There is a whole spectrum of bureaucracy and overregulation in the “West”. The EU is probably worst. The US are quite relaxed in comparison. The UK is somewhere in the middle.
This is basically a myth at this point, bolstered by how much more we complain about it.
The US made the colossal mistake of trying to do regulation at the federal level, basically equivalent to doing it at the EU level, which the EU is now attempting to do more of and discovering what a trash fire it is.
And one of the big reasons for that is that the more centrally the regulation happens, the more corruption it attracts. That's where the US got the reputation for not regulating -- it's not that there aren't rules or that the rules aren't long and arduous and inefficient. It's that they're, on top of that, less effective because there is more regulatory capture by incumbents.
That centralization leads to corruption is a common claim but I have seen the exact opposite. Being smaller and unwatched leads to more corruption. Smaller towns can have plenty of their local corruption and parochial influence which are more accessible.
National level winds up cared about by everybody as it isn't a "someone else's problem" situation and thus winds up watched far more.
Then there is the matter of consistency with across state laws and enforcement. One set of rules is easier to comply with and more consistent in expectations, especially when states wind up fighting over jurisdiction.
Local jurisdictions have to compete with each other. If one town has a 40% tax rate because it's giving half the money to the mayor's brother and the town down the road does not, everybody starts to move out of that town and the economic decline ousts the corrupt politician. When the same thing happens at the federal level (with the money going to Lockheed and drug companies), "move to Canada" is a lot harder than "move 5 miles to the other side of the town border where you're already still a citizen."
This doesn't imply that small governments are never corrupt -- you can certainly find examples -- but it keeps the corruption in check. It adds vote with your feet as a means to avoid corrupt governments.
And the idea that everybody is paying attention to what happens at the federal level is contrary to evidence. Remember "we have to pass the bill to see what's in it"? It's too easy for lobbyists to sneak language into multi-thousand page bills that nobody is ever going to read before it becomes law. Whereas at the local level you shouldn't have multi-thousand page omnibus bills that have to address every edge case for everyone everywhere.
It's also easier for local muckrakers to prevent corruption when they find it, because federal corruption tends to have coalition support. The F-35 is a boondoggle but the people in the districts who receive the trillion+ dollars in tax money are very in support of the program and you're not going to convince them to cut it because the money comes from outside their districts. That doesn't happen at the local level -- the recipients are in the same local jurisdiction as the taxpayers -- so once anyone identifies the waste you can build support to eliminate it.
Federal regulations prevent a race to the bottom for things like pollution, labor rights, etc. And IP, internet, and other regulations only make sense at a federal level.
But, in terms of how to lay out a town in terms of residential zones vs. commercial zones, sure that should be local.
> Federal regulations prevent a race to the bottom for things like pollution, labor rights, etc.
Not really. Local people suffer the most from local pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most incentive to strike a reasonable balance. Federalizing e.g. minimum wage is just an excuse for high cost of living areas to screw over low cost of living areas by depriving them of their natural cost advantage, pressuring wage laborers into higher cost of living areas where they get less for their money because businesses stop operating in lower cost of living areas if they would have to pay the same wages.
Also, there is no point in trying to do this at the federal level because any company whose primary motivation is "lack of environmental regulations" has already moved to e.g. China.
> But, in terms of how to lay out a town in terms of residential zones vs. commercial zones, sure that should be local.
Ironically, this is the thing that actually suffers from being too local, because residency is required to vote in local elections, and then you get exclusionary policies and zoning designed to inflate housing costs which can't be reformed because everyone with an interest in reform is excluded by the unreformed policies from eligibility to vote in the jurisdiction.
Though of course that could be fixed by moving to the state level from the cities; almost nothing actually needs to be done at the federal level.
> Not really. Local people suffer the most from local pollution and low local wages etc., so they have the most incentive to strike a reasonable balance.
I don't know. On the one hand, you can look at the Kansas Experiment[1] as vindication of the federal and state system, where the states experiment. On the other hand, you could see that as stupid people (or at least some a bit divorced from reality) willing to throw caution to the wind to the detriment of their constituents, and for the most part not learn anything from the fallout.
At least the damage from those stupid people is well contained, as opposed to the alternative where stupid people come into power at the Federal level every 4-8 years and muck it up for everybody.
