alt Hacker NewsNo, because we do need the federal government to do stuff. We just need it to mostly do the opposite of everything that it's doing. We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things, by bringing a sledgehammer down on the factions that want to do those things.
> We don't need to reduce federal power, we just need to reduce the overall power to do bad things
If you define the bad things they're not allowed to do narrowly then they'll trivially avoid the restrictions while still doing bad things. What works better is to define the good things they are allowed to do. But then the good things have to be defined narrowly, because a broad definition makes it easy to get bad things into the tent.
So a proposal can either be to prohibit some bad things on paper while not really doing it in practice, or it can be to permit them to do only the things that have to be done federally for some specific reason and define them narrowly enough that it doesn't just let them do whatever they want. Those are the only real options.