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Get the "S" out! [Abolishing the states and other radical political dreams]
spacekungfuman
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass.
Chief Justice John Marshall, McCulloch v. Maryland
In the ask an American why we don't trust the government thread which briefly popped up, I saw a number of people posting that they feel a stronger tie to their state than to America. This surprised me, because I feel absolutely no pride in my state (NY). I have tremendous pride in NYC and long island, but I don't see why I should feel any more of a connection to (or have my taxes support) the people of Albany, Buffalo or some other distant part of the state than the people of southern New Jersey or Eastern Conneticut, let alone the commuting regions of those states. To make matters worse, the people of these far flung communities have a say in issues affecting the city, while people who commute there everyday from other states (and pay NY state taxes) cannot vote in the local or state elections which can have a direct impact on their day to day lives.
To me it seems like it would make much more sense to focus on local government (which is best suited to dealing with local issues) and the federal government, with some form of weak intermediary government acting as a conduit between those levels and focusing on areas of common concern (like a city and it's supporting suburbs, or large rural areas). I know how entrenched the states are, and that the suggestion that we eliminate them is radical, but I have a hard time coming up with a reason that they should exist. They are too broad to deal effectively with many local issues, and not broad enough to deal with many big picture issues like the planning of an interstate highway or railroad. I am interested to hear what other people think about the number of levels of government that we have, and what if any role there should be for a level of government between local and federal governments. Let's dream wildly now.
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I have no problem with citizens having some say in how their city is run. They live there, they should have some input. Though I think California goes way overboard in this direction.
The status quo suits me. In some areas I'd like the federal government to have more power like having a federal organization that polices the state and local police forces to crack down on corruption and crooked cops, like IAB with more power.
What you're suggesting would end the United States as a nation. You'd regress North America back like it was prior to the America Revolutionary War. Which might even be worse then what conservatives who propose to dissolve the federal government yet keep the nation intact loose coalition. :shock:
Things I don't think states should have control over would include marriage rights, insurance law, minimum education standards, and women's health law.
More on topic!: State government taking money from one city and using it to improve another may not make people all warm and fuzzy, but the idea is to try and balance out the costs of doing shit (like rural utilities) and prevent the states from turning into desolate wastelands dotted with cities. Plus, there's some shit that needs to be done that can't be done inside a city, like farming. Having a city identity is fine, but the states have a reason to exist. Personally, I'd like more directed up to the Feds, but that's because I'm a huge fan of "if we all agree X needs doing, let's simplify management of it and do it federally instead of forming 50 different plans with 50 different sets of rules and metrics like idiots"
It would actually be much better if we did have everyone living in the cities/towns and the rural areas turn into wasteland. Rural living is massively expensive in terms of resources - cities are extremely efficient, which is why we invented them so long ago. The cultural isolation is also very damaging to a modern nation, especially one like the U.S. that privileges the rural voter over their urban counterpart.
As for farming, you don't really have farm communities much any more. There are still some family farms, and there is a growing locally produced food movement, but the majority of America's farms are essentially factories made of fields.
You don't need tons of people living in the country to run a modern mechanized farm. The exceptions are fragile fruits and vegetables that need to be hand picked, and there's no reason that you can't have that workforce commute in from the towns and cities.
:^:
I agree with this pretty much completely.
Ever read "A Story of the Days To Come?"
May I interest you in the US Constitution and it's federal form of government?
Pretty much this. Except that I'm Ok with living in an actual rural area, since by definition there's few people there. It's the sprawling suburbs that are a gigantic waste of resources and horrible for our culture.
You're going to have similar conflicts with state and local governments. Not being in the federal government doesn't mean they're any less incompetent or corrupt. They actually have less restraint from being crooked without a strong federal government to keep them in line. Not to mention big business has one less obstacle to fight against so they have more time and power to dominate state and local areas.
Wouldn't that be dividing the country into larger numbers of states, closer to the U.S. model?
No. There is a massive difference between a federal state as constituted through a bargain between sovereign states and people versus a federal state, constituted directly between people, that merely delegates its authority to subordinate entities. The relationship that ELM is proposing is closer to that of a US state and its subordinate governments at county and municipal levels: the only constraint on state power on its lower entities are things that the state itself binds itself to.
