Since the peanut gallery didnt have the nads to post here, I'll do it for them.
So sorry to hear that. Perhaps you can offer a thoughtful defense of libertarianism?
What was I wrong about? "States' Rights" argument has historically been used to disenfranchise minorities and virtually nothing else. It didnt even come into the collective consciousness until the Civil War era, prior to that it was considered to be an obscure piece of the Constitution. It has been commonly known to be a "code word" used by segregationists to defend segregation since the Great Depression.
If neo-liberals don't like something it's "racist".
states rights clause has to do with limiting the power of central government for obvious reasons, but since you have so much faith that government should tender your every need I see why you don't see a need for it.
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Alexander Hamilton explained the limitations this clause placed on the proposed federal government, describing that acts of the federal government were binding on the states and the people therein only if the act was in pursuance of constitutionally granted powers, and juxtaposing acts which exceeded those bounds as "void and of no force":
"But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such."
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oh hi Thomas Jefferson and James Madison what do you have to say?
"Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party....each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.
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Your narrative of states rights = racism, a shitty simplistic narrative? yes!
"The historian James McPherson noted that Southerners were inconsistent on the states' rights issue, and that Northern states tried to protect the rights of their states against the South during the Gag Rule and fugitive slave law controversies.
The historian William H. Freehling noted that the South's argument for a states' rights to secede was different from Thomas Jefferson's, in that Jefferson based such a right on the unalienable equal rights of man. The South's version of such a right was modified to be consistent with slavery, and with the South's blend of democracy and authoritarianism.
Between the slave power and states' rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states' rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas "by joint resolution" [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision - all triumphs of the slave power - did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states' rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina."
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there are good historical arguments for states rights because I believe beyond regulating interaction between people, regulating peoples actions directly is wrong. and that's what the federal government is becoming, central rule by committee, regulation and decree that bypasses due process.
