Or, we could pay attention to the 10th Ammendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Instead of randomly applying variations of a law, don't federalize it. Let the states pass their own variations, and see how that works out. Sure there are other variables at play, but they mostly revolve around how suitable the law is for the people it applies to, and that's a legitimate reason for the law to vary and part of the purpose of the 10th Ammendment: local self-governance.
I believe most federal laws should be repealed and replaced with guidelines for the states to follow when designing their own laws. These would be "Best Practices" for governments. Most of the world treated the US Constituion this way as they wrote their own constitutions, and I think that worked pretty well. It should work for State governments too.
That won't work. Somehow we've gotten into Lord of the Rings Mode -- "one ring to rule them all"
We have effectively turned a distributed system into a monolithic piece of spaghetti. And now folks are suggesting that what we need -- wait for it -- is more testing.
We're effectively having all the same conversations large organizations have when creating billion-dollar POS centralized software development systems. Should we focus on requirements (listen to the voters). Should we be more clear on the impact of the change (environmental, financial, etc)? Maybe we just need some super-smart people put in the right spots. That'll fix it.
Many times I wonder: are people doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again just in slightly different settings? (sigh)
"are people doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again"
This is a common view in mainland China. Particularly, the last few years, in regards to the U.S.: "They've had a good 200-250 year run, now this arc/dynasty is coming to its end and another arc will replace it. Hopefully the turmoil while bootstrapping the next won't be too painful." 200-300 years is the generally accepted time of a Chinese dynasty. As near I as can tell, this is due to people "forgetting" their history. Written history may not be enough. You need to be able to feel it similar to those that put their lives on the line to create it.
Using the states to perform the experiments is useful, and we've been doing that for hundreds of years, but it's besides the point of the article.
The whole point is to produce sets of people that are drawn from an identical distribution where the only difference is whether the law applies to them or not. That way any changes that result can be confidently attributed to the law itself.
Right now, when we see differences between California and Iowa, there are a million other factors that may be causing different outcomes than a single law.
Random testing, particular in cases like drug trials where the technique started, also relies on neither the testor nor testee knowing who is being tested. That can't be the case for laws. So, if someone behaves differently, is it because of the law that applies to them, because of the law that applies to others but not them, or because they're being watched to see how they behave?
You know, we used to have laws like this: segregation laws. The people who weren't subject to the laws became abusive to the others, and the people who were subject to the laws rebelled against them. The situation was very unjust.
Segregation laws are by nature nonrandom. It doesn't seem very apt of an analogy to me. You're right about the fact that people might react differently when they know they are being singled out, though.
My point in bringing up segregation wasn't about the selection process, but the outcome. I believe that if two groups of people are given different variants of a law to live by, one of those groups is going to discover a way to use the difference in the laws to gain an economic, social, or political advantage over the other group. As soon as that happens, you've got state-mandated discrimination, and we already know how that turns out.
Not necessarily always the case. Anyway, the author isn't suggesting that we do this in all areas of society. Just the ones that fit the experimental structure pretty well. Using the articles examples of education and crime -- seems pretty difficult to imagine criminals gaining advantages over each other b/c they had different rehab experiences.
Also, "[using] the difference in the laws to gain an ... advantage" does not equal state mandated discrimination. It's more of a state-accepted, or allowed, discrimination. State mandated discrimination is something a little more explicit, like when Zimbabwe's President Mugabe enacted laws that took land from one racial group and bequeathed it to another.
There are already ways in which people are given different variants of a law to live by, perhaps due to selective enforcement and because people with wealth and power are given a lot more slack than nobodys. Compared to that, these sorts of experiments, limited in both scope and deployment, seem quite reasonable.
The article actually explicitly discusses your first point: that people can be affected by the experiment. It's called Hawthorne's Law, and the author discusses what types of laws might be good / bad to perform these tests on.
Your second paragraph isn't particularly applicable, because what you're describing doesn't meet the requirements to be considered a double blind randomized trial, modeling after drug testing policies.
Yes. Independent of your position on the proper distribution of power between the state and federal government, having states experiment is little better than doing observational studies. There is a reason randomized experiments are the gold standard.
