Protecting Constitutional Liberty Through Federalism: Jonathan Williams on American Radio Journal

Calls for a larger federal government are hardly new. What is remarkable is how often advocates of big government socialism assume that electing the right people in Washington is enough to remake the country. It isn’t. The Constitution was designed to resist centralized government based on the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and the healthy skepticism our founders had about the concentration of power in a central government.

Thus, in our system of government, political power is divided not only among Congress, the executive branch, and the courts but also between Washington and the states. That division is not an inconvenience. This decentralized government through federalism is one of the very safeguards of American liberty.

Consider proposals such as Medicare for all, tuition-free college, highly restrictive taxation, a universal basic income, and regulations intended to rapidly move the economy away from affordable and reliable energy. These proposals share an assumption that America can be reshaped from the top down if only big government politicians acquire enough power. In more centralized political systems, national governments can impose sweeping changes like these with relatively few institutional obstacles. Thankfully, our American system works differently. Presidents and members of Congress operate within constitutional limits and must contend with courts, state governments, and voters. Power is deliberately dispersed.

The states are an important part of this system because they provide something Washington cannot: competing models of government. State governments make decisions about education, taxation, regulation, infrastructure, and public safety. They do so differently, allowing Americans to observe what happens when government takes different approaches to the same problems. Justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states laboratories of democracy. The phrase remains useful because experimentation requires more than ideas; it requires the ability to observe consequences: one state raises taxes; another cuts them. One expands regulation; another reduces it. One changes how schools are financed or operated, and others can reserve the results. Successful policies can be copied, and unsuccessful ones can be rejected.

The process becomes more consequential because Americans are not permanently stuck with the policies of their state government. People vote with their feet and move. Moving is an expensive and disruptive exercise, so most Americans don’t cross state lines casually. But when large numbers nonetheless leave one state for another, their decisions contain information. They reveal something about the relative attractiveness of different combinations of state policy. Migration is therefore much more than a demographic statistic alone; it is a constraint on government power.

State governments depend on taxpayers. When residents leave, they take future economic activity, tax payments, and even charitable contributions with them. When businesses and workers choose another state, policymakers must confront the costs of making their jurisdictions less attractive. The movement of Americans from states such as California, New York, and Illinois toward states such as Texas, Florida, and Arizona illustrates the point. Migration has many causes, and no single policy explains every move. But governments ignore these movements at their own peril.

Federalism creates competition among governments. That competition imposes discipline that political promises in Washington often lack. A politician can promise that a new federal program will solve a problem. A governor, though, must eventually confront taxpayers and businesses that can leave if the price becomes too high. That’s why the Constitution’s division of power and federalism matter.

The Founders did not create a system in which a temporary political majority could simply impose its preferred vision on the entire country. They created a system in which power would be divided, decisions would be contested, and ambitious programs would face multiple institutional barriers. Those barriers are sometimes portrayed as failures of government. They are better understood as safeguards against government overreach in many cases.

The difficulty of imposing Medicare for all, rapidly eliminating fossil fuels regulation, or dramatically expanding federal regulation and redistribution is therefore not merely a matter of political arithmetic. It reflects a constitutional structure designed to prevent concentrated power from producing concentrated mistakes. There’s a wisdom in that restraint. Government officials, like everyone else, can be wrong. The larger the government program and the broader its reach, the greater its cost when assumptions prove wrong. Federalism limits that damage by allowing different jurisdictions to pursue different policies rather than focusing the entire country into a national experiment with the policy gone wrong. That’s not an argument for perfect state policies or perfect markets. It’s an argument for humility about political power.

Americans do not need Washington to make every state alike. They need a system that allows states to differ, citizens to choose, and governments to learn from consequences. The genius of this federalism is not that it guarantees good policy in all locations; it is that it makes bad policy much harder to impose everywhere at once. That’s a feature of our Constitution, not a bug.