The Case Against the States

By Michael Kinsley

The fancy word is "subsidiarity." it's the principle that public functions should be performed at the lowest possible level of government -- the one closest to the citizens. The world is in a frenzy of subsidiarity at the moment. The former Soviet empire divides and subdivides into ever smaller sovereign units. In Western Europe, there is a rebellion against the "bureaucrats of Brussels," headquarters of the European Union. And here in the United States, a recurring theme of the Gingrich Ascendancy is that this or that Federal Government program should be turned over to the states. State governments, it is argued, are more efficient and better attuned to the wishes of the people.

Subsidiarity is a good principle, in the abstract. What's more, in the United States it has the imprimatur of the Constitution. In our system, basic sovereignty is supposed to reside in the separate states. The Federal Government has only specifically delegated powers. Louis Brandeis famously described a state as a "laboratory ... of social and economic experiments," able to try out public policy in a way the lumbering national government cannot. But subsidiarity is not the only principle of good government, and there are good reasons for skepticism about the current fad for solving every problem of the nation (welfare, health care, environmental regulation, etc.) by dumping it on the separate states.

Above all, this is an evasion. We are all citizens of the states, as well as the nation, and to say that some problem should be "handled by the states" does not make it go away. The great questions of government are what functions it should perform and how it should perform them. Should we or should we not supply health insurance to those who can't afford it? Should we or should we not require welfare mothers to work? What level of government should perform these functions is an inherently less interesting, and important, question.

Brandeis may have been correct that the states are better able to experiment in search of novel public-policy solutions. But most public-policy dilemmas of today do not await novel solutions. They await the simple will to make unpleasant tradeoffs between our desire for government services and our desire not to pay for them. The notion that there is some novel solution out there waiting to be discovered -- one that avoids the need for such trade-offs -- is a childish fantasy.

As envisioned by the Republicans since the election, turning it back to the states is an evasion in a cruder sense as well. They propose bundling the money now being spent on various federal programs (like food stamps) into "block grants" for the states to spend as they please. But, in the process of bundling, the Republicans propose to slice up to 20% off the total, on the unproved assumption that the states can deliver equivalent services that much more efficiently.

Subsidiarity, then, is often just an intellectual and financial free lunch. And there are other problems as well. To function properly, government must be a monopoly. We can argue, as we do, about what taxes and regulations ought to be imposed on individual citizens, and what benefits ought to be made available. Even after that argument is settled democratically, though, subsidiarity can make the settlement hard to enforce.

The citizens of every state in the union, for example, could decide to have a certain air-pollution standard for factories. But without a national standard, companies will inevitably play one state against the other, and every state will end up with a lower standard than all of them would prefer. Similarly, the individual states might all wish to guarantee universal health care for their citizens. But none could afford to be flooded with uninsured sick people from its neighboring states. If health-care reform is left to the states, all of us might end up forgoing a social benefit that most of us would choose to enjoy.

A final consideration against the principle of subsidiarity is the principle of patriotism. Whatever the Constitution may say, most of us feel a greater loyalty to the United States as a nation than we do to the individual states. The reason we feel inclined to treat poverty, for example, as a social problem rather than an individual tragedy is that these are fellow Americans who are suffering. That's also why we wish to help them more than we wish to help, say, a citizen of Zaire. Few of us feel less of this patriotic fellow feeling for residents of Mississippi than we do for residents of Connecticut. If welfare is left entirely to the states, a poor state like Mississippi will inevitably be less generous than a rich state like Connecticut. Does that make sense?

Subsidiarity enthusiasts are often quite two-faced about it. When there is a social problem they really think is pressing, they tend to lose their ^ enthusiasm for turning it over to the states. Although crime is traditionally a matter for state and local governments, politicians in Washington these days compete vigorously to federalize the most categories of criminal behavior and spend the most out of the federal Treasury to build prisons.

Don't get me wrong. The states are nice to have around. I live in one myself. But "turn it over to the states" is a trivial answer to any policy puzzle -- even when it happens to be correct.