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The Devil In Devolution Summary

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According to the article The Devil in Devolution, the “devolution revolution” is seen as, “The shift in government’s center of gravity away from Washington and toward the states…” which translate to the return of power from the federal government to the state government. In recent years, the author of the article (Donahue) believes that the states have been given too much power, and the power of the federal government has been declining. The “tragedy of the commons” principle is when an individual abuses a shared resource to the point in which the supply is overwhelmed, and some people are unable to receive the resource. This applies to federalism because the states seem to be usurping all of the “power” from the federal government, so there …show more content…

Donahue discusses the issue of how Nevada decided to increase their revenue by making their divorce laws more lenient, so more people would travel there for their divorce. This would allow couples to dissolve their union, while helping the economy in a small, striving town. This relates to devolution revolution because it causes states to have to compete with their divorce laws in attempt to increase their revenue as well when Donahue just believes federal government should be able to set one widespread law. Finally, in his article, Donahue talks about the issue of when the states had the right to choose what kinda of “currency” they used which fluctuated the economy greatly. The states, back then, had the choice to choose paper money, and most of them did because they didn’t really want to pay taxes with their gold and silver. With this change in currency, the value fell and hurt the economic “reputation”. If the federal government hadn’t given the state governments the right to choose paper money they would have been much better off in the long run. Overall, in his article The Devil in Devolution, Donahue’s main point was the states were being given too much power and weren’t necessarily able to handle all the responsibility properly that comes with power like the federal government would have been able

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