That’s Right.
Following the lead of Matt Yglesias, Ryan Avent points out that there are all sorts of ways in which conservative/libertarian opposition to stupid government interventions – licensing requirements, stupid land use restrictions, unnecessary hurdles to starting up a business, etc. – has the potential to yield huge benefits. I’d strongly disagree, though, with any implication that having interregional variation among regulations is a bad thing: even in the case of environmental policy, there’s a real need to experiment with different approaches and allow regulations to be sensitive to different regions’ different needs. Moreover, diffusing power is an essential part of the kind of accountability that allows bad regulations to be shown up for what they are: if it’s my city that won’t let me keep backyard chickens, I can fight them; if it’s the USDA, I’m not likely to get very far. But the general principle gets things quite right, and I’ll also give an enthusiastic second to the observation that creative intervention at one stage can eliminate the need for more serious and costly intervention at another – though don’t get me started on universal preschool.
Filed under: conservatism, environment, government/law, libertarianism
You’d think you wouldn’t have to point out that federalism is useful for, you know, self-government.
Yeah. I mean, I do understand that there’s a genuine sense in which it’s “irrational”, but the crucial point is that it can be rationality itself that is very often the problem, and that things often have consequences in practice that don’t show up in the abstract. And so federalism at once (a) allows the damage to be relatively contained, (b) allows governments to be quicker on their feet and more easily responsive to their constituencies, (c) allows for the sort of experimentation that lets us figure out what does and doesn’t work, and (d) allows solutions to be curtailed to specific problems. That’s not to say that this is the right approach in ALL cases (global warming is arguably an exception), but it’s a very important option to bear in mind.