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Authors: Daniel Hannan
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change to collaboration with the InternationalCriminal Court. This international change in outlook has accompanied a change in the domestic arrangements of the United States: a shift toward greater central control and higher federal spending. America, in short, is becoming more European.
4
THE RETREAT FROM FEDERALISM
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
—JAMES MADISON, 1787
T he Founding Fathers were in no doubt about the merits of decentralization. The autonomy of the individual states was, for them, “an auxiliary precaution,” alongside representative democracy and the separation of powers, to prevent the growth of an overbearing government.
The dispersal of power has several other advantages, too. It stimulates competition and economic growth. Itencourages experimentation and the spread of best practice. It brings government nearer to the people and, in doing so, makes it smaller and less wasteful. All these boons, however, are, so to speak, fringe benefits. U.S. federalism was chiefly designed to prevent the growth of a dictatorial central state.
As Thomas Jefferson put it in a private letter in 1812:
Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants, at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder, and waste.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that these arguments belong in the pages of a history book. If anything, the framers were hundreds of years ahead of their time in anticipating modern public choice theory. They intuited something that political scientists were later able to study empirically. They understood that large administrations would become prey to vested interests, and that the law of dispersed costs and concentrated gains would make big government expensive, inefficient,and nepotistic. In the words of John McGinnis of Northwestern University Law School:
A large diverse democracy, where interest groups are held in check by jurisdictional competition, substantially reduces the incentives for individuals to seek rents through government action. Individuals will instead spend their time, on balance, in relatively more productive and peaceful activity.
The founders, and the Jeffersonians in particular, were also ahead of their time in understanding that, in any state, there will always be a centripetal force exercised by the federal authorities. Again, they sensed by instinct a phenomenon that a later generation of political scientists was to identify and label. Professor Roland Vaubel of Mannheim University has carried out a major study of twenty-two federations, and found that, in all but one of them, there has been a tendency, over time, for power to shift from state or provincial authorities to the central government. He has identified a number of factors that drive the process of centralization. Provincial governments, for example, often refer a decision upward in order to overcome local opposition to a specific measure, which jurisdiction, once transferred, is almost never returned. Constitutions are usually interpreted by a supreme court whose members, being appointed at the federal
4
THE RETREAT FROM FEDERALISM
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
—JAMES MADISON, 1787
T he Founding Fathers were in no doubt about the merits of decentralization. The autonomy of the individual states was, for them, “an auxiliary precaution,” alongside representative democracy and the separation of powers, to prevent the growth of an overbearing government.
The dispersal of power has several other advantages, too. It stimulates competition and economic growth. Itencourages experimentation and the spread of best practice. It brings government nearer to the people and, in doing so, makes it smaller and less wasteful. All these boons, however, are, so to speak, fringe benefits. U.S. federalism was chiefly designed to prevent the growth of a dictatorial central state.
As Thomas Jefferson put it in a private letter in 1812:
Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants, at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder, and waste.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that these arguments belong in the pages of a history book. If anything, the framers were hundreds of years ahead of their time in anticipating modern public choice theory. They intuited something that political scientists were later able to study empirically. They understood that large administrations would become prey to vested interests, and that the law of dispersed costs and concentrated gains would make big government expensive, inefficient,and nepotistic. In the words of John McGinnis of Northwestern University Law School:
A large diverse democracy, where interest groups are held in check by jurisdictional competition, substantially reduces the incentives for individuals to seek rents through government action. Individuals will instead spend their time, on balance, in relatively more productive and peaceful activity.
The founders, and the Jeffersonians in particular, were also ahead of their time in understanding that, in any state, there will always be a centripetal force exercised by the federal authorities. Again, they sensed by instinct a phenomenon that a later generation of political scientists was to identify and label. Professor Roland Vaubel of Mannheim University has carried out a major study of twenty-two federations, and found that, in all but one of them, there has been a tendency, over time, for power to shift from state or provincial authorities to the central government. He has identified a number of factors that drive the process of centralization. Provincial governments, for example, often refer a decision upward in order to overcome local opposition to a specific measure, which jurisdiction, once transferred, is almost never returned. Constitutions are usually interpreted by a supreme court whose members, being appointed at the federal
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