Article by Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan: “…The scholarship on state capacity emphasizes the plurality and unevenness of state capacities. For example, states can strengthen their capacities in some areas, such as repression, while self-consciously weakening their capacities in others, such as corporate regulation. States exercise their power for different ends and use assorted means, some good, some bad. Some state agencies deliver health care for millions, while others target working-class people through tax audits and imprisonment. Moreover, we care not just about the state’s capacity to act, but also about the democratic legitimacy of those actions. States make some decisions through democratic means, such as legislation and regulation based on public input and consultation, and others through undemocratic methods, such as court decisions. And while state capacity entails the ability of the state to pursue its own goals autonomously from powerful social groups such as large corporations, there are other social groups, like poor communities suffering the effects of environmental racism, that do not have enough power to influence the state.
Taxation, spending, regulation, and public provision are all aspects of state capacity. A prerequisite for a state that meets even Weber’s minimal criteria would be fiscal capacity: the ability to collect taxes and direct public resources to the state’s desired ends. On the taxation front, U.S. state capacity is clearly heading in the wrong direction, with corporations and wealthy individuals openly pursuing a multitude of tax avoidance strategies with little fear of negative consequences. At the sub-federal level, states and municipalities compete with one another for private investment via offers of deregulation and subsidies, allowing powerful corporations to choose the level of regulation and taxation they desire. On the spending side, the federal government’s reliance on private contractors and unwillingness to use its bargaining power as a large buyer means it has limited control over military procurement costs…(More)”.
