many other areas. Federal rules and regulations drove health care costs up because it prevented sales across state lines. The Feds help cause if not were the main cause of water crisis in California by selling water so cheap that it exaggerated growth of water intensive businesses. It forces companies to see alternatives to sugar to protect a few business interest in limited states. The list can go on and on. Oh, it also lends aid to and gives court backing to search and seizure.
I am quite sure we can afford to live with a much more limited government
Look at St. Louis: rather than creating peripheral connections through then-undeveloped (not anymore!) land to the existing I-55 (which for miles runs along the Mississippi, completely avoiding the problems I cite), they routed not one, not two, but three different interstates (often less than a mile apart) through central neighborhoods (most often those of minorities), destroying the existing networks of travel, commerce, and community. For what? To save a longhaul trucker five minutes? Pull the other one; those truckers drive north or south of the city on 270 to avoid the mess of the Poplar St Bridge and East St Louis's mind-melting spaghetti junction, and they have for decades. The destruction of minority communities, and the poorer lives that minorities live in St. Louis today, was a feature, not a bug.
Considered successful by some, perhaps, and probably not so much by others. Like people who don't like global warming or highway deaths, to give two examples.
Sources: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub... http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.cfm#question16
It's exactly that kind of cross-state cooperation you're talking about.
On the other hand, the high speed rail corridors in the act (which was a new network altogether) failed horribly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_Surface_Transportat...
Well and it seems to be working as part of any sufficiently large company.
That said the states would have evolved them to meet the needs, while the federal government took a more revolutionary approach. I tend to prefer the agility of incremental approaches. That said, when you are on the right side, revolutionary change is nice too. Despite how it seems today, I'm sure there are those that would argue the money could have been better spent. Ultimately, the question is where you put your faith; we the people or we the government?
What does that even mean? The Constitution guarantees free flow of goods and services between all 50 states. We don't need trade agreements between groups of states for anything, it doesn't get any freer than it currently is.
On the other hand, it's sensible to have the federal government make transfer payments between the states in an attempt to equalize development and keep the beneficial union together.
Well, okay, but you'll end up with most of the red states declaring bankruptcy while the blue states do significantly better. Take a look at which states are subsidizing the others... http://taxfoundation.org/tax-topics/federal-taxes-paid-vs-sp...
If you're going to vote for high spending, you certainly ought to be paying for it.
> decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies.
Wow, no thanks. There are already plenty of differences from one state to another. Having to deal with a radically different regulatory/trade environment from one state to the next is not helpful to business.
For those regulations where it doesn't we should reexamine and figure out a better way if possible, but I think people should better appreciate what having good government allows you to stop thinking about and start focusing on the things that matter.
Of all the websites on the internet to argue this... Are you forgetting that YC made(/makes?) their applicants move to San Francisco? Again, SF didn't randomly become a tech hub because of some will or want, they just so happened to have attractive culture and conducive laws for startups at the right time.
Are you sure that you want to claim that these differences are categorically not helpful for business?
(Aside: this is the very reason that federally mandated net neutrality is a bad idea. Alaska has less than 750k inhabitants, 300k of which live in Anchorage. Alaska is 16.13% of this country by land mass. Are you really comfortable with denying very poor and very remote communities their right to enter into a contract for ad-injected or domain-whitelisted internet at a lower price because you can't stand the thought of your Netflix being throttled?)
In reality is far easier to take away rights and discriminate on the state or local level. In a perfect world, people would have high mobility and it would be feasible to move from a state that represents you poorly to one that represents you better. Over time, presumably, people would prefer states that took better care of their people and protected their rights more.
In reality, the people that need the often late and insufficient protections of the federal government are the exact people that have the least mobility in society. In these cases, the federal government can serve a useful purpose, however bloated and inefficient as it may be.
It reminds me of monolithic kernels vs microkernels. Microkernels may be more architecturally appealing and may have many benefits on paper but where the rubber meets the road, monolithic kernels have won out. You can create all kinds of hypothetical circumstances where a microkernel wins, (free market capitalism, libertarianism, etc), but without some nonexistant force to enforce some kind of level playing field, you end up with what we have: a big monolithic patchwork of one off fixes and workarounds.
Designing a society is hard, designing a huge software system is hard and there is a reason why so many corners have to get cut to make shit work. The system evolves all the time and giving lots of power to the states just helps the powerful in their divide-and-conquer campaign against the rest of us.
Now if you excuse me I have to attempt to figure out whether it is easier to move to another state or another country.
I pay no attention to my state legislature because their activities seem uninteresting and irrelevant. Most people spend their time instead focusing on the federal government because federal policies are the ones everyone thinks should solve the world's problems.
But I have no voice in the federal government. Congress is mostly crippled because it's politicians have to be all things to all of too many people in order to be elected and stay in office.
If more power rested in my state of 3 million people I would certainly feel a greater sense of empowerment. In an electorate of that size I would have some chance of helping to drive public discourse about how to design a better healthcare system or how to improve the economy in my little part of the world. I might even stand some chance of electing an independent or 3rd party candidate that actually agrees with me on more than one issue rather than having to pick from one of the two crappy candidates with funding from billionaires in far-off realms that I have available now.
I think many people feel the same as I do and suspect that, if there were a transfer of power to the states, then democracy at the state level would flourish, surpassing what we now have at the federal level, as people perceive their increased control over their government and increased investment in its activity.
Sadly, I have no hard data to back up this thesis, and have never been able to think of a good way of looking for data to either confirm or refute it.
Why decentralize power back to the states? What is it about the states that make them the right level to delegate power to?