One problem with defining regions by administrative concern is that these change through economic and demographic forces anyway, and in particular, these forces can occur in a way that directly conflicts with people's sense of nationalism and identity, and sense of ownership over the neighborhoods they live in. It doesn't save you from localist nationalism. If lots of people suddenly want to immigrate to a boom town, administratively one might desire to reclassify the town to an industrial region and annex surrounding suburbia into city limits. This can easily generate a lot of local resistance, and if those people feel more loyal to their own town than the overarching federal government, then you would have to use quite a lot of police force just for protecting the rights of your own federal-level citizens.
American states (and therefore their lower authorities) don't have the right to explicitly limit freedom of mobility, but don't kid yourself about what a lot of residential zoning policy is designed to do.
The issue seems to be, especially in the US, that states are out to actively fuck one another over and there's no organized strategy to stop this. It's really really fucking stupid.
Oh and that, as always, the lower level the government the shittier since less people are paying attention.
There's also the problem that the lower you go the poorer you are.
The GOP wants to force states to foot the entire bill for education, which would basically kill public education. Completely.
One major problem is that states and local governments are forced to run a balanced budget, which really really sucks during a recession.
The US constitutionally limited itself to integration at a time when transport costs were much more significant, and did so in a way that ensures that each state's elites benefited from the extent of the common market, so later evolution would almost certainly have resulted in choosing either state sovereignty or democratic politics. As it turns out, the US went solidly for the latter. Much of the weakness of state policy is due to inefficient and costly ways to implement things that these states want really badly but only fully sovereign states could do relatively easily: control immigration and trade, preserve existing economic interests and cultural identity from changes in other states, conduct industrial and labour/healthcare/education policy, shield one from recessions in other states, etc.
Left alone, things like minority rights can take much longer to propagate. Consider how long it took for women to get the right to vote in all the Swiss cantons.
Abolishing States would force local and federal powers to complete take up State responsibilities. This would be a clusterfuck; the federal government is huge, inefficient and indebted. Projects or directives that span hundreds or thousands of kilometers will by definition require more than local decision making to manage. Entrenched power structures exist mostly to preserve themselves, meaning the States will not go willingly.
Move some responsibilities and jurisdictions around and alter the weights of various powers. Big cities I think are the only entities with both the incentive and the power to justify it or to actually cause it to come about.
We need a strong, centralized government to focus our energy and push off into one unified direction. To see how our country forges ahead, unified, it gives me goosebumps to think about how much we could accomplish. Small governments are for small minds.
Something like devolution in the UK, only sane and not as a stop gap against secession.
I'd also like to get people more involved with their state and local governments since that's the level that the most annoying and dumbass laws get passed and the level that people can have the most power over.
But I'm a small state liberal so I might be a little biased.
Yup. Any movement away from State power will have this result.
And, anyway, States with relatively small and few cities are already less powerful than economic and population beasts like California or New York. More rural areas will always have less say than metropolitan areas, even though they take up the lions share of the territory.
I'd add banking and loan regulations to the list if the complete jurisdiction isn't already in the hands of the feds.
My question in regards to minimum education is, does that include k-12, vocational and college or is it only the first one? It would certainly help to have a minimum standard for k-12, even if people are going to home or private schools. At the very least it makes it harder for bigots to ensure their kids grow up ignorant.
On the other hand, I think vocational and college level education suffers because profits becoming a bigger factor. I'm wondering if having a federal minimum for all vocational certificates and degrees would help drive costs down. I know irresponsible spending is partly to blame on unneeded administrative costs that drive up tuition bills, but part me wonders how many classes get added as requirements as a means to get more money out people rather than teach them required skills both for their profession and to be a functional member of society (be a critical thinker rather than being a biological automaton).
I'm also open to the idea of giving states more control where it makes sense. For instance, I think states could in theory do a better job with transportation than the feds because they are actually near the infrastructure in most cases and have a better feel of where it would be better to build additional roads and where to make public transportation more readily available. On the fed level, I'd be more afraid that some dumbass from Alaska would end up wasting tons of money on middle of butt fuck nowhere because it's his Congressional district than I would be of an Alaskan state legislator of pulling the same shit. Partly because the Alaskan state legislator would have to deal with his fellow Alaskan legislators who feel that money could be better spend elsewhere. Mind you it isn't perfect, VA has wasted tons of money improve roads in the south while the 1-95 corridor up North gets worse.
