Federalism & Inequality, Part Two

In my last post on this topic, I described an ideal system of federalism and its advantages and disadvantages. One of the concerns that progressives often have about this kind of federalism, which I wish to take seriously, is that it will lead to a growing gap between the incomes of rich and poor regions [...]

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Who Killed Local Autonomy in the U.S.?

Once upon a time, local governments accounted for the lion’s share of economic policy-making in the United States. Before World War I, not only was the federal government’s economic policy-making activity strictly limited to areas such as international trade, management of federal lands, trust-busting, and food and drug regulation, but state governments themselves were also [...]

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The Future of Free Cities, Part 1

I am currently blogging from Roatán, Honduras, where I am participating in the “Future of Free Cities” conference, sponsored by Universidad Francisco Marroquín. The conference is about the economic and political preconditions for the establishment of free-enterprise zones in developing countries, as well as the internal governance of these territories. In his opening talk last [...]

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Regional Inequality

The latest Economist has an interesting feature on inequalities among regions within countries. The article compares countries on their ranges in GDP per head (the ratio of richest region to poorest). Thus, we get charts like the following: But range is an extremely crude concept for measuring inequality. In the U.S., the District of Columbia [...]

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Bell, CA: A Cautionary Tale of Local Control?

Why are citizens so disengaged from their local governments? Part of the problem is that local governments do so little. Another is that local electoral institutions seem to be designed so as to perpetuate conflicts of interest.

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A Constitutional Right to Marriage?

So what do we think about the district court ruling overturning California’s same-sex marriage ban? To my knowledge, this is the first time a court has asserted a federal constitutional right to marriage. As a longtime supporter of getting government out of marriage licensing and of legal equality for same-sex and nonmonogamous relationships, I am [...]

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Sunday Morning Quotation

A bit late, but trying to keep this feature alive. Adam Smith.  The Wealth of Nations.  Vol II, Book 5, Chapter 1: “The abuses which sometimes creep into the local and provincial adminstration of a local and provincial revenue, how enormous soever they may appear, are in reality, however, almost always very trifling, in comparison of those [...]

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More Money for the States?

It is probably fairly obvious to our readers that many (all?) of us here at Pileus support a more robust form of federalism (and decentralization) than we currently enjoy in the U.S.  So it is with much chagrin that I relay news from this weekend that President Obama wants more federal dollars to bail out irreponsible supposedly [...]

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Who’s Afraid of Fiscal Federalism?

In the 2005 case Gonzales v Raich, the Supreme Court pulled back on its federalism jurisprudence and ruled that the federal government may prosecute someone for growing marijuana at home for personal use under the authority of the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the right to regulate commerce among the several [...]

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Liberty as Decentralization

Under certain conditions, decentralization can in and of itself represent an increase in freedom, even if government does not shrink as a consequence. Libertarians need not be complete anarchists, just radical decentralists.

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McCarthy on Red Toryism

Daniel McCarthy has some interesting thoughts on Phillip Blond’s ideology “Red Toryism” in the latest American Conservative. Red Toryism sounds a bit like what James Q. Wilson and others have called “populism”: an ideology favoring tight regulation of the market combined with conservatism on social issues. As something of a virtue libertarian, McCarthy actually has [...]

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