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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

The problem I have with your particular statement is that you seem to be using a conspicuous lack of central planning as evidence that it's completely ineffective while past episodes involving central planning applied to deal with somewhat similar circumstances have shown it to be effective in tackling issues like ebola outbreaks, swine flu or other pandemics that do not respect federalism, "local control" or pure ideology divorced from rational thought.

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Federalism reflects a principle that works even in a pandemic response, which is that local units of government are better equipped to evaluate the local situation and respond accordingly. The federal government was too big and ponderous to quickly react to the situation in NYC (which after all comprises a mere 2.5% of the US population). Meanwhile, other states locked down too quickly and for hard because that’s what was required in NYC.

Note that when the pandemic hit, the EU room a back seat to the National governments, even though the EU has a CDC itself. And in Japan success was largely due to local effort: https://fee.org/articles/did-japan-beat-covid-19-with-a-dece...

That might make sense with respect to things like lockdown plans, but the PPE and ventilator shortage seems like a clear counterexample.

What need is there to centralize those resources?

The inability of any one state to marshal those resources as effectively as the central government can, not to mention the supply chain debacle of the central government interfering with the acquisition of those resources.

That’s an artificial limitation, not helped by the National government’s penchant for seizing State orders and stockpiles under the current administration.

Without crap like that, there’s no reason California or New York couldn’t create their own medical stockpiles. They could run their own testing regime at least as effectively as the Federal government, but the FDA actually hindered testing both by the States and private companies early on due to an old regulation based in an old law that they could not shed fast enough. States were also quick to shed regulatory barriers of their own making, which should probably remain shed after this is all over.

I guess the idea that all 50 states can replicate this effort effectively is something you can believe.

You don’t need all 50 to do it. Wyoming’s largest metro area isn’t that far from Colorado’s, and two of Missouri’s largest cities are on its East and West borders.

States stockpiling or relying on Federal stockpiles or making agreements to share stockpiles is as much a choice as any other. Seeing as how the Federal stockpile was not properly maintained and refilled by either the Obama administration or the Trump administration (who could have at least checked on it) after H1N1, maybe at least one of them would manage to do a competent job of it.

That seems to contradict the empirical outcome of COVID, where smaller nation-states (Denmark, Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand, etc) were able to provide for their citizens much more adequately than larger counterparts.

I recommend listening to this podcast that outlines exactly why smaller polities were able to be nimbler: https://soundcloud.com/reuters/the-exchange-too-small-to-fai...

Yes, economies of scale provide advantages for procurement, but after a while, there are diminishing returns from more scale. That is to say, New Zealand's population is a sufficient scale, it need not pool its procurement operations with Australia. It's a key differentiator between Federalism and Individualism.

Note that federalism is much more vulnerable to local interests. So instead of having to watch out for “Big- whatever” bending the State to their will, “microlocal” governments can fall prey of laughably small interest groups (see the Covid outbreak in Lombardy: just a couple local businesses interfered enough to procrastinate lockdown until their products shipped. It cost thousands of deaths)

Missions would be inefficient if they weren’t centrally planned. Markets would be inefficient if they were centrally planned.

But this is just what Hayek's work is all about: to show _why_ central planning is ineffective. It works with theoretical arguments and there is no need to use real-life examples.

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