In principle, I think Barton Swaim’s proposal that Congress should limit how much money states can offer companies to site in their jurisdictions would be a fine exercise of its constitutional power to regulate commerce. I wonder how workable it would be in practice. Wouldn’t states be able to circumvent any restriction by, in effect, saying, we’re certainly not giving a tax break to Amazon to locate their operations here, we just have a tax credit that benefits large multi-state companies whose names start with A? And wouldn’t you need a large and powerful central bureaucracy to knock down such state attempts?


Swaim invokes the European Union as an example of a government that has successfully moved against corporate subsidy-chasing; maybe someone who knows more about this issue can enlighten me in the comments about how much power the EU has had to assume to get the job done.