Federalism reform is needed to reinvigorate the economy

Federalism reform is needed to reinvigorate the economy.

At the most basic level, the U.S. needs more jobs— 12.1 million by one estimate—to recover the jobs lost during the downturn and keep pace with population growth and labor market dynamics. Beyond pure job growth, the U.S. needs better jobs, to grow wages and incomes for lower- and middle-class workers and reverse the troubling decades-long rise in inequality.¶ To achieve these twin goals, the U.S. needs to restructure the economy from one focused inward and characterized by excessive consumption and debt, to one globally engaged and driven by production and innovation. It must do so while contending with a new cadre of global competitors that aim to best the United States in the next industrial revolution and while leveraging the distinctive assets and advantages of different parts of the country, particularly the major cities and metropolitan areas that are the engines of national prosperity. This is the tallest of economic orders and it is well beyond the scope of exclusive federal solutions, the traditional focus of presidential candidates in both political parties. Rather, the next President must look beyond Washington and enlist states and metropolitan areas as active co-partners in the restructuring of the national economy. Remaking the economy, in essence, requires a remaking of federalism so that governments at all levels “collaborate to compete” and work closely with each other and the private and civic sectors to burnish American competitiveness in the new global economic order. The time for remaking federalism could not be more propitious. With Washington mired in partisan gridlock, the states and metropolitan areas are once again playing their traditional roles as “laboratories of democracy” and centers of economic and policy innovation. An enormous opportunity exists for the next president to mobilize these federalist partners in a focused campaign for national economic renewal. Given global competition, the next president should adopt a vision of collaborative federalism in which: ¶ the federal government leads where it must and sets a robust platform for productive and innovative growth via a few transformative investments and interventions; ¶ states and metropolitan areas innovate where they should to design and implement bottom-up economic strategies that fully align with their distinctive competitive assets and advantages; and ¶ a refreshed set of federalist institutions maximize results by accelerating the replication of innovations across the federal, state and metropolitan levels.

Barry R. Weingast, Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, February 2k, “The Theory of Comparative Federalism and The Emergence of Economic Liberalization In Mexico, China, and India”, http://www.stanford.edu/~weingast/weingast.comp.fedm.MS0.00.pdf, TB

Competition also induces subnational governments to provide a hospitable environment for factors of production, typically through the provision of local public goods, such as establishment of a basis for secure rights of factor owners, provision of infrastructure, utilities, access to markets, safety nets, and so on. Jurisdictions that fail to provide these goods find that factors move to other jurisdictions.

Brown 09, Graham K. Brown, Department of Economics and International Development, University of Bath, March 2009 “Federalism, Regional Autonomy and Conflict: Introduction and Overview,” Ethnopolitics, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1-4 pdf

John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary open the issue with a critical re-examination of the case against federalism. Although they concede that the track record of what they term ‘pluri-national’ federations appears uninspiring at best, they argue that the literature that extrapolates from this track record to a general case against federalism does so on the basis of a number of methodological and interpretative errors and omissions. Instead of broad arguments about the impacts of federalism, they argue for a more nuanced assessment that considers both the historical and the demographic conditions that may be more conducive to federalism, and the nature of the federalized institutions themselves, identifying six important factors. Conditions that determine the feasibility of federalism as a peaceful way of managing multiethnic societies, they suggest, include the presence or absence of a demographic Staatsvolk, and—following Stepan’s (2004) distinction between ‘coming together’ and ‘holding together’ federalism—the historical conditions under which federalization occurs. In terms of federal institutions, McGarry and O’Leary highlight the importance of ‘authentic’ democratic federalism, mutual agreed resource management regimes, consociational government at the centre as well as at the state level, and the size and number of federal units. Many of these themes are picked up by other contributions within the issue.
Impact – Tyranny
Federalism prevents despotism and protects individual freedoms

Walker 99 (Geoffrey Walker TC Beirne School of Law [, “Rediscovering the Advantages of Federalism,” Australian Law Journal, 1999 p. 1-25 accessed 7/10/08 from http://202.14.81.34/Senate/pubs/pops/pop35/c02.pdf)

The fifth advantage I want to put before you is that federalism is a protection of liberty. I mentioned earlier that a federal structure protects citizens from oppression or exploitation on the part of state governments, through the right of exit. But federalism is also a shield against arbitrary central government. Thomas Jefferson was very emphatic about that, so was Lord Bryce, who said that ‘federalism prevents the rise of a despotic central government, absorbing other powers, and menacing the private liberties of the citizen.’27 The late Geoffrey Sawer of the Australian National University in Canberra was a very distinguished constitutional lawyer. Although he was definitely no friend of federalism, he did have to admit that federalism was, in itself, a protection of individual liberty. Even in its rather battered condition, Australian federalism has proved its worth in this respect. For example, it was the premiers and other state political leaders who led the struggle against the 1991 political broadcasts ban. In fact, the New South Wales government was a plaintiff in the successful High Court challenge to that legislation, and that decision, I would suggest, was the perhaps the greatest advance in Australian political liberty since federation.