1.5. LOOKING AHEAD
45
Juridical remedies do not make sense in constitutions that are largely procedural, as in the
United States; the court has no manifesto to adjudicate intergovernmental disputes over the
distribution of divisible goods. They may affect distribution indirectly: for example, rulings
about school adequacy or minority rights likely affects federal monetary flow, and if the need
is not spread uniformly across the states, the court’s decision will benefit some states more
than others. But this intervention is as likely to stir up distributional tension as quell it.
Therefore, if one defines redistribution to be the primary problem of federalism, institutions
so useful to compliance, such as courts, would have no natural place in the theory.
Solving the allocative problem does not automatically shift attention from allocation to
production. The former is a search for a distribution of divisible goods that satisfies all so
that the federation is not threatened by secession. However, an equitable allocation does not
necessarily solve the secession problem; state governments may have viable exit options (and
the national government may overwhelm the state governments, assuming all authority).
While these alternatives are costly, the expected benefit of independence may outweigh
the benefit obtained with federal membership. By contrast, the latter transformation is
a way of making the value of contribution to public goods great enough that it subsumes
the temptation to fail to contribute or to focus attention purely on laying claim to as many
divisible goods as possible. It is a method that focuses on growing the pie as the fundamental
problem, so that each share redistributed is comparatively larger. In this manner, exit
options are minimized. Both problems—equitable division and efficient production—need
to be solved.
1.5
Looking Ahead
The book proceeds in the following fashion. I develop the reasons for forming a federation,
each which displays characteristics of a classic public good provision problem. With this
characterization of federalism, we examine its implications: federalism has an essential prob-
Convention