We Need States

If there were no states, we'd have to change the name of the country. I suggest "The Blobby Thing Under Canada".The flag would need revision too. Apart from that, I see no problems. Except ... well, will you tell the Texans, or should I?

Abolishing beta testing doesn't ensure that your final release is of final-release quality. It ensures the opposite.If we abolish legislative experimentation by the states, that doesn't mean that all the national legislation would be tried and tested. It would mean that it was untried and untested. It would be the "random process of legislative experiment" that you so decry when the states do it. It would be more random and experimental then it would be without looking to precedents set by individual states, because of being made with less data.How, for example, would it be less "random and experimental" for the Blobby Thing Under Canada to legalize marijuana then for the state of Colorado to do so? It wouldn't. It would just be an experiment on more people with less data.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Would you like to expand this argument? Is there any such thing as an issue whose natural scope is the borders of the USA?

But if you put it that way, it's actually good that there's no "natural scope".It is good that because of the artificial boundaries of a state (let's say Texas) the interests of an aeronautics engineer should be tied to the interests of a cattle rancher, and vice versa. It would be harder if they were both citizens of the Blobbly Thing Under Canada.It is good that people with potentially conflicting interests should be stuck together and work out their differences.I don't see ... I mean, in your new version, how would it all work, and what would Senators be for? Could I become the Senator For Being Able To Program Computers Really Well And Also Being Better Than You At Math?I don't say that the present solution is perfect. But it does bind together people of different interests together. You think that that's a bad thing; I think that it's good.

But I'm not just talking about their interest actually being tied together, I'm talking about them feeling that they are tied together. In such a case, the more local and specific the association is, the better. In principle, I love all humanity, but this is a weak feeling that is difficult to do. I love the USA better, and am fonder still of the great state of Nevada. My family is still more important to me --- my conservative Catholic brother-in-law means more to me than all the other conservative Catholics in the BTUC put together. Now, you may say that it is arbitrary and illogical for me to care more about him than some random guy in China, to which I will reply that human beings are arbitrary and illogical. The way to get people with disparate opinions and interests to care about one another is to make them identify as being part of a group, and the smaller the group is, the better it works. (See, for example, the outpouring of emotion over Buzsaw's death. None of us would have cared a damn if the first thing we knew about it was reading his obituary: we care because he was one of us.) Uniting people on a state level and saying: "You're all Texans" exploits this fact about people.So my answer to this ... ... is BECAUSE WE CAN. Local patriotism is a thing. The software engineer in Austin does feel more of a connection to cattle ranchers in Texas than he does to cattle-ranchers elsewhere. The abolition of states would not make him feel a universal love towards all ranchers, it would make him more indifferent to their condition.This is just a fact about how people work. You may condemn it as irrational, but you'd have a harder job arguing that it isn't true.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, I guess it's just something you don't feel. But a lot of people do. I know that I do. I am proud to live in the Battle Born State, defined, as you would point out, by arbitrary lines drawn on a map. I am irrationally proud of this, even though my huge enormous brain tells me that I personally did not take part in the Civil War. (If you don't know why Nevada is called the "Battle-Born State", look it up.)But I am irrationally proud of this. Many people are irrationally proud of their states. If you don't feel that way, then I guess you don't feel that way.---And I guess this brings me on to the one crucial point that would wreck your scheme of abolishing the states, which is that a huge overwhelming majority of people would be against it happening. We like having states. We just enjoy it. It is good in itself, without any practical considerations being figured in. You point out that the existence of state legislatures costs us money. Well, so do libraries. I feel that it is a price well paid, because we want states and libraries to exist. Ah, well, obviously that's because Maryland is crap. Of course you guys couldn't feel any local patriotism living in a shithole like Maryland populated by a bunch of idiots like Marylanders ...... if that sentence, which was completely insincere, made you even a tiny bit annoyed, then you feel a little bit like I do. You know perfectly well that it's Nevadan. You may not know that if you pronounce the first "a" in "Nevada" long rather than short we want to kick you in the groin. This is what I'm talking about. Human beings are in fact irrational and inconsistent. Let us therefore organize our system of government to exploit that fact rather than to deny it.

Um ... but if you have different states with different policies, you do have controls. Maine does one thing, New Hampshire does another. It's if we have a single national policy that we have an experiment without controls. Perhaps you could expand on this. Y'know, by typing some more words which might hypothetically justify it? Hmm, let's think. The abolition of slavery. Votes for women. Freedom of religion. Old age pensions. If you want me to go on, this could take a while, so let's just sum it up by saying "every good idea that anyone's ever had".

What do you think "control" means? Not so much. Hence my request for some sort of justification of your point. No? What does "promotion" look like? Here we have things which were tried in one state or some states before being adopted federally. What makes a thing a "promotion" or not?

No I'm not. Here's a clue that I'm not: I never said that Federalism was an orderly process of promoting the results of state experimentation to Federal law.