It's an argument against allowing democracy to engulf too many aspects of our lives, especially when it comes to the "one size fits all" democracy of the Federal government.
Why should voters in Wisconsin get a say in what chemical substances I put into my body where I live? They shouldn't. It's unnecessary and just opens our government up to all sorts of abuses of the system.
So many things in our lives should be left to us, not decided upon by politicians in DC who were put there by voters in other states who are completely ignorant of our lives and circumstances.
The problem is: Where do you draw the line? How do you determine what should be left to us as individuals and what should be decided via the force of majority-rules democracy? Potentially everything could be left to the free market so there is no line to draw which wouldn't be to some extent, arbitrary. We could argue that the majority can decide what the limits of the government could be, but that would be government deciding its own limits. Not the best idea if you want a small government.
The US Constitution had some great lines drawn and it required much more than just majority rule whims to change it. Unfortunately, it's been butchered by politicians and the courts and that butchering has effectively become law through practice and precedent. The US Constitution had a good run, but it's fairly ineffective now.
If you're just asking a philosophical question about where to draw the line -- Libertarians have put a great deal of thought into this matter. The non-aggression principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle) may not work in absolute terms, but it would be nice to move toward it to battle the continual feature creep of the federal government.
Societies, governments, and businesses have life cycles. America had a great start with the idea of Liberty being central to everything (except the ironic scourge of slavery). That notion of Liberty attracted people all over the world who helped turn the US into the super power that it was. Over time, though, the success and ends that Liberty created became more powerful than the core message of Liberty itself.
Now here we are. The Takers have infected our society to such a degree that all of our societal "safety nets" are headed for near-inevitable bankruptcy. Unless people wake up pretty soon and realize that we have to act responsibly, we're pretty much doomed to suffer a great amount of financial upheaval in the next 25 years. With the new season of Dancing With the Stars underway, though, I doubt anyone will have time to worry much about Liberty.
If a solution can be local, it should be. The reason the US Constitution was so limited in the powers that it gave the Govt was because those powers not listed were to be left to the states. That was what the 10th amendment was all about.
It's been very much ignored over the last 90 years, and that's a shame.
But how are you going to make voters accountable for their votes? That was my initial question and despite all the talk about federalism you have yet to answer...
You can ask all you want, but I didn't claim to have a solution to that problem. It's a fundamental flaw with democratically-based governments.
My droning on about federalism was related, though. Individual Liberty allows people to succeed or fail based upon the decisions they make in life. Economic frameworks built upon individual Liberty like capitalism reward good decisions about how to use your labor and capital while punishing poor decisions.
The best the government can do is to go back to a more Constitutionally supported mandate, taking care of foreign policy, regulating interstate commerce in the sense that the founders wished, and only providing the barest of frameworks within which the free market could operate.
Why should voters in Wisconsin get a say in what chemical substances I put into my body where I live? They shouldn't. It's unnecessary and just opens our government up to all sorts of abuses of the system.
So many things in our lives should be left to us, not decided upon by politicians in DC who were put there by voters in other states who are completely ignorant of our lives and circumstances.