Because I'm not really interested in abandoning my fellow citizens who lack the means or the support structures to leave where they currently are to the tender mercies of people who plainly don't give a damn about them.

Even every "red state" has plenty of people in need who can't afford to go elsewhere and shouldn't be asked to abandon their families and their lives to just not die.

(EDIT: I normally don't respond to killed comments, because feeding the trolls sucks, but: I live in Massachusetts, dude. I'm used to a state that actually works. I wish you all had them too.)

>Even every "red state" has plenty of people in need who can't afford to go elsewhere and shouldn't be asked to abandon their families and their lives to just not die.

>(EDIT: I normally don't respond to killed comments, because feeding the trolls sucks, but: I live in Massachusetts, dude. I'm used to a state that actually works. I wish you all had them too.)

You could write an analogous comment from a perspective of "people in the blue states need saving too".

Are you going to be singing that same pro-federal tune if issues don't go your way at the federal level?

I live in Massachusetts too. While the burning dollars of taxpayers does keep us warm there is no shortage of states in the nation that would revolt if it had government that "works" the way our government "works". People in other states are not so willfully subservient to government in the name of the common good as we are. We step in line for things that would provoke revolt in states with stronger traditions of individualism and distrust for government.

We have a limited federal government for a reason. Massholes like us have no business telling people thousands of miles away with different cultural values and different economic circumstances how to live their lives. The hell do you or I know about what's best Wyoming? Exactly.

The root problem here is the people who insist that their political beliefs should be implemented for everyone in the country, not just for the people around them who agree with those beliefs. This idea that "we can't leave anything up to local government because there might be some local government out there who disagrees with me" is why we have so much federal gridlock.

I don't particularly care about self-inflicted wounds, but the splash damage upon the people whose lives they make worse in the offing is a damning indictment of this conception of federalism.

Shit's broken, and it's broken for the weakest among us, and it's only getting worse with the "drown it in a bathtub" corps stomping through the White House.

I respectfully submit that you might want to reconsider your priors and update them if you want to accurately reason about the present state of the USA Republic.

The Trump administration has observably almost fully embraced an MMT style social welfare program. The sovereign currency denominated deficits don't matter position has won. The only thing that's missing is the employment backstop, but the $600 a week federal unemployment bonus arguably achieves the same fiscal effects as paying for busywork.

The reality is everyone cares, they just disagree sharply on how to solve issues or which issues are priorities — to which the solution of several independent approaches seems reasonable.

When people in state A see that state B is doing much better because of policy X, they can choose to enact similar. I’m not sure I understand why they need to be compelled to adopt your preferred policies.

It’s interesting that you discuss “red states” being in need — but ignore the prolific violence in “blue cities” and poor trapped there.

As they say: Cure yourself, doctor.

I'd be inclined to agree with you, expect I feel this is what got us Obamacare instead of a better system - and _even then_, there was a multitude of red states that refused to accept the Medicaid expansion, to the harm of precisely the people you speak of. Pushing societal improvements on states that don't want them feels like buying a sandwich for a homeless person and having them throw it on the ground, and I no longer feel its worth the effort.

Two or even three is not usually not considered to be several.

Too slow, too reliant on voluntary compliance, and most importantly, too difficult to make decisions with long term time horizons.

Not sure you want an efficient, consolidated government if the wrong party is leading it.

This chart shows government spending by various levels of government: https://images.app.goo.gl/iVpyyr2Ftzo6m7PB6

In the US, about half of all spending happens at the federal level. Germany, which also has a federal system as a matter of its constitution, also has the central government spending about half of all government dollars. Canada is even more federalist. The vast majority, about 3/4 of 4/5 of government spending happens at the provincial level. Denmark also has the majority of spending at the local level. Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Chile, and Mexico are about the same as the US in pushing about half of all spending down to the local governments.

In a two-party system that gentlemanly good faith eventually breaks down and you end up with our current problem, where you need supermajority control of all branches of government to actually do anything, because if you lack even one single point of control then party-line behavior will allow everything to be ground to a halt.

Parliamentary systems are better, there is just one house in most cases, and the executive is of the same party as the legislature, so when a government forms it has consensus and can execute policy. Yes, this is less checked-and-balanced, and that's a good thing, because accomplishing policy and checks and balances are opposing goals. Too much checks and balance and nothing gets done. If everything is fine that's great, but our system has been deadlocked for 20 years now, things are not great, and nothing can be done about it.

And there are still an executive and judicial branches in a parliamentary system, it is still a federal system, just not the American federal system.

The real "checks and balances" is ultimately voting. Having snap elections allows that check to be manifested much more readily when the government begins to go off the rails of public opinion.

(the queen is actually a very interesting apparatus in the british government... apart from having some kind of maximum duration between elections, you are dependent on someone to decide when to call a snap election. Obviously you can't really rely on a government that is completely off the rails to call an election on itself, and party line voting poses obvious problems. So how do you deal with it? An oracle machine (in the crypto sense) that exists outside the system and can operate independently to decide when to call an election. Which is what the queen does, she can dissolve parliament and call an election.)

https://www.etymonline.com/word/veto

This even appears in technical projects, e.g., Linus Torvalds, who's for years been the Linux kernal's "no" man:

[I]n the end, my job is to say no. Somebody has to be able to say no to people.

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/07/03/2133201/linus-torv...

Smaller, simpler systems, with greater levels of trust, or greater inequalities of power, seem to avoid this. Large ones, not.

I'm sure there's some discussion of this in political theory, though I'm unaware of it. Listing out a typology of other loci of power would also be interesting.

I posit that there will always be this conflict until cities have a blue federation superimposed on a red countryside. But the constitution isn't set up that way. Maybe next time.