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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   33165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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but that's also true (as you point out) of giving states back the instruments of economic belligerence.

I think either I misspoke, or you misinterpreted what I wrote. If the government gave the states back their commerce power that would permanently increase federalization because it would dramatically change the incentives available to the states and their citizens. But short of that, not much would change. I think across the multiverse that most versions of america would convergently evolve something like the department of education, even if it had a slightly different role or function in response to the initial conditions of its creation.

Now, there is a caveat to all this. Though many aspects of the federal bureacracy serve a real purpose, that doesn't mean that they're destined to grow indefinitely. For that reason, I suspect that trump will manage to-- in the medium term-- cut the DOE back. In fact, I think the very existence of trump is proof that there's a sort of logistic growth curve for federal agencies. Agencies start small, grow rapidly as they become popular for solving the lowest-hanging problems, then exceed their carrying capacity and become bloated and therefore unpopular and subject to cuts. And we're obviously in an "exceeded the carrying capacity" era, vis-a-vis deficit spending.

But in the longest term, I think the DOE is more-or-less guaranteed to bounce back. The state apparatus is something darwinistically selected for the ability to increase its own carrying capacity. If we were at the knife-point of optimization where no additional changes could be made to the government to increase its absolute ability to generate revenue then it would be permanently doomed, but we're far from fully-optimized in terms for taxation. Even ignoring the possibility for technological economic growth, we're quite far from the bureaucratic state-of-the-art. Switching to the land value taxe, for example, would permanently move the laffer curve to the right-- governments could extract a higher total share of taxes for any given level of free-market economic performance.

Meanwhile, the "federal housing code" thing you mention would be, I think, destined to fail for essentially the same reason the current "federal drug code" is failing. That being, that housing-- and drugs-- are locally and culturally specific in a way that doesn't benefit from the federal government trying to enforce nationwide uniformity.

Putting that all together:

I think there are other, less forceful ways to do it! America is permanently(?) less unitary because the Obama administration decided not to enforce federal drug law, and by the way that the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs, for instance. You could likely continue to make America less unitary by removing direct election of Senators, by (to take your example, and something that plausibly may happen soon) trimming the Department of Education into a machine for distributing block-grant funding and administering student loans, by shredding federal firearms regulations, etc.

Removing direct election of Senators would plausibly alter the power calculus, but trimming the DOE is either structurally predetermined or guaranteed to fail.

If the government gave the states back their commerce power that would permanently increase federalization because it would dramatically change the incentives available to the states and their citizens.

Or people wouldn't like it and would return the commerce power to the feds, just like they did last time – that's what I meant.

That being, that housing-- and drugs-- are locally and culturally specific in a way that doesn't benefit from the federal government trying to enforce nationwide uniformity.

This is also true of education! Which, to sort of play in to your point – it is possible that the path that worked in the past, or that we took in the past, was not guaranteed to be the best path forward, or the best path now. Even if, as your suggest, certain outcomes in the past were predetermined, that does not necessarily imply the same thing in the future. If Team Trump transforms the Department of Education into a block grant funding machine, it's possible that will work considerably better than the prior department and nobody will want to change it back.

Removing direct election of Senators would plausibly alter the power calculus, but trimming the DOE is either structurally predetermined or guaranteed to fail.

I am not convinced history is quite this inflexible.

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