Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

You appear to want government to be a part of the solution. I do not. They will F it up, just as they have since 1933.

You want to give them more money (taxes) to waste on bad programs and/or policy.

No.

The solution comes from us.

I can't figure out how to imbed this, so:
You make me sad.

The man who called gunmen to gather on the streets of Kenosha Tuesday night — culminating in the deaths of two people and an injury to a third — says he did so to keep the city safe. Despite the deaths, he believes they made it safer.

Kevin Mathewson is a former Kenosha alder who in June created a Facebook page called “Kenosha Guard — Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property.” On Tuesday, he posted a “call to arms” as a page event.

“Any patriots willing to take up arms and defend out [sic] City tonight from the evil thugs? Nondoubt [sic] they are currently planning on the next part of the City to burn tonight!”

In a subsequent public post, under the identity of the page, Mathewson addressed Kenosha’s police chief, Daniel Miskinis:

“Chief Miskinis, As you know I am the commander of the Kenosha Guard, a local militia. We are mobilizing tonight and have about 3,000 RSVP’s. We have volunteers that will be in Uptown, downtown and at the entrances to other neighborhoods.”


https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2020/08/27/a-call-to-arms-that-filled-kenosha-with-combat-weapons/?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=0f0badaf368f51e772a6a1c408b76aca49ae97fb-1598613604-0-AfvFVgv4Wlwsv_NTRUxbsqAniJAeOxhTtLRe4XMc3aH6k7wZFiKTT07iELnKpIKy5MDIzCQeeYdpYmh_RSrnj-g8WYsTHT1BV3O6IJP2KKuixOaLaU-mrmjVeryivUBdL0q0OsYwtjliBc0_x7Llbz8yHq8O8K9YAXyZCJRUnVjGmRy6z3mQTyHs0Jv3rDo16E1GBc8R6UxekGFmcRZJ6dfrmVljFs0y6CYivvHfdDNgHuLrrzZXBSF5-GhZGpxsfO1lbG5Pfc-UW6q2GEW_JpFGxmDhghuDSEYfX8ue5bdJvRLONRNmJfXd5NkeDev6DhWVtvcHWBEPqh7HrQgZCmAxEaaBfYL4oR7NQwUcCpFm

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ

This is my favorite and appropriate for the times.  “ I’d like to have an argument“

Perhaps because they are Americans too. To many times, people forget that even though they may live in a different part of the country, the opinions, lives and traditions of people in the South are somehow inferior to yours. The left has made everything that defines our nation as racist or a "dog whistle". Michelle Obama alluded to all of this when her husband was running for President. She stated:

In the opinions of many, removing statues is one way that the left is attempting to "change our history". The fact of the matter is, you can't change history but you can try to rewrite it to comport to ones own ideas. Perhaps if more people would have listened to what the left has been telling us they want to do, more people would have realized it and stood up to it before now.

I think it's been pointed out here, but much of what has become the South's "tradition" was a concerted effort to rewrite history to make the Civil War not about trying to keep the institution of slavery but taking some heroic stand for autonomy and state's rights. 

And has been pointed out here, the history of most of those statues is that they were not put up during the confederacy, they were put up 30ish years later after reconstruction when free blacks were getting too "uppity" and to remind them of their place--below Southern whites.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/01/why-do-people-believe-myths-about-the-confederacy-because-our-textbooks-and-monuments-are-wrong/

History was changed to make the Confederacy about something that it wasn't about in 1860. And now when we try to point that out, we're the bad guys? 

I understood the point.

Now perhaps the augment is that a certain group of elites, say Toni Atkins and Anthony Rendon can better hold their senators to account than the populace of the state overall. Or perhaps they can at least gum up the federal government better.

But as you said above, the people and the states apparently have different interests. If the state, in your case California, is not made up of its people but by its state assembly, then that's elitism. And in many cases, elitism is fine, but gotta call a duck a duck.

So let's make a thought experiment. California wants, for example, marijuana legalization. 

If that is decided on a state-by-state basis rather than a national basis, Californians have more agency as to whether marijuana would be legal IN CALIFORNIA if that power is held in Sacramento rather than Washington DC. If they want something, they have to convince a majority of 40M Californians of their desire, not 330M Americans. 

In our current system, if 21M Californians want marijuana to be legal in California, they can't do it because marijuana is illegal at the federal level. (Admittedly it's a bad example because California *has* "legal" marijuana, but it's not really legal. California just doesn't enforce federal marijuana law and the federal government has chosen not to either.)

That's why I'm saying that state legislatures guarded against ceding power to Washington DC, and why "states" have at times different interests than "people". Because if California has to balance its desires against all the other states, then it has less autonomy to make its own decisions.

It's why there is so much antipathy in rural states--because today they feel like Californians and New Yorkers are telling them what to do. And it's why Californians and New Yorkers are so offended by the "anti-democratic" Senate and electoral college, because rural states are a brake on them getting what they want. 

Prior to the 17th Amendment, more power was in state capitals and less in Washington DC, which meant that people in California could have things one way while people in Montana could have them another. That wasn't always a good thing, i.e. if one state chose to restrict its peoples rights it's wrong. But by having more power in state capitals, it actually gave the people of those states more control over the policy decisions controlling their lives. 

And we arguably are better off if the social stigma about getting pregnant at age 15 unmarried were still around.

There it is. You just committed what @CWSooner calls the "motte and bailey" logical fallacy.

Your first point was about unmarried women having babies. When challenged, it became teen pregnancy. 

But you can have a social stigma against people who can't provide for their babies--and for whom it will derail their future life possibilities--getting pregnant, without having a social stigma against "unmarried women having babies."

Someone of an appropriate age who has their sh!t together, can provide for herself and her baby, and determines that she wants to be a mother but doesn't necessarily want a romantic partner, should be free to make that choice without stigma. I personally think it's a less optimal solution than having two loving and supportive parents, but it's probably a better option than her getting into a bad marriage with a man she hates just to have a baby.

I can support that without being forced into being supportive a 15 year old who gets pregnant because she believed some jackass boy who told her pulling out was an effective method of birth control and now she's stuck with a kid. 

There should be a social stigma against that. And guess what... THERE STILL IS!

 I'd wager my entire portfolio on US doing a better job than our government has.

absolutely