A large point of what I took from the article is that states are simultaneously too large (because they encompass metro areas and rural areas that often have little in common, both in terms of economic and social outlook) and too small (because they encourage race to the bottom competition between states who in many ways have common interests).
When you devolve power to a lower body, you are doing a form of central planning because you're determining what those lower bodies should be. So we should do it right. That might mean that states aren't the only body to consider.
>> They are the result of ... the political processes we already had in place
You can't assign this causality with certainty. They may have also arisen despite the political processes we have in place.
Fixed that for you. The market is far more important in shaping the economy that the state.
All you've done is state that "my idea is good because my idea is good."
A better response would be to devolve power to CSA - combined statistical areas. These are geographic units defined by economic interactions (measured in part by commuting distances).
See, CSA's make sense because they have a rationale based in recent experience. State boundaries from over a century ago do not.
In software development, we've moved power from a Big Design Up Front (aka waterfall) planned by a few to a series of teams, each with core specialties, areas of control, and many degrees of freedom but still have interfaces, agreements, and goals to tie them all together.
It's because we know that the waterfall process can't have all the information up front, can't see all the risks and opportunities, and can only be as good as the experience and foresight (sometimes guessing) of the few in charge who also happen to be the furthest from the problem.
Why is it bizarre to consider a similar approach to a much more complex system?
I agree that it's a great idea to delegate powers to lower bodies. But you have to decide what those lower bodies should be. I'm just arguing that the states (as currently formed and defined) might not be the best bodies.
And, in fact, the poster child for "agile" was the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation which was a gigantic FAILURE precisely because of all the complexity which "agile" never handled.
Complexity doesn't magically go away just because you break things into smaller pieces.
I, too, find it funny that people whose main large-project experience is C3 use it as evidence that they should be trusted with anything.
> It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
> The product is only as good as the plan for the product.
> Take the upgrade of the software ... a change that involves just 1.5% of the program, or 6,366 lines of code. The specs for that one change run 2,500 pages, a volume thicker than a phone book. The specs for the current program fill 30 volumes and run 40,000 pages.
> Don't just fix the mistakes — fix whatever permitted the mistake in the first place.
> Ten years ago the ... group was considered world-class. Since then, it has cut its own error rate by 90%.
- All from http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
Not every piece of software needs such an obsessive approach - but, there are pieces of software that absolutely do need such an obsessive approach!
In other words, there isn't a single binary correct answer for every choice. There are some things that are best decided at the neighborhood level, there are some things that are best decided at the global level, and there are are many things that are best decided at levels in between.
It seems to me a national approach, with significant input from the states, seems like a very appropriate level for something like an interstate road system. Particularly given our already successful history with the National Highway System [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System].
Why is it bizarre to consider an approach that is logical and has already been demonstrated to be effective?
In software development, we change the team structure if we find that multiple teams do the same thing for the same customers. So, in this case, redraw the state boundaries.
It is not "in software development." It is product development.
Nothing in particular, but states are smaller than the federal government. For most things, more local government is better in my opinion.
I agree with your premise (I think); personally I prefer the ninth amendment to the tenth. Certainly however, I would favor d?evolving power to the states instead of pushing power up the totem pole through regionalism.
I think the key point you allude to here is that there is nothing sacred about 50 states or their boundaries.
The article suggests exactly the parent's argument: decentralize power back to the states (and redraw the boundaries so the states make sense).
Examples include the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, massive Federal armed deployments against natives, the Mexican-American War, the Homestead Act. My brain is starting to break trying to fathom how completely and utterly ahistorical your assertions are. The article even makes explicit statements that contradict your claims.
Setting aside the historical facts, there's other problems with the blithe claim that "markets and states know best."
The primary fallacies in your proposal are that decentralized states will be (a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit, (b)able to out-perform centralized economic decision-making of planners, (c) not be subject to the lobbying that so corrupts state and local governments now.
See, that's the problem with your line of thinking - it rests entirely on the assumption that markets and smaller government units are always and everywhere better at decisions than centralized governments.
A more intelligent and balanced perspective would be that sometimes centralized decision-making makes sense and sometimes decentralized decision-making makes sense.
Can we please get past this puerile debate about centralized and decentralized decision-making? It's completely dependent on the context and requires deep thinking not comforting ideological platitudes.
You seem to be operating under the belief this is harder than corrupting State and/or local governments.
Hint: It is easier, not harder.
> b) able to out-perform the decentralized economic decision-making mechanism of the market (prices),
Corruption is done via the marketplace at market prices within an ideological range the constituency will accept. I'm uncertain why you think that isn't market-based.
> a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit
If they were paid the market price to perform this function then, yes, they could do so. Nothing prevents that.
> Here's an alternate proposal: decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies. Reduce the federal take of taxes, leaving the money in the hands of the people who actually innovate, employ, and make economic decisions.
Corruption at the local level is pervasive, extensive, and frequently impossible to fight due to the fact the only people with the financial resources are the ones who bought the local government in the first place [or nonprofits who cover a greater area, such as the ACLU, and able to bring in out of area money to compete against the corruption].
If you think this is a recipe for reducing corruption, I suggest you get involved in local politics and try to support a minority candidate in a heavily white area. Hell, they'll do all sorts of legal [but shady] shit like hire a guy with the same name [different middle initial] and put them both on the ballot to split the vote. You only need to pull of a few percentage points of support this way to win in many situations.
> The fantasies of central planners never end.
The fantasies of people who think decentralization reduces corruption never end either.
However, corruption at the local level affects a limited number of people, and since local politics are easy to influence, they can be changed. Local politicians get into criminal trouble all the time, so they are not immune to the law.
