> Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different

> Let different US states have different laws (that the Federal law cannot trump) and let's see through experimentation which set of laws is best for different sets of people. This only makes the chunking smaller, not fundamentally removes the chunking that you objected to. ("Chunking" in this sense meaning that we have a region ("chunk") that has to all follow the same law picked by some fixed (possibly local) strategy, such as majority wins or other common voting strategy.) I actually agree with the concept that the chunks should be smaller about many things than they currently are in the US, and that the US generally has too many federal laws. The problem with your answer to the question posed, however, is that we still aren't sure what we mean by "best", except just to ask every body and take some kind of "most popular answer wins" or averaging strategy. Fixing a heuristic like "best" allows you to deduce (most of) the rest of the things you need to figure out. One obvious potential problem with this strategy, which is the point of federalism to address, is that the equilibrium reached by allowing each chunk to vary its laws and people to move freely between them, is that we might settle on to a suboptimal equilibrium (or never converge) which is considerably worse than one we might have discovered via planning. Obviously, the current state of affairs isn't what many people would think of as optimal either. So the question, at least as I see it, becomes "What mechanic do we focus our effort on to fix?" As someone who thinks that voting is a useful mechanic, my answer would be that addressing the voting mechanics would allow the law to more accurately reflect the desires of people governed and allow for better selection of heuristics for decision making. Your stance seems to favor just removing large segments of what exists, and seeing what gets invented to fill in the gaps.