cherry picking and excluding the middle: First, you\'re ignoring the obvious strengths of a centralized system. When policy is both good and uniform, questions of policy are settled well everywhere rather than in a particular state, province or territory. Also, the combined whole has a cumulative power that member states do not.
Second, you\'re ignoring the obvious weaknesses of a de-centralized system. Policy changes from place to place so that laws vary and large entities can play states off against each other.
Lastly, you seem to be excluding the possibility of a centralized federalist government which mixes the two models. As you pointed out, federalism has some great strengths and centralism has some very serious weaknesses. But the opposite is also true. The key is take the middle path falling off neither to the right nor to the left by architecting a system that mixes a strong centralized government within a federalist system in such a way as to both retard the abuses of centralized power and overcome the inherent weaknesses of decentralized governance.
But that is easier said than done. Aristotle argued that the best government is the mixed model of government that combines the best of monarchy, aristocracy and republicanism. But he apparently didn\'t see that one can also have a mixed formed of government that mixes the worst of these by combining tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule. I suspect that the same is true of the federalist question, that the real problem isn\'t so much in building a federalist or a centralized system (or some combination thereof) but in building a system that accounts for its own deficiencies. You want a system that has checks and balances, but not one that has so many checks and balances so as to not be able to get anything done.
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