[bhups]

"If we abolish all local and regional regulations, then there is an absolute reduction of regulations. "

You seem to make the implicit assumption that federal regulations are somehow better than the same amount of state-level regulations. This simply isn't the case. Today, New York has to participate in the same polity as Florida, and it is for that reason that it does not have a single payer system, despite its citizens being in favor of it. This is unsurprising because you can't create one-size-fits-all solutions for all of our states given how different they and their economies are.

Instead, if we allow them to chart their own path, we can allow them to fail (or succeed) fast. The alternative is the limbo state we are in where nobody is moving forward (or backward) and nobody is happy.

To continue the engineering analogy, this is a divide-and-conquer problem. Denmark and the Nordic countries were able to successfully implement their social systems because they are small, well contained countries. By allowing US states to implement their own systems, we set them up for the same kind of success.

[lkrubner]

I try to limit how much I write on sites other than my weblog, so I wrote a reply and posted it to my weblog:

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/the-advantage-of-cent...