And yes, conversely, when power is decentralized, you don't get "benevolent dictators" who might otherwise do some good. My point is that this argument doesn't really work if applied consistently in all cases - or, at least, not without more digging into the specifics of costs vs benefits. Personally, I'm not convinced that centralization is a net good overall, if only because it makes large standing armies possible.
Frankly we're heading down the path of membership flexibility if the next few years don't bring about significant change.
It's not like the confederacy was fighting for slavery and to be part of the union. Both Kentucky and Delaware were happy with the status quo. The confederacy wanted both slavery and to leave the union, which they perceived to be their right.
The federal government at the time was much smaller than the current one and much less empowered.
The union stopped being good enough for them, when it stopped being perfect.
You'd be hard pressed to argue the confederacy wanted to take over the union and then impose slavery on the free states. I mean, you could make the argument, but it's more likely to me they simply wanted to leave and continue enslaving people.
I don't know how this turned into a discussion on slavery. The issue was secession. The civil war answered that us states cannot secede. Itll be interesting to see how the dynamic in the eu changes since this is a possibility there (although I'm doubtful they'd let a continental member leave).
I can't see its use being refused: that would disintegrate the bloc. And there was no question that we (the Brits) wouldn't be allowed to, so the precedent has been set.
I would imagine a few tweaks to the Article 50 exit mechanism will be made next time the treaties are revised - there are some game theory problems in the current trigger mechanism and the timescales set down turned out to be too short in practice - but it's no longer in dispute on principle.
It was also not in dispute in the first constitution of the united states, but they just did away with that for funsies (I'm being facetious). I imagine we'll see something similar in the EU as the bloc becomes more integrated.
In the past, if you traveled from San Francisco to new Orleans you would experience an entirely different set of stores, a new dialect, new customs, and frankly a new language.
Even the difference between California and Oregon is stark. California being mainly Hispanic and Oregon being mainly Nordic and with lots of Slavic influence. The names change and even the languages do.
I'd never see Russian in California but it's a regular occurrence in Oregon.
EDIT: By no means am I suggesting though that Americans do not have fondness for one another. I just think the relationship between a rural Alabaman and an urban Californian is more like the relationship between two citizens of differing EU countries. We certainly have a shared culture of sorts, and we will defend each other in the face of non-Americans, but there are cultural differences that cannot be simply glossed over.
A federal state as a tight union of autonomous non-sovereign states is viable. We have plenty of examples for that. An EU-style loose union of sovereign states also works, if only barely. However, there is no evidence that a loose union of non-sovereign states would work in the present-day world. It might work, but the question is very complex, and we can't hope for a confident answer without actually trying it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28137396
I would assume that fewer people who are already doing well will move states than will people who experiences more problems where they were.
Or much, much worse for the locals if housing construction can’t keep pace with the population influx. Or your state does the right thing and somehow solves its homelessness problem and then homeless from around the nation arrive (or are shipped off by their home states) and overwhelm the system.
As for the homelessness example, that is my point exactly, and the general problem with welfare state. You have to choose - restrict the access to welfare state specifically, restrict movement generally, or don't have a welfare state. I do not view welfare state as a sustainable QOL improvement (or a QOL improvement at all), so I am in favor of the last option. For me, people moving in to abuse a local welfare option is a positive development. Contrary to GGP(?), the localities that get punished are not punished for "improving quality of life"... they are punished for stupid policies.
Name someone alive who does not contribute to the quality of life.
Generally, there are plenty of people who do not contribute to society in any major way (e.g. even taxes), or even directly harm it.
For any specific improvement in quality of life, as it is commonly understood (and whether it's measured for an average person/median person/the most miserable person/...) there's very obviously somebody who doesn't contribute to it. Not literally everyone helps run a homeless shelter, plant a forest, build a highway, or run a non-corrupt judiciary. Similarly, there are quite obviously some people who detract from any particular improvement, either directly (whether it's a corrupt cop decreasing public trust, a burglar decreasing safety, a factory fouling up the air, a hiker littering in the park), or by using up a public resource more than they contribute to it.
There's no reason why somebody's combined contribution cannot be a net negative. So, it's very easy to find such a person.
