The Texas ban on fracking bans and Minnesota's decision to allow shoddy pipelines to run through territory against the wishes of those living in the territory effectively remove the people potentially affected by the decisions from the decision making process.
Not accurate. Instead what has happened is that something that the people want to be a local decision has been elevated to state politics. The entire state may have an interest in the tax revenue generated by fracking, so the entire state and not just the nearest local people get a say.
To change things you have to affect politics on a state level. There is no obvious reason why deciding things on the state level should be defined as undemocratic.
Some place within your state is going to be the site for handling the waste your state generates. Somebody is going to decide how much water everybody in the state gets to use out of some river that wanders from town to town. And the correct decision is not to let individual towns vote to hog all the water or to let everybody vote to ship the garbage everywhere but their own town.
I understand that the locals feel that only their votes should count, but fracking affects jobs in nearby counties and may affect the economy of the entire state which in turn affects how much money gets spent on educating everyone's kids and whether or not the state can afford to give poor people health care. Many people in the state, even those who live nowhere near the fracking sites have an interest.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King
If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams