Centralizers vs Tenthers on the Economy

“If only D.C. were more like Bejing!”

In an article that could have easily been entitled “Abolish the States,” Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, laments the ways the states have prevented the bureaucrats in D.C. from centralizing even more power. Why? Because the states aren’t draining wealth from their citizens fast enough as the feds! Read along as he enviously writes about the centralized structure of the Chinese!

But other major nations don’t have federal systems … They have states and municipalities, to be sure, but either the responsibility for funding most functions of government resides with the national government, or, as in Japan, state and local governments are not required to run annual balanced budgets. In China, which probably has had the most robust recovery of any major nation, taxes and spending for everything are set in Beijing (including the lower tax rates for provinces in which manufacturing for export is the main economic activity).

A brief review of this man’s article shows the contradictory viewpoints between centralizers and tenthers when it comes to the economy. Centralizers believe wealth is created only from government force while tenthers have faith that individuals and mutually beneficial transactions can create more wealth than a bureaucrat could ever dream up. One thing Meyerson is right about is that if you give the feds a monopoly on spending power, they’ll spend like no one else in the world.

Tags: Centralizers, Economy, Statists