> This is why I'm frustrated with the idea that we need to enact change and policies at the federal level. The federal government should just exist to protect our liberties and organize national defense. Everything else should be organized more locally at the community level where voters actually have some skin in the game.
You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take would somehow become less popular.
Whether small-government enthusiasts like it or not, the US is highly interconnected on almost every level. There are certain things that absolutely require federal responses. Things like pollution and viruses absolutely need to be handled from a nation wide perspective. How would healthcare work as a piecemeal implementation across local lines? Its almost as if "letting localities decide" is a nice way of ensuring something will fail without forcing it outright.
Your argument is implying that the federal government is somehow ineffective, but given the federally led improvements across the last century - from roads to environmental regulations, public health and even the internet just shows that you're either ignorant of intentionally dishonest.
None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland. Subsidiarity and decentralization aren't new ideas, and are generally the prescribed solution to unlock governance in a large & heterogenous polity.
> from roads
The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down.
> public health
The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.
> even the Internet
DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.
> The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down.
Its been effective. It achieve the goals it set out to do. We discovered that focusing on highways and cars was ultimately not very good. But it achieved the goal it set out to do, so I don't get what your point is.
> The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.
This is an absurd argument. What are you even trying to convey? That the Federal Government should take charge of providing healthcare? OK then.
Medicare/Medicaid/ACA are all Federal policies and provide healthcare to millions who wouldn't get that otherwise.
> DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.
Again not sure what your point is. EU has Federal agencies too, yeah, so what?
> Insofar as "localities" are ill-suited to governing, the States are a sufficient mechanism for top-down control.
Hard disagree. While States have been great for introducing and experimenting with new ideas, spreading those ideas across the country requires Federal Investment and oversight. Obamacare traces its origins to Romneycare in Mass, but it required Federal dollars to bring it to the rest of the country.
> We discovered that focusing on highways and cars was ultimately not very good. But it achieved the goal it set out to do, so I don't get what your point is.
That's exactly the thing we're arguing against — a monopoly/monolith doesn't necessarily know whether the goal is the correct one. Enterprises rely on competition to arrive at the "correct" goal. The argument is to allow State actors to do the same. Discovering that something is "not very good" after experimenting on 300+ million people is worse than running those experiments and observing those failures more locally at the State level, where failures impact fewer people. GP commenter made the same argument, as follows:
"Additionally, we shouldn't be trying to put all of our eggs in one basket. Should we have single-payer healthcare nationally? No one knows if that's the most appropriate solution for all of the US, but why not let cities or communities try various localized healthcare strategies out for themselves. Each may try things differently. Some may work and some may fail. Other places can see how things worked elsewhere and either decide to improve, not implement, or take verbatim what another local government has done. You influence change by setting an example and letting others decide for themselves, not by trying to force the world to behave as a small subset of people want."
I don't know that I agree that healthcare systems should be fragmented at the city level, but there's really no reason why States shouldn't drive healthcare policy and try different approaches. Switzerland, Denmark, the UK, Singapore, and Germany all have wildly different healthcare systems — all with their own merits and demerits. There isn't a single system that is objectively "the best". States can enact the policies that the citizens want the most, and we can see for ourselves how they do.
> This is an absurd argument. What are you even trying to convey? That the Federal Government should take charge of providing healthcare? OK then.
And this is an absurd reading of that argument. The argument is that we got to where we have because the Federal government started off by 1) imposing wage ceilings that resulted in employers offering health insurance to get around those, 2) enacted a tax deduction to incentivize employers to keep doing this after the wage ceilings were lifted, and 3) instituted a mandate for employers to provide health insurance. These are all terrible policies, all advanced at the Federal level. It should then follow that we should reduce the degree to which the Federal government makes these decisions, not increase them. You don't promote a bad decision maker, you fire them.
> Medicare/Medicaid/ACA are all Federal policies and provide healthcare to millions who wouldn't get that otherwise.
Medicare subsidizes healthcare for overwhelmingly rich people (old people are the richest cohort in America, owing to a lifetime of accrued income). Does that mean we shouldn't subsidize healthcare for any old people? No, not at all — Medicare was just local optima. ACA entrenched employer-sponsored health insurance via the employer mandate. Are individual mandates bad policy? No, not at all, that's how Swiss healthcare works. But ACA was more than just that, and got us stuck in local optima.
Again, that's the entire point — when we give a monopoly sole decision-making power, it's very difficult to get ourselves out of local optima, especially when the polity is as ideologically polarized / heterogenous as ours.
> Again not sure what your point is. EU has Federal agencies too, yeah, so what?
Exactly. The argument is not that the US should have 0 Federal agencies, it's just that it should look more like the EU, writ large. One of the foundational principles of the EU is "subsidiarity" -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(European_Union). I (and ostensibly, also GP) argue that the US ought to follow this model.
> Hard disagree. While States have been great for introducing and experimenting with new ideas, spreading those ideas across the country requires Federal Investment and oversight. Obamacare traces its origins to Romneycare in Mass, but it required Federal dollars to bring it to the rest of the country.
