Decouple federal government from nation-states

A world of city-states should join federal governments à la carte.

I spent the fall writing about smaller, local governments—the state and the city—and the ways they might be empowered to have more autonomy.

I argued that US states should become more like EU countries and that cities could be even more autonomous. What if a US state could have universal healthcare like the Nordic Countries, I asked? What if a US city could manage its own immigration policy? 

What if we split the whole world into city-states?

I mentioned only briefly in those essays that I still thought we should leave some part of the United States federal government intact—at one point I called it the “United City-States of America.” That’s because, even if I think we should grant more authority to smaller governments, we still need the larger ones to protect us from war, manage our international trade and currency, and also very importantly: to keep local governments in check. 

That doesn’t mean I think we should get all of those things from one large federal government like the United States—I don’t. Rather, I think the United States and other federal governments should decouple federal governance into several independent government layers that city-states can join ad hoc. Think: A human rights layer, a military layer, an economic layer…

A world of city-states could then join those federal governments à la carte, rather than be stuck with the whole menu.