Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

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There is certainly something to be said for placing clear limits on what Congress can do, but it's extraordinarily difficult to set out what they should be able to do ex ante and get it right. For example, it makes reasonable sense that the federal government should be in charge of the national defense, but then Washington is colonized by the defense industry which allocates itself a budget the size of Sweden's GDP. On the other hand, state governments have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to be captured by major industries within the state (e.g. coal in West Virginia, oil in Texas) and if it wasn't for the EPA those states would be [even more] uninhabitable, but we only have the EPA as a result of reading the commerce clause quite broadly. Making environmental regulations isn't specifically enumerated as a power of the federal government.

I sometimes wonder if the problem isn't one of having too much accountability. If terms were twice as long then politicians could spend half as much time campaigning and wouldn't have to take as much money from private interests to stay in office. If federal senators went back to being appointed by the state legislatures there would be less voting but there would also be less unwarranted federal interference in state affairs. And so on.

It's interesting that you bring up environmental issues. Those are especially tricky, since they deal with the commons: our air and water, which are typically not privately owned and thus are legally forbidden from being handled by the free market.

And the military? Well, sure there are issues there. We can all agree on that.

Now, the military and environmental regulation are inextricably linked to the economy, no doubt about that. And their impact on the economy can be large, no doubt about that either. But there is so much which the government gets involved with - and where there is SO much money to be made via lobbying and influence peddling - which the government really doesn't need to be involved in.

I guess I'm saying that if the EPA and military corruption were the only issues we had to deal with, we'd be in a much better space than we are now.

But those are just examples. You would have the same issue with state-level regulatory capture with finance in New York, or internet and other utility providers capturing the states they provide service in, etc. And then there's antitrust and copyright and other such things that essentially have to be done at the federal level because they have national scope.

There are certainly things currently done by the feds that could be reasonably handed over to the states. Social security comes to mind as a big one. But social spending is hardly the area where moving that out of Washington would make the largest dent in K Street.

The point of moving regulation to the states is to foment competition amongst said states - this should exert downward pressure on corruption, but how much we don't really know. Certainly we currently have some states which are more corrupt than others. Which would certainly be an improvement on the status quo.

Copyright is certainly a popular issue here on HN, and I'm sure K Street makes a lot of money on it, but again it's like the EPA - something which the government has to by definition regulate in some way.

In fact, moving Social Security and Obamacare subsidies to the states would probably put a larger dent in K Street than all of the other issues you've mentioned combined (military, EPA, copyright, antitrust). You're talking about trillions in handouts, issues which impact every single citizen, massive bureaucracies fighting for power.

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