For the more diffuse and desultory the federal government’s undertakings, the
less prepared it will be in meeting world-class challenges when they arise.
To begin to restore some semblance of order to the respective competences of the national
and state governments, it helps to revisit the main arguments for central intervention.
At various points in history our sub-national governments have shown themselves ill-
suited to four types of essential work: the provision of certain pure and costly public goods; the
protection of basic rights; the ability to secure even a minimal social safety net for persons in
need; and the remediation of various economic activities that spill harmfully from one jurisdiction
to another.
Had the original thirteen colonies proven capable of providing for the common defense
(the quintessential example of a pure and expensive public good), the Articles of Confederation
might have had a longer shelf-life. Had southern states not enforced white supremacy well into
the mid-20
th
century, there would have been less need for a federal Civil Rights Act in 1964. Had
most states been able to rescue their impoverished citizens from the Great Depression, the New
Deal would have seemed less urgent. If more states had had the wherewithal to correct on their
38
The EU recognizes that what it calls subsidiarity is (in some sense) a desirable organizing principle. But
regrettably, the concept continues to lack any operational clarity. On, for example, the vague application of the so-
called subsidiarity principle to environmental regulation, see R. Daniel Kelemen, The Rules of Federalism:
Institutions and Regulatory Politics in the EU and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p.
30. The European Council has developed “no consensus on the meaning of subsidiarity,” and the European
Commission “never shapes the debate in a fundamental way.” Steven Van Hecke, “The Principle of Subsidiarity:
Ten Years of Application in the European Union,” Regional and Federal Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp.
65, 71. Scholars have labored to comprehend what subsidiarity really signifies in Europe, with little success:
“Subsidiarity,” write two observers, “seemed to offer a quasi-federal principle of distribution of competences
without really invoking federalism and allowed the Member States and subnational units to criticize the
Commission’s discretionary expansion without having to engage in detailed battles regarding what was and what
was not supposed to be dealt with at the European level.” Kees van Kersbergen and Bertjan Verbeck, “Subsidiarity
as a Principle of Governance in the European Union,” Comparative European Politics, 2 (2004), p. 151.
39
For a full treatment of this theme, see Pietro S. Nivola, “Can the Government Be Serious?” in Henry J. Aaron,
James M. Lindsay, and Pietro S. Nivola, eds, Agenda for the Nation (Brookings, 2003).
40
There is no end of citations that could be supplied for these precepts, but for one very good and concise synthesis,
see Edward M. Gramlich, “The Economics of Fiscal Federalism and its Reform,” in Thomas R. Swartz and John
E. Peck, eds., The Changing Face of Fiscal Federalism (New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1990), especially pp. 152-
167. A fifth advantage of centralization is sometimes added to the list: possible economies of scale. I do not
intend to treat this item separately, since, for the most part, it may be regarded as a variant of the public-goods and
the externalities arguments.
19
Convention