For over 200 years, the U.S. has divided the labor of governing three ways: national, state and local. But, many countries get by with two levels of government--national and local. Maybe we could save some money by getting rid of the middle men.
Why have states?
In the time of our forefathers (white Whigs with white wigs) it made a lot of sense to cobble together a country out of the pieces lying around after the war. After all, Virginia as a going concern had been around for a couple hundred years. The thirteen states already had functioning governments. George Washington, for example, served a number of years in the Virginia legislature before (reluctantly, he said) taking on the roles of rebel captain and first head honcho.
Back in the day a message could only travel about as fast as someone could carry it in their pocket. A sailing ship on a particularly windy day might get something from Boston to New York in a couple of days. An urgent message for help might make its way on horseback from Fort Pitt to civilization in less than a week. A politician would take a lot longer.
If you were a businessman, you would hardly want to make a lengthy trip from, say, the tidewater in Virginia to New York to get your Congressman to vote you more tobacco subsidies. So, it's easy to see why the states got to keep their governments while slaves cleared the swamps of what is now D.C.
State government made some sense until the end of the 20th century. The Web put an end to that. With a web conference, you don't really need to go visit Washington in person. And, certainly, lobbying has reached a point where you have a proxy there all the time. (That is if your business is sufficiently large.)
But isn't it time to re-examine the premise? What have the states done for me recently? All they've done is cause trouble. They gave us chads in Florida and Arnold in California. Stage government is the primary reason we have the Electoral College. And many of its institutions (the "National Guard" comes to mind) are nothing but thinly disguised federal institutions. If there were any doubt, then look where the "militia" is serving. It ain't defending Charleston, West Virginia.
(Let me digress for a moment. The National Guard is almost wholly funded and controlled by the U.S. government. It's little more than pork for politicians, giving them a way to leverage state money to get federal dollars. In the late eighteenth century, the state militias actually functioned as their own little armies. If some well organized country [like Canada] invaded us, it was the state militia that was going to respond while Congress debated whether to fund an army and try to hire soldiers.)
So, what do we do with our states these days? They seem to exist primarily to fund two things:
- Schools
- Roads
Part of the problem is that we really don't need them for either purpose. We've all but done away with the benefit of having states do either task. In large measure, we don't even trust them any more.
Take roads. The federal government has decided all the rules of the roads. If you wanted to do something sensible, like give soldiers under 21 the right to drink alcohol (so that they would lose their inhibitions about re-upping for the army), you can't do it because the federal government will take away all your road funds.
With schools, we now make up the tests in D.C. If a state wanted to innovate in the field of education they'd have to set up a pilot program in some other country to try it out. They would have to outsource the job. It's doubtful they could find anyone in India or China to take this on at a reasonable price, so they would probably have to shop around in the fourth world.
In short, we don't trust the states with roads or schools any more. They might screw them up, so we have to set standards at the national level and use blackmail (the threat of withholding federal funds) to get the states to comply.
In a way, this makes a lot of sense. Do you really want roads to be different in Maine and Hawaii? Do you really want to adapt your driving behavior whenever you go over the Jersey state line? Do you really want a child in Alabama or Montana to have a worse (or better) chance to succeed than one in Pennsylvania or New Mexico? Probably not.
But this has created a marketing problem. How do the states differentiate their products from those of the local or the national governments? Increasingly, they can't.
When news traveled as fast as a beating hoof the states could get away with duplicating, in large measure, the functions of the federal government (and each other). But now we can pick up the phone and call our representative or senator. We can fax them, e-mail them, telegraph them and, in fact, mail a letter to them faster than anyone in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America could communicate with their state representative.
We don't have any clout when we call them, but that's another matter. What matters is that we can bypass the state and go direct to the big guys. So, why keep states around?
My prediction is that by the end of the decade there will be a serious attempt to get rid of state governments and replace them with federal mandates. And I think that within fifty years they will all be gone.
There is really only one hope for the states. They need to fight back, before it's too late, by curbing the power of the federal government. They can do that by getting together with two thirds of the other states and proposing a Constitutional convention. At that convention, they need to trim the sales on the ship of state. They need to carve off a little market of their own.
For example, they could propose that any money collected by the Treasury not spent on the military be spent on projects for the states in strict proportion to their populations and prohibit withholding for any reason such funds. They could, for example, end unfunded mandates by requiring that all expenses incurred by federal laws be billable back to the U.S.
They might also insist that the federal government no longer be able to usurp their right to grant their citizens additional protections, both civil rights and marketplace rights, beyond what federal law provides.
And they should insist that all international treaties protect their rights to define what will be sold in their territories. As it stands now, we are in danger of having countries with low standards define what is acceptable in California. And Ohio. And Florida. And New York. (You get the picture.)
But maybe states no longer serve. I hope not. I don't think most of my e-mail messages ever reach Diane Feinstein.