Vegetative States

Every time I hear someone going on about states’ rights, or the demise of federalism, I think, well OK, fair enough. The Constitution was written for something called the “United” States – not a single, homogeneous place having little or no trace of the autonomous original thirteen colonies and the many territories that followed. Back then, the states were assumed to have an identity and a history that they wanted to preserve, and their individual strengths were taken as assets which, when contributed to the whole, would make the Union stronger. But these strengths would be best preserved by maintaining a degree of autonomy and self-determination. Well, we know what happened – when was it? – “fourscore and seven years” later, when some of the states decided to take this self-determination thing a bit too far, and they had to be taught a damn good lesson by good ol’ Honest Abe. And ever since then, the states as meaningful cultural and social entities have slid deeper into a pool of irrelevance… and they are only kept alive politically because they constitute convenient divisions for purposes such as allocating, and counting, electoral votes, and allocating federal funds. But their laws can be overturned at the slightest whim of any federal court, and any significant economic decisions, not to mention social policies, have to meet the stern gaze of their masters in Washington. Their legislatures spend all their time working at the margins, worrying about the pathetically trivial handful of options they have left. And their courts are basically flyover country between local jurisdictions and the federal courts.

So what on earth good are they? The answer is that they are basically expendable. But, in line with my First Principal of Government, namely that every government program is a jobs program, state governments drone on, providing a means of sustenance for countless political hacks, mediocrities, and piles of deadwood, even though they have virtually no mission. (But as is well known, when there is no mission, no one can figure out how many people it takes to perform it. So the sky’s the limit.)

And this brings us back to the issues of states’ rights and federalism. Let’s say the trends that began with the Civil War could be reversed. Do you really want state governments, as presently constituted, to assume more control over the lives of the citizens? Do you want to turn one more iota of decision-making over to the zombies who wander around the typical state capital? I sure as hell don’t, and I live in Pennsylvania, which is, I suppose, about average on the corruption and incompetence scale. What if the question involved New Jersey, say, or Illnois? Or Louisiana? Now admittedly, state governments are a product of their environment, the way government employees are the products of theirs. Government employees were not born that way – i.e. as barely-conscious parasites. They were created by the system, by its rewards and punishments. In this, it can be truly said that government employment, like the ailment the kids in “West Side Story” suffered from, is a social disease. And likewise, state governments are suffering from a political disease – they have little or no authority, responsibility, or accountability, so they wind up acting accordingly. If the states had been able to hold on to the degree of autonomy they enjoyed in the early 1800s, they might (read “might”) have wound up with more productive, efficient, and intelligent administrations and leaders. But under the conditions to which they have been subjected, the bad has driven out the good, and simply asserting, or implementing, some form of renewed federalism isn’t going to bring them out of their stupor.