L3 @ 51: “There are two reasons why I prefer subsidiarity:”

You make a good case — functionally — for pushing power down to a lower level. I had never thought about the comparison of the population between, say, Houston today and the entire USA at independence.

However, it would be better to start with the US Constitutional approach (paraphrased) — power resides in the people, now and forever. The people can choose to delegate certain powers to a level of government, and the people always retain the right to take those powers back.

You may call that “subsidiarity”, L3, and you may have good historical reasons for doing so. But in the modern world, “subsidiarity” has been stolen by the statists of the European Union. They not only stole the word, they reversed the meaning to the one that even you adopted: “we need to push authority much further down than the states”, i.e. authority belongs to the Center, who may deign to push it down to the peons.

George Orwell wrote extensively about the corruption of language. At the moment, the worst kind of EU/UN Neo-Stalinist could agree wholeheartedly with L3 on the need for “subsidiarity”, but would mean the opposite of what L3 means.

Power and money are intimately related. If we want an expanded federalism, we need to re-orient the money flows. Instead of money going directly to the center to dole out with strings attached, the money needs to go to the lowest governmental level (be that State or city), with any other level of government limited only to taxing the governmental level immediately below it.

Look at how the US Congress (for all its many faults) was able for years to reduce the damage done by the Neo-Stalinists of the UN by simply refusing to allocate money to it.