Would the US run more efficiently with fewer or no states? Considerations could be administrative, budgetary, manpower, etc.
America would be much more efficient without certain states, particularly Florida and Texas.
Fusing some states into larger entities would help.
But, no…eliminating the separate states altogether is a poor idea.
And remember, the States are not agents of the Federal Government, and never have been.
If there were no States here, there would be a greater uniformity of laws between regions, but more problems. Income tax would be higher because of the increased revinues needed by the government to run programs previously funded by the state. I also think that the overall perception of the federal government would go down the toilet because they would have control over too many things (Not that they don’t already).
Would it be more efficient, probably not simply because we are so big, that there would be just too much to run.
OK, first - Chas - :rolleyes:
Second - well, I think the short answer is “yes it would”, but the drawback is that the US would not really exist as the US anymore. States Rights as a Constitutional principle and as a National way of thinking is a very profound concept, that is intended to give regions of a large country control and self-determination. In a country as large as the US (and I know, with the media and Net it seems small), there are IMO valid, important reasons for allowing different regions of the US to be governed differently.
Some of it is due to variations in its population density - New York should not have the same laws as Montanta, for example. Some is due to the level of agriculture versus industry, and some due simply to regional differences in the predominant culture, religion, society, history, etc.
One can always argue that a large, centralized government increases efficiency - “We need to streamline to improve efficiency”. But then, you get the problem of one agency trying to account for and adequately cover all of these varying regions and cultures in the country, and thus you move back to a desire to de-centralize - “We need to distribute power to remove roadblocks.” Just like Dilbert.
Curwin asks - Would the US run more efficiently with fewer or no states?
By coincidence, last night I had a conversation with a man here in Dublin, Ireland. He thought the world would be run far more efficiently if there were no United States at all.
Of course, he was prejudiced, just because the US napalmed most of his family a while back. Some people have no sense of proportion.
I would think no. While it is true that elininating states should increase efficiency by eliminating redudancy, it would also increase waste and fraud. If the people are in charge are a couple hundred miles away they are better equipped to monitor things than if the people in charge are thousands of miles away in Washington.
I wouldn’t think so. It would reduce democratic oversight of the bureaucracy, for one thing. You’ve got one Prez, one Veep-Prime Minister (in the current administration), 100 Senators and 435 Reps. They’ve got a big workload as it is. Now, add the workload of supervising all the municipalities in the US, all the school boards, all the highways, all the industries, etc. If the states were eliminated, you’d have a massive increase in the federal bureaucracy, with a corresponding decrease in democratic oversight. Not efficient, in the long run.
The poster formerly known as jti (sig™ inserted at request of dantheman).
Anthracite, I think you had the best example. All of your reasons were very good, especially this:
One reason I can think of that we have states is to stifle dictatorship. Imagine your living in a state that started with good laws on, say, taxes and education, two current hotbutton issues, but the state government starts screwing around with the laws and turns it into a bad place to live, you could move to another state with good laws again. Just as the three branches of national government (idealy) keep each other in check, so do states governments and citizens have power to keep the national government in check
Think about this too, States each send senators and representatives to the capital to represent the states interests and citizens interests, respectively. No states equals no fair representation in Washington equals total executive and judicial power equals dictatorship and communism. There are better ways to streamline government than eliminate states.
I’ll drop this in before we this gets moved to GD …
Here are some problems I see in having a USA without the S.
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Schools. I can’t imagine how any government could run a public school system for as big a country as this without having some local oversight. And people will want the local oversight to be elected. Do we want to pay for 10,000 Federally-derived school boards?
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Infrastructure. Accountability for fixing stuff that makes life liveable will be difficult. Say you live in Seattle and there’s a pothole? How fast will the Federal Street Maintenance Bureau get over to fix it. (I suppose if there were no states, it wouldn’t be a Federal agency would it?)
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Springfield and Riverside. It’s going to be really hard to differentiate those places without states.
This would be a real problem. States help categorize our mail system. Imagine having an address Mr. Fred Fake, 111 False St., New York City, 01234-5678. Without states an address could be very generic.
Eliminating states to make government more effecient, wouldn’t make government more effecient. Municipal local, county, and state governments keep burdens off of the federal government’s shoulders, burdens theu should never have. BobT, your whole post was right on target for keeping states.
Off the subject now, didn’t Peurto Rico vote no to becoming a state a few years ago? What are the pros and cons of being a territory or dependency?
I think the major drawback of Peurto Rico is that they have to pay the taxes and follow most of our laws, but they are unrepresented in the senate or house.
But they got the offer to join.
That is unfair for Puerto Rico to be unrepresented, but I think they don’t pay federal income taxes and that may be why they voted no because if yes they would have to pay more taxes and they didn’t want to. I don’t blame them.
The only way to make a fully centralized government efficient is complete centralization of power in one person. That is traditionally referred to as monarchy, but has appeared under the guises of fascism and state communism. History teaches us that that is a non-optimal path, because power without accountability is dangerous. Accountability comes from the division of power and the resulting bureaucracy. To maintain accountability, bureaucracy must grow in proportion with the amount of centralization. This is the main drawback to the kind of increased centralization the OP asks about, and it is an insoluble problem with our current knowledge.
So, to have a highly centralized government, we must ask ourselves “Do we want a highly efficient murderer or an inefficient slobby mess for our government?” As neither outcome is beneficial, the question must be based on false premises. The false premise underlying the question is that government should become more centralized. So, to answer the OP, the answer is no, the US would not run more efficiently with no or fewer states.
Our govt’s (esp fed) is designed to be inefficent. The checks and balances are there to slow down gov’t and make it hard for them to do things.
Also remember that any power not given to the fed by the Constitution is reserved for the states. (even though the Fed had been using the Constitution as toilet paper for a long time- but that’s another topic)
So to answer your question, Yes the Gov’t would be more efficent if you got rid of the states and lets all pray that that day never happens.
I’ve actually head of a movement to INCREASE the number of states by sub-dividing existing ones. North and South Jersey, and North and South California to name examples.
enolancooper wrote:
An old story has it that after Alaska was admitted as a state, Texas was upset because it was now the second-biggest state. The generous Alaskans offered to divide their state in half, thereby making Texas the third-biggest state.
On that note (sort of), when living in Texas I’d always heard that part of Texas’ admittance papers to the Union guaranteed that they could break themselves up into two (or was it three?) separate states any time they chose.
Don’t know the validity of that, after all that’s the type of things people just always say.
According to the People’s Almanac, Texas was given this right, and I believe it was to break into five or six states.
However, I seem to recall subsequently reading (and it might have been in one of Cecil’s books, though a search of the online columns netted nothing) that, the admittance papers to the Union notwithstanding, such an attempt would be barred as unconstitutional.
I really don’t recall where I read this…sorry.