You're really missing the point here. The entire point being made is that what the voters at the level of a state or the entire nation is irrelevant because it shouldn't be their decision to vote on.
Even if 75% of California residents want to ban single family zoning, if 75% of residents in Redding want to keep it in Redding, why should people in San Diego have any more than 0% influence on that decision? People 600 miles away should have exactly zero input into something like that.
It's not about whether the decisions being made are good. It's about who gets to make them/how broadly they apply. China could have the greatest ideas in the world, but it doesn't make sense to "democratically" vote with equal representation between US and Chinese citizens on what free speech laws in the US should be. They have 4x the population and nothing in common. Such a "democracy" would be a farce.
> Even if 75% of California residents want to ban single family zoning, if 75% of residents in Redding want to keep it in Redding, why should people in San Diego have any more than 0% influence on that decision?
Because Redding isn't an independent, self-supporting, sovereign entity, its an administrative subdivision of California whose existence as an entity and powers of government are delegated to it by the people of the State of California through the Constitution and laws of said State (in part directly, and in part indirectly through, e.g., Shasta County, a similar but higher-level subdivision within which Redding is nested), and which is funded in no small part by distribution of taxes set and collected by and from the State of California as a whole.
No one is discussing the legality of such things. The discussion is whether things like that are just. That's why e.g. eastern Oregon has a secession movement. The west side of the state can legally tell the east side to do what they want. The east side does not feel that being in a shared democracy with the west side is working.
> No one is discussing the legality of such things. The discussion is whether things like that are just.
That's what I was discussing, too.
If there was a Redding-separatist movement, we could discuss whether Reading separatism is just and whether that changes the justice of decision-making arrangements, but the justice of decision-making authority within the current context is not independent of the structure of that context aside from the particular decision-making question being examined, and where “Redding” fits into that structure.
(This is also a separate question from the justice of particular decisions; like it can be just for the people of California at large to be the decisive decision-making authority, and still be unjust for them to make a particular decision. But that wasn't the question.)
There is a secessionist movement in NorCal[0], but as has been said before:
> Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
The bar for injustice is quite a bit lower than secession-inducing. If you have broad agreement in place X that they would like to live one way, and agreement among places Y and Z (who have never even been to X and would be entirely unaffected by what X does for the decision at hand) that X should live another way, then I assert Y and Z imposing their will on X is unjust, regardless of how democratic the decision was, or whether some generations-old political structure says Y and Z can do that. The people of Y and Z should recognize that they shouldn't do that.
Even if 75% of California residents want to ban single family zoning, if 75% of residents in Redding want to keep it in Redding, why should people in San Diego have any more than 0% influence on that decision? People 600 miles away should have exactly zero input into something like that.
It's not about whether the decisions being made are good. It's about who gets to make them/how broadly they apply. China could have the greatest ideas in the world, but it doesn't make sense to "democratically" vote with equal representation between US and Chinese citizens on what free speech laws in the US should be. They have 4x the population and nothing in common. Such a "democracy" would be a farce.