State's rights doesn't give power to the people. It gives power to mostly gerrymandered state legislatures and to appointed judges.
Click to cancel is popular among the people. It was blocked despite this. If the people had power (as opposed to lobbyists, or big business), this would had passed federally.
> State's rights is just about always the best way to go
Generally agreed. I live in Canada and think we would be much better off if we pushed more legislation away from the feds and to the provinces. The needs/wants of Alberta/Saskatchewan is much different than Quebec for example.
Gun control is a major divisive issue in Canada as gun control is 100% at the federal level, but the preferences of how it is handles varies hugely between provinces, so much so that some provinces are threatening to not enforce the federal laws.
Im fine with the feds managing border enforcement, immigration, and military — and collecting taxes to fund those programs — but other than that they should leave to the provinces.
The other alternative is that everyone is subject to the mob rule of the major population centers which have much different needs/wants then those outside of the centers. Why not just give the population centers what they want and those in rural areas what they want?
Gun control is harder to do like that because guns are physical objects and it's trivial to bring them across unmanned borders. Something like subscriptions are much easier to deal with because that can just be based on billing address.
It seems to work fine in the USA? Lots of guns illegal in California are legal elsewhere? There are also lots of municipalities that ban guns like NYC.
Also consider that huge amounts of illegal guns cross the Canadian federal border, despite there being border control.
Same thing with bear spray, illegal to carry in most cases but anyone over the age of 18 can get it because it has real legitimate uses.
> It seems to work fine in the USA? Lots of guns illegal in California are legal elsewhere? There are also lots of municipalities that ban guns like NYC
It works as well as having a peeing section in the pool
I see it that California has a pool where you aren’t allowed to pee in and Texas has a pool you are allowed to pee in. People are free to use whatever pool they want as long as they follow the rules of the pool?
Not really, there are lots of examples where you are not allowed to possess certain objects in certain places, I believe that guns are just a hot topic that results in knee jerk reactions. A simple example is I cannot ride an atv in certain forested areas during wildfire season, do we ban all atvs because someone may bring an atv in a place they are not allowed? No, we punish those who bring the atv where they are not allowed.
If you want to continue the pool analogy, many pools don’t let you bring in pool noodles and other floating objects into the lap swimming lane. That doesn’t mean you ban pool noodles, it means you kick people out who don’t follow the rules.
If someone possesses an object they are not allowed to have in a certain place they should be punished, the real problem is that Canada has a deteriorated rule of law where those who breaks the laws of the country are not stopped.
giving provinces too much power has generally been a problem for Canada, and a major goal of the current government is to bring more unity across provinces in terms of regulations, so that canadian markets are bigger than one province.
each province still has cities, so you arent getting away having cities dominate. instead, i think cities should be provinces to themselves, same as seattle and portland should both be states in the US. the rural albertans can take care of themselves without taxing calgary and edmonton.
Rural albertans have much more in common with people in Edmonton and Calgary than they do with rural Quebec.
I agree that the current trend in government is that feds are getting more power in Canada, but I dont think it is a good thing as now the entire country has to live under the rule of like 3 cities.
That’s good and all for things that begin and end within a single state. Some things really should be done at the federal level. I don’t think a single service I subscribe to is based in the state in which I live.
> The question: will companies segregate their customers? Everyone gets to click-to-cancel or is there now a dedicated code path just for the lucky few?
The answer to that is that companies will use geofencing to restrict click-to-cancel to only the states that pass such laws. We've already seen this happen on a national level, when Apple segregated the EU and the rest of the world on the topic of sideloading
> It's absurd that such laws would need to be passed 50 times for all US citizens to benefit from it. It should be done at the federal level.
You're missing an important reason why regulating at the state level first is a good idea: because it allows you to test the implementation with a small fraction of citizens before rolling it out.
Yes, basically everyone wants click-to-cancel, but actually writing good regulation is hard. Ideally, what would happen is that a few states would try things in different ways, and then when they figure out the best implementation, the federal government would pick up that implementation.
The problem here is that it’s testing the implementation details more than the generalized idea.
