America is a very large country. So once upon a time when it took many days for the fastest horse and rider to cross each state, centralised rule was impractical so it made sense to have each state run itself. Today information is a global commodity – it travels worldwide in an instant.
So why then does each state have so much autonomy? Granted, the centralised v decentralised debate is a religious one but surely it makes no sense to have such significant changes in law determined by which state you happen to be in.
Some of these are a bit irritating but inconsequential – for example in Pennsylvania you can’t be trusted to buy booze anywhere other than a state store, but you can ride your motorbike without a helmet if you want. Just a few miles away in New Jersey you can buy your alcohol from the supermarket but you must wear a helmet at all times (somehow they’ve got the balance right I think).
Some laws have greater consequences – such as whether you can get married or not if you are gay (and even that can be a movable feast as witnessed recently in California), whether you could be subject to the death sentence, how much tax you pay, what maximum speed you can drive at (not to mention subtle differences in the highway code), differences in insurance and car registration laws. One area that particularly irritates me is that education is determined locally. That sounds logical enough in theory – the last thing you want in education is for it to support a network of quangos but in practice it means that the quality of the curriculum in each state is variable. In some states evolution is positioned as “a theory” with creationism described as an equally-weighted alternative . That’s seriously scary.
For a country that talks a lot about equality and fairness, this doesn’t seem fair.