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November 07, 2008
Observations : A Hidden Virtue of States Rights
A while back I had an interesting conversation with a friend and co-worker who was complaining about how every state in the United States had different laws covering a wide variety of subjects (rules of the road, taxes, voting, etc.). I started off giving the usual justifications (history, the fact that the United States is built on the assumption that the federal government has no authority beyond what we give it, etc.); but eventually came upon an interesting virtue of the system that I had never heard anyone propose – that the “States Rights” rule actually gives the federal government a diverse laboratory for testing government policies. By letting individual states try different solutions to problem like health care, tax policy, welfare, education, etc. the federal government can see the effect of various policies before trying them at the national level.
Want to know the effect of higher taxes? Look at the states that have higher taxes. Want to know how well certain solutions for health care work? Take a look at the states that are using them. Alternatively, want to know how to encourage innovation? Take a look at the policies in the states where a lot of innovation is taking place.
What’s interesting about this is that you can build a whole party platform around the idea. Have a party that is very supportive of trying new policies in individual states; but discourages other states from adopting them until they have been proven to work in at least one state. Then say that they will only adopt at the federal level those policies which have already been proven to work in a diverse set of states.
Now this doesn’t work for those things which only the federal government can do – basic monetary policy, military policy, etc.; but for many other areas of government this can be a quite useful way to both limit the federal government and to make sure what it does do works.
Posted by Steven at November 7, 2008 05:00 AM