Yeah but that's just because most of that taxation goes to the Federal government. There's no reason that can't change, and for the majority of one's taxes to go to their State government. Today, I pay around ~30% of my income to the Federal government and ~10% to my State. The argument is to make that the other way around, so that you don't need Federal dollars to bring things at the State level. This is exactly how it works in Switzerland, where the top marginal rate at the Federal level is ~10%, and Cantonal rates vary between 16-30%. Switzerland isn't some "libertarian" hell hole, it's one of the most prosperous nations on the planet. Likewise, the EU's leaves taxation entirely to its Member States, and not only do they do just fine, some of their States are arguably more prosperous than the US.
Pointing at Greece kind of makes the point: you get to isolate the failures, and Greece doesn't get to hold back Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, et al. On the flip side, EU Citizens aren't at each others' throats about everything because they are largely enfranchised at the Member State level.
You can't say either of this about the US.
> Irish financial crises
Yeah but then as of 2015, Ireland became the fastest growing economy in the EU. As of today, it is among the top 10 wealthiest countries in the world.
> and Brexit
Yes, and now the UK no longer gets to sabotage the EU.
>If your argument is that there is variance within the EU, you can make the argument that there is just as much variance within the US
No, my argument is that the EU tries to "have it both ways" by taking away fiscal and monetary sovereignty but leaving cultural sovereignty intact. The result is that Greece, Ireland, Spain, etc were not really able to regulate their economies in any meaningful sense to prevent the kind of blow-up we saw in 2008, particularly because, when you share a currency and trade zone with a heavy exporter like Germany, their surpluses are your deficits.
The Spanish, Irish, and Greek housing bubbles were underwritten by the profits of German exporters. Greek fiscal malfeasance was overlooked because it was considered politically more important to grow the EU and the Eurozone than to let anyone at all have the authority necessary to enforce healthy fiscal and trade balances.
The United States does not actually work this way, because the federal government engages in countercyclical transfers between the states. The wealth of New York and California gets recycled, through taxes, to pay for military bases in Maine, pensions and Social Security checks in Florida and Arizona, and timber conservancies in Idaho.
> None of this is unique to the US — the EU is similarly "interconnected", as is Switzerland.
I live in Switzerland, and the response here to the virus and most other incidents are far more federally managed than the cantonal system would imply to someone accustomed to US states, in my opinion. If forced at gunpoint to generalize, the simplest explanation I would use having lived in both countries is that in Switzerland the cantons have more independence in execution, while in the US they have more freedom in legislation.
It's not so much about locality - it's about competition. Locality is just the means to that.
Everyone wins when competitors try different things and find out what's efficient and what works well and what doesn't. Marijuana legalization and gay marriage started as experiments by states and localities, which could find and set the example to be adopted federally.
Everyone loses when an entrenched monopoly (here the federal government) can forcibly impose one way of doing things with no room for deviation.
Not to say that competition isn't also relevant, but I think locality is still necessary for osmosis of ideas/thoughts.
I think both Marijuana and gay marriage legalization started because of a small group of like-minded people that found it acceptable and were able to spread that ideology enough so that eventually the state could vote on them. For those particular examples, competition doesn't really kick in until it's already been experimented with, but then it really speeds up the spread for sure.
Looking at the timeline of cannabis laws [1], recreational use in particular, Colorado basically tipped the ice berg. My point is that the organic spread of new and/or controversial ideas is localized before competition kicks in.
Everyone doesn't win when competing localities of government try different things. What actually happens is Amazon shops around for enormous public subsidies for its HQ, bankrupting local and state govnerments. We're in a world of globalised companies and expecting some backwater county in Arkansas to negotiate with Huawei is just absurd.
For the same reason that Google tells Congress 'You need to let us run free to fight those Chinese giants', the US needs federal level regulation to play on the same level as those companies, if it had the guts.
> What actually happens is Amazon shops around for enormous public subsidies for its HQ, bankrupting local and state govnerments.
I'll offer a different take: taxation (and budgets) are just the price we pay to society for a basket of services. There's some optimum price / optimum basket. This competition allows different societies to lower their price (taxes) or lower their basket of services based on the democratic needs of that society. Some societies will value job creation more than short-run costs to the budget, and others will not. It's not surprising at all that the city that didn't have a whole lot of jobs chose the former (via the democratically elected government), and the city that already had a lot of jobs (NYC) chose the latter, also via a similarly selected government.
The libertarian "Minimize the federal government" is an extremely misguided fanatical view which is devoid of any fact-based reasoning. Federal investments have lead to transformative change in most sections of the US economy. Federal Reserve keeping the interest rates low and providing unlimited liquidity is whats keeping the stock market from tanking today. Federal investments will be key to de carbonizing the US economy and reducing income inequality (e.g. by increasing the minimum wage).
Careful criticizing libertarianism on here. This is the hive.
A lot of survivorship bias on here and folks who want to think everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get rid of taxation and large government etc etc
You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take would somehow become less popular.
Whether small-government enthusiasts like it or not, the US is highly interconnected on almost every level. There are certain things that absolutely require federal responses. Things like pollution and viruses absolutely need to be handled from a nation wide perspective. How would healthcare work as a piecemeal implementation across local lines? Its almost as if "letting localities decide" is a nice way of ensuring something will fail without forcing it outright.
Your argument is implying that the federal government is somehow ineffective, but given the federally led improvements across the last century - from roads to environmental regulations, public health and even the internet just shows that you're either ignorant of intentionally dishonest.