It’s as if I wrote code to process data in a certain way, write it for an old mainframe and to process a specific set of data. There’s not a ton of generalizability to other data, and how you implement the code on other systems will impact the outcome. Especially because there are few objective measurements to evaluate the success of legislation
> The problem here is that it’s testing the implementation details more than the generalized idea.
Well, the problem is that you can't test the generalized idea either. Even if a law is passed at the federal level, you're still only testing a specific implementation of a regulatory concept you want to implement.
Having a bunch of entities (the states) try implementing the same concept in different ways allows you to explore more of the solution space than if you only have a single entity (the federal government) do it uniformly upfront!
Yes, although this is expensive and harmful, there is little reason to think the bad experiments would adopt the winner, or that we can even measure the best outcome. Plus, for a lot of stuff - we don’t need experiments, we know what works!
As an example, is there any reason to think we need to do experiments on whether children are fed at school for free?
> little reason to think the bad experiments would adopt the winner
What does this mean? Not a coherent sentence.
> that we can even measure the best outcome
So, exactly the same as when it's done at the federal level.
> for a lot of stuff - we don’t need experiments, we know what works
In terms of legislation? Factually incorrect. Legislation/regulation is extremely difficult to get right and it's incredibly rare that there's precedent that is universally-agreed-upon to be beneficial in general, let alone when the states don't try their hand first.
> As an example, is there any reason to think we need to do experiments on whether children are fed at school for free?
Again, what does this mean? This isn't a coherent sentence either.
This is just not an appropriate response, but I'm happy you feel like you made your point. You can chalk up another internet point for p0wnage of someone you'll never meet.
It's entirely an appropriate response given that you made multiple factual claims without providing evidence, and you made several statements that just were incoherent and so I couldn't even understand what your points were.
> I'm happy you feel like you made your point
Factually, I did make my point. I made factually correct statements, and you responded with false claims and fallacies, and eventually realized that you couldn't actually refute my points and so started emotionally attacking me. That indicates that you don't understand the difference between feelings and things that are factually true.
> Was it your intent to shut down a conversation?
No, it was my intent to discover truth. Do you not realize that facts and truth matters and that you can't just lie about things? If you can't justify your positions with facts and logic, you're just a hypocrite and your opinions are meaningless.
Also, Hacker News is specifically about intellectual curiosity. I want to know if what you're saying is true, and engage with points that you make (feelings are not points), and so I ask questions and challenge. Emotional outbursts, like yours, are the polar opposite - they're anti-intellectual, and shut down curiosity.
But it's actually easier to get a law passed at the state level than at the federal level. As you can see, congress has a hard time passing meaningful laws right now, and from people I know who work there, it's largely because there's too much stuff for them to do - they simply don't have enough bandwidth. At the state level, you have fewer signatures you need to get on petitions, you represent a larger fraction of the constituents, your representatives are more sensitive to your demands, etc.
From a greedy/selfish perspective, having the states prototype laws before the federal government effectively offloads some of the regulatory burden onto the states.
And, when the law works, the other states tends to notice - you get political momentum.
States rights exist in the United States, regardless of if its been used for good or ill. The United States is a federation, and States Rights ARE a thing. States Rights are also used for professional licenses and insurance regulations, jumping to slavery is absurdism.
with the setup of the US, i wouldnt consider that states rights are a thing - the union is only a set of things that the union government womt do. thats nothing to say that the states are allowed to do it
> "Slavery and States' Rights" was a speech given by former Confederate States Army general Joseph Wheeler on July 31, 1894. The speech deals with the American Civil War and is considered to be a "Lost Cause" view of the war's causation. It is generally understood to argue that the United States (the Union) was to blame for the war, and downplays slavery as a cause.
It is absurdism. It is dismissing the 10th amendment because the argument was also used for slavery. No one is thinking that states rights wasn't an argument used for slavery. But this is arguing vegetarianism is evil because hitler was.
I argue it isn’t absurdism when the evidence is clear that the idea of state rights is continuing to be used to subjugate in direct conflict with democracy, versus the actual collective and agreed upon belief of deferring to states rights and putting power closer to the governance of those states.
