Quote:
Originally posted by Nic Name
The only point I'm making is that criminal law ought not to be a matter of regional approach within a nation and is a weakness in the American system of government in my opinion.
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Well, we like it this way. It's especially good that when one state does something stupid, they don't all have to.
For instance, the only place you can buy hard liquor in PA is a State Store, so-named because it is in fact owned and run by the state...well, the Commonwealth, actually. It's a fairly stupid idea, and it's predicated on the notion that having the state control liqour will somehow reduce drunkenness and alcoholism. It's a difficult institution to dislodge, because it tends to be staffed by beneficiaries of polirical patronage and civil service/union drones. And the monopoly tends to keep prices artificially high. (If we'd managed to elect Fisher we might have been able to get rid of it, but too many people went for Slick Eddie's siren song last Tuesday.)
If I found this sufficiently annoying, I could move to a neighboring state. But I don't, and what keeps me from doing so is 1) I don't drink enough booze for it to matter that much to me and 2) most of the neighboring states (MD, NJ, NY) have dirt-stupid gun laws...and that *does* matter to me. (There is some hope for MD, they've got a new govenor too. :-) )
So everybody gets to decide which mix of laws suits them best and we've got at least 52 flavors to choose from. It's very much like watertight compartmentization, the impact of bad decisions is limited, and good decisions can propigate from one state to another only if the local residents agree that what they did in Georgia is a good idea for North Dakota, ferinstance.