One thing I've been a long-time advocate for is States setting up their own banks akin to that of North Dakota's. If for no other reason than to have a way to leverage national monetary policy for regional aims, so that when the Federal government rushes to the aid of Wall Street (e.g. by flooding it with cheap liquidity) there's a way for State governments to more directly interact with those mechanisms themselves for their benefit.
I strongly suspect significant challenges in setting up effective and responsive governance and incentive structures to keep such things from not becoming their own instruments of abuse, but ever since watching 2008 unfold it's bothered me how easy it is to leave States twisting in the wind while the balance sheets of financial institutions are made whole by feeding at the Fed liquidity trough.
One of the basic premises of "States rights", as it were, is that it's supposed to offer lots of little "laboratories of democracy", but as it stands right now there's no good way to actually finance those laboratories to invest in ambitious things. So, what we mostly end up with instead is only the downside of using "States rights" in the only way that it's cheap to do so, which is usually by restricting or denying things. It's much harder to get the upside of investing in things without all the latitude that the Federal government enjoys financially.
"Liberal Democracy" is all theatre, all the time. It is a plutocracy with an extremely advanced propaganda arm designed to fool even the most intelligent observer, as can be seen by the high degree of trust placed in the system by my esteemed colleagues here at HN.
Alas, we get the rulers we deserve.
Robert Hockett has written a lot about productive investments via the federal reserve banks, and how that could be used to transform the economy.
Here's one recent paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4023614
He wrote a short book about it as well: https://www.amazon.com/Financing-Green-New-Deal-Renewal/dp/3...