We see and hear it every day from almost all media outlets when they tackle the subject of e-cigs and vaping, this notion that 1) if something isn't federally regulated, then it simply MUST be dangerous; and 2) if something exists and Washington hasn't regulated it yet, this is a brazen dereliction of duty on their part. The thinking seems to go that if something exists, and there is one chance in a million that it might potentially cause harm to someone somewhere, then federal regulation and federal legislation are not only desirable, but absolutely imperative. The further implication is that grown men and women can't possibly be trusted to make decisions about their own health without explicit guidance from the relevant group of federal bureaucrats.
So few Americans seem to understand any more that, the way our government was originally constituted, federal regulation was supposed to be a last resort, to be undertaken only when absolutely necessary. The framers of our Constitution considered this concept important enough that they enshrined it in the Bill of Rights by enacting the Tenth Amendment, which says quite plainly that all decision-making power not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution or its amendments shall be vested in the states.
When did it happen that we started craving federal oversight and acting like we can't possibly live without it? The whole thing that made our form of government unique in the first place was that it vested as much decision-making power as possible with the states and local municipalities, since it was once taken for granted that people can govern themselves at the local level much more effectively than a far-off monolithic bureaucracy can (this was, incidentally, one of the prime motivating factors in us declaring our independence from Great Britain in the first place). If we've become this habituated to all our decisions being made for us in Washington, why bother still having state boundaries and state governments?
So few Americans seem to understand any more that, the way our government was originally constituted, federal regulation was supposed to be a last resort, to be undertaken only when absolutely necessary. The framers of our Constitution considered this concept important enough that they enshrined it in the Bill of Rights by enacting the Tenth Amendment, which says quite plainly that all decision-making power not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution or its amendments shall be vested in the states.
When did it happen that we started craving federal oversight and acting like we can't possibly live without it? The whole thing that made our form of government unique in the first place was that it vested as much decision-making power as possible with the states and local municipalities, since it was once taken for granted that people can govern themselves at the local level much more effectively than a far-off monolithic bureaucracy can (this was, incidentally, one of the prime motivating factors in us declaring our independence from Great Britain in the first place). If we've become this habituated to all our decisions being made for us in Washington, why bother still having state boundaries and state governments?
