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Introductions / Re: albany ny yo
« on: May 24, 2012, 03:46:34 pm »It's funny that you discuss federalism on your blog. I studied federalism quite a bit while in law school and I think you're giving the concept of subnational governance short shrift.Hmmm, I disagree with a lot of this. The essence of my disagreement is that ‘local’ government is worse and worse the more that technology reduces the significance of distance. The relevance of state identity has declined by a factor of dozens over the centuries. And to the extent that state identity remains, it’s mostly parochial, and not in a positive way. When things get bigger and more streamlined, the potential for disfunction goes down and accountability goes up. When things are local and diffuse, the reverse happens. The ‘particular reason’ that states would be more likely to get major issues wrong is that they’re more insular and provincial, less cosmopolitan, more secure in their practices and habits, etc.
Suffice it to say that federalism makes a great deal of sense, but is often coopted by various political factions. There's no particular reason why it has to be associated with slavery / denying gays the right to marry, or rather, no particular reason why the states would get those issues wrong and the federal government would get it right.
The easiest rationale for federalism is by looking at Congressional earmarks. When the federal government pays for things that return a strictly local benefit (e.g., when the federal government pays for resanding of New Jersey's beaches), NJ representatives in Congress get to reap the political benefits with very little of the cost (e.g., higher taxes). In other words, you get to impose externalities on everyone else. Really, it should be NJers who decide how much they are willing to pay for those beaches to be resanded, and whether they are worth the benefit returned.
Of course, federalism requires some amount of preemption, and indeed in the US practically everything is preempted by the federal government, either expressly or implicitly (implicitly because of a natural conflict, or sometimes because the federal law is designed to be comprehensive and any state law in the same "field" is deemed preempted -- see ERISA, NLRA, etc.).
The real value of federalism is just, well, different people want different things. Some states want to pay more in taxes and get more services. Others want to pay less and get fewer. You get closer democracy when people are closer to their government.
Now, if you are a conservative, those might sound alright. But I’m trying to make an argument about why federalism is structurally conservative – and that’s something that has been true throughout American history. Go back to John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton. Without them, we might never have empowered the national government in the early 19th century – and the rest of our history might never have happened.
While I’m not in love with earmarks, I don’t see the problem being a federalism issue at all. Earmarks are a perfectly rational response to the problem of complicated lawmaking. It’s a form of logrolling, that allows you to cultivate majorities on big appropriations bills. If you really want to get rid of earmarks, you can do so. But it comes at the cost of erasing the practical arrangements necessary to make law. Or: you can eliminate some of the other significant hurdles: the de-facto-60-vote-filibuster, Senate malapportionment, multiple veto points, etc.
Searching the archives, I see I wrote about this back in 2010:
http://www.heartachewithhardwork.com/2010/11/im-falling-all-over-you-like-a-bad-jacket.html
Also, any idea what’s wrong with the olneyce account?