Corruption at the national level affects all of us, and it's much harder to change the institutions. Even worse is the bureaucracy, which cannot be changed directly by the people, but meddles incessantly with our economy.
As for escaping corruption, you can leave your city easily, your state with moderate difficulty, but your country with great difficulty.
I think you could argue that people are less involved in local governments, so it is easier to control them or corrupt them.
John Oliver's piece on special districts was really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3saU5racsGE
This is not the case. The first step of "divide and conquer" is "divide."
>If I have no power over another, then my corruption affects only me.
That's how how corruption works. It's not a property of individuals, it's a property of institutions.
>corruption at the local level affects a limited number of people
At first. Then two corrupt local levels team up, and there's nobody to stop them. Corrupt organizations don't require regulatory action to form alliances. Even if you decentralize everything on paper, they will be centralized in practice, because corruption causes some people to have disproportionate means to get what they want.
Tragedy of the Commons is what occurs then as well as an inability to defend oneself against those who use force.
Go move to some country with essentially a nonexistent government and see how this works out for you if you genuinely believe I am wrong.
> However, corruption at the local level affects a limited number of people, and since local politics are easy to influence, they can be changed. Local politicians get into criminal trouble all the time, so they are not immune to the law.
So your argument is to make it cheaper, easier, and dismantle the checks and balances by defunding the enforcement mechanism at the federal level?
Seriously? Do you not understand that logically plays out until the local politicians are unable to be held accountable to a higher authority?
Just like it has happened for countless other industries without the need of the government to do anything.
Though that question isn't really relevant to the question of how industry hubs form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooker#Final_years_and_...
Actually we should credit the sun. For without the sun we would have no earth.
Wait, wait a minute! This line of reasoning seems ridiculous!
Why? Its the same reason we don't credit the government for every accomplishment ever made. We focus on the key players. Could the government have been a key player here? Perhaps. But your line of reasoning is not the reason.
William Shockley is credited with making Silicon Valley what it is today. He was a federal researcher who hired eight other federal researchers. [1] They then created Fairchild Semiconductor which developed transistors for the aerospace industry.
Look up the history of Shockley, Noyce, Fairchild, Intel.
Though one may not credit the federal government for the creation of an industry, it is ridiculous to say that such an industry would exist without the government's existence. Govennment is a necessary prerequisite even if it deserves no "credit".
Less attention from the people (and the press)? More restrictive state constitutions?
I don't have a lot of hypotheses.
Find a historical society that knows about the rail and they'll be all too happy to tell you why. Typically the reroute was because some business interest bought off the company and they went miles out of their way to come to him. They'll also be able to tell you about the abandoned town that should have been on the route, but withered and died after the railroad went around them (not unlike the little towns along Route 66 a century later).
Occasionally it'll be because some landholder wouldn't let them cut across his homestead, but usually it was graft.
If you think the Congress is a cesspool of corruption, state governments are the scum at the bottom.
Examples:
- The legislative leaders of New York were just convicted of felony charges. About a half dozen of their colleagues have been convicted of various corruption crimes in the last few years.
- The NJ governor basically stole Federal aid intended to rebuild the overloaded and damaged Hudson River rail tunnels that connect NYC to NJ and the rest of the country by rail.
I agree that this regional vision is pretty dumb. But, I think the Federal government has a pretty good record on planning and funding transportation infrastructure.
On that topic, don't even get me started on the wastewater agencies. At both the state and local levels, they have repeatedly failed to accomplish anything fairly or effectively.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy
(edited to correct a typo)
Some things need to be guaranteed for every American citizen, and that can't simply be left up to the states to "experiment" with. We're talking about government here, not scrum teams.
There is virtually no way to have a consensus on what precisely needs to be guaranteed. I would personally prefer to move to a state that does not "guarantee" health insurance (I will pay for health insurance myself).
But like I said, moving isn't a liquid matter. There's quite a bit of friction involved. So states are imperfect, yes. But I still prefer 50 imperfect laboratories to 1 imperfect monolith. The potential of moving to a local maximum of ideal-fit with my tastes means a lot to me.
For what it's worth, the same rationale is why I do not believe the United States should adopt any given policy simply because it is done by a majority of other first-world countries. Policies should stand on their merits and should not be adopted simply to be aligned with other countries. I prefer diversity.
There was a consensus; we call it the Constitution. The problem is that American lawmakers today aren't able to negotiate a single law let alone a document like that.
States are not really a solution to that problem: large states have gridlock much like the feds, and small states create the patchwork of laws that prevent me from mailing you a beer but ensuring some lawyer at LargeCo will be paid to figure it out. And all states are more vulnerable to corporate capture than the feds are.
Laboratories of democracy work when we have democracies that are worth studying, and when politicians adopt fact-based policies instead of ideological ones. But we do not live in that world, and have not for at least 30 years.
Move to a better state.
Do they?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/kansass-...
Central planners think that there should be one state, the US state, where the individual "states" derive their power from the Fed. And if you think that the states should be small municipalities then that's fine too. But it's not hypocritical that municipalities derive their power from, and are restricted by, the state.
States have always been (partially) sovereign, and there is a clear trend over time of them becoming less so.
What are recent egregious examples of this in your mind? Are you talking about ObamaCare?
* Drug laws (i.e.: Colorado has "legalized" marijuana but it's still federally illegal and for now the federal government is just ignoring enforcement for now, but there's no reason, e.g. Ted Cruz would continue to do so.) The laws are based on "interstate commerce" which the federal government how power over, yet somehow it still applies to state-grown marijuana.
* A lot of stuff very close to a "war" has been done without states actually voting to go to war.
