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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

> The coronavirus has made it pretty clear that America is completely unprepared for any sort of major deviation from "normal".

This is the nature of the US system of competitive federalism. States only coordinate with the federal government when either (a) it's politically expedient, because the ruling party in the same for both at that time, or (b) the federal government forces this issue, at which time lawsuits ensue.

It's helpful to think of the US as more a series of regions that sometimes fall under a shifting umbrella government than an actual, single entity.

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I don't understand how you have identified this as the problem. Sure, states haven't coordinated on lockdowns, testing, or mask purchasing. But it's not because they're struggling against the federal government, it's because there's no official policy to coordinate with.

Seems to me like our main difficulty deviating from normal is the fact that a 20% decrease in demand kills off 10% of businesses within weeks and causes 20% of people to instantly get behind on their rent. There's no slack in the system.

> it's not because they're struggling against the federal government

Actually, it is:

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/495519-maryland-gov...

“The National Guard and the State Police are both guarding these tests at an undisclosed location [because] the federal government seems to be interrupting supplies that are being sent elsewhere in the nation, and so I wanted to make sure that we received what we ordered,” [Illinois Gov. J.B.] Pritzker told reporters at an April 15 press conference.

I mean... your example is /true/, but I’m hard pressed to think of a second one. One example isn’t a trend.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-...

"... the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week." [Emphasis added]

Is that enough of a trend for you?

Sorry, I was unclear.

I meant that aside from the conflict over PPE - which has happened more than once - I am not aware of instances of the state and federal government working against one another.

https://twitter.com/warmh20penguin/status/124575849252841062...

Actually, there are two interstate pacts doing just that, coordinating their covid-19 response because they think the federal government is useless.

There's the Western States Pact (CA, OR, WA, NV, CO), and NY just announced an eastern states consortium (NY, NJ, MA, CT, PA, RI, DE).

Add to the fact that several states have had to take drastic measures like calling in their national guard to protect their own PPE shipments from being seized by federal agents, and it's hard not to argue that several states are in fact struggling against the federal government in a completely unprecedented way.

This is how things are supposed to work. The federal government is give very specific enumerated powers per the constitution. The founder are would be appalled by the size and scope of the federal government. One thing they did not account for was lack of loyalty people have towards their own state.

States are supposed to be using national guards to protect things they buy from seizure by the federal government?

Can you explain why you believe that?

The state militias are for stopping possible encroachments by the federal government. No the feds should not be seizing stuff. The state are supposed to check the fed, and the people check the state.

I have a hard time seeing what these pacts accomplish.

What's gained by coordinating Covid response in Spokane and Fresno?

Having any intelligently coordinated response at all?

So, concretely, what would Spokane and Fresno officials need to coordinate?

The federal government has been actively confiscating PPE shipments and doing who-knows-what with them. There were multiple stories about this, though they didn't grab many headlines. It's not even just competition, it's more like federal spite, with focus on blue states.

It’s more nuanced than that. As Gov Pritzker made public, states are having to bid against one another for PPE and driving up prices significantly because it’s every man (or woman) for themselves. He publicly castigated the federal government for not centralizing the acquisition of resources (which isn’t the same as footing the bill as they can allocate the materials (acquired at whatever better cost they can negotiate as a single buyer then) to states based off of population or need, ands charge them for them if they like.

If the feds did centralize acquisition and distribution all hell would break loose. Every allocation would be disputed and every allocation would be blamed on partisan allegiances.

The solution would be the states deciding among themselves who should get what, with the richer states being OK with getting less than they would otherwise get.

It's pretty interesting that most countries in Europe are unitary states while most countries in the Americas are federal states. Maybe due to the centuries of warfare in Europe the states that survived were unitary states that could better handle external threats. Or maybe it's a holdover from a tradition of monarchy that the Americas never had.

Interestingly, Germany is also a federal state. Yet we never seem to hear about federal regions of Germany disagreeing with each other and fighting with the Federal government like we hear about the US. Any Germans want to spill the tea on German inter-regional political drama?

> most countries in the Americas are federal states

This ain't true¹. Most of the landmass of the Americas is covered by federated states, sure, but the vast majority of states are unitary.

The more relevant factor is the size of the state's territory. With a few exceptions (like China), most big countries are federated, and most small countries are unitary.

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¹: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/Ma...

Good point, I was using that map when I made my observation and overlooked the cluster of smaller countries in the Andes. My bad.

After doing some back of the envelope calculations, about 17% of the countries in the Americas are federated and 16% in Europe, so it's actually pretty similar. But countries in the Americas have a much bigger size disparity than in Europe which really makes the federated areas stand out.

It can be argued that this it is part of the American political character because our origin story was shaped by the combination of disparate states, as in, we could have easily had colonies that sided with the British.

It got cemented due to Slavery as we basically carved up the country between slaves states and free states, and ultimately fought a civil war to deal with this bifurcation.

It’s been our long history, it defined us.

Edit: Whoops, I did the American thing again and forgot there are other countries in the Americas.

> Yet we never seem to hear...

For reference, do you hear about any internal German politics?

To expand on it: I can't really compare the magnitude, because I don't have a good sense for how much of an issue it is in the US, but yes, states do sometimes disagree with each other, have differing interests depending on local factors, want funding allocated to their projects, and they do occasionally squabble with the federal government over authority (especially when they want federal funding for things that are their area of responsibility). They also have quite an effect on how politics inside and between the political parties work (which I feel like in other countries the largest cities do instead?)

I always thought that the post-WWII German government is federal because it was designed mainly by the US government, which is federal.

Well, Germany when it first emerged as a nation state as Imperial Germany in 1871 did so as a federal state. Quite different from the UK or France. Even Italy, which emerged as a nation state in 1861, did so as a unitary kingdom. Germany's federal form of government seems to go against the trend in Europe.

A hint as to the US federal infighting is that very few other countries have statues to the side that lost the civil war. Or other similarly traumatic wars; the Communist countries have demolished their statues of Lenin or herded them into museums, even Spain has removed its last statue of the dictator Franco.

(Not to say that you can't see the faultlines in other European societies though. Ireland's parties inherit from her civil war. The UK has not entirely given up on anti-Catholicism, and has forgotten that its own most recent civil war only ended in 1998. I would put money on East vs West still being somewhat live in German politics, but conducted with a good deal more dignity)

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