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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

The government isn't a market. Treating it as such just leads to worse results for everyone except for the corporations and those wealthy enough to shop around. Everyone else who can't afford to just move across the country is SoL when basic services can no longer be paid for because there was a race to the bottom in tax rates

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It is a market - that's the whole point of the federation of states system that the founding fathers put in place.

If your state has bad laws, you can go to a different state.

Using government as a market has worked very well for both marijuana legalization and gay marriage advocates.

That's the US system, which is not everywhere and has been degraded heavily since the founding fathers of the US put it in place. Additionally moving from state to state was not a task most people could just do whenever they disagreed with the laws

> If your state has bad laws, you can go to a different state.

Uprooting your life and moving is nowhere near as trivial as dipshit market fetishists make it out to be for the majority of people.

It's not a very liquid market however. Because the lawyers ensure that the deals are legally binding. It's not like a city can declare bankruptcy and reset the no-tax deals.

Positive results for social policy. Questionable results for economic policy.

Historically the latter has been driven by physiological particulars of a state — availability of farm land, coal mines, etc. Has anyone actually thought through how that transitions to a primarily services-based economy?

(Aside: if state governments are a market, then the Senate is socialism, lol)

Pretending a market doesn't exist by forming cartels isn't the answer either.

You can't vote in your small local city to tax 100% of the profits of a local company and force them to stay.

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