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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

this is a good point, but i think that's a symptom of the problem. fixing money in politics can help address this issue. currently, the balance of power between state governments and corporations is out of wack, and allows corporations to pull such shenanigans.

states that fall for short-term thinking (like giving factories tax-free deals) will continue to fall behind, but with reforms like these, the people can start holding their politicians accountable for crappy deals that don't really benefit the citizenry.

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> but i think that's a symptom of the problem. fixing money in politics can help address this issue

I don't think this solves the problem at all.

You don't need to be in the pocket of big corporations to want to have their high-paying jobs in your state.

Most of the cities and counties that give TIFs to walmart et al. are not in the pocket. They're just behaving rationally given the structural incentives they're being dealt.

> fixing money in politics can help address this issue.

The Warren proposal addresses corporate money in politics. It's not a total solution, perhaps, but it's also more concrete than most alternatives, and doesn't rely on either abolishing the defining feature of the corporate form or tossing out core political speech protections of the First Amendment, which are problems of the alternatives that aren't so vague as to be meaningless.

While it may be a symptom, and I'm 10,000% on board with getting money out of politics, I would still be entirely against leaving that kind of regulation to the states before any of that happens.

> "I would still be entirely against leaving that kind of regulation to the states before any of that happens."

the framers of the constitution very well understood that smaller governmental units are more responsive to, and less detached from, their citizens than larger ones, and as such, they created a carefully balanced distribution of power. the federal government was not meant to be 50 times larger than a state government, but rather, roughly equivalent in size and power, but with different responsibilities.

why give that up and let power concentrate in the hands of a few washington politicians? what do you gain as a citizen?

The small responsive unit of Delaware has an outsized effect on how corporations are run in all 50 states, and it cuts out the legislature of my state on certain aspects that were traditionally reserved to the states.

The framers never imagined that kind of commercial reach.

The federal gov't was designed to address such issues when they were proven to be significant, by those very framers, even if the framers themselves did not anticipate the specifics. That is what the commerce clause is about, among other things.

If the states were supposed to be doing that, then they've already failed miserably at their duty.

As for what I stand to gain, I'd say it's an end to the race to the bottom that I pointed out in my initial comment. No more would there be banks running to whichever state is willing to gut it's consumer protection laws. What good is it being in a state that respects consumers if the credit card companies are going to set up in South Dakota or Delaware and impose those rules on me?

The Tenth Amendment clarifies that conflict significantly, IMO, in favor of the states.

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