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I'm going to do just that toward the end of this project. Briefly the idea is that government works best at the most immediate level and the country has grown to the point where that is no longer possible at the federal level. What I have in mind is a federal government slimmed down in role to something approaching the original idea, but that can't be done directly and immediately unless as the result of some drastic trauma which would probably better be avoided.

There are difficulties, of course. The existing government mechanisms are likely better to be absorbed by the states than all those bureaucrats - who are people too, I suppose - being cast out into the street. And some of them actually do know their topic, really. I've met a few. More to the point, they'll have to go along with the thing or it will never get off the ground. In preparation certain functions will need to be divested from the Executive, where they're essentially accountable only to the President and in office longer than he, to the Legislative, where at least we can vote their bosses out every two years. The departments of Commerce, Labor, and Education come to mind for starters. As I interpret Articles I and II the Executive has no business in those arenas anyway.

At that point the states step up. Yes, as Madison and Hamilton pointed out, within certain specific areas the multiplicity of state laws will be confusing and detrimental to the image of a single country with a single voice. But only within those areas - outside them, tough. Here I'm thinking of such things as appeal to social reformers eager to seize the center of power in order to universalize their passion of the moment - Prohibition, for one, which had no business ever in the hands of the federal government. Environmental policy, for another. This course will be resisted furiously by those perfectly happy to rule from a high throne, secure in the certainty that theirs is the only correct point of view. That, IMHO, is where the federal system has most been abused.

There are, of course, functions that a federal government really does do better, and defense, import taxation, and the regulation of interstate commerce are a pretty good place to start, just as Madison insisted in this essay. When I say I'm a de-Federalist for the same reasons they were Federalists, that's what I'm trying to express.

This would be silly utopianism on the order of Plato or of Hoppe were it not for the existence of a time-tested plan: the Constitution. It isn't perfect, far from it, but it's the only road I can see that is clear enough to tame the beast and with credibility far in excess of the sort of academic silliness that brought us Marxism. If we want one representative per 30,000 citizens it's going to have to be at the state level because Madison was correct about a House of 10,000 members not working.

There is, of course, the objection that replacing a bloated, unwieldy and arrogant federal government with 50 bloated, unwieldy, and arrogant state governments may not be much of an improvement. To that I'd answer perhaps, but at least they will be more accountable. Perhaps at that point we might consider a similar momentum toward county and municipal government. It is, after all, what both the Federalists and the anti-Federalists were thinking of.

This might be complete nonsense - I haven't really thought it through yet to my own satisfaction. But if we are to reduce the size of federal government and return a level of accountability to the citizen we'd probably better be considering the practical means of doing so. Wishing for it won't get us there, nor will the construction of utopias on a tabula rasa that we'll never see. We have to get from here to there, we can't simply start anew. IMHO, of course.

Now I'll open another beer and really tell you what I think... ;-)