> Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result.

Oh, that one is easy. The original US constitution gave the federal government the right to preempt state laws in matters within its enumerated powers, but placed strict limits on what those powers are, and created a check against federal overreach by creating the US Senate, which originally had its members elected by state legislatures who would thereby send Senators disinclined to let the federal government usurp their powers.

Then populists amended the constitution to cause US Senators to be directly elected, and since US Supreme Court Justices are confirmed by the Senate, that in turn allowed them to replace the Justices with ones who would do things like read the inter-state commerce clause as covering non-commerce happening entirely within a single state.

Having eliminated any meaningful constitutional restrictions on federal power, federal officials were then captured by large corporations to enact federal regulations that only those large corporations can comply with, and to erode any federal constraints on corporate mergers while still preempting the states from imposing them either.

You can't give the central government the authority to do something and then expect them not to. If you don't want them to do something, you need something actively constraining them from doing it. Which was the US Senate until it wasn't.

I am not criticizing your historical explanation or your comment, but I would like to make a footnote:

Sometimes narratives like these which lay out a simple cause-and-effect between political decisions and modern outcomes can make people think that reverting the situation is a solution to modern outcomes, but that is rarely the case.

Everything evolves, and the solution to modern problems is to find a solution that works within modern constraints.

There is more than one possible structure to sustain an active constraint against power grabs, to be sure. But a Senate elected by the state governments was effective in doing it for as long as it was in place. There are other things that could work instead, but sometimes the old thing only stopped working because it stopped happening. And either way you would still need the something else to be used instead rather than continuing the status quo which is objectively not achieving the intended purpose.

You have done nothing to demonstrate any of those claims, though. Make your case without the appeal to history to make it valid.

It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory.

Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations preempted by federal laws unnecessarily and don't want excessive federal spending because money collected in federal taxes can't be collected in state taxes and taxpayers have a threshold level of total taxation they're willing to put up with

So I'm not sure what you're asking for other than logic and evidence.

> It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory.

This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.

> Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations preempted by federal laws unnecessarily and don't want excessive federal spending because money collected in federal taxes can't be collected in state taxes and taxpayers have a threshold level of total taxation they're willing to put up with

You are assuming a whole lot in that logic.

1. That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation

2. That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes

There is no logic or evidence when you get rid of the history and the wrong assumptions.

> This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.

We currently have evidence of what happened both before and after, but the before was ~100 (not 300) years ago. If you want evidence from modern day you would have to actually repeal it. Shall we give it a go?

> That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation

The required incentive is present even if the federal officials are in the same party as the state ones.

Suppose the banks are up to some shenanigans and the position of the party in power is to regulate them. Do the state-level officials want the federal government to do that, preempting them from doing it at the state level and letting the federal officials take the credit? No, they want to do it and get the credit themselves.

> That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes

In order to spend more money without raising taxes, they would have to borrow more or print more money.

The amount of money they print is essentially set by the Fed according to their inflation and economic targets and that isn't likely to change.

They already borrow about as much as they can get away with without causing major immediate problems; if they could borrow more instead of taxing more they would be doing it already. And borrowing isn't free money. It puts the taxpayers on the hook for both the principal and the interest, and the state legislators wouldn't want either of those coming from their taxpayers. Not only that, federal bonds compete with state government bonds for investment capital, so state legislators wouldn't want more federal debt either because it would make it harder for them to issue state debt.

None of your arguments are as logical or self-evident as you assume they are, and anyone who walks through them will figure that out. But baking them in as implicit through a historical example can get them through a lot of defenses and that is what I was warning about. That was my point.

Cities (and other types of local governments) never really had any legal rights on their own. They have always been creatures of the states.

Federalism is having power divided, so we have gone away from federalism, not towards it. And I personally believe very strongly that it has been disastrous for our nation to do so.

In US context it's somewhat ambiguous because of the historical use of the term "Federalist" to denote supporters of the new Constitution (which was more centralized than the Articles of Confederation) and "Anti-Federalist" to denote the opposition.

I would argue. This is too brought a stroke. Federalism has been stripped away, yes, but if it had been done with some other rules in place and notifications so that smaller organizations can effectively pick up the baton, I would argue it could have worked better.