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I never fully realized it until now, but the US, with it's federated structure is putting itself at a competitive disadvantage to other countries. It's the wor

I never fully realized it until now, but the US, with it's federated structure is putting itself at a competitive disadvantage to other countries. It's the worst of both worlds, where states have a flaccid independence (they can legislate but not control their borders, thus cannot avoid the free-rider problem). Nation-wide standards that don't fall under the commerce clause have to be bribed into half-ass existence, and then only for a political season. We're structurally incapable of benefiting from economies of scale or standardization in government.

rayiner 9y ago
We also suffer internal transaction costs by having to deal with 51 different legal systems.
- euroclydon 9y ago
  And what to do about it? Most conservatives want smaller federal government, which reduces the aggregate size and expenditure for government, but exacerbates fragmentation. On the other hand, progressives want larger federal government, which introduces standardizing layers, but spends way more on aggregate government.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Nothing to do, we're stuck nickle and diming ourselves into irrelevancy.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    > smaller federal government > larger federal government I find both of these positions frustratingly vague, and I'm eager to blame them for making the problem appear intractable. They're perfectly intuitive enough to make people have a gut-feeling for what it means without actually thinking about what it means, and in that sense avoid actually debating that, which would be productive. What does "large" and "small" even mean? Governments are complex social/cultural/legal systems, no matter what the "size". I'm pretty sure waterbed theory applies here[0]. (This is not a critique of your post, but about the US discourse surrounding this in general. At least how it comes across to me as a European) [0] "the observation, ascribed to Larry Wall, that some systems, such as human and computer languages, contain a minimum amount of complexity, and that attempting to "push down" the complexity of such a system in one place will invariably cause complexity to "pop up" elsewhere.", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory
    - euroclydon 9y ago
      I think we're saying the same thing. Small Federal Government either means larger state governments or a whole bunch of undesirable problems like increased pollution, job discrimination, etc, and those issues are not uniformly distributed because of the states.
emodendroket 9y ago
The United States is not the only federal system on Earth and it is in some ways an outlier among those.

rayiner 9y ago

We also suffer internal transaction costs by having to deal with 51 different legal systems.

euroclydon 9y ago
And what to do about it? Most conservatives want smaller federal government, which reduces the aggregate size and expenditure for government, but exacerbates fragmentation. On the other hand, progressives want larger federal government, which introduces standardizing layers, but spends way more on aggregate government.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Nothing to do, we're stuck nickle and diming ourselves into irrelevancy.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  > smaller federal government > larger federal government I find both of these positions frustratingly vague, and I'm eager to blame them for making the problem appear intractable. They're perfectly intuitive enough to make people have a gut-feeling for what it means without actually thinking about what it means, and in that sense avoid actually debating that, which would be productive. What does "large" and "small" even mean? Governments are complex social/cultural/legal systems, no matter what the "size". I'm pretty sure waterbed theory applies here[0]. (This is not a critique of your post, but about the US discourse surrounding this in general. At least how it comes across to me as a European) [0] "the observation, ascribed to Larry Wall, that some systems, such as human and computer languages, contain a minimum amount of complexity, and that attempting to "push down" the complexity of such a system in one place will invariably cause complexity to "pop up" elsewhere.", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory
  - euroclydon 9y ago
    I think we're saying the same thing. Small Federal Government either means larger state governments or a whole bunch of undesirable problems like increased pollution, job discrimination, etc, and those issues are not uniformly distributed because of the states.

emodendroket 9y ago

The United States is not the only federal system on Earth and it is in some ways an outlier among those.