National-level quality of life as an average of states that can make either choice is like some states littering and some states cleaning up after them, or as a parent poster wrote "punishes states that attempt to increase their quality of life too far above the national average".
You seem to think having a low quality of life and lowering the quality of life are the same, and additionally, that improving the quality of life in a given state is something that a state, almost by definition, cannot do.
Nope, that is a vacuous statement. Some people contribute more, some people contribute less - again, trivial to demonstrate, let's say I contribute X to others' QoL, positive or negative. If I go out now and throw my trash away in the park, I now contribute less than X, whatever X was.
> You seem to think having a low quality of life and lowering the quality of life are the same, and additionally, that improving the quality of life in a given state is something that a state, almost by definition, cannot do.
Where did you derive that from? To be fair I don't even understand anymore what you mean by quality of life :) Wikipedia: "Quality of life (QOL), according to Britannica, is the degree to which an individual is healthy, comfortable, and able to participate in or enjoy life events". QoL for the state is thus a metric (an average/median/...) of individual QoLs in that state. Within the state, individuals and groups (including the govt i.e. the state) can improve various aspects on QoL, usually via specific amenities (physical or "cultural" like safety/trust/...). They can also detract from it. Everything I said above follows from that.
Your examples only illustrate simple behaviors, and do not show that there are negative and positive contributors, only isolated incidents any person can choose between, and whether or not this sums to a positive or negative person in relation to eg. their tax contributions.
At the state level aggregate, which is more relevant when talking about population flows with regard to differing state policies, each of your examples can fall under Simpson's Paradox and form a misleading picture.
You have, I believe, neglected to address the points made with respect to reversion toward the national mean for progressive state policies.
Edit: Say for example, two states A and B have identical QoL by whatever measures you choose. Then in an effort to improve QoL in their state, A offers free comprehensive healthcare, but state B does not. Some of the sick people in state B, having lower QoL for reasons of health and acting in their own interests, move to state A for treatment. Now state B, with fewer sick people registers a median increase in QoL. Perhaps state A registers a smaller increase than they had hoped for, and now bear an additional tax burden.
State B benefits by doing nothing. State A improves actual QoL for sick people. What am I missing?
How is "there are negative and positive contributors" different from "whether or not this [behavior] sums to a positive or negative person"? There's no reason Simpson's paradox would apply here; and, Simpson's paradox with respect to what? We are trying to find if a specific person X is a negative or positive contributor to local QoL.
Your example actually illustrates that and contradicts the first point - if we introduce a free service, let's say QoL would go up; someone moves in to abuse it, you admit QoL goes up less ("smaller increase than they hoped for") - that person is a negative contributor, all other things being equal. Or, if you say their net is still positive (no reason it would always be positive), then the original complaint - states punished for improving QoL - does not apply. They got rewarded by this positive net contribution, not punished, right?
As for the example itself, there's nothing "free" - someone pays the doctors providing healthcare, etc., and you could argue the payers' QoL goes down. If you don't limit how much people may have to pay (it's universal vs a limited number of taxpayers), their QoL can go down a lot. If it doesn't balance out and the state gets "punished", it's precisely because it's bad policy that doesn't improve QoL. The debatability of the merits of universal healthcare itself aside, the reason it may not be too bad on country level is because it's hard to move in to make use of it; it comes with status/residency restrictions, and also health-based immigration restrictions in some countries (like Canada, IIRC).
I do admit I generally think states can improve QoL much less than they think they can, and can degrade QoL much more than they think they will, but there are many things states can do (and have done in the past) that create good incentives and don't suffer from this problem. Most of them actually involve undoing things. Others involve things that incentivize more positive contributors than negative as 2nd order effect; be it safety, building certain kinds of infrastructure, etc.
The first was the civil war, and federal power consolidated for obvious reasons. Easily half the states demonstrated that they could not be trusted to run their own affairs and protect the rights of the citizens enshrined in the Constitution.
The second was more subtle. The reinterpretation of the Constitution that occurred during the Great Depression granted the federal government the authority to regulate commerce within States under the interstate commerce clause. This authority drives everything from farm subsidies to drug regulation. It is a piece of federal power that people can reasonably argue about the virtue of, but in a modern comment deeply interconnected world it's reasonable to believe that the federal government needs limited central economic planning authority for the country to flourish.
