Huh? Your comments are completely ahistorical. The US federal government played a massive role in creating the states. Examples include the Louisiana Purchas

Huh? Your comments are completely ahistorical. The US federal government played a massive role in creating the states. Examples include the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, massive Federal armed deployments against natives, the Mexican-American War, the Homestead Act. My brain is starting to break trying to fathom how completely and utterly ahistorical your assertions are. The article even makes explicit statements that contradict your claims. Setting aside the historical facts, there's other problems with the blithe claim that "markets and states know best." The primary fallacies in your proposal are that decentralized states will be (a) completely altruistic in allocating a pile of cash to the places that will produce the most economic benefit, (b)able to out-perform centralized economic decision-making of planners, (c) not be subject to the lobbying that so corrupts state and local governments now. See, that's the problem with your line of thinking - it rests entirely on the assumption that markets and smaller government units are always and everywhere better at decisions than centralized governments. A more intelligent and balanced perspective would be that sometimes centralized decision-making makes sense and sometimes decentralized decision-making makes sense. Can we please get past this puerile debate about centralized and decentralized decision-making? It's completely dependent on the context and requires deep thinking not comforting ideological platitudes.