Thank you Larry. My thoughts on this aren't all that well-developed. The gist is that a federalist structure is the way to go - in the sense of having at one level local authorities that have genuine power and then an overlay of more national government. That was sort of the core Constitutional vision. In the cultural orbit I'm in, there…
Thank you Larry. My thoughts on this aren't all that well-developed. The gist is that a federalist structure is the way to go - in the sense of having at one level local authorities that have genuine power and then an overlay of more national government. That was sort of the core Constitutional vision. In the cultural orbit I'm in, there's an abiding assumption that the founders were being a little overly precious about all of this, that 'states' rights' was from the beginning code for pro-slavery, that state government is in any case corrupt and toothless, and that the 'truth' of the U.S. is in the sort of nationalist vision of people like Lincoln or FDR, which powers over the niceties of locally-driven government. My intuition is that the founders were a little more astute than the NYT op-eds I read, and Covid was actually a nice illustration of why a more distributive model works better. Simply put, different models worked better in different places, and in the midst of (for many reasons) incoherent national policy, distribution turned out to be a better way than people might have assumed to handle a crisis.
Thank you Larry. My thoughts on this aren't all that well-developed. The gist is that a federalist structure is the way to go - in the sense of having at one level local authorities that have genuine power and then an overlay of more national government. That was sort of the core Constitutional vision. In the cultural orbit I'm in, there's an abiding assumption that the founders were being a little overly precious about all of this, that 'states' rights' was from the beginning code for pro-slavery, that state government is in any case corrupt and toothless, and that the 'truth' of the U.S. is in the sort of nationalist vision of people like Lincoln or FDR, which powers over the niceties of locally-driven government. My intuition is that the founders were a little more astute than the NYT op-eds I read, and Covid was actually a nice illustration of why a more distributive model works better. Simply put, different models worked better in different places, and in the midst of (for many reasons) incoherent national policy, distribution turned out to be a better way than people might have assumed to handle a crisis.
- Sam