The Battle Against the States

I wrote recently about the coming Battle over states rights versus the federal government. On issues ranging from gay marriage to abortion to decriminalization of marijuana, the battle will rage for the next several years.

Liberals and Democrats generally favor the idea of a strong central government that dictates what states can and can't do. Conservatives and Libertarians tend to favor states rights; allowing states to decide what is best for them as constituent needs and wishes are more easily noted at the local level. This was the intent of the framers of our Constitution.

Today, liberal blogger Matt Yglesias posits that states are the problem without making his points too clearly:

I was talking to a libertarian-minded fellow at the Kaufman Foundation conference I was attending on Friday, and he asked me something like why does all this big government stuff have to be done at the federal level? Couldn’t we leave it all up to the states? That way there’s be a kind of “policy competition”—states could try different things, people could leave policy regimes they didn’t like, and we could see what works:

The most obvious problem with this proposal is that in the areas where the case for government activism is the strongest, it just wouldn’t make sense to take action at the level of a small sub-unit of a large economically integrated country. Rhode Island can’t regulate air pollution since it can’t help air wafting in from neighboring states. And Kentucky can’t do macro stabilization policy—there’s too much economic leakage into the rest of the country.

Now, no one I've ever spoke to has ever advocated leaving it all up to the states with no federal government oversight. That is an extreme libertarian position (as are many positions of that ideology) and one that no self-respecting pundit would ever make. The generally accepted conservative position is that states were granted rights under the 10th Amendment (and to an extent the 14th Amendment) to act on behalf of their citizens and in the best interest of those citizens. The framers understood that a strong federal government could become a kleptocracy, a theocracy or something worse. States, they reasoned, could be held more accountable since those elected in states tend to be more representative of the community at large.

Yet Yglesias uses the position of a libertarian to make his equally inane point about air "wafting" over Rhode Island or his other point about Kentucky and economic stabilization.

Liberals fear states becoming more powerful; because they know that some of the precious laws they hold dear would be overturned quickly starting with abortion and moving on to gay marriage and welfare. Roe V. Wade was thrust on the states and gave them no recourse but to comply with a practice that many people feel is abhorrent. Given the opportunity to overturn Roe V. Wade at the state level would mean large swaths of the Midwest and South would be anti-abortion zones and organizations like Planned Parenthood would be ousted within months.

But probably the more profound problem here is that it doesn’t seem to work in practice. In the context of the normal political debate, I obviously come down on the big government side of the equation. But at the same time, I wouldn’t disagree with the observation that there are some elements of our economy that are badly over-regulated. It’s much more difficult to start or expand a business than it should be and this is one of the reasons why our economy has gotten so dominated by cookie-cutter chains that have enough scale to amass expertise and legal clout needed to navigate this thicket. There’s more occupational licensing than their needs to be. There’s too much regulation saying that buildings have to be short, or can only occupy so big a percentage of the lot, or have to have so many parking spaces. At the same time that I think the country’s overall policy dynamic is too tilted toward the automobile, the actual vehicle registration process is weirdly cumbersome, and the rules governing auto dealers are positively insane.

Does Yglesias really believe that the regulatory burden on small business and such would become less burdensome if it were passed to the federal government? We see how well the federal government did when doling out our tax dollars in TARP 1. Add to that the fact that we just passed a $1-trillion stimulus package that wasn't even read by those who voted on it. I'll ask Yglesias to try to get VA benefits or social security benefits and see if he still thinks that federal government could streamline the process better than the states.

He bemoans the fact that state and local government gets bogged down in the minutiae of zoning but they have a much clearer picture of what their residents want. To pass this on to the federal government would be madness. Suppose a suburban town is approached by Home Depot to build a new store.Imagine the federal government getting involved in the process. Towns would lose their identity and become beholden to the federal government and lobbyists. In other words, the system would be corrupted well more than it is currently.

Rather than the small scale of the units leading to better policy via competition, what seems to me to happen is that the lack of public attention paid to policymaking at the state, county, and municipal level leads to much more pure interest-group capture than you see on the federal level. Not that interest groups don’t have a lot of clout in federal politics. But the relatively competitive nature of elections and the relatively bright spotlight shown on national politics puts a check on these things. At the state level, bad policy really runs amok. So I wind up being skeptical that you could really improve much of anything even in those areas when I think the libertarian perspective is broadly correct by devolving more authority downward.

Of course the interest groups play a huge part in local deliberations of policy. That's the point; they are issues that affect the everyday lives of normal Americans. On issues of local concern, those interest groups don't include only businesses and local leaders but the citizens as well. I suppose that Yglesias hasn't been to too many town hall meetings where public policy is argued in real time among citizens and their elected officials. The US Congress and Senate never have to answer to their constituents except when they are running again. In between, their interaction generally is limited to a staffer reading an e-mail and not even telling the elected official what his constituents want or think. We saw this play shamefully with Sen. Specter voting for the stimulus when the majority or Pennsylvania residents opposed it.

States and municipalities should have more rights, not less. Yglesias and his ideological brethren would much rather have all power focused on DC where, regardless of who holds power--is slanted heavily to the left. Entitlements are the mother's milk of the Capitol and to take the power from the local yokels and put it into the hands of the DC elite is a dream they've been chasing for decades. The fact that it would actually reduce freedom and choice in our nation seems to be lost on our federal officials and it seems to be lost on Yglesias as well.