It is tough to compare California to Missouri or any other pair of random states.
Lets lower taxes in Missouri on gains from startup companies. Would silicon valley suddenly move to Missouri? Probably not. Does that mean it is a bad idea for the US economy as a whole to lower taxes on startups and encourage entrepreneurship? Absolutely not.
Random testing works because you have hundreds or a thousand people with a relatively similar background and then you break them into groups and try different things. The states are so variable to begin with that you can't find two that are all that similar.
How about this: let's let the states decide how much to tax gains from startup companies. Then we could see if the states that don't tax startups have a boom in startup companies and economic growth, while states that tax startups don't.
Hey, we already do this: some states have corporate income tax, and some don't, and guess which states have more corporations registered?
If you break people into groups and say that group A won't have to pay taxes on startup company gains but group B does, then group A gets a significant economic advantage over group B which wouldn't exist if you weren't doing the test. You're discriminating against group B and if the test goes on long enough to produce results, you've probably given group A a permanent unjust advantage.
Well I lived in Delaware for 4 years, and sure a lot of companies are on paper headquartered there, but those companies are not actually there. Basically Delaware's economy is DuPont, Gore, and a bunch of financial companies. But my startup is "based" in Delaware even though not one of us still lives there. So that argument is really irrelevant.
I don't think breaking people into groups is a good idea either. I just think extrapolating from states to national policy might be a bad idea. I'm against higher taxes, but if you look at states with high taxes vs low taxes, the logical conclusion would be higher taxes. Why? Because NY, CT, CA, NJ, and MA have really high taxes but also really strong economies. Manhattan has high income, sales, and property tax, along with super high tolls and everything else, and it is one of the richest places in the country.
You can't recreate that in the middle of a tax haven even if you wanted to. At some point you make enough money that you'd rather live in downtown Manhattan and pay an extra 5% of your income in taxes than give up what you like about living in Manhattan to save 5%.
One concern is if neighboring states differed too much there would be incentive to exploit the system. We already see issues with purchasing cigarettes in low tax states and smuggling and selling them in higher tax states. States would effectively be have to have the same system its most permissive neighbor does since geography makes it so easy for illicit enterprisers to smuggle in those benefits.
Possible solutions are to coordinate neighboring state activities or to increase enforcement but each of those has its own set of problems.
You have two options: try to change your state's policies, or move to another state. Both are easier when you're dealing with a more local government than the Federal government.
If the Fed mandated the approach the state takes, then there is much less ability to push back. That's really unfair to the citizens of the state.
Funny thing about the 10th Amendment: only reason it made it into the Constitution was because the Founding Fathers made sure to reserve most powers to the Federal government in Articles I-III.
America has had a limited-power central government. The first time, it was called the Confederation, and it failed within 5-6 years. The second time, it was called the Confederacy, and it failed just as quickly. Europe's experiment with a weak centralized government hasn't worked out that well either.
The US Constitution deliberately created a strong federal government because the Founders had lived through a weak federal government and had no desire to go through that ever again.
As for that bit about guidelines: it would never work. States actively resist guidelines and best practices. Its one of the reasons that the federal government issues so many mandates to the States as a condition of receiving federal funding.
Powers are not "reserved" to the federal government. They are granted. This is an important distinction because the federal government does not innately have any powers so it does not make sense to say that some power is reserved to it in this context. It is the same way with states, but since the states ceded some of their powers (which had previously been granted to them by the people, who are considered to be the ultimate source of the powers by the predominant philosophy of the founders) to the federal government it makes sense to say that the states reserved some of their powers.
Also, the mandates you speak of should be looked at for what they are: loopholes. The federal government was not granted the power to explicitly set (for example) the legal age of alcohol consumption, so it used the loophole to effectively give itself that power. So the guidelines should never work. When the federal government tells the states to follow guidelines, they should be allowed to say "shove it" without being punished because the federal government was never given the power to set those guidelines in the first place.
I don't think you understand how mandates work. If the federal government has the direct power to issue a mandate in the context, it does so, states' be damned.
