> It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory.
This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.
> Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations preempted by federal laws unnecessarily and don't want excessive federal spending because money collected in federal taxes can't be collected in state taxes and taxpayers have a threshold level of total taxation they're willing to put up with
You are assuming a whole lot in that logic.
1. That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation
2. That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes
There is no logic or evidence when you get rid of the history and the wrong assumptions.
> This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.
We currently have evidence of what happened both before and after, but the before was ~100 (not 300) years ago. If you want evidence from modern day you would have to actually repeal it. Shall we give it a go?
> That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation
The required incentive is present even if the federal officials are in the same party as the state ones.
Suppose the banks are up to some shenanigans and the position of the party in power is to regulate them. Do the state-level officials want the federal government to do that, preempting them from doing it at the state level and letting the federal officials take the credit? No, they want to do it and get the credit themselves.
> That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes
In order to spend more money without raising taxes, they would have to borrow more or print more money.
The amount of money they print is essentially set by the Fed according to their inflation and economic targets and that isn't likely to change.
They already borrow about as much as they can get away with without causing major immediate problems; if they could borrow more instead of taxing more they would be doing it already. And borrowing isn't free money. It puts the taxpayers on the hook for both the principal and the interest, and the state legislators wouldn't want either of those coming from their taxpayers. Not only that, federal bonds compete with state government bonds for investment capital, so state legislators wouldn't want more federal debt either because it would make it harder for them to issue state debt.
None of your arguments are as logical or self-evident as you assume they are, and anyone who walks through them will figure that out. But baking them in as implicit through a historical example can get them through a lot of defenses and that is what I was warning about. That was my point.
This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.
> Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations preempted by federal laws unnecessarily and don't want excessive federal spending because money collected in federal taxes can't be collected in state taxes and taxpayers have a threshold level of total taxation they're willing to put up with
You are assuming a whole lot in that logic.
1. That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation
2. That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes
There is no logic or evidence when you get rid of the history and the wrong assumptions.