[mcny]

> Sorry, what's wrong with California regulating emissions?

Nothing. Ideally it would be at the federal level so California wouldn't have to do it though.

> If 90% of people in Alabama don't want weed legalized, don't force it upon them.

No. The hypothetical ninety percent of people in Alabama have no right to restrict the rights of the other ten percent. It doesn't affect them. They should stay out of it.

[AlexTWithBeard]

> The hypothetical ninety percent of people in Alabama have no right to restrict the rights of the other ten percent

My castle - my rules.

I have close to 100% right to restrict smoking in my home.

I have close to 0% right to restrict smoking on the whole planet.

The boundary is somewhere in between.

[mcny]

Absolutely. States rights is no panacea either. You’ll still have power struggle within the state and personally it makes no sense to devolve power to the state, or heavens forbid, county/parish or town level.

The federal government should say things like this is the baseline - you can go one way on it but not the other. Personally, I want more of this, not less. For instance, I want a federal land/property tax that local governments can’t just make go away in a race to the bottom.

I want a federal ban on capital punishment. Meaning no jurisdiction within these United States should have the legal authority to give capital punishment.

Devolving power lower doesn’t solve any problem. It is seriously scary if you’re a minority. And you don’t have to be black or gay to be a minority, you could just be the wrong denomination of Christianity.

From what I’ve read, we used to demonize everyone from the Irish, the Germans, the Italians. Nobody is safe from the tyranny of the majority and the more you devolve power to a local level, the more these problems will grow larger.

Personally the whole point of government is to protect the individual from the whims of the masses. If I want to smoke weed (I don’t but just an example), the rest of the town shouldn’t be able to tell what I can do. What if fifty one percent of a town decides it wants to be “whites only”?

[throwaway0a5e]

Why does this stuff need to be at the federal level? CA has a very different air quality situation than Alabama. Why can't they both regulate air quality as they see fit?