* Personally, I'd like a state to be able to experiment with a basic income guarantee and corresponding removal of minimum wage, but that wouldn't be possible because of the federal minimum wage law.
* Federal agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA have been growing in power lately with their FISA court rubber stamps and attempted use of All Writs.
Electoral college reform (fifty states with equal population) http://fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/
This type of gerrymandering or repartition is a rich part of US voting history. The legal term might be "apportionment" or the math term could be "equipartition".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States
which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers
which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons,
including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, & excluding Indians not
taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand,
but each State shall have at least one Representative;…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Or by getting rid of the notion of apportionment altogether.
There's no reason, in an always-connected society in which people can telecommute to work, that people's votes should be aggregated (counted up and applied) based on their geographic proximity.
Instead, votes should be aggregated exactly at the level of governance to which they apply. For example, representatives to city government should be elected by city-wide ballot, not ward-by-ward. State reps should be elected by state-wide ballot, not district-by-district. National reps should be elected by national ballot, not state-by-state.
Forcing geographical aggregation on people just strips geographically-distributed minorities of their power. If, say, 5% of the country's population consists of radical vegetarian pacifists (RVPs) who would vote for a RVP slate, then why shouldn't 5% of the nation's representatives (give or take) come from an RVP party? Yet if those 5% are distributed evenly throughout the country, they can have no party, and no dedicated direct voice, because the current system dilutes their votes among those of people who happen to live near them.
"Let the people gerrymander themselves!"
Of course, this would require changing the system, and would reduce the power of those who control the current system. Therefore it is extremely unlikely ever to happen.
(By the way, some might object that such a change would make small states lose their voice at the national level. But everybody who thinks their state's interests are threatened by some national policy, can form a party and vote its representatives into office. I'm not saying geography shouldn't be considered at all-- I'm just saying it shouldn't be the only means of aggregating votes.)
With mixed-member proportional voting, you have two votes, one for the local representative, one for the perceptual representation.
It's a great read.
I'll have to read the book...maybe he makes a clearer argument than in this map, or is selecting on some variable I'm not seeing.
I've also lived in south Georgia (a little over a year) and Seattle (4 years), and have traveled those areas extensively. Those parts of the map definitely ring true to me, especially the "left coast" designation for the PNW (a lot of my friends in Seattle jokingly called it that) and the "New France" designation for the NOLA area.
I'll definitely be checking this book out - thanks for the recommendation.
Growing up in Milwaukee, I didn't know anyone who drank tea, outside of occasional yum cha (dim sum) in Chicago. We drank beer instead.
Now, I'm not saying that you're wrong. I'm a New Yorker that went to school in western Massachusetts so I know those two cultures very well. Not so much about The Great Lakes midwest. I think the map is meant to reflect economics as much as cultures though and certainly the St. Lawrence Seaway and Eerie Canal shipping routes, as well as the major railroads in the region, have established very strong economic ties between Yankeedom and the Great Lakes region.
Founded by Puritans, residents in Northeastern states and the industrial Midwest tend to be more comfortable with government regulation. They value education and the common good more than other regions.
That fits Minneapolis to me, but maybe not so much the rest of the upper midwest, and not even all of (rural) Minnesota. I think it's less about culture and more about community spirit and civic-mindedness. For example, in the recent NYT map of "Life expectancy of 40-year-olds with household incomes below $28,000, adjusted for race"[2], Minnesota and the northeast look fairly similar (along with Washington and Oregon). Or look at Presidental election results.
Wisconsin used to fit this, but is drifting apart from Minnesota, as discuss in this piece[3].
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/w...
[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/11/upshot/for-the...
[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/right-vs-le...
This reshuffling has profound economic consequences. America is increasingly divided not between red states and blue states, but between connected hubs and disconnected backwaters.
If you're wondering why 8 million Americans[1] have voted for Donald Trump in this election cycle, look no further than this snippet. The elitist garbage is so thick and so deep I had to put on waders - the ones I normally reserve for venturing through my backwater community. Using faceless macro-economics to justify ripping power away from suburban and rural communities is the exactly the type of liberalism that pissed off every person Trump is appealing to right now.
The very idea that a nation state should be organized not according to the political will of its citizens, but according to the most efficient allocation of capital, is contrary to the very idea of the democratic republic America is built upon.
Furthermore, I echo the opinions of others in this thread who have suggested that the individual rights of citizens are better protected when power is decentralized to the states, and after the states, to county and municipal governments, hopefully leaving the bulk of the authority in the hands of the citizens themselves.
Power to the people.
[1]http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/repub...
I'm sure alabama and the like would do a great job protecting rights if given free reign.
The majority of Americans live in cities. Why shouldn't they have the balance of power?
If so, I predict more highways, more car centric growth, less investment in public transit or bicycles paths.
Are you arguing that most states do matter more than the DC-Boston corridor? That region as a state would be the 3rd most populous, and 1st in GDP.
Are you arguing that the country isn't divided between connected metropolises and disconnected backwaters? Maybe you take offense at the phrase "backwater", but regardless, the rural areas of this country are disconnected in many ways: they have extremely few transportation options, low import/export capacity, slow and sparse internet and cell coverage.
The article isn't arguing that power be ripped from rural areas, but that in order to let the very important urban areas, where most of the population and economic activity is, thrive, they shouldn't be so hindered by state boundaries and politics.
Urban areas that cover multiple states have more in common internally, than states do between their internal urban and rural areas. This shouldn't be a controversial idea.
And in what way do states represent the political will of the citizens? Did any of us actually vote to determine the current state configurations? No, those were mostly done either by pre-independence forces, like England, or by the Federal government. Today's citizens certainly didn't have a say. Power to the people indeed.