So instead we have a more centralized federal government that cannot be trusted to protect the rights of the citizens enshrined in the Constitution ( that same post civil war government interned the Japanese, allows police to search any vehicle with the "signal" of a dog, and instead of enslaving blacks just disproportionately tosses them to wither away in prison instead. Instead of enslaving brown people here, now our kinder gentler federal government just blow them up in foreign countries instead. )
>The reinterpretation of the Constitution that occurred during the Great Depression granted the federal government the authority to regulate commerce within States under the interstate commerce clause. This authority drives everything from farm subsidies to drug regulation.
That's the first time I've seen the war on drugs used to justify the centralization of power. I suppose we need a new civil war against the "untrustworthy" states that have legalized marijuana so affairs can be run the right way.
It's pretty "reasonable" to believe the federal government DOESN't need the authority they currently have.
It's weird to watch.
I would say the 1st and last examples are examples of the federal government making a very bad call. The others are primarily the fault of local governments.
the federal govt should have zero benefits tied to marriage. By having benefits tied to marriage they have essentially established religions that have male-female marriage as the default religion of the country.
if taxes, inheritance etc were not tied to marriage and instead were done with standard contracts between 2, 3 or N people (civil unions). Then the marriage problem would go away.
Regardless, that clause is about the federal government not interfering with official state churches (“establishments of religion”) which existed until the 1830s.
You're leaving out the massive fights from states that did not want to recognize gay marriage, which could have easily gone the other way. The same process will repeat with marijuana prohibition and the states fighting it may succeed this time. What would have happened if gay marriage stayed as a patchwork of legal statuses? What will happen in the long run when marijuana is legal in many states but continues to send you to prison for decades in others? This is not a stable situation and the exact reason we need the federal government to do things instead of leaving it up to the states.
Unless it concerns powers specifically given to the federal government by the US constitution that would be unconstitutional: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." (10th Amendment).
If you do not like the laws in your state, vote to change the laws.
If you do not like the laws in other states, discuss and persuade the voters of those states to change their laws.
The constitution is a broad documented to be interpreted
It's not a step by step manual or grocery list
> If you do not like the laws in other states, discuss and persuade the voters of those states to change their laws. Or better yet and occasionally easier get the federal government to change the law for the whole country, benefiting everyone
This is only an option for the most privileged among us. What are the options for someone who is gay and doesn't have the means to move to a less bigoted state?
The right of people to govern themselves is important even if we disagree with how they do it. Note the EU Human Rights Court came to the exact opposite conclusion a year after Obergefell, finding no right to marriage for same sexual couples under the EU convention on human rights.
If you look at constitutional law in western Europe, no country has a court that intrudes as much into social issues as the US Supreme Court.
I don't really know whether we can unwind the federal governments grasp on things without basically destabilizing the whole thing though at this point (and admittedly, I'm not sure the majority would want to).
Power has been moving in a central direction ever since.
It's interesting to speculate on how much of the colonies Britain would have won back in the War of 1812 if it hadn't faced a unified front, or what a powerful France would have done in world history if it had never made the Louisiana purchase sale to the United States because there would have been no United States to make the sale to (or, for that matter, what a powerful Spain would have done if France had made the sale to Spain instead, expanding the Mexican holdings). Or how long slavery would have lasted in North America if there had been no pressure of maintaining a national-scale rule of law to bring disagreements between Northern and Southern states to the point of a military conflict.
I'm really tired of people saying stuff like this : <insert vaguely conservative stance here> has become a rallying cry for racism and transphobia and bigotry.
Its really obnoxious and disingenuous. Give me one example of someone using states rights as a call for racism and hatred.
My guess is you probably only said what you just said because you've read enough articles by blue-haired liberal arts graduates with a sub 100 IQ.
> Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union
> The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union...
> The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_States%27_Rights_Pa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orval_Faubus#Little_Rock_crisi...
> In a 1985 interview with a Huntsville Arkansas student, Faubus stated that the Crisis was due to an "Usurpation of power" by the Federal Government.
The Federal government has subjugated all states, and merely tolerates their grasps at 10th amendment autonomy as it derives power from the collection of states. But it is more well funded, controls the currency, and has more land and resources under its title. States don't matter.