Honestly, I wonder if the level of autonomy we provide to states and lower subdivisions makes sense anymore in an era of one-day delivery and non-in-person sale

Honestly, I wonder if the level of autonomy we provide to states and lower subdivisions makes sense anymore in an era of one-day delivery and non-in-person sales. They're buying the same goods, with the same currency, backed with the same warranties, and shipped with the same couriers, but because some of your customers are on the other side of an arbitrary line drawn for a political gambit in the mid-1800s, here's an entire second set of rules and documentation to deal with. Even if you can somehow convince all the states to play ball, and not tie any sort of standardization process in the courts until six months after the heat death of the Universe, you've got the same problems on different scales with patchworks of local authorities. If anything, though, what we should be looking for is a uniform national VAT or sales tax, distributed proportionally back to the states/local authorities. It would discourage the "race to the bottom" gaming of special tax regions and exemptions to attract business, and take funding for essential aervices out of the hands of state legislatures. In at least some states, we have real problems because such legislatures will do things like "taxes can only be raised as a ballot initiative with supermajority" as political posturing, then hatch up harebrained schemes like "the courts said we actually have to fund public schools, let's sell off state-owned land as a one-time earner" to kick the can down the road. Added plus: we could reasonably price goods as tax-inclusive, like in the UK, because the marketing copy can be consistent and accurate everywhere.