I'm guessing you're not black.
(E.g., North Dakota has the same representation in the Senate as California, despite an order of magnitude more Americans living in California than North Dakota. That is to say, a Californian has maybe 2% of the influence via the U.S. Senate as a North Dakotan.)
Is this really fair to the large and growing proportion of Americans who live in denser areas? Some of them, like those in D.C., aren't even represented at all!
> Using faceless macro-economics to justify ripping power away from suburban and rural communities is the exactly the type of liberalism that pissed off every person Trump is appealing to right now.
The House gives _equal_ (approximately[1]) per-person representation to residents of high and low density states, while the Senate gives much more per-person representation to residents of low density states. To balance that out, you'd need a House that gave more per-person representation to residents of higher density states.
[1]: Actually, the error on this is as much as 50% due to the huge size of congressional districts -- there are a small number of states with as few as half a million residents per congressional district or as many as one million per. But this is not consistently biased in one direction or another towards or against denser or larger states)
http://aschmann.net/AmEng/index_collection/AmericanEnglishDi...
http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2011/humanities/west-coast-sp...
Edit: now that I look at it, I would also question their "Urban Corridor" from Los Angeles to Las Vegas... unless they mean people travel between them easily. That corridor is mostly desert.
There are many ways of looking at the US, but quality of life is more than just cost of living. The same house might cost 50k or 2.5 million just based on location, but you can't buy pollution free air, low traffic levels etc. On the other hand there are many advantages to living in or near a mega city like a wide range of good restaurants.
Even things as basic as crime stats get mixed into this. People simply get away with less crap in city's.
Getting back to politics I think America is simply less unified than people assume. People live vastly different lives and want a wide range of things.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/03/where-do-bor...
It also ignores state boundaries, but includes Canada and parts of Mexico and the Caribbean.
Oddly enough reading Garreau alao taught me to appreciate how much effect the 1970s oil embargo had on the American psyche: people lived in genuine fear that the sky is falling and they will all freeze to death without heating oil. Highly recommended read if you have time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/w...
http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/04/16/177512687/a-...
[Edit: Unless by "outpunch" you mean "have higher per-capita representation", in which case they punch equally in the House. But the large states dominate the House: nine states have more than half the votes.)
Why isn't my town its own state, as a check against ramrodding country-wide legislation?
There is are families of issues where which side of the debate a person is on correlates strongly with his/her geographic location. On those issues, without some kind of protection, people in the less populous places will lose every time.
You could say that it's only fair for the majority to win all the time. But I've heard it said that a pure democracy is like 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what to eat for dinner, and that doesn't sound very just to me.
Here's an alternative off the top of my head. Each US citizen gets ONE vote no matter where they live. They vote for ONE person no matter where that person lives. The top 33 (or 34 once every six years) become United States senator.
So, we'd be ruled by American Idol winners? That doesn't seem like an improvement.
Speaking of elections and democracy, we have more problems when it comes to state and local governments. At least many people can name who they'd like to vote for POTUS and some can even name their state senators. Given this, I think it is ridiculous to say that state legislators get to decide replacement for US Senators. I am also not a big fan of the way we do things in the house.
As an elected House member of District n of the great state of X, how do I approach any legislation? What's best for the nation is not always what's best for the businesses in state X and definitely what's good for the nation isn't always what's best for the businesses in district n.
If I am supposed to look out for the whole nation, not just people in a particular district, why am I being voted in by just people in a particular district in a particular state?
If I am supposed to look out for just my district, is this the best way to look out for the interest of my district? Anyone with one ounce of naivety removed from them can easily see that although all of our House members and Senators are supposedly equal, some are more equal than others (and not just because we have two major political parties).
Another thing that would be interesting would be choosing the government by first-past-the-post and the parliament by proportional representation, preferably in the same election, i.e. proportional representation with no coalitions allowed.
I'll take the counter argument. It's generally the ideologies in the most populated cities that drive Senate seats. Do you think that the vast agricultural population of California is represented by Dianne Feinstein?
In fact, it's becoming an issue even among similar cities. For example, Senator's Feinstein's stance on surveillance is at odds with many of the technorati living around the bay.
The argument goes that if we do that the Senate appointments will be highly politicized and so on, but uh, that's the way the elections are.
Having the Senate represent the interests of the state governments was a useful check on centralization of government at the federal level.
Confirming evidence: Shortly after the 17th amendment was passed, the federal government began growing dramatically.
Why? Those Senators were accountable to the people of their state, same as state legislatures.
Also due to the fact that the wealth of the nation is centered in many of these urban centers I'm probably more worried about them wielding too much power in our current era of money/lobby dominated politics.
The United States are a federal republic, a federation of fifty states, not a unitary government of 350 million people. The Senate is where the States, not the people, are represented; the House is where the people's Representatives sit.
Abolish the 17th Amendment and have state legislatures appoint Senators.
Rural areas use more resources per capita, contribute less to our GDP, and are less educated than urban areas. Giving these areas a greater influence holds back progress.
Why is it this way? Because at the Constitutional Convention, the small states were wary of being dominated by the large ones. Well, that was then: Is it still a reasonable concern? If you live in Iowa or North Dakota, say, and you don't want New York, California, and Ohio to set policy for the whole nation (including you), then yes, it's still a reasonable concern.
House: Californians and Wyomingans are equal.
Senate: Wyomingans are 48 times more important than Californians.
It doesn't balance out.
If you're ok with the senate giving greater influence to low-populated areas, would you be ok with giving rural voters a larger vote weight than urban people when electing a senator? It's contradictory to vote for senators by using "1 person 1 vote" who then do not proportionally represent the population.
