Oh, I agree completely that some on the left make plenty of bad statements of their own and are altogether too ready to blame markets for various things. I'm sort of a centrist and believe that many things need to be worked out by trial and error. This means that people basically need to be free to try, but that, in some cases, errors also need to be dealt with, and sometimes, the government is the most efficient way to deal with them. Often, local governments are preferable to farther away/bigger ones, but some issues are also dealt with best on a larger scale.
I think a major problem is that governments are large, monopolistic, and tend to copy each other. How do you know what really works if you don't have different models to look at?
We see some competition between governments in areas like the European Union that have free trade and free movement. This has resulted in tax rates being lowered and business being liberalized across the EU. However, the European Union cooperates on some things, such as financial regulation, so we won't see any competition between different models there.
I think the US is much too large in terms of people, GDP, and land area to be efficiently governed by one entity. The law is crusted over with special interest regulation and really needs a rethinking. However, I doubt that is likely to change any time soon.
And I agree with you that trial and error is a good way of proceeding. The problem is that the visibility and the severity of an error are not always correlated. It is easy to fix visible problems but not get closer to an efficient model.
Sure. We've found a model that works pretty well, and a whole lot better than various recent experiments, so it's a fairly safe bet. Who wouldn't want to copy that?
> US is much too large in terms
Difficult to say. It's not run worse than plenty of smaller countries, and has one huge advantage: it's an ironclad free trade area.
> I think the US is much too large in terms of people, GDP, and land area to be efficiently governed by one entity.
I've felt that way for a while now. People need to feel they have sovereignty, so "states" should never get too large. Also, as Taleb said in The Black Swan about mergers: the lower diversity means that when one fails, it's catastrophic. Instead of 300 million people trying to decide on Red or Blue, we could have 50 states that catered to every style, much as in Europe.
