Summations Only

I hope I never grow so old that I can't tell the difference between right and wrong. Funny, though, that you usually accuse us of moral relativism. "Can't see the water in which you swim", indeed.

After the election I assumed he'd have come out of the woodwork to tell us all that America is gonna go straight to hell, now, having re-elected the Muslimoatheist Socialist Foreigner from Chicago, but neither hide nor hair. Was the shock too much for him? Or did he already decamp for the refuge of Canada?

They're terrible and useless and should be disbanded. There's a legitimate need for local government and a legitimate need for national government. There's no rational purpose for having intermediate pseudo-state government in between.Let them persist as historical curiosities, boundaries on a map. But state legislatures should not be allowed to make law. Your vote shouldn't matter more or less based on the population of your state, or whether you live in a city or a farm.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

There are no such matters. States are simultaneously too large (they encompass too many different types of land and community) and not large enough (they don't encompass all instances of a land or community type.) Anything relevant to a single geographic area is appropriate for the local government. Anything relevant to multiple communities as a whole is appropriate for the national government, because it's a problem faced by all communities.

You understand that I'm not actually a frog, right? That the image beside my posts is not a self-portrait? It would be, but why would it? Roads are exactly the sort of thing that is properly a matter for national authority. Why should the roads be different just because you drive on them from Minnesota to Iowa? Yet you drove home on Federal Interstate 35, probably. Or maybe Federal Interstate 94. I did all the time, when I lived in Minnesota. But I guess knowing about the Federal Eisenhower Interstate System - and you not having heard of it, apparently - is more evidence of my "ignorance."Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

That's my point. Nothing is appropriately a state-level matter. It's either inherently local - an issue of circumstance related to conditions experienced only by a single locality - or inherently general - an issue faced by all communities. States only handle issues - like roads, for instance - because we artificially divide those issues up, hand them to the states, and say "ok, you handle this, but only for these randomly-selected geographically-proximate Americans and not these others."I dunno, maybe you have to live in a city like DC to understand how fucking stupid that is. There's no purpose to having states.