No. States actually have rights, not just individuals. There's a difference between a federation and a unitary state, and federation was considered a good idea. (Short summary: any power can become a tyranny, so keep other powers around to counter the national government.)
> Laws are made by human beings, not land.
Nobody ever said that laws were made by land. But laws are made by states, not just by individuals.
> It's contradictory to vote for senators by using "1 person 1 vote" who then do not proportionally represent the population.
Only if you hold the mistaken idea that senators represent people rather than states. They don't, and they shouldn't.
States are arbitrary and given rights by individuals. States cannot feel the effects of any law. States are not citizens.
>(Short summary: any power can become a tyranny, so keep other powers around to counter the national government.)
That's a comforting idea in the abstract, but when applied it basically means people in rural areas should have more say in the national government than people in urban areas. You're literally in favor of taking power away from people and giving it to others. You're for tyranny of the rural rather than people being treated equally. In the age of telecommunication it makes even less sense.
We're not the EU. The idea that the US is a collection of countries went out the window a long, long time ago. Federal laws have a much bigger effect on people than state laws.
The Senate is the only place where people are not proportionally represented. To argue for it is to say that people are not equal, and that states are more important than people, which flies in the face of democracy.
EDIT: To address your point below, you're in favor of taking away power from some and giving it to others based on population density. This is a horrible idea since our cities are where our most educated and most productive live.
Absolutely. For the exact same reason that we don't live in a democracy. It's a feature, not a bug.
I mean, by your argument, why have a House or a Senate? We've got telecommunications, just have a vote. Direct democracy. Why not?
Well, that turns out historically to be a really bad idea. But anything short of it is "taking power away from people and giving it to others", in one form or another.
New York, California and Ohio don't get votes. They have no say in setting national policy. The people living in them do, and they deserve to have an equal say in setting national policy as the people who live in small states.
But the bigger problem is twofold. First, you don't have to <redraw state lines> to do this, and it seems like a lot of HN commenters feel that redrawing states is the best approach. Second, due to Republicans who hate all government and Democrats who view all "urban planning" as inherently racist, there's no real possibility of a consensus to have any plan at all to improve American cities as a whole.
While they're at it, maybe they can figure out how to move themselves so they're part of the contiguous US.
What you're proposing is probably a state with less population than Wyoming. We don't need more states like that. In fact, we should be eliminating states like RI and WY, and combining those areas with other regions to form more populous states, so we don't have this problem where we have some states that have enormous populations and some with puny populations; they should be more equal.
Instead, if northern Californians don't want to be part of the same state as the Bay Area, maybe they should push instead to join Oregon.
Edit: Sorry, I thought this was a proposal along the lines of the State of Jefferson, to break off the very northern part of California, in wine country, north of the Bay Area.
Yeah, splitting the state in half around the mid-section does make sense; the state is too large, and the north and south halves are pretty different from each other. While they're at it, Las Vegas should probably join the southern half.
I don't think that point stands up to scrutiny. Are state governments really hindering cities? Then why are cities growing ever more powerful, economically and culturally? And since cities contain such a large proportion of the population, they already wield proportionate power in state capitols.
The notion that urban centers are superior to rural areas is ridiculous given cities' dependence on rural agriculture, natural resource extraction, etc.
Could it be that urbanists simply don't want to be forced to confront in state legislatures the potential negative impacts their sprawling cities impose upon rural neighbors? That's the impression this article gives me.
Map showing what America really looks like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Cartline...
http://crh.gaotie.cn/CRHMAP.html
The whole country is meshed with new railway systems that normally runs at 200 miles/hour(designed for 218 Miles/hour), it presents large pressure to local airlines and is really convenient when I travel there.
The main factor is that cities (metro areas) should not cross state boundaries, because this creates an administrative nightmare. Look at all the problems between NJ and NY because the NYC metro area includes all of northern NJ, but it has its own separate state government.
There's many, many places in this nation where different parts of a state have entirely different cultures, and really shouldn't be in the same state together. "Upstate" NY and NYC are a prime example here, but so are Chicago and rural Illinois, plus maybe the Seattle and Portland areas and the eastern sides of their respective states. Maybe a lot of people would be happier with their states broken up so they don't have their local politics dominated by people hundreds of miles away who don't share their values, and would prefer to team up with similar parts of neighboring states (eastern WA and OR might want to just join Idaho for instance).
themagician is correct though: there'd be little agreement on how to redraw things. My idea for dealing with that is to make it voluntary, at the county level, and proceed county-by-county at moving state lines around, or having referenda elections on larger changes (such as folding Rhode Island either into the eastern half of Connecticut, or combining both of those with Massachusetts). Combine this with an election system that allows people to make multiple choices. For instance, let a voter in Spokane WA rank the following choices in their order of preference: 1. stay in WA with Seattle, 2. Become part of a separate, independent state of eastern WA, 3. Become part of a new state that includes eastern WA and OR together, 4. Become part of a new state that includes #3 and the ID panhandle, 5. Join ID.
The fundamental theme is that people in every locality should have the right of self-determination, something that politicians usually seem to sneer at. If voters in Charlotte, NC don't want to be part of that state any more, they shouldn't have to be, and if they can get the counties surrounding them to join them in creating a new state, or just merging with TN or VA, they should have that right. Of course, there are big issues of feasibility which must be considered. But a lot of break-ups wouldn't be that hard to do, such as separating NYC from upstate NY.
