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Comment by stuckinhell | Hacker News Reader

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> This can't be a good thing long term.

This is exactly a good thing long term.

Instead of HIPPO decisions, the states are serving as laboratories and experimenting with ideas to see which have the most merit. This is their role in The Union as intended by The Founders.

WEF/ESG assumes their choices lead to sustainability - there's no proof that the underlying methods of those choices are actually sustainable. That proof won't be available for decades. ESG without deeply examining issues like environmental impact of Wind Turbine/Solar Panel/Li-Ion Battery recycling, lifespan of alternative energy sources, mining, supply chain / global conflict, additional sunk carbon for manufacturing, manufacturing waste, electrical generation realities, or, as Texas is making clear here, financial and economic realities, ESG chooses to prematurely declare its ideas as winners.

Different does not imply improvement.

I'm for examining both pathways because it can only increase understanding.

Balkanization of corporations is a good thing.

It enables more competitions to fill in the void and hopefully cheaper prices.

But an outright ban is worse for the economy as less competition means higher prices.

Apparently, Gov. Gavin didn't or hasn't studied this President Nixon's failed regulation of gas price

Study?

Nepotism doesn't work like that.

We won't balkanize because the federal government will give up power to the state governments to preserve its own existence before that happens (we hope).

I'm genuinely kinda curious what you think state power is for if not to serve political agendas. And outside of some abstract unactionable thing like "for the greater good" or "freedom" or whatever. Eventually you have to actually form policies and implement them, a political process driven by political motivations.

State power usage in political agenda's needs to be carefully evaluated, or it can lead to revolutions or disintegration.

When state power is used to serve political agendas, it can be easily abused for personal or party gain. This can lead to corruption, nepotism, and favoritism, which undermines the integrity of the government and erodes public trust in the system. Something we already see in many states, California's project to build a bullet train failed after millions and millons of dollars.

Using state power to serve political agendas can have serious negative consequences for democracy, governance, and society as a whole. It is essential that political leaders prioritize the interests of the people and use state power for the greater good rather than for their own personal or party gain. The "greater good" isn't a ironic or strange concept either just like the "noblesse oblige", these represent the contract between the governed and rulers. The disintegration of these concepts in a nation lead to civil war or separation.

I know but "the interests of the people" is just as vague as "the greater good." When you get to the point of actually defining those interests and deciding what will further them, you're at political agenda.

Seems a bit pedantic here. But partisan political agendas like in CA and TX are clearly not the same as a neutral political agenda.

I think most people here understood political agenda as partisan term here.

What I'm workings towards is that that just isn't a useful distinction. You can't form any kind of useful framework for evaluation or action out of "political and therefor bad" vs "non-political and therefor good."

Some of these things are bad because they are bad, and you have to take a side opposing them on those grounds rather than invent these justifications that allow keeping your neutral purity intact.

The problem is without shared values, you can't define "bad" at a national level. Both sides believe they are on the "right side of history", that's the problem here.

The "greater good" is "political" in nature, but it's not something that's hyper-partisan like what we seeing occur in the nation. We need a minimum set of neutral rules in nation with a very very wide variety of beliefs to maintain our technological nation.

You can and should think of the greater good in terms of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs at population level. If you don't have food to eat and energy to keep you warm, self actualization or individuality really don't matter.

It depends on the specific power you're discussing.

Executive state power is supposed to be used to enforce laws on the books, regardless of whether the current political party agrees with them. If there's disagreement, there's a legislative process to follow.

Abusing executive power to selectively enforce, or harass, is obviously deeply problematic in a liberal society.

Legislative state power is where your points hit home. Absolutely, by all means, enact the laws that you're able to based upon the elected legislation. As long as it squares with the state and federal constitution, you're golden.

Judicial powers bent to political purposes are an absolute horror and should be rooted out as quickly as possible.

I think with a country as diverse as the US, balkanization is preferred. It's really by design, states have autonomy over citizens and the federal government presides over national issues. Unfortunately, the federal government has gained more and more power and tries to pass laws that half the country doesn't want. The next political party gets in power and does the same thing, except for the other half.

