depressing thought of the day

Nothing like a bucket of cold water in the face:

But I don't think there is much hope for the idea of devolving authority. Once we have sold the idea (which we didn't succeed in selling until 1965) that the federal government is responsible for everything, the idea of state and local control doesn't make political sense. I'm not very optimistic about devolving control. It is just too easy for Congress to pass a law that imposes costs on others--unfunded mandates, etc. It is even difficult to define what an unfunded mandate is. If a radical devolution of powers was possible, it would have been done before. The assumption of states' rights is gone. There's no support for it in the Supreme Court and there's no support for it in public opinion.

Yikes, nothing like calling it as you see it. That's from an interview with James Q. Wilson, one of America's foremost public policy experts--and the author of one of the authoritative textbooks on American government and the one which served as HHS's AP textbook back in the day, for those that care. As much as I hate to say it, I think the closing remarks there are, unfortunately, spot on. What's worse, that interview was from 1995. If things were that bleak then, how much worse off are we now? As the title of the closing article in a recent Week issue asks, "How Dumb Can We Get?"