If you're that out-of-step with the people around you, you'd be better off just moving, instead of trying to force everyone around you to adopt your mindset. Minorities don't have a right to force their views on the majority, though they do have a right to basic civil rights. But there's only so much change that's feasible: attitudes take generations to change, since you usually have to wait for the people with the wrong attitudes to literally die out.
Also, I'm not saying that eastern Oregonians actually want to join Idaho, I don't know because I don't live in eastern OR. This is just an example. That's why I proposed a referendum with so many different choices: maybe the people there would prefer to join with eastern WA only, and not be part of ID at all.
I would, however, support a tax credit (not deduction) for anyone moving because of redrawn state borders.
And you do realize there's other places in the country to live, right? There's tons of moderately-progressive cities across the nation that don't cost that much. Austin is a pretty good example.
As for living with minorities, there's only so much you can legislate, and if you push too much, you get a big backlash and the next thing you know, Republicans control both houses of Congress, state legislatures, and Ted Cruz is President.
There's a lot of things people need to do. They need to abandon hip-hop music and religion too, and they also need to build a Moon base, and they really need to build me a giant mansion in Hawaii. I'm going to be waiting around a long time for people to do all these things I think they need to do....
>Applying radical Wilsonian determination to the US sounds very libertarian.
And trying to marginalize people you don't agree with sounds very authoritarian.
That's some real victim blaming there. By your logic, if I'm being sexually harassed by my employer I should just change jobs. I shouldn't complain, or try to enact any real, meaningful change and stay in my current job - no, I should voluntarily leave due to their illegal behavior.
I hope you're not a manager or CEO, because frankly your solution to an employee coming to you complaining about discrimination seems to be to just tell them to get another job.
> Minorities don't have a right to force their views on the majority, though they do have a right to basic civil rights
That depends on their views. If your view is backed by the law, then yes, you do have the right to force your view on the majority. I think you have confused the fact the views of many minorities are basic civil rights, like the right to not be discriminated against.
Someone who is trans probably believes they should be treated the same as somebody who is cis. Given that view is enshrined in law, I'm pretty sure they have a right to enforce it on the majority.
> But there's only so much change that's feasible: attitudes take generations to change, since you usually have to wait for the people with the wrong attitudes to literally die out.
Except with your plan, everyone experiencing discrimination has moved away, so these attitudes never die out because there's nobody to correct the behavior in the first place.
> I would, however, support a tax credit (not deduction) for anyone moving because of redrawn state borders
...which would effectively mean the government is subsidizing discrimination. You are bribing minorities to move out of areas discriminating against them, at great cost to them (finding a new job, a new place to live, etc) and at zero cost to those who wanted them out in the first place.
It isn't fair, but that's the way it is. If the 800-pound gorilla steals your peanut, you don't fight him for it. You just go find yourself another peanut and eat it more quickly.
Evasion favors the weaker party more than a toe-to-toe, blow-for-blow battle.
It's very difficult to be the minority, no matter where you are, unless you have a synthetic tribe to back you up. You don't have to run away, per se, but you do need to go to ground with your people whenever it becomes necessary. If you don't have enough friends, or the friends you have don't have enough power, you basically have to back down on everything, right or wrong. That's the way the real world works.
You can live in the world that is, and you can dream about the world that you want, but it is unwise to confuse the two.
It's somewhat inaccurately referred to as "the 1%".
By your logic, people who like marijuana shouldn't move to MJ-friendly states like CO or WA, they should stay where they are and get arrested. Meanwhile, CO and WA are the ones that have actually led the movement to legalize it nationwide by doing it themselves, by thumbing their noses at the federal government, and then proving that not only does it not cause massive crime (since MJ was banned based on the assertion that it causes black men to rape white women), but it also brings in huge tax revenues and massively benefits the economy of the state. Now other states are trying to copy them. According to the logic of federalists like you, these states should never have defied the federal government.
As for changing jobs due to sexual harassment, there's only so much you can do even though it is (rightfully) illegal. If you do get them in trouble for illegal behavior, and then you continue to stay in this job with a sexually harassing manager, exactly how nice of a work environment do you think it's going to be? You don't think they're going to do everything they can to make you miserable? Why kind of masochist would stick around in a place like that?
>I shouldn't complain, or try to enact any real, meaningful change and stay in my current job
Your problem here is that you seem to think that you can actually change peoples' thinking. You can't. You can only punish their bad behavior when it goes over the line. They're still going to hate you and make your life miserable in ways that aren't quite illegal, or can't be proved.
>I hope you're not a manager or CEO, because frankly your solution to an employee coming to you complaining about discrimination seems to be to just tell them to get another job.
This makes no sense: you're talking about a case where you're being sexually harassed by your employer (your words), not by a coworker. If I'm your manager and I'm sexually harassing you, how much good do you think it'll do for you to come to me and complain about it?
It's simple: if you're being harassed by your employer or someone your employer condones, then you gather evidence and file suit, while finding a new job. Expecting evil people to change is silly. However, if it's just some low-level coworker, then still gather your evidence, but if management seems amenable, present it to them because they'll probably investigate and terminate the asshole.
That will probably be a relevant point in another 200 years when we've addressed the "basic civil rights" thing. As of 2016 it's a bit theoretical still.
Ideologically NYC should be separate from Upstate New York -- I certainly agree as a liberal minded person living upstate.
However, it's not as easy as you claim, mainly because without the millions of taxpayers in New York City upstate would crumble faster than it already is.
I can only speak to the northern most counties where I grew up and still live, but most of the manufacturing industry has gone and left ghost towns and social difficulties in its wake (unemployment, crime, drug abuse). The biggest industries are healthcare, tourism, and the prisons (which host inmates almost exclusively from the city).