Historically, it was slavery. Now it’s immigration, reproductive rights, etc. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. It’s always about control exceeding genuine governance. Maybe that'll change, but until evidence and outcomes demonstrate otherwise, "the purpose of the system is what it does."
History is written by the victors, and the fight never ends. Yesterday's Lost Cause remains just that until current affairs once more brings forth the need for a rebirth of old ideas. Big fan of cannabis legalization? Hop on the State's Rights bus. Don't think that one size fits all? Welcome to the State's Rights bus. Don't think that just because a psychopath is sitting in the highest Federal office, that the rest of the U.S. is obligated to help him? Welcome to the State's Rights bus. Don't think the Feds should be able to universally obliterate women's sovereignty to their own body? Hopefully welcome to the State's Rights bus until such time as we can get something back in play on the Federal level.
It's a disservice to associate a fundamental characteristic of our structure of government with one particularly egregiously unpopular use of it, or to wholesale dismiss it because it tends to be associated with things a lot of people find unpopular. That's rather the point. Arizona or New Mexico can tell off Nevada, who can tell off Utah, or Maryland that how they (Utah/Maryland) do things doesn't fly here.
If you've never been a State hopper, it doesn't quite click, but once you've traveled the U.S. and lived in several different regions for long enough periods of time, it clicks. Not all States are the same, and that's okay.
Allowing states to regulate subscriptions is different than slavery.
In particular, states shouldn’t have the right to restrict travel. If the slaves had free travel they would just leave for northern states. If people are able to leave to other states (even if it means rebuilding their life), plenty of bad state laws are OK because those affected will do so.
The 14th amendment says no state shall deprive you of your life or liberty, not a minimum of one state, should you have have the funds and will to move there.
Could I not make the same argument against you for authoritarian central state rule bullshit? Maybe in some European countries it might actually work alright in their current political climates. But how can you look at the US right now and be like "Yes, we need more centralized and powerful government despite the federal government already wielding far more power than ever before or ever imagined in the past." We have literal centuries full of lessons on why strong authoritarian governments are trash and inevitably result in oppression, corruption, internal conflict, and war.
Usually, it’s only “states rights” when conservatives want something. To be determined if this sticks as it rolls out to more states, or the federal government attempts to infringe on state authority. No different than the Missouri governor overriding voters and repealing voter-approved paid sick leave and minimum wage law, Ohio conservatives attempting to override voters on reproductive healthcare, Florida raising the bar for ballot initiatives, Texas gerrymandering efforts currently in progress, etc.
“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” -― David Frum
In 2018, voters passed the Better Boundaries ballot initiative, requiring our legislature to adopt non-gerrymandered congressional maps. In 2020, the legislature passed a law that effectively ignored the results of the initiative, and they drew even more gerrymandered maps after the census.
We sued the state, and last summer our Supreme Court unanimously agreed that, per the state constitution, the legislature does not have the power to unilaterally gut laws passed by ballot initiative after the fact.
So the legislature haphazardly put together their own ballot initiative that would have amended our constitution to give them the authority to ignore the results of ballot initiatives. This was put on our ballots, but our Supreme Court came through unanimously again, saying that the text of the initiative was grossly misleading and that they did not meet the constitutional requirement to notify the electorate far enough in advance of election day. This initiative was on our ballots as they had already been printed, but the results were not counted per the Supreme Court's order.
My state government is still fighting tooth and nail to kill Better Boundaries before the 2026 election. None of these lawmakers give a single shit about the will of the people.
Sinmilar thing happened in Missouri in the 90s, but without supreme court help. Voters put a law on the ballot, it passes, legislature passes another law cancelling it out.
So now when the voters want something they no longer put a law on the ballot, they put a Missouri amendment on the ballot. Those can't just be overwritten by a legislature law, those must either be found unconstitutional or canceled out by another amendment.
It's a fun game the voters of Missouri and their representatives have created for themselves.
Beat for beat what has happened in Ohio. Same for enshrining abortion rights in our state constitution. The state legislature is hostile to the will of the people.
State's rights is just about always the best way to go. It's nice to see the power being returned to the people.