Superiority of Federalism

...Since August 1968 he has been Professor of Economics and Public Choice at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University...

...Further, it must be said that recent mathematical investigations seem to indicate that this is basically a rather small factor...

...If the central government decides to assist fatherless families and the result is increased desertion, a withering of family ljfe and unimagined welfare costs, the whole nation will be inflicted with one bureaucracy's shortsightedness...

...A somewhat more recent argument for federalism, one which Jeremy Bentham was not impressed by, is that it permits individuals to exercise better control over their governments...

...The Post Office has been in need of liberation for years, yet bureaucracy would not loose its hold...

...But not only the Supreme Court has been in the business of preventing experimentation...

...Others doubted federalism practicable in a complex post-industrial state...

...Below Professor Gordon Tullock of the Center for Study of Public Choice at Virginia Polytechnic Institute cogently essays the benefits of a renewed federalism...

...Thus my choice of where I live or where I establish a business is determined partly by market considerations and partly by my consideration of the political situations in various places...

...Many college students were especially chary of a New Federalism, for political science departments across the country have for years attitudinized their students to disdain decentralization...

...There is an inverse correlation between the frequency with which any type of crime is perpetrated and the length and likelihood of prison sentence on that particular type of crime...

...These and similar considerations have impressed us with the validity of federalism...

...Even the military is fraught with inefficiency...

...Today, the conventional wisdom is in an alembic...

...Local government permits individuals to "vote with their feet...

...These cantons themselves are broken down into smaller units-the communes - which have a great deal of government authority...

...Granted all of these advantages for local government, one might inquire why the United States does not immediately disintegrate its central government and become fifty (or indeed eighty thousand) nation-states...

...Clearly this argument would apply with even greater force to the some eighty thousand local governments than to the fifty states...

...Some, of course, would be disastrous, but others would certainly be successful...

...Still, it is clear that there is some gain to be made here, even if it is...

...If we agree, however, that diverse institutions to fit diverse tastes are more efficient than cramming everyone into the same mold and that we need experimentation in order to make progress in government, then the federal system is clearly superior to a centralized government...

...The contrary or Hobbesian approach looks to efficiency in terms of neatness and superficial appearance, not in terms of what people actually want...

...The importance of this phenomenon is only now beginning to be fully recognized...

...Tullock is a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association...

...Further, the crime rates differ from state to state...

...And, it is a lot easier, to leave George Wallace's Alabama and take up citizenship in Ronald Reagan's California than to imigrate to Switzerland...

...And it can inflate the currency...

...It is somewhat obscured by the national media which give much more attention to the national scene than to local matters...

...The net effect is that we will find our government less efficient than it was before...

...Then Peter Drucker, in THE AGE OF DISCONTINUITY, arrestingly catalogued the limitations of centralized government...

...This competition, needless to say, is available only in the federal system in which power is decentralized...

...Both theoretically and in practice big government has become a mess...

...In both cases, we as customers gain from this competition...

...Under a federal form of government it is possible to experiment with new techniques without much cost...

...Preventing experimentation thus protected the prejudices of the Supreme Court from confrontation with data from the real world...

...In recent times, this particular argument has been strengthened by the development of modern statistical techniques...

...Once again this should greatly reduce the ability of the states either to serve as scientific laboratories for different policies or to provide specialized combinations of taxes and services for people whose tastes are not exactly those of the national norm...

...Many federal government programs sharply restrict the degree to which states can choose programs different from those of their fellow states...

...Not only have we recently centralized much power in the central government, but we have also put great restrictions on the ability of local governments to experiment with new techniques...

...Of every dollar appropriated for the poor, only a few cents ever reaches its destination...

...In many cases, different state governments or different local governments follow policies which make it possible to statistically test the efficiency of different policies...

...Only a governmental unit covering the entire basin could carry out this kind of control...

...If you are one of seventy million voters voting in a national election, you have less influence per se on the outcome than you have as one of, say, one and one-half million voters in a state election or ten thousand voters in a local election...