People around here like to cling to their rural red state values and look down upon city liberals, but if all of a sudden that tax support left we would be up shit creek (the Hudson?) without a paddle.
Finally, I'm not an upstate NYer, but it's not just some rural area; there's multiple good-sized cities there, including Buffalo, Rochester, and Albany. There's also a lot of farming there; where do you think NYC gets its food? I live down in Virginia now but I frequently get milk from NY. Finally, I think more rural areas might be happier joining forces with other such areas. Perhaps upstate NY would like to join with Vermont, or with part of northern Pennsylvania (including Erie). (Actually, I'm thinking VT, NH, and most of Maine except the part near Boston would be better off joining into a single state, and also taking the eastern sliver of NYS that borders VT.)
People aren't going to change their values if they have someone else's values forced on them from outside; they have to realize their values aren't working and change them willingly. It's just like how Christianity was suppressed in Russia by the Soviets, and then had a huge resurgence after the USSR fell, and now the Russian Orthodox church is a huge force in Russia today. People in these regions are going to cling to their values even more strongly as long as people in the cities force legislation on them that they don't agree with. The answer is to leave them to their own devices and let them fail by themselves.
Like a tiny train that takes you wherever you want to go. Plus, the era of public spending on public good in the US is over.
It's the same problem we have with roads. Everything gets built up at the intersections because that has the best access. But then it causes massive congestion at the places that are already a bottleneck. Let's recognize this and not place new infrastructure to do it wrong from the start ;-)
Not necessarily because of ill intent, but because you become just another number to whoever "represents" you.
My personal philosophy is that one day we will conclude that the best way to govern is to treat it like we treat most things. Find someone in our community who we think best represents our collective interests, elect them to some council of several neighborhoods, who elect someone from their body to represent the community at the county level, who elects someone to the state level, so on. In practice, I would imagine that each level up you go, the less time you would spend at that level - ie, a national body would behave a lot like how infrequently the UN convenes, and even then it should be mostly to adopt laws from more local governments into the collective one when they have overwhelmingly popular support.
You end up with each layer representing more and more localized interests, and since your base unit of elected official will always be someone elected with social relationships to most / all of their constituents, corruption is much harder to see take root. Have each constituency able to impeach at will, and you can have fairly long or even no term limits, and they will replace bad actors with good ones until they find the best person to represent the majority.
I imagine a system like that would also factor social mobility, it lets you move where the local politics are in your favor and you would see the gradual accumulation of optimal policy where people prosper the most, which would naturally over generations grow in size. At the national level, you can probably use split partitioning of districts and a re-balancing every census to account for these migrations and growths. That means gradually the best communities gain influence over time.
It also has the added benefit of letting everyone cut off higher-tier governance wherever they disagree. You can organize countries based on regional commonality and the borders would be organic with which districts want to participate in which city, or which county, or which state, or which nation. You would almost certainly see similar borders - in the US for example - that these maps demonstrate in the OP because common cultures would align. The only thing missing after that is open borders for migration, so people can freely travel to places whose ideologies align with their own.
Denver to SLC, on the other hand, you'd be 100% correct about.
A big problem of an urban corridor for CO Springs to ABQ is that of not enough water to prop up an exploding population.
Regardless, it sure would be great if we had a better rail system in the US!
No thanks.
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-urban-archipelago/Con...
All in all, borders these days are almost immutable, very hard to change.
It just confirms how myopic people who live on the East Coast are about our "flyover" country.
When you're talking about any sort of economic or tax impact, cities of around 100,000 people are barely a suburb on a map like this. Hell, even after the super-charged growth of the last decade, the combined GDP of North and South Dakota is less than $100 billion. The Minneapolis metro area's GDP is over twice that.
It could be that Minnesota doesn't want North Dakota, of course, but tbh Fargo's getting fairly cosmopolitan, surprisingly enough, and is closer to the Cities culturally than most anything else in a few hundred mile radius.
Anyway, this discussion is probably completely irrelevant to about a billion percent of normal Hacker News readers. Gotta represent your people, though. :)
The Bakkens does change things but the east west probably only exists as a I-29 to I-94 link and giving voting difference isn't even a majority.
Yes, Fargo and Grand Forks tend to look more towards MN (specifically the Twin Cities not MN in general), but they also have a large student population with a large percentage not from ND due to tuition and quality of education (e.g. aviation).
> Anyway, this discussion is probably completely irrelevant to about a billion percent of normal Hacker News readers. Gotta represent your people, though. :)
From the down votes, you are probably right, but judging economic impact via population is really, really dumb as the only metric (you didn't - others did).
You're probably aware (but others may not be) that the East Dakota / West Dakota proposal has a long history: http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/609-had-the-cookie-crumbled...
Lastly, why do residents of Fargo seem to pay no attention to Winnipeg? I've never heard anyone from the area talk much about driving North for a bit of culture, despite it being a little closer than the Twin Cities.
Its easier to drive to the Twin Cities than Winnipeg (heck its easier to drive to the Twin Cities from Grand Forks) than to cross the border and use different currency. That border crossing is a pain in the rear. I did the crossing before 9/11 and it was a pain then.
(As far as I can tell, this whole kerfuffle over the definition of "America" keeps happening because of regional differences in the definitions of continents.)
Split up into smaller, independent nations, don't terrorize the world with your armsdealing presidents wanting to achieve "democrazy".
Don't spy on its citizens as well as the rest of mankind.
Don't poison our food via tradedeals negociated in secret with global consorts.
Don't murder our leaders, only wanting to be free from you.
Please die.
Further, I can't imagine a state like Texas signing up for being split in two. ("Don't Mess With Texas" has been it's anti-litter campaign for 30 years.)