This where I run into issues with given the states more power. Maybe if we went with what is suggested at the top of the post, then perhaps it might be possible since they would have less stuff to worry about. It really is a damn shame they didn't grab for the power to dictate minimum education standards. It's not just the 99% that need it, from what I can tell the 1% aren't much better off either in some regards. As in they don't know why certain things are a bad idea, are possible not taught how some things truly broke down and seem to also suffer from be trained as soulless automatons.
The federal government really needs power to make sure this shit doesn't happen. Or if it does, it rarely gets used correctly.
I'd agree with your additions as well.
I think that states should manage infrastructure, but we do need federal oversight on that. You want the interstate to be the same quality all over. But maybe put the decision to build new routes and such into state legislatures? I can't imagine it's beyond the mind of humanity to figure out a way to make that work.
It tricky, I think they should still have power to go after the states if they misuse federal money and we should prevent the scenario that south saw in the civil war with railroads, where they were horribly inefficient because nothing was standardized (differences in rail widths being such an example). Other than that, I'm not sure there is much you can do, perhaps make the legislator liable for any harm caused by infrastructure failing due to inadequate maintenance. That might discourage scenarios like southern VA legislators siphoning state money to under used roads in their districts, if all of a sudden they could go potential go to jail because a bridge in northern VA fails due to a lack of maintenance because there aren't enough funds.
Exactly. The feds should have oversight on the states, otherwise why have a federal government? Our history is full of examples that prove we need DC to exist in some form, and to do so in a position of strength.
I'd argue that states need to have a lot less power over their university systems. They're strangling them now, to save money for the majority of their constituents who did not go to college. You have state legislators and governors in the U.S. actively running against their world respected university systems, using dog whistle class biases against the educated and professors.
My own state is one lawsuit away from a constitutional crisis, as the state constitution mandates that college be "as near to free as possible" and the state has withdrawn more than 50 percent of its support in the last two decades. The GOP-held state legislature is using the resulting tuition increases to argue that the colleges are greedy and need to cut their budgets more.
The whole "in state student" price scale is also horrendous for national economic development. It ensures that talented poor and middle class students must go to schools in their state, no matter their career aspirations and the state of the local economy. So, they get no internship opportunities or professional contacts in their chosen field.
The factory worker daughter obsessed with marine science is pretty fucked if she grew up in Kansas, and you really don't want to be studying to go into the tech industry in a state that doesn't actually have a tech industry to intern in. I suspect the only reason that the courts aren't enforcing the "full faith and credit" clause in this case is that constitutionality is actually a poorly applied joke in any area where the federal government itself doesn't want to engage in a power grab.
They're awfully defensive about it too.
In some regard, I wonder that if States were let off the chain to do as they will, the eventual natural selection of politicians and policies would shift economic power (and population) away from the rural / southern areas, showing strength in progressivism.
So you want to remove the state level and then blow the local level up to state size?
Isn't that what we basically have now? Local authority is derived from the states, states grant charters and such (at least in Florida, but I'm pretty sure this is true across the country).
The state system makes sense, we've just depowered it to the point of uselessness in today's 'murica.
I think what we should do is get together and actually delineate what is a "state issue" and a "federal issue". I don't know how that would work outside of a constitutional amendment but it's something I think our constitutional law desperately needs.
(And half of what the GOP is claiming under STATES RIGHTS is bullshit, btw).
So long as the national voting system gives rural state voters a greater voice than their urban counterparts, you'll have policies that fix this to make sure that the rural states come out ahead. We've already got a national politics where the conservative rural states are basket cases that need constant infusion of tax dollars from liberal urban areas, while conservative rural politicians bang the table about how liberals are incompetent at governance.
I think that, unless this is addressed, is going to be a major fracture point in American politics. There's only so long that the national politics can be hijacked by the minority of the nation - the GOP is more gaming the electoral map and voting laws than actually gaining support these days - before the entire system starts to look illegitimate.
Illegitimate political systems can hang around dying for decades, even centuries, but they're last days are always painful to live through.
I think the state system is a relic of 18th century politics. If we want to be a collection of states, dissolve the union and let the chips fall where they may. If we want to be a nation, be a nation and get rid of the 50 competing little "states." Right now, we're pretending to be both and failing.