Much of this thread is seems to concentrate on the question as a national issue. Another basic principle of GOP policy has been to let the states deal with policy questions when they can, and in terms of business and labor policy, there has been a historical tendency to let the states act on their own.
So to discern GOP economic policy one has to go to the 50 separate state parties and see what is driving their economic policy. My sense is that there are some general similarities, but also real differences depending on the state's economic assets. It's like asking what is the economic policy of the European conservative parties (perhaps like EPP), where there are commonalities but also differences between member countries MPs.
Do you think there are any economic externalities with states doing their own thing, some of which might be quite negative as a race to the bottom? My idea is to let states experiment, find out what works, and then nationalize the issue, and then over time, let states experiment some more, so you have decentralization, and then centralization, and back and forth, with the delta function being what drives creative change, while minimizing the externalities. Does this make sense to you at all, as a Grand Unified Theory?
I admit I am a most odd Pub on this issue, because in general, I am hostile to "states rights," however much that might not comport with our political history.
Intrastate tensions are very interesting, with Illinois and NY perhaps being rather unique, since their respective major cities are so dominant, while having a substantial out state non major city population, but not enough to really have that much political power. Thus you have policies that work for the dominating cities, but don't work for the hinterlands. In NY, that has tended to result in upstate NY being an economic basket case. It just can't economically compete with a very robust social safety net, and high taxes, while having no high paying economic sectors that can afford to pay for it all. Now the end game, is to just live off government transfer payments, with a very anemic middle class. That is why in part, "states rights" sometimes don't work very well, because within some states, what is on the ground is just so different.
