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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

>here’s zero national economic gain from _any_ variation in law from state to state

Yes there is. States compete with each other and this prevents any one of them from having laws that are much crappier and more oppressive than average because when that happens businesses and people leave.

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So competition might prevent one of many downsides to different states having different laws? I don't see why this means there's any benefit to that situation over just having one set of laws?

Depending on your political leaning, you wouldn’t want the same laws in GA as in CA.

That’s a relatively unusual leaning. Most people think their values should be universal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

Not as unusual as you would think, given that it is a basic principle of both the EU (despite what Eurosceptics would have you think) and the US.

You’ve just described variation as a way of mitigating the effects of variation.

There’s a case to be made for variation, but that ain’t it.

The model [1] GP alludes to claims that competition forces small governments to provide better (more efficient, more optimally chosen, etc) local services than monopoly governments, for the same reasons that competitive companies are expected to provide better services at a lower price.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiebout_model

Wrong. You'd move to New Hampshire if this was true.

How do you know I'm not planning to?

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