And that, sir, is an excellent point in return. I have noticed that, on drug threads, if the participants start making common ground and start honestly debating differences, the flame-throwers suddenly quit posting, and go find another thread where the food fight is in full swing. I, for one, am sick of that - of the sweeping, stupid generalizations, of beliefs so entrenched that they are impervious to reason. The drug war threads on FR too often become an intellectual Somme - a battlefield with no objective, other than inflicting carnage on both sides. Time to change that.
It's kinda subtle, but let me try. I think we would agree that, prior to the 14th Amendment, the 9th and 10th stood together as a cast iron fence around the federal government, but the Bill of Rights had little to no bearing on the states. The first eight amendments define legal rights of individuals, and the 9th and 10th define limitations on the federal government.
Now, the 14th is passed. OK, amendments 1 thru 8 of the BofR now apply to the states. But what about the 9th? Does an amendment that is meant as a constraint on federal power still apply when joined to the 14th, which extends federal power? That is the contradiction, IMO. The one reference to the 9th by SCOTUS in recent history, in the Griswald decision, was an effort by liberal justices to justify creating a new federal right under the 9th and imposing it on the states via the 14th. I don't think that you or I wanna go there...
We discussed DUI just the other day. I agreed it is a legal use of the police power of states, if used with extreme caution for violations of due process.
And the devil is in them thar details. But the feds have been the ones pushing the DUI envelope, most recently by mandating a drop in the legal limit from .1 to .08. So I think such "harm threshhold" laws, for lack of a better term, are better off at the state level - but I also acknowledge how this concept, when grabbed by busybody activists, can become a serious problem - a municipality could prohibit a McDonalds from opening because of fat issues, or a research lab from opening because of animal testing issues. But that, IMO, goes with the territory.
Government, like any other human invention from guns to butter, can be used for good or bad. But we shouldn't disregard government just because it can go bad - that, in the immortal words, requires eternal vigilance. But, if we insist on fighting among ourselves, we are not being vigilant, but misdirected. Both libertarians and conservatives, I think, can agree upon the fact that the fox should be shot if it tries to get into the henhouse. It is only when we fight with each other that the fox gets a chicken dinner...