Over at Neighborhood Effects, Mercatus Center and George Mason University’s economist Bob Nelson has an interesting post about the U.S. Senate and its relevance:

When the United States was founded, the ratio of the largest state in population to the smallest (Virginia to Delaware) was 13 to 1. Now it is 71 to 1 (California to Wyoming). The U.S. Congress makes most of its decisions by forging compromises that bring together large enough coalitions of winners to pass a bill. Senators from Wyoming and other sparsely populated states sell their disproportionately large voting rights for disproportionately large federal moneys (relative to population). That is a main reason farm subsidies have been impossible to curb: states like North Dakota and South Dakota trade Senate votes for this abundant source of federal money.
In many cases small states actually want the federal government taking responsibility because then federal money pays. This dynamic is apparent in the Rocky Mountain states where 50 percent of the land is federal — and, even if it were offered to them, states would refuse to take financial and administrative responsibility.

Read the whole thing here.

Nelson also points us to this article by Neal Pierce that asks whether state governments are obsolete.