In my school debate club, a kid presented an idea that was new to me. He believes we should have a unitarian government: with smaller federal government, little to no state government, with local governments based on Metropolitan disticts instead. He claimed that state governments seemed inefficient and contradictory to what state representatives worked for in the Federal government, saying local governments would cater more to the people's needs specifically, especially in large states like California. I am a fan of States' Rights and Nullification, the whole Tom Woods thing, in the current system, so I don't know how to feel about it. It seems like lesser, more efficient government. Any thoughts?
I'm not sure his logic is consistent.
I feel as though the debate is framed within this notion that all power descends from the Federal Government, which is untrue. If 50 states petitioning a single entity is inefficient, imagine the zoo that many hundreds if not thousands of petitioning bodies would become in a unitary system. Any inefficiency that arises from the States petitioning the Federal Government is because the Federal Government is too large and confiscates too much power and resources from them. Were this not the case, States wouldn't have to go begging and fighting for it back at D.C.
Remove the Federal Government, and you remove all inefficieny from the system. This reasoning, brought to it's logical conclusion would then make States irrelevant and bring soverign power to the county or even town/city limits.
Local governments? Let's set our standards even higher:
“Power to the local governments” would be a vast improvement over “power to the states”. The latter is favored because it has a huge heritage for Americans, but otherwise many American states are larger than many full-blown countries.
And even generally speaking, local government is what comes closer to a spontaneous order, so must be favored at all times. Remember, it was free cities, not free regions that made the West.
I have thought about that. A confederation of city(/town/village) states in an agreement with a national institution which would provide a small national defence force. Every year the city states would give a certain amount of money based on how many citizens it had (or maybe how much land it occupied) to the central government with which it could fund the defence force. The confederation would be voluntary and the only requirements for membership would be the payment of the due and compliance with a "bill of rights", which would sketch out certain negative rights (mostly free speech, free movement in and out of the area ect) which no law the city states make could violate. If the city states fail to live up to either of these requirements they are no longer a member of the confederation and a without defence services, but no offensive action would be taken by the central government.
This would also allow for an easy transition into statelessness.
The best comparison I can think of is that of a company. If you think of the state as the CEO's and the smaller local governments as supervisors or some equivalent, then it seems obvious that any move to distribute power would be good; just as the distrubition from supervisors to workers would be even better.