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Nornagest comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong
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Comments (231)
I wrote in "Federalist". I believe Texas should be governed by Texan values and California should be governed by Californian values.
I wouldn't suggest that this principle is the highest principle, but it seems obvious that it should be somewhere high up in the ranking of principles (say, #3). People often try to argue that because we can't make federalism the highest principle, it shouldn't be a principle at all. That seems totally wrong to me.
In general I agree with this. However, I am also in favor of government subsidy on moving between jurisdictions (though, not a full subsidy, as that would cause moral hazard problems). Uprooting your life and relocating to a new location is costly, in time, money, effort, and social ties. These costs will be disproportionately borne by people with values far from the mean of their cultural/geographic locale. Without a subsidy to help Texans with California values and Californians with Texan values relocate, Federalism will essentially develve into a large welfare redistribution to individuals with values close to their jurisdiction's mean from individuals further from that mean.
If we were to decide that local homogeneity of values is something we wanted to encourage -- which I'm not sure of -- a subsidy for moving costs would probably help, but I don't think it's sufficient to overcome the inertia that keeps e.g. Texans with Californian values in Texas. People have lots of ties to a place besides the purely financial: moving implies leaving friends and often family, finding a new job and new housing, probably learning a certain amount of new cultural content, etc.
I wouldn't expect such a subsidy to overcome inertia in all cases. I expect it would help on the margins, though.