We Need 250 States

Have you heard about the folks who want to create North Colorado? The reader who sent me the link suggested that it was time to plug my essay We Need 250 states. There, I wrote,

In 1790, the largest state in the union, Virginia, had a population of under 700,000. Today, Montgomery County has a population of over 900,000. Our nine-member County Council answers to about the same number of registered voters as the entire House of Representatives of the United States at the time of the founding of the Republic.

We cannot have an accountable democracy with such large political units. We need to break the political entities in the United States down to a manageable size.

I have just started reading America 3.0, by James Bennett and Michael Lotus. One of the early chapters offers a utopian scenario for America in 2040 in which there are 71 states. In that scenario, people have sorted themselves in part by political preferences. That would not work for someone like me, who lives in a blue state but who does not want to move. I think we need the option of virtual citizenry. Imagine I paid user fees in Maryland for specific services here, but for most tax and policy purposes I lived in a virtual state with other libertarian-minded folks.

3 thoughts on “We Need 250 States

  1. Just read your 250 states proposal. Not sure if I read it at the time, but I found it interesting this time around.
    One area of disagreement, related to the practical implementation rather than the fundamental idea, is with granting each state populations of equal sizes. As populations change over time, you would be forced to change the boundaries. As an administrative unit, it is not ideal to have to constantly change the size. Instead, you could use something like a k-means algorithm (also what should be used instead of gerrymandering) and just make 250 states with a minimum number of people. These are the new states and they will have a number of House seats in proportion to their population that will be elected at-large (potentially from the state legislature).
    I like the idea of layering elections of both the House and the Senate on the state legislatures. The key, of course, is to ensure that you don’t have corruption at the state level. You argue that reducing the size reduces the corruption, but it doesn’t really change the incentives, just their magnitude.

  2. http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/23/yes-its-real-tim-draper-gives-details-on-ballot-initiative-to-make-silicon-valley-a-state/ The successionists seem to be taking over everywhere, that was a good essay Kling. Very likely the 50 states do not remain. I have also read where the US would best be served by dividing into 8 “optimal currency areas” http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-07/8-united-states-new-monetary-america

    So Mr. Kling, how long until we have our first new state or new currency? I had talked to one of Robert Mundells students (architect of the euro currency area) and she was convinced the Euro would not survive to 2020.

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