Saturday, February 28, 2009

Fight The Power

I've long thought the general libertarian preference for state/local versus federal power to be somewhat weird. It isn't that there aren't some good arguments for local control, it's that those arguments aren't especially libertarian unless you see Tiebout-style local government as sort of indistinguishable from the magical free market in action.

I'd cheer on my libertarian pals if they focused more attention on the abuses and bad policies of state and local governments, which really do impact the "economic freedom" they obsess about far more than does the federal minimum wage law.