8 million people? I suspect the Bay Area might be able to make direct democracy work for a while. I wouldn't want to extrapolate that out to the West Coast though and certainly all of the states.
That's part of the allure of people championing state's rights as opposed to doing things on the federal level. Unfortunately I don't know of too many historical examples of power becoming decentralized.
It's not just the pure numbers, but geographical and cultural range. 8 million people in an area (16k sqmi) smaller than the US State of West Virginia(24k sqmi) are going to have an easier time understanding and voting on issues affecting everyone than 300+ million people in an area over 9 millon square miles. Direct democracy in the US could end up with even worse tyranny of the majority issues than already experienced. (Example, detonating multiple nuclear weapons in the state of Nevada in the 50s. It might have passed in a national vote, but likely not a vote only in Nevada.)
Incidentally this is PRECISELY why our country was founded on the idea of a weak federal government and strong state governments.. it's just too damned big with too many different competing cultures and ideologies to get anything done. This is why I'm a Libertarian. Yes, I believe some states would wind up terrible to live in because the people that live there are terrible. That is why I would choose to live in a different state.
While many founders wanted a small federal government, it was tried and failed twice with the Articles of Confederation. There is a level of power that the federal government needs to have or the states will simply bicker forever. On the other hand, state legislatures had to be taken out of the loop on electing senators (see the 17th amendment) because they fell into endless bickering. Different issues are best addressed at very different levels of the federalist system.
You like federalism which is biased toward States' rights, which is why you are a Libertarian? What?
Libertarianism is about individual rights, not States' rights. You can be both a Federalist and a Libertarian if you want, but one doesn't follow from the other.
> I don't see why 8 million people should make better decisions than 80 or 800 million people.
With a smaller group that is local to one another, they're more likely to share interests and understand one another. Communication is faster and clearer among the electorate and between the electorate and the elected.
