I've been thinking a lot about how the U.S. is far too big for any meaningful federal governance (how can any policy possibly be tailored to fit the needs of New Hampshire, Georgia, Oklahoma and Oregon simultaneously?) and the reason it's so huge is because it allows us to tie together areas like NYC, Houston and LA into one massive, globally powerful GDP.

the lack of federal leadership during the coronavirus has made this very clear - because I don't believe things would have been particularly different with another president. our current president made everything worse and more difficult than it needed to be, but the idea that another leader would have managed to unilaterally unite the country in this crisis is a myth. the pandemic has shown how truly fractured we are in a way that makes unified federal leadership nearly impossible. the pandemic idea of breaking up into regional groupings of states was very smart in terms of being able to produce effective policy and probably a good idea of what should be done permanently.

but that would never happen, because it would mean fracturing our economic output. in other words, we are saddled with a massive, ineffective government that is always going to ignore a massive percentage of its electorate to make sure the stocks stay high.

this is only emphasized, for me, when looking at a list of the largest countries by land area, of which the United States is fourth. Russia and China, the 1st and 3rd, both solve the problem of governing giant land masses by having extremely strong, unilateral governments. naturally this runs into its own problems, like the Chinese time zones thing. you have to go pretty far down that list by size to find a country that seems well-governed (excluding Canada and Australia, which are two of the least dense countries on earth).

anyway, my overarching point is that countries really shouldn't be this big, but geography dictates economics, and economics (based solely on theoretical, top-level output) dictate power.