[ke88y]

> Something to keep the lobbyists from getting too cozy would be nice.

That doesn't make much sense to me. The firms that rent office space on K Street don't have power because of the location of their office... it's the other way around: K Street real estate is rented out by those firms because of the street's proximity to power.

Move the power center and the firms currently renting office space on K Street, DC, USA will instead rent out space on Blah Street, Middlepoint, USA.

More-over, I don't know if moving the capitol of the country to the median point as defined in this article makes any sense either. It's one of those "literally everyone loses" propositions because "median" isn't "modal". If anything, it could make sense for the capital to be located at the midpoint by travel time.

But it's all wildly impractical if you stop and think about. The amount of infrastructure alone would require decades of work. And states would have to surrender sovereignty over a big chunk of their (settled!) land. Etc.

[bobthepanda]

The midpoint by travel point mattered more in an era where travel across the country was measured in weeks or months.

At this point the only people with difficult transport are those in rural communities that may lack air services, though to combat this somewhat Congress funds the Essential Air Service at hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

[ke88y]

Good point. Again, the whole thing feels a bit silly. Not a huge fan of DC but not sure why you'd think moving the capitol would actually change anything about how politics works...

I think this "move the capitol" thing is pushed by people who think "then DC would be accountable to small town America because it would be in small town America!"

Which, LOL, no. That's not how it'd work at all. That small town would lose self rule, be developed into a mid-sized city, become completely divorced from its previous character, and nothing else would change other than building a big ass city in Small Town, IL for no particularly discernible reason.

Which sets aside the fact that Small Town America already has an absurdly disproportionate amount of representation per human inhabitant.

[grotorea]

Midpoint by travel time isn't too far from how French department capitals had to be reachable in one day by horse.