So what kind of consequences would making the Fed powerless have?
All sorts of crap. The exact results involves so many variables it's not really worth considering much of the particulars. Still, some of the bigger things you have to remember:
Most of our states are not particularly self-sustaining; even the ones that are net exporters in terms of finances or physical output rely quite a bit on interstate and international commerce in one realm or another of their industry and infrastructure. Remove the framework existing and enforcing the means to trade between states and across borders (i.e. the federal government and specifically the portions related to trade) and pretty much
everyone is fucked. How
hard varies by region, but the possibility of any individual state (or, frankly, any political entity of meaningful size on the planet) benefiting much on the net from a federal dissolution (in practice if not name) is basically nil. Trade and whatnot
could be reworked, settled into new paradigms and whatnot, but... you'd be looking at decades. Possibly centuries. Before all that got sorted out. And in the meantime everything works worse; shipments have harder times getting around, there's next to no surety of encountering one set of business/legal conditions in one area as another (i.e. investment conditions in what used to be the US goes to complete shit. Have fun with that.), and on, and on, and on. The concept of the fed dissolving is one that would have any sane businessperson waking up screaming in terror during the night. Similarly any and every one that deals
at all with anything involving logistics, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc. Nightmare doesn't even begin to describe it.
Education standards would be fucked. There would be no accreditation that was not regional, and basically none of those could be trusted. Existing accreditation would effectively be nulled. Communication between schools -- i.e. for transferring, moving, etc., etc., etc. -- would be buggered in about seven thousand different ways. Eventually things might settle down on that front, but you'd either be looking at approaching-50 state contracts or states that were just complete garbage and had next to no capability of sending their people elsewhere (you want to know how many colleges are going to spend notable effort bringing people from a state with a failed education system up to par? Ha.) or digging themselves out of the hole.
Corollary to the first, transportation would be fucked. You could not be assured you could go across state borders without facing immediate legal consequences. Your license would be shit, your tag would be shit, the standards you were previously operating under would be shit and fluctuating even harder than they already do every few dozen miles. Moving would now be equivalent to goddamn
immigrating. Long distance transportation would have to deal with even more legal and procedural hoops than they already do. Interstate or cross country transportation lines (highways, railroads) would now face radically shifting conditions in regards to funding and maintenance. You now have (at least, who knows if some states would splinter under the conditions ensuing) 50 different entirely distinct flight zones, most of which do not have much experience with treating their own airspace as singular. Good luck. Also none of that is exhaustive, of course. There'd be whole hosts of other crap going down on that side of things.
Infrastructure would be fucked. Any area that requires resources or connection to other areas -- like water, electricity, communication lines (telephone, internet, etc.) -- would now have to renegotiate pretty much every aspect of what they previously did, and gods help them if there's more than two state actors involved or one of the ones they need to work with is now belligerent. Most of them would no longer have the same degree of financial, material, or human resource support. You would shortly see power outages, water quality and access failures, broken communication lines, and so on. These
might clear up, eventually, but it would not be short, it would be painful, and it would be expensive in an environment where every aspect of economy just got kicked in the reproductive organs with a spiked rocket-powered pneumatic repeater boot.
Healthcare would be fucked. Good luck maintaining even a facsimile of a sea to sea baseline for medical professions. Good luck actually maintaining any sort of database or register or something like it that tracks what sort of background and qualification any particular person claiming to be a medical professional has. Good luck keeping various regional medical issues from spreading. Good luck doing anything continent wide (such as HIV outreach, medical research, and on, and on, and on). Good luck knowing what happens to you if you're in a different area and shit goes down. Good luck with that previous system of healthcare that was keeping millions of our elderly (among others) from straight up dying. Take all the good luck you can get, you're going to need it.
... and honestly, now I'm tired of trying to list just the
major ways we'd all be screwed by it. That ain't all of it, I've just run out of steam. Imagine if all of europe had been in the EU for a couple centuries, had no or next to no previous precedent tailored to the individual countries to fall back on in regards to cross-border interaction, had significantly higher degrees of codependency, and decided, "Nah, let's just junk this shit."
There's a (lot of) reason(s) why, while I may be able to follow the reasoning and ideological basis behind the GOP perspective on governing, I am not even
remotely a republican. Even if I had any other ideological crosstab going on with the other aspects of their platform, that one
alone, the insistence and pursuit of a minimized federal government, is something that as far as I'm concerned is equivalent to national-scale suicide. It would
end this chunk of north america as an economic or political power.
People that think the effects would be relatively small or even not frankly disastrous do not realize how interdependent our states and the systems within them are, nor how dependent that interdependence is on the federal framework, nor how poorly prepared our states are to even
consider fracturing from a logistical/economic/etc. standpoint. Absolutely huge swaths of our lifestyles and economic and legal frameworks are incredibly reliant on the basic concept of being able to go from one place to the next and face relatively similar conditions. Of certain laws being enforced in one place largely they same as they are in another, in certain standards being met in regards to infrastructure/construction/etc. between one side of a state border and another, and so on, and so forth. Among all the other stuff it does,
that is the federal government. Take that away and you effectively rip out the core of american political systems, economic systems, infrastructure systems, education systems, and continuing onward until you've covered just about every goddamn thing this country and its constituent parts does. You'd have to rebuild the whole thing from something that's so close to scratch the practical difference is academic, and you'd have to rebuild it something approaching fifty different times, each of them in relation to fifty different political entities that are
also building in relation to fifty others.
tl;dr: Shit is the
worst juju. Or close enough it probably doesn't matter.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4235203 times)