Ever notice how so much of the power “progressives” seek involves squashing the rights of others – especially those living in one-party “progressive” wastelands?
I’ve been noticing a log of agitation in “prog” media against state pre-emption laws – laws that prevent cities, almost invariably “progressive” cities with authoritarian one-party rule – from passing laws that are stricter than state laws on certain subjects.
And those “certain subjects” invariably involve the economic and personal freedom:
Many of these preemption bills at the state level overrule local decisions about inclusiveness, housing rules, the minimum wage, and other issues. The updated report found the most common issues subject to preemption included tax and expenditure limitations (with laws in 42 states), ride sharing regulations (41 states), minimum wage (28 states) and paid leave (23 states). There have also been preemption legislation aimed at limiting a city’s ability to enact stricter gun laws or ban plastic bags…Preemption has important ramifications for many of the new business models and technologies changing cities and real estate, including home sharing, ride hailing, and the potential introduction of municipal broadband. While statewide regulations can simplify operations, they also sacrifice local nuances and control, and in many cases, take away a localities rights to control or introduce new services. Twenty states have banned localities from creating their own broadband systems.
Pre-emption is the one reason the “citizens” (borderline subjects) of Minneapolis and Saint Paul still have the right to defend themselves.
And you can be the DFL is taking aim at that. Every single session.
Notice the focus on the social “good” of broadband. Like their cities progressives want the internet to be a single party data information delivery system – sadly with the aggressive connivance of FAANG (FB,Apple,Amazon,Netflix,Google) they are already well on their way toward that goal.
A variation on this tactic is the occupational licensing racket.
My furnace quit last winter, a friend referred me to a shop, they had rave reviews on-line, but when I gave them my address, they declined to work for me. St. Paul requires a special, additional license to work within the city and inspectors know which shops have the extra license so if the inspector sees a service truck from an unfamiliar shop, they check to see if the homeowner has a permit for the work (he doesn’t because the out-of-town shop can’t pull one) so the inspector red-tags the home. The homeowner gets a penalty for failing to obtain a permit and the out-of-town shop gets a penalty for working without a license. Since the rave-review shop couldn’t do the work, I ended up hiring a local shop that cost me $1,500 to . . . replace a thermostat.
Mind, if I had known that was the problem, I’d have gone to Menards and spent $50 to do it myself. So I suppose it’s fair to say I paid them $50 for the thermostat and $1,000 for knowing the thermostat was the problem (plus a trip charge, tax, mileage, fuel surcharge, after-hours fee, weekend-fee, restocking the inventory in the truck fee . . . .).
But the out-of-town shop couldn’t have diagnosed that? There’s something special about St. Paul thermostats?
Coming next:State-wide, centralized garbage-hauling.
Perhaps it would be a good time to understand why states (and the nation) at times uses pre-emption; because the larger body cannot afford the cost of letting the smaller body have its way. For example, we would pre-empt city firearms laws because it’s hard to go from southern Minnesota to northern Minnesota without going through the Cities, and because the location of the state capitol would impose St. Paul city ordinances on the rest of the state.
Probably want to use it sparingly and for liberty, but let’s remind the world why we have it.
NW
I think Waste Management will have a lock on that – they’ve been buying up the small rural waste haulers in MN & WI one by one and bringing the joys of big city garbage day to the sticks. My personal favorite; if you cancel their service they charge you the equivalent of 4 months collection fees to come and pick up their garbage bins.
If they do institute “State-wide, centralized garbage-hauling” most people won’t notice the difference in service.
I generally support preemption for criminal laws (City can’t ban firearms) but not regulatory issues (beyond limiting the city’s rules to the city itself). If Mpls wants to property tax, license, minimum wage, inspect, etc, itself into an economic wasteland then we shouldn’t stop it (we just need to not bail it out either). That’s why I moved out of St. Paul. I just didn’t move far enough.
Regarding preemption for regulatory issues, let’s imagine a city–say the state’s capitol or its neighbor to the west–so impedes commerce that the rest of the state must massively subsidize those cities’ populations through welfare and the like. I’d argue that the state can, out of self-defense, pre-empt some of the worst of those regulations.