Winehole23
07-29-2014, 11:12 AM
A ballot initiative that would support breaking California into six smaller and more coherent states (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/07/15/331694432/plan-to-make-6-states-out-of-california-may-head-to-ballot) is being backed by Timothy Draper, a tech investor. It’s a great idea. But why stop with California? Breaking up all of the too-large states would increase both the accountability and efficiency of the U.S. government.
America’s state governments are too big to be democratic and too small to be efficient. Given an adequate tax base, public services like public schools and hospitals, utilities and first responders are best carried out by cities and counties. Most infrastructure is either local or regional or national. Civil rights, including workers’ rights, should be handled at the federal level, to eliminate local pockets of tyranny and exploitation. Social insurance systems are most efficient and equitable when they are purely national, like Social Security and Medicare, and inefficient and inequitable when they are clumsily divided among the federal government and the states, like unemployment insurance, Medicaid and Obamacare.
So what are state governments particularly good at? Nothing, really. They interfere in local government, cripple the federal government, shake down lobbyists and waste taxpayer money.
Few if any state borders correspond to the boundaries of actual social communities with a sense of shared identity. A look at county-level voting maps shows that, in terms of politics, rural Americans everywhere generally have more in common with their fellow hinterlanders than with their urban fellow citizens in their own states — and vice versa. Arbitrary state boundaries merely insure that state legislatures will be the scenes of endless battles between country mice and city mice, resulting in stalemates that don’t serve the interests or reflect the values of either mouse species.
Not only is the state level of government a mostly useless layer of politics and bureaucracy between the city or county and the federal government, it’s also more dominated than local government by the well-financed and the well-organized. Nearly a century ago John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas, FDR’s first vice-president, proposed that Texas be divided into multiple states because of the high cost of statewide campaigns. Expensive statewide campaigns tend to result in a state political system dominated by rich donors, corporations and banks, or powerful lobbies like public sector unions.
Fortunately, the U.S. Constitution provides the answer. Let’s turn to Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
No state has been formed from part of another state since West Virginia broke off from Virginia during the Civil War — but not for want of constitutional authority. The constitution authorizes states to divide into smaller states or fuse into larger states, with the permission of both the state legislatures and Congress.
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/28/break_up_the_states_the_case_for_the_united_statel ets_of_america/
America’s state governments are too big to be democratic and too small to be efficient. Given an adequate tax base, public services like public schools and hospitals, utilities and first responders are best carried out by cities and counties. Most infrastructure is either local or regional or national. Civil rights, including workers’ rights, should be handled at the federal level, to eliminate local pockets of tyranny and exploitation. Social insurance systems are most efficient and equitable when they are purely national, like Social Security and Medicare, and inefficient and inequitable when they are clumsily divided among the federal government and the states, like unemployment insurance, Medicaid and Obamacare.
So what are state governments particularly good at? Nothing, really. They interfere in local government, cripple the federal government, shake down lobbyists and waste taxpayer money.
Few if any state borders correspond to the boundaries of actual social communities with a sense of shared identity. A look at county-level voting maps shows that, in terms of politics, rural Americans everywhere generally have more in common with their fellow hinterlanders than with their urban fellow citizens in their own states — and vice versa. Arbitrary state boundaries merely insure that state legislatures will be the scenes of endless battles between country mice and city mice, resulting in stalemates that don’t serve the interests or reflect the values of either mouse species.
Not only is the state level of government a mostly useless layer of politics and bureaucracy between the city or county and the federal government, it’s also more dominated than local government by the well-financed and the well-organized. Nearly a century ago John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas, FDR’s first vice-president, proposed that Texas be divided into multiple states because of the high cost of statewide campaigns. Expensive statewide campaigns tend to result in a state political system dominated by rich donors, corporations and banks, or powerful lobbies like public sector unions.
Fortunately, the U.S. Constitution provides the answer. Let’s turn to Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
No state has been formed from part of another state since West Virginia broke off from Virginia during the Civil War — but not for want of constitutional authority. The constitution authorizes states to divide into smaller states or fuse into larger states, with the permission of both the state legislatures and Congress.
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/28/break_up_the_states_the_case_for_the_united_statel ets_of_america/