I guess that's true. I imagine the less polarized the environment is the more beneficial the Federal approach is, because you get sane checks and balances and consensus on things before accepted. The more polarized it is, the better the compartmentalization of states is at keeping the crazies at each end of the spectrum from causing too much damage to everyone at once.
Not necessarily. Before the EPA, states would often put their toxic dumps close to the state line, where the winds and the current would take their crap into the next state. Incentives only work if there are no externalities (sticking someone else with the bill).
And moving power from the cities to the state level tends to screw the city, especially in heavily gerrymandered states.
You're certainly right that NIMBYism in zoning laws is a big problem, but NIMBYs can be quite powerful at the state level as well.
> Not necessarily. Before the EPA, states would often put their toxic dumps close to the state line, where the winds and the current would take their crap into the next state. Incentives only work if there are no externalities (sticking someone else with the bill).
The answer to this is to let states sue each other in federal court for any pollution that crosses state lines. Not companies in the states, the states themselves. Then states can prevent that from happening however they like, but if they don't, the state itself owes the neighboring state(s) billions of dollars. Strict liability. And then you don't need any federal regulations telling anybody how to do it.
> And moving power from the cities to the state level tends to screw the city, especially in heavily gerrymandered states.
On zoning rules? It's hard to imagine people getting screwed much worse than they do now.
YES YES YES. Policies and laws should be more local to adhere to the local situations in local areas. A politician in Berlin cannot understand the situation in a random town with 500 inhabitants and therefore should rarely have something to say about how life functions there.
Many regulations cannot be local because of basic game theory. Beggar-thy-neighbour policies, for example; if one region allows a little more pollution and attracts industry because of that, then other regions are forced to do the same or lose out. As a result industry socializes the cost of its pollution and takes a private profit. Similar effects occur for safety standards, consumer standards, employment standards, tax, and so on.
> proper regulation either forces companies to curb their emissions or taxes it. In other words, to internalize it.
No, in other words, to pass on the costs to society, because the cost of whatever they are providing goes up. Plus, since the companies are a concentrated interest, it's easy for them to buy regulations from the central authority that are favorable to them and unfavorable to potential competitors.
A proper regulation would look more like this: a company cannot even build a factory to begin with until it can convince all the parties who could potentially be impacted by their operations to agree. No centralized authority (like, say, a government) can agree on behalf of those parties, because no centralized authority can possibly properly represent all of their interests. So either every single party agrees, or nothing happens.
The usual objection to this is that no factories would ever get built, because there will always be some party that is simply unwilling to agree. But that objection ignores basic economics. If the factory really is a profitable venture, even with all of the potential impacts taken into account, the factory owners will be able to bargain with the other parties to some kind of mutual agreement. In some cases, they might just offer to buy land outright from parties that are unwilling to agree to having the factory built next to them. Or they might offer shares in the enterprise to neighboring landowners in exchange for permission to build. There are plenty of possibilities; the key point is that the economics of the situation forces the people who want to undertake the enterprise to show good evidence that the benefits really do outweigh the costs. Whereas under the centralized regulatory regime we have now, the burden to be met is much lighter and does not really do anything to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs.
> Do the needs of that town with 500 inhabitants require different streaming laws? Freedom to repair laws. Special export restrictions?
A town with 500 inhabitants isn't required to have different streaming laws or freedom to repair laws etc. They could all pass the same ones. But if the state of Colorado thinks that the rules in New York are too favorable to device makers and the state of Alaska doesn't care to have any laws on the matter at all then why shouldn't the people there be able to make their own choices?
If the cost of living is dramatically lower in Wichita Falls, Texas than it is in San Francisco, California, what sense does it make to have a federal minimum wage instead of allowing each place to choose appropriate to their local economy?
> Should they be allowed to dump chemicals in the water we all share?
Pollution that crosses state lines is the purpose of federal courts. You don't need federal regulations for that, just an outright complete prohibition on it and penalties for the offending state.
> Host servers that serve copyrighted material?
That ship has sailed, hasn't it? It's a global internet. The Pirate Bay is still up. Does it really matter if it's hosted in North Dakota or Sweden or wherever it is now?
And we could most certainly stand to not have DMCA 1201 everywhere.
