>The appropriate size and scope of government for an agrarian society is not the same as for a burgeoning industrial society is not the same as for a mature service-oriented society.

That may be true; it still doesn't tell you what the appropriate size is for each of those. Moreover, I'm talking about the size of the federal government, not the size of all government. I want government to make housing and education more affordable and provide for the care of the elderly etc., I just want it to happen at the state rather than the national level.

>Complaining that the government is big and that the government has inefficient policies are two separate complaints.

One is related to the other. The bigger you make something, the more surface area you create for corruption and waste. Look at the F-35 -- the estimated lifetime cost of that program is a trillion dollars. And most Americans don't even know it exists, because the national attention is focused on medicare and how to raise the tax revenue necessary to continue funding all of the programs that need not exist at the federal level.

>The fact is that once you take out parts of the government budget that are simply taking in checks from one group of people and getting them to another group of people, government expenditures have actually been shrinking relative to GDP.

The parts of the budget "that are simply taking checks from one group of people and getting them to another group of people" are the programs that I'm arguing shouldn't exist at the federal level.

>In practice what happens is that there is far less attention paid to local politics, which means that local government programs can get extremely dysfunctional before anybody starts paying attention.

I can see how this would be true in 1985 when a citizen's connection to the state capitol was almost entirely made up of the local newspaper's capitol reporter writing a weekly column on zoning regulations that almost nobody reads, but that was before the internet.

And a big part of the reason people don't pay attention to local politics today is that the federal government is doing the things the states should be doing. People aren't going to pay attention to things they don't care about. They care a lot about spending programs and taxes.

>C.f. San Francisco.

I'm not going to argue that there has never been an example of state-level waste or a mismanaged state or local government. The point is that when there is a mistake, the scope is limited to that area and we get a baseline in what the other states are doing to compare it against to determine how well it's working.

>Yet the history of federalism has been that the only experiments states are interested in running are how to suppress minority groups and women.

I'm not talking about repealing the Civil Rights Act. Things like that don't cost a lot of money.

And your statement is clearly false. California has been running a profoundly different public university system than, say, Texas. The services offered by New York are better tuned to the needs of citizens in a thriving metropolis. The services offered by Wyoming are better tuned to the needs of citizens living in rural areas. Why should we be so keen to crush local diversity and choice in spending programs?

Federal laws are terrible at things like that. Here's one important example: Most federal programs and taxes don't account for regional cost of living. So someone living in San Francisco making $70,000/year is paying a much higher federal tax rate, and is eligible for a much smaller subset of need-based federal programs, than someone living just outside Kansas City doing the same job who makes half as much money but also pays half as much for products and services and thereby achieves the same standard of living.