This is like the opposite of central planning. It appears to be proposing that we should manage political/economic regions as they actually exist, along naturally occurring boundaries, rather than imposing arbitrary boundaries (like state borders) and managing that way.
> decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies.
Wow, no thanks. There are already plenty of differences from one state to another. Having to deal with a radically different regulatory/trade environment from one state to the next is not helpful to business.
I think people neglect how much centralized regulations and processes can reduce cognitive load. Perhaps there's increase cost to the individual regulation, but the reduction in cognitive load and wasted time likely offsets that cost substantially in many cases.
For those regulations where it doesn't we should reexamine and figure out a better way if possible, but I think people should better appreciate what having good government allows you to stop thinking about and start focusing on the things that matter.
Also, those regulations provide freer markets - free from the distortions of corruption and abuse. They provide safer markets which attract more investors, because they feel they won't get cheated.
> Having to deal with a radically different regulatory/trade environment from one state to the next is not helpful to business.
Of all the websites on the internet to argue this... Are you forgetting that YC made(/makes?) their applicants move to San Francisco? Again, SF didn't randomly become a tech hub because of some will or want, they just so happened to have attractive culture and conducive laws for startups at the right time.
Are you sure that you want to claim that these differences are categorically not helpful for business?
(Aside: this is the very reason that federally mandated net neutrality is a bad idea. Alaska has less than 750k inhabitants, 300k of which live in Anchorage. Alaska is 16.13% of this country by land mass. Are you really comfortable with denying very poor and very remote communities their right to enter into a contract for ad-injected or domain-whitelisted internet at a lower price because you can't stand the thought of your Netflix being throttled?)
> decentralize power back to the states and have groups of states work out arrangements among themselves to enhance their shared cross-border economies.
Wow, no thanks. There are already plenty of differences from one state to another. Having to deal with a radically different regulatory/trade environment from one state to the next is not helpful to business.