> and still lingers behind some smaller countries in QoL.
I hear this all the time and it’s a silly comparison. Some small homogenous country in Western Europe with citizens who subscribe to an empowering philosophy and share the same culture will obviously have a higher QoL.
It’s way easier to get the ship where you want it to go when most everyone is actually rowing and agrees on the direction.
That supports my argument though. A highly populated country is much more likely to have citizens with clashing philosophies or cultures. Subdividing it to smaller states results in a state having less citizen "worth" but more efficient application of that worth overall.
I've always been a fan of state over federal, but I don't think a lot of our states are "rich" enough to balance out the others. I'd imagine an optimal balance would be several of the lower population states be merged together based on culture until we have ~10 states with the wealth of Germany or some such, but then dumping a lot of the federal powers to before Wickard v. Filburn. The thing is that the impotence seems to kick in on the "super-large" continent sized countries, but that doesn't mean there isn't a minimum size too, of which a Vermont or Kentucky doesn't really meet compared to a Texas or California.
It should also be noted these changes would only practically be achieved with a time machine, because the social/economic/military cost of changing anything involving the foundation of the US nowadays would be apocalyptic
I hear this all the time and it’s a silly comparison. Some small homogenous country in Western Europe with citizens who subscribe to an empowering philosophy and share the same culture will obviously have a higher QoL.
It’s way easier to get the ship where you want it to go when most everyone is actually rowing and agrees on the direction.