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> instead of actually governing And what do you suppose should be the priorities for the federal government? What needs actually governing that can't be better

• jfengel 4y ago
  Whether it could, in theory, be done better locally, then at the very least you'd need to plan for that. You can't just turn off the Social Security Administration, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security etc and assume that the states will pick up those jobs tomorrow. We could have a decent argument about which jobs are better handled by a federal government and which aren't. The notion that the federal government isn't actually doing anything and could just vanish tomorrow is absurd and not worth discussing.
  • prottog 4y ago
    How about the notion that the federal government is doing way more than it should given its remit under the Constitution? That's my point, not that it can and should cease to exist.
    • jfengel 4y ago
      I don't actually believe that, because the Constitution is deliberately vague about what the government can and can't do. It exists in its current form as the result of 250 years of evolution, following the rules at each step as best it could. Even so, I'd be willing to say, "Sure, fine, the government is doing more than it should". That's pretty vacuously true, and also irrelevant. Getting people to agree on which parts are important, and finding a better way to implement them, seems a more germane question.