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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I think this is silly. That said...

> “Why are you trying to have the federal government come in and tell us what we can do in our own state? Prime example that the federal government is not focusing on what they need to be.”

My guy, you're welcome to decline Federal highway funding.

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There is value in discussing when the federal government is potentially overstepping.

I'm very curious about whether this new rule stems from accident data near the funny signs, and I wish the article had dug into that question a bit.

FOIA request? :) https://www.muckrock.com/ Enable crowdfund mode for the request and I'll pay the $5.

In practical terms this is like saying "you're welcome to decline food". Part of the argument for limiting federal government in the first place is to prevent this kind of arm twisting.

> In practical terms this is like saying "you're welcome to decline food".

And that's true. Federal road funding for highways comes with some specific regulations and conditions, on signage, minimum bridge heights, etc. To extend the food analogy, if someone's gifting you free food, it's probably a bit rude to complain you don't like the parsley garnish.

This misses the point, you can't actually decline this funding. The federal government taxes it out of your state and then gives it back to you with conditions sidestepping the fact it would be brazenly unconstitutional for the federal government to institute these rules directly.

Trump poked the bear with this one by trying to withhold unrelated federal funding to sanctuary cities and Obama got made folks really mad when he tried it with the ACA.

You absolutely can. States did exactly that with Medicaid expansion funding; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid_coverage_gap

This would be an even bigger waste than that, given the relatively small condition being applied, but opting out for ideological reasons is clearly doable.

You're making a thing that's grey out to be black and white. You can impose conditions on money that is deemed by a court to actually be feasible to decline which is why medicaid expansion was ruled constitutional but tying those conditions to medicaid funding in its entirety would have likely been slapped down based on the opinions after the case.

And with this court who has an axe to grind with expansion of federal power I expect the bar is much lower now.

> My guy, you're welcome to decline Federal highway funding.

Everyone keeps blathering about "states rights"... but these have been moot ever since the Minimum Drinking Age Act, in which the federal government got its way by what is essentially extortion [1].

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

Paid for by citizens in your state.

My guy you're free to decline conscription and impressment and the draft. You'll just end up dead or in jail!

No, you're not free to decline conscription. You'd go to jail.

Similarly, "free speech" doesn't mean you can't be fired for it, but it does mean you can't be criminally punished for it. Nothing in the Constitution requires the Federal government to pay for a state's highways.

The federal government doesn't pay for anything, the citizens do

If you're going to take that approach, said citizens elected successive governments that set up and sustained the regulatory regime that leads us right back to this point.

The gun points one way

I agree, and there is great value in standardizing traffic control devices across state lines.

Which is paid for by an outflow of money in the form of taxes (of various types)

My guy, this is called extortion.

There's extensive legal jurisprudence saying otherwise, including in the specific case of interstate highway funding. (As pointed out elsewhere in the comments; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole)

I don’t really see how “I’ll give you money to build roads as long as you don’t put silly signs on those roads” counts as extortion.

>My guy, you're welcome to decline Federal highway funding.

Wait until you see what happens if universal basic income becomes a thing.

Some states declined the ACA's Medicaid expansion, at great cost to their citizens. I'd fully expect some to do the same with UBI if administered in similarly state-managed but Federally-funded fashion.

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