A great post from David Giacalone about how laboratories of democracy never learn from their experiments.
The local laboratories thing has always bugged me. Of course it is true that a federalist system allows different states to try different responses to problems, and that this is a good way of experimenting with solutions to problems. I see no serious problem with that. The problem arises when people make the perennial mistake of representative government—of confusing the means with the ends. State sovereignty is not an end in itself, but a means to securing the liberty of the citizens. In other words, the authority of a state is limited by natural moral law; as the Declaration of Independence put it, the states may “do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do”—not everything, only those things which government may of right do.
Unfortunately, people tend to take the “laboratories” notion (most famously enunciated in the dissenting opinion in New State Ice Co. v. Leibmann), to mean that states are not limited—that these laboratories, in other words, may perform their experiments on unconsenting human subjects—and that this is somehow a virtue. Not at all! When the states violate the rights of citizens, the federal government may legitimately step in. State sovereignty was, to put it simply, not the point of the American Revolution. As Madison put it,
is it not preposterous, to urge as an objection to a [federal] government...that such a government may derogate from the importance of the governments of the individual States? Was, then, the American Revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual States, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty? We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the New...? It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.... [A]s far as the sovereignty of the States cannot be reconciled to the happiness of the people, the voice of every good citizen must be, Let the former be sacrificed to the latter.
How unfortunate that so many people—even those masquerading as defenders of freedom—would put the power of the state ahead of the freedom of the citizen: a mistake Madison (who wanted a federal check on state authority) would not have made.
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