If the federal government does not have the direct power to issue laws in the context, it uses the power of the purpose to convince states to play along as a condition of receiving federal funds. The states can receive without punishment, they simply can't receive the contingent federal funds. That happens a lot in practice.
By the way: the legal age of consumption is imposed on the states through this latter method. The federal government, as you point out, doesn't actually have the right to impose a legal age of booze on wholly-intrastate lanes of commerce. So, it makes receiving federal funds for roadway/transit construction and maintenance contingent on setting a legal age equal to or higher than the federal "mandate".
I know how mandates work. I was just coming up short for a better word. You haven't really said anything I didn't already know, (possibly because you didn't think I understood the point, which is fine. I didn't do a good job saying what I meant), but I will respond to one statement.
"The states can receive (refuse?) without punishment, they simply can't receive the contingent federal funds."
This isn't really true, in my opinion. They really are punishing the states. The money they are willing to give out in exchange for cooperation does not originate with the federal government, it originates with the people of the states. By taxing the people, they are depriving the states of revenue. By not giving it back because they are not cooperating, they really are punishing them.
Article I is mostly about how the government is run, except for sections 8-10. Section 8 is powers of congress, which in summary are:
- Manage the economy
- Deal with foreign nations
- Deliver the mail
- Run a patent/copyright system
- Manage the military (standing navy, but the army is supposed to be justified every two years)
- Govern Washington DC
Section 9 puts limits and boundaries on the powers of congress.
Section 10 says that the states can't do the things Congress is responsible for.
Article II is about the president. The only real power he has is to be commander in chief of the military and to negotiate treaties. There's no new power here; the president is just in charge of a couple of items from Section 8.
Article III sets up the supreme court. No particular powers are granted here, just some definition of the responsibilities of the highest court.
There is nothing in here about "most" powers being granted (not reserved) to the Federal government. Most of the power was still with the states, who were responsible for their own internal governance and who influenced the Federal government through their Senators. The earlier federal governments were weaker than the one set up by the Constitution, but the Constitution did not establish a strong central government. The states were still largely independent, self-sufficient, and self-governing, and only gave up rights related to how they interacted with each other, other nations, and the scope of their military's.
I wouldn't say that States actively resist guidelines and best practices; I'd say they resist unfunded mandates. And the real point is that they're supposed to be able to resist. They're supposed to be self-governed and independent, and if the Federal government tries to tell the States to do something that is outside of the Fed's powers to dictate, the States should resist unless it happens to be a really good idea.
you are basing this on your public school education in a democratic state. I am sick of democracy taking credit for the gains in the human condition due to free trade.
the best form of peaceful organization of humans in order to create wealth is the joint stock corporation. no other innovation in economic interaction can even touch it when it comes to boosting the human race out of subsistence living. the venetian republic which ran on roughly this model flourished through trade for 1000 years. how many other civilizations have lasted that long? and without enslaving their neighbors?
populism has ever been the ally of dictators, because dictators know exactly how easy it is to sway the opinions of the masses with propaganda. this is one of the few points I am in agreement with Chompsky about (manufacturing consent). you can trace this through hitler and napolean all the way back through the ages to caesar.
you see a non-democratic form of government and think "autocracy" because you have been programmed to. there is a huge space of possible governments, and technology is enabling more of them to be possible. democracy is shit, it is only efficient in value-homogeneous small populations.
you can downvote away but google books means there is no more excuse for being ignorant about the shitty democratic (not political label) historical narrative of good triumphing over evil.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Instead of randomly applying variations of a law, don't federalize it. Let the states pass their own variations, and see how that works out. Sure there are other variables at play, but they mostly revolve around how suitable the law is for the people it applies to, and that's a legitimate reason for the law to vary and part of the purpose of the 10th Ammendment: local self-governance.
I believe most federal laws should be repealed and replaced with guidelines for the states to follow when designing their own laws. These would be "Best Practices" for governments. Most of the world treated the US Constituion this way as they wrote their own constitutions, and I think that worked pretty well. It should work for State governments too.