Getting back to the subject of this post,
I just got the Pirate stuff I had ordered from Sweden, to help support the Pirate Party. I know of course that they couldn’t (and certainly shouldn’t) win, but I couldn’t resist showing those who were strong-arming Sweden into heavy-handed raids on the Pirate Bay that there were those who had had enough of things like that. A midwestern Architect makes a donation to a small Swedish political party–that must be the long tail, right?

As someone working on many projects in which sustainability is an issue, not all of them in US, I will simply say that to avoid the problem of the free-rider, as some term it, or the tragedy of the commons as Jared Diamond puts it in his super excellent book Collapse certain environment laws must be international, because that is the scale of the ecosystem we all need to protect. Certain items certainly can be dealt with on a local level, but many cannot.

Getting back to the subject of this post, I just got the Pirate stuff I had ordered from Sweden, to help support the Pirate Party. I know of course that they couldn’t (and certainly shouldn’t) win, but I couldn’t resist showing those who were strong-arming Sweden into heavy-handed raids on the Pirate Bay that there were those who had had enough of things like that. A midwestern Architect makes a donation to a small Swedish political party–that must be the long tail, right?

This isn’t an all-or-nothing issue. I agree with you that it’s a good thing that the 14th Amendment empowered the federal government to protect individuals against violations of their rights by the states. But the fact that the federal government has a role in protecting basic rights doesn’t mean that we should federalize everything. There no reason that we need a national retirement system, a national welfare system, or national education standards. Nor is there any particular reason for national laws about medical marijuana, euthanasia or marriage.

These are subjects about which people have legitimate disagreements, and so it makes sense that they should be made at a level closer to the people affected.

I also think it’s a mistake to see this as an issue that would primarily benefit conservative or libertarian causes. To take one issue at random: in many ways, I think environmental laws would be stricter if they hadn’t been federalized. California would like to have stricter clean air rules than the federal government’s rules, but the federal government preempted state law when it enacted federal standards. And, of course, the Federal Marriage Amendment is an attempt to usurp the sovereignty of states in the area of marriage.

The issue is how the right balance should be struck, and I think it’s pretty clear that things are presently tilted toward too many decisions being made at the national level.

One of the deep problem with Libertarianism is that it has yet to internalize the Civil War, on many levels. One of those lessons: It doesn’t work to have half a country where some people are regarded as property, and half where they have human rights. And the Founders tried very very hard to make that work, because it was such a deep division. But it tore the country apart.

To spell it out: You can’t declare yourself a Confederate, so that you can own slaves. You can’t have some market choices, like whether or not to have a market in slaves.