Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Locke1689 | Hacker News Reader

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In fact, my personal prescription for where we are right now is for a significant return of power to the states. Some things have to be national-scale policy, but the list is much shorter than you think. We don't need a national-scale health care plan. Many of our states are larger than European countries that manage. State plans already exist. We don't need national agreement on any given social issue. If we weren't centralizing all our power, we wouldn't have to spend so much time arguing what the central policy should be.

I think you actually underestimate the complexities here. The problem isn't number of people -- you're correct, many states are as large as European countries. However, the states don't have nearly as much self-governing power (as granted by the Constitution) as European countries. In things like healthcare, this makes a big difference. For example, one of the biggest benefits to the federal government is that it can temporarily run a budget deficit during hard times. There are innumerable times (including now) when that would be necessary for a large swath of public services. It would require a rather huge change in federal law in order to make this work on the state level. Another problem you would get is massive problems with the full-faith-and-credit clause. All in all, it may be worth considering that, accounting for modern high-speed transportation and intercommunication and trade, strong states may be an antiquated idea.

Right now, for better or worse, our government is more liberal than our population

That's difficult to argue. Notably, consider that one person's vote in Wyoming counts 67 times more than a Californian's in the US Senate and 1.264 times a Californian's in the House of Representatives.

"It would require a rather huge change in federal law in order to make this work on the state level."

Yes. I did say "significant return of power to the states", after all.

"All in all, it may be worth considering that, accounting for modern high-speed transportation and intercommunication and trade, strong states may be an antiquated idea."

It is also worth considering the opposite, that in an era of increased administrative efficiency, increased economic efficiency, and increased communication efficiency, that the need for one strong overarching State is diminishing. Everything else is decentralizing as a result of the very forces we cite; why is the State such a special exception?

I don't see any evidence that corporations and capitol are following any pattern of "decentralizing" whatsoever. What do you base that assertion on? Rather the opposite. Multinationals already run roughshod over nations. Stronger international governments are what is needed. Wouldn't more "powerful" States be even cheaper marks for corporate soft power?

For what it is worth Denmark runs a deficit now, and I doubt there is a single state in the US that is anywhere as tiny as Denmark.

Granted the Danish economy is more sound than, say California but still.

The population of Denmark is 5.5 million, which if it were a US state, would make it the 21st largest state.

Yeah but that's mostly irrelevant. As I said, the problem isn't size, it's state and federal law.

Any entity can run at a budget deficit. There is this new-fangled banking instrument known as a "loan"

Yeah, that's not how it works. I feel like we're talking past each other. The nature of state and federal fiscal policy is complex, but this article covers an introduction to it http://www.ncsl.org/IssuesResearch/BudgetTax/StateBalancedBu.... You'll note that there are ways that states can run deficits in practice but there are a number of restrictions which affect how appropriations work in practice.

However you will also note that budget restrictions are self-imposed by state law or state constitutions, which would likely be rewritten as the states took over more social services.

Another reason that I like the idea of states and local governments handling more services is that it is politically more difficult to waste money on stupid projects. For Example: a road near my house was recently repaved using money from the stimulus. It was in fine shape before and didn't need work done but most people were not upset because the federal government payed for most, if not all, of it. However if my village said that sales taxes would be raised .25% for 6 mos. to pay for the project most of these same people would have immediately decided that repaving the road wasn't worth the cost.

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