It's a good thing that I can move out of a state that's turning into something I don't like. It's expensive and uprooting, but at least I have the option. When the federal government passes a law I don't like, I'm stuck with it.

> Unfortunately, the federal government has gained more and more power and tries to pass laws that half the country doesn't want.

On the other hand, due to mechanisms favoring minority obstructionism left over from the slavery era, the federal government also hasn't passed laws that most of the country does want.

- Nationalizing healthcare[1]

- Getting money out of politics[2]

- Stricter laws about gun purchases[3]

Rather than having powerful state governments, what I'd prefer is that the states were dissolved in all but name, and their powers were ceded to county governments instead. The multiple tiers of government at the national/state/county/municipality made sense in a time when information could only travel as fast as your fastest horse, but that was nearly two centuries ago. Ceding state powers to counties would give you your options for moving away from policies you don't like, and would even make it more convenient since you wouldn't have to move as far.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/08/most-americ...

[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx

Is it really preferred? I simply cannot return to my home state because my home state has become so disconnected politically and socially. It's pretty sad. There are several states that fit this category for many. I don't even particularly feel that safe traveling through some states.

Many states are effectively headed towards extremism and terrorist states. It's not like the extreme states are differing in subtle ways. They are openly attacking human rights and really what America should be about. It isn't good by any measure.

>The next political party gets in power and does the same thing, except for the other half.

Can you give some examples? I'd say centralization of power has been mostly one sided for the past century or so. (FDR, JFK, LBJ)

George Bush and the Patriot act

I was actually thinking that, but I also think the Patriot Act was largely bipartisan. From wikipedia[0]

>Passed the House on October 24, 2001 (Yeas: 357; Nays: 66)

>Passed the Senate on October 25, 2001 (Yeas: 98; Nays: 1)

62 nays from democrats in the house[1], and only one nay in the senate and one not voting[2]. I'd say its more like Bush just happened to be president at the time. He didn't run with Patriot Act as his "platform" either (obviously). It also isn't directly about taking away state power in the first place so from that alone it isn't a great argument. That said, Patriot Act to me really seems like a turning point (for the worse) in US history.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

[1]https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2001/roll398.xml

[2]https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...

I agree, I think on many aspects for the last 40 years, we have a uni-party disguised as a dual party. National security is one of those aspects. Having said that, the Patriot Act was proposed / championed by the GOP, but the Democrats were also culpable. I would add the drug war and militarization of police to the more-GOP side, but again, both sides are largely culpable.

The civil war was the first instance of this federal overreach. Things haven’t really gotten better since then.

The Confederacy placed enormous control in the centralized government. It was not a contest between a loose collection of states and a centralized federal power.

Can you describe this more, or link to some materials?

I'm not familiar with it.

Are we talking about temporary war powers, or was this the long term government structure that would have been powerfully centralized?

If accurate, it would certainly change my understanding of the ideals of the confederacy.

Many people claim that the civil war was over state vs federal authority. They are wrong and have, at best, been duped by lost causers and white supremacists.

For example, it was written into the constitution of the confederacy that no state could ban slavery. The confederacy also had strong centralized control over things like money. These were not temporary powers.

>Many people claim that the civil war was over state vs federal authority.

It was; the state vs federal authority to regulate / abolish slavery. Both points of view are right but ignore the other half of the equation.

>The confederacy also had strong centralized control over things like money. These were not temporary powers.

Can you expound on this? One of the issues with the confederacy is their ability to fund the war through taxation, because many states didn't feel they were obligated to pay it, because state's rights (of course). It's pretty ironic that they seceded over the federal authority over slavery, and the lack of that authority in their own government to fund the war was a major contributing factor in them losing the war, and no longer existing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_war_finance

It's crazy, the plantation class was unwilling to fund the war for their own economic survival, that they were winning at the time. Absolutely mind blowing.

> They are wrong and have, at best, been duped by lost causers and white supremacists.

Yeah, I'm sort of over absolutism.

Everything has nuance.

Authoritarianism's favorite tool is to reduce complex issues to "us" vs "them" absolutes.

Lots of things have nuance. I'd encourage you to speak with historians who study the civil war for that nuance. They'll tell you clearly that the narrative of state's rights vs federal authority is not based in the archive.

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