...The political scientist, Robert Dahl, speaking some years ago at a meeting of the American Political Science Association expressed an incipient dissatisfaction with centralization...

...Massachusetts can watch and, if it works, adopt the same procedure...

...You could, therefore, anticipate that government policies would be more closely adjusted to your preferences in local government agencies than in national government agencies...

...This same phenomenon on a larger scale occurs between states...

...not a massive one...

...In some ways, this would be an attractive solution and Scandinavia is an illustration of the advantages of having small national units...

...But, what if there were fifty bureaucracies experimenting with solutions to the problems of government...

...Nevertheless, although we can dream of the prospects, it is clear that transferring all government activities to local government would not be wise...

...The third and most recently discovered advantage of federalism waited upon the widespread use of the automobile before it became of major importance...

...The Welfare machine is the oddest and most wasteful contraption of all time...

...Only in those cases where the population of a state (like Utah with the Mormons) or local government is quite different from the population of the nation as a whole, do you get major differences caused by differences in taste...

...We are extremely fortunate to have a federal system of government, and the centralization of power in the national government which has been such an important trend in recent history is retrograde...

...To give but one obvious example, the Mississippi River requires uniform management if it is to be kept in a reasonably navigable state, prevented from having more than a minimum of floods, and kept reasonably clean...

...I can select the suburb around a major city which best provides a combination of public services and taxes...

...This, in a way, is a reaction to the previous situation...

...If it does not work in Alabama, Massachusetts has lost nothing...

...Perhaps the oldest scientific argument for a federal form of government is the one that John Quincy Adams used when he was ambassador to England to convert that compulsive centralist, Jeremy Bentham...

...As Drucker says all big government has shown in the past thirty or forty years is that, "It can wage war...

...As far as we can see, this theoretical proposition is true...

...Other things it can promise, but only rarely accomplish...

...Similarly, defense is best done by a large governmental unit, and there are many other activities which require central control...

...Still others felt federalism would lead to birth defects if injected into the drinking water...

...The statistical problem is difficult but has been solved, and statistical analyses based on these data indicate quite clearly that imprisonment does serve as a deterrent to crime...

...These changes are sensible from the standpoint of those people who feel that uniformity is, in itself, desirable, or those who (eel that the federal government program is "eternally right...

...Presumably, one of the reasons for this was a feeling that it might turn out that a voting procedure which was distasteful to the Supreme Court was actually more efficient...

...Switzerland, surely the best governed country in the world, is not only very small in itself, but is a federal state with the individual cantons having considerably more power than the American states - even though they are frequently smaller than our countries...

...We should agree, however, that efficiency will be highest if, in those areas in which it is possible, government is decentralized down to state control or, better yet, local control...

...A number of southern states, for example, have established domestic policies which are particularly suitable for industrial development and have, therefore, obtained very rapid rates of growth...

...The civil servants and elected representatives who run many small cities which have the misfortune to be located close to competing small cities live harried and worried lives, just like small businessmen in a competitive market...

...The Supreme Court, for example, has made it impossible for local governments to experiment with different voting procedures...

...As Adams pointed out, if Alabama has an idea for a new way of dealing with burglary, it can implement it...

...Practically speaking, the basic problem with governmental enterprises like Welfare and the Post Office is that unless you can control the habits of the poor and the volume of mail, you have to adapt your programs to changing situations-governmental bureaucracy simply does not allow for such innovation...

...As a result, voters in state and local elections frequently find it very hard to get information about the behavior of their government...

...Generally speaking, once again the commune has more authority than does American local government...

...For example, it is almost orthodox in criminology that punishment does not deter crime...

...Recent mathematical work, in fact, seems to indicate that if you have a number of government units operating close enough together so that the citizens can readily move from one to another, the form of government in those units becomes relatively unimportant...

...As it happens, however, different states impose different amounts of punishment upon different crimes...

...Some dismissed it as mere political fustian...

...In the years immediately after the Civil War, most southern states - as a result of Reconstruction - had local policies which were averse to economic development and hence fell behind the rest of the nation...