Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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The problem of federalism is that a lot of polities will be shitty and the rest of the country won't stand for it. Segregation would still probably be legal in many parts of the country if the federal government hadn't put the states in their place in the 1960's and 1970's.

Also, how do you reconcile glorification of federalism with the fact that the level of corruption and general terribleness in the big state governments is far worse than that of the federal government, despite the federal government being much larger and more extensive? Would you really rather devolve power from the federal government to California, Illinois, New York, Texas, or Florida? Ohio, Georgia, Massachusetts? Sure, as you say you can move, and that's a fair point, but the only states that are arguably well-run are the ones that are also insignificant in terms of population and GDP (or have economies based on unsustainable things like federal spending (Virginia), oil resources (the Dakotas), etc).

Both really good points. First, I'd mention that lots of polities are pretty shitty right now in a variety of ways, and yet (mostly) continue to be left to their own devices. True injustice gets the citizenry's gander up to be sure (and rightfully so!), but there doesn't seem to be much agitation for the Federal government to dictate to failing cities like Detroit or to crummy school districts in Kansas where they don't teach science when they don't like what it says.

As to corruption: I agree that state governments are more corrupt, but I still like the tradeoff. In a hypothetical world where state and local governments had more power (read: more money directly under their control), I'd hope that the media and the voters would pay closer attention. Probably a dream, but even so, just because a system is less corrupt doesn't mean it's making better decisions. A bureaucrat in Washington can have great intentions, but if he screws up badly, it's the whole country that suffers the consequences. Most importantly, there's no way to explore the counterfactual of a nation without that bad decision having been made. Obviously states and localities never provide perfect "controls" in the laboratory of democracy, but watching the future of, say, Texas vs. California will provide us with some good notions about the practical effects of very different views of the role of government.

I'm not really arguing for a wholesale devolution of power. I have no problem with the Feds continuing to build highways and run the FDA. But the extent to which state governments (mostly voluntarily!) are becoming addicted to a range of "free" Federal aid and its associated strings is a bothersome development.

Segregation would still probably be legal in many parts of the country if the federal government hadn't put the states in their place

Segregation would still probably exist without the feds stepping in therefore let's spend trillions of dollars a year driving our economy into the dirt.

Then on the other side, you have the Dred Scott Decision, the Fugitive Slave Act and many other Federal moves that prolonged slavery in this country. Would it not have been for the northern states and churches, the Federal Government would have been able to keep slavery itself in place.

Bottom line is that we want to maximize freedom for individuals and small group decision making wherever possible. Larger entities should only step in when individuals or small groups can't work it out for themselves.

The federal government decisions that prolonged slavery were animated by the interests of states that would without a strong central government still have slavery, and impacted mostly those states, so I'm not sure that helps your argument much.

So now you're falling back on "interests" of the states when the actions of the Federal government are the ones we have on hard record.

I could just as easily counter Rayiner's contention that the Feds were responsible for ending Segregation by saying that the interests of the states, localities, and citizenry were the actual force behind the end of Segregation.

You actually think that these states would still have slavery? To this day, thirty years after the last country in the world (Mauritania) abolished it?

Segregation would still be de-jure lawful in Alabama, in the same way that sodomy laws were still technically enforceable in Texas until struck down by SCOTUS.

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