I have often heard the economies of scale argument as a justification for implementation at the federal level instead of the state level. However, in the same breath I also hear people talk about how great Sweden or Switzerland is. Perhaps people don’t realize that Sweden has about as many people as Georgia. Also, states are free to band together to create coalitions to create economies of scale (e.g., licensing) if they feel the need to do so. Given that there are functioning European governments that are much smaller than the US and are more efficient on a lot of metrics than the US federal government, I believe the US federal government has hit a point of diseconomies of scale for many/most of its activities.

I wonder how far this principle can be taken. How far down can you push authority before you end up with problems? Fiefdoms and local corruption that may be easier to operate than high level (e.g. political machines in Chicago). The ultimate decentralization would be to let each person do as they please, but long ago humans decided that was a bad idea for some behaviors, and grouped together to make governments. But, as you’ve rightly pointed out, you don’t want to centralize too much authority.

I suspect the ideal locus of power depends on the subject: sometimes the Federal government is too far up, and individuals are too far down; often individuals are the right locus; and sometimes Federal government is the right locus. The real question, to my mind, is what sorts of things should we consider to determine the best location of power? What trade-offs are at play?

On a mostly unrelated note, the same type of argument has been made for dramatically expanding the house of representatives. The idea is that when the constitution was passed, we only had about 75 in the house, but they each represented only ~30,000 people. Currently, an average member in the house represents about 750,000 – though it varies considerably – thus each voter’s “voice” is diluted. To ratchet that number down to ~50,000 per representative, would require ~6,000 in the house of rep. Which is another huge number, so I don’t see how it fixes anything, just seems to shift around the representative-ness problem.