Re: CHAT: Californian secessionists (was Re: Californian vowels [was Re: Likin

Quoting Tristan Alexander McLeay <zsau@...>:

> At 03.16 p.m. 2.10.2001, you wrote:
> >And there are actually political scientists who think we should
> >abolish the states and make them provinces! Heh. _Multus sanguis
> >per vias fluebat_...
>
> What's the difference between a 'state' and a 'province', anyway? (And
> can anyone tell me if 'state' as I, an Aussie, understand it the same as
> the way Americans understand it?)
Granted, the meanings are arbitrarily assigned. But in
American political discourse, "statehood" implies a level
of autonomy that "provincehood" does not.  This comes
from way back after the Seven Years' War (known in America
as the French and Indian War), when Great Britain created
a vast political unit known as the "Province of Quebec",
which stretched all the way from the north of today's
Quebec to the Ohio River in the south.  It was given
nowhere near the same levels of autonomy as the colonies
on the eastern seaboard, and this prompted the Revolutionaries
when writing the Declaration of Independence to say that
King George III was unfit to be king because he had set
about

"... abolishing the free System of English Laws in a
neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary
government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render
it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing
the same absolute rule into these Colonies."
<http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/declaration/declaration.html>

This distinction between province and state can also draw
on ancient parallels:  Roman provinces were most certainly
not very autonomous, while the "states" that were "allied"
with Rome had a lot more leeway in their internal affairs,
at least insofar as they avoided much of the rapine of Roman
provincial taxation and were allowed to determine their own
form of rapine.

But modern Canada is a case in point that it can go the
other way, too.  Canadian provinces have, arguably, in many
ways even more autonomy from their federal government than
our states now do, having some say even over IIRC the laws
over immigration and import -- Quebec has special laws
favoring francophones over ... allophones(?) .  This is a
recent development vis-a-vis the US federal government.
Nowadays, the US federal government gets its way by what
amounts to systematic blackmail:  it ties lots of different
often unrelated requirements onto receiving federal monies.
Louisiana, for example, used to maintain a drinking age of
18, unlike virtually every other state.  Well, the federal
government had no right simply to tell Louisiana that it
couldn't do that, so it did the next best thing: it said
that if Louisiana wanted to get the billions of dollars of
federal monies to maintain its highways, it had to raise
its drinking age to 21. And how long did it take Louisiana
to buckle? About six months. So, it is in this way that the
US government imposes uniformity on the states.

==============================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...>

"If a man demands justice, not merely as an abstract concept,
but in setting up the life of a society, and if he holds, further,
that within that society (however defined) all men have equal rights,
then the odds are that his views, sooner rather than later, are going
to set something or someone on fire." Peter Green, in _From Alexander
to Actium_, on Spartan king Cleomenes III