I'd rather just streamline the process and regulate the environment in the first place, instead of trying to micromanage every single incident of interstate environmental damage in the country and trying to assess a monetary value to it.
A state can manage the overall process, if there is something that affects their neighboring state, the Feds have to power to arbitrate or regulate it.
It already exists, your streamlining is applying strict rules to different parts of the country that may not be able to comply with your ideals.
And yet if I were to suggest some equally plausible applications of the interstate commerce clause, would I be correct if I guessed that you'd criticize me for judicial activism or changing the meaning of the Constitution?
Saying something is equal doesn't make it so.
Regulating something that actually affects interstate commerce or making something up that doesn't affect interstate commerce are two different things.
So it depends.
Nothing. Except our interstate highway system covers 48 states, not 2 states.
Yea and then they can extend it to other neighboring states if they so desire.
In this case, they clearly do. We have the best highway system in the world.
At the expense of a more energy efficient public transit system.
If I own a radio station in Arlington, VA and someone in Bethesda, MD decides to broadcast on the same frequency (and we both have the approval of our respective states), the result is that no one hears anything other than noise.
I happen to live on the border of three states where this is a regular occurrence.
You usually hear the different radio stations bleed over into one another.
The Feds don't do much about it.
The could though because it crosses state lines.
If I host a music piracy website in Delaware (where, suppose, it isn't illegal) can a record company in California sue me?
Uhh yea, the Feds already have the power to regulate the "arts and sciences" in terms of copyright.
We need the federal government, not the states, to set these kind of standards.
They already do that, legally.
Faulty comparison. Unless you think you can get most Americans on board with adopting an Amish lifestyle, the more accurate comparison would be Americans with health insurance versus Americans without health insurance.
You mean eating foods high in saturated fats?
Yea the Amish do that too and they in line with the trend of being overweight, like everyone else.
You can't regulate people to be healthy, no matter how hard you want them to be.
Insurance doesn't make people healthy, personal lifestyle choices do.
I'm not talking about enforcing the contracts, I'm talking about the systemic market failure that occurs when you have a patchwork system of insurers and providers that are incompatible with one another and no one willing to coordinate anything among them.
They seem to do fine right now.
The cause in price increase is the third parties getting between the consumer and the service provider.
The price mechanism is not being fully implemented.
That's a classic economic situation that regulators have failed to address.
Human behavior has changed as a result of technology. Most of us aren't farmers. Most of us don't have 10+ children. Most of us have at least finished high school, if not college. Most of us live well into our 70s. Most of us have ventured more than 20 miles from our home at some point in our lives. Etc, etc.
Nothing has changed in regards to how people respond to their environment.
Situations have changed but not the human behavioral response system.
And what makes you think that those human interactions are the same now as they were 200 years ago? People do NOT interact with each other in the same manner. 200 years ago it was considered dishonorable to have debt; now we can hardly live without it. 200 years ago dueling was the preferred method of settling a dispute; today lawsuits are. 200 years ago employers would have been horrified at "intruding" into their workers lives by making sure they earned a living wage; today companies are vilified for NOT doing this.
Times change, technology changes, people change, human interactions change, and governments need to change.
Dueling wasn't that popular, it was mostly for the elite members of society and even then it wasn't that common.
Human behavioral response is still the same.
You make credit easier to obtain, people will get it.
People flow through the path of least resistance.
Human behavior has followed this paradigm for centuries.
It hasn't changed.
Where the Founding Fathers really fell short (as the Constitution applies today) are in the following areas:
1. Human rights
2. The scope of congressional power
3. The scope of presidential power
4. The constitutional amendment process itself
#2 and #3 need to continually change as society changes and government must regulate new industries and/or solve crises in old ones, in order to keep up with the times. And #4 needs to change because the Founding Fathers grossly miscalculated how difficult it would be to amend the Constitution. I can't for one minute believe that any of them would have expected us to only amend their document 17 times in over 200 years.
Why do they need more power?
Why would any rational person give them more power, when they have grossly abused the power they have?
I think some of you need to have your heads checked, you seem to all be self destructive.
That doesn't work so well anymore, since pollution has unintended consequences that are difficult to measure but reverberate across state lines.
Your just creating reasons but the feds have the power to regulate pollution that crosses state line already.
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