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Unpopular Opinion
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I'm talking about laws. Differences like being able to freely open carry in some states while others barely allow anyone to even possess a gun. Or how some states have universal state healthcare and other do not. Or how drugs are handled, with many states ignoring the federal prohibition.
Sure, we share a lot of language and a generic background identity of being 'American', but the legal differences are massively varied from state to state.
I can promise you that the sovereign European states which have their own constitutional laws and practices differ more from each other than US states do.
You have state laws, sure, but you also have federal laws. We don't. There are EU regulations, and through those regulations, the sovereign states synchronise their own laws if it suits the situation.
Do you think the laws for guns are the same for us Finns as they are for the Greeks or Spaniards or Swiss?
Do you think the healthcare systems are federated in Europe? That everyone has the same system? The systems often vary from state to state within the member states. (I could tell you horror stores of our country trying to integralize our systems.)
Th EU decided everyone should have universal healthcare, because it's objectively just good. So it was agreed and then they make the regulations on what it should achieve. Not how it should be done or anything.
So each sovereign state gets to find their own way into the solution.
The U.K. has the National Health Service (NHS), a government-operated system. One also finds public systems in Italy and Spain, while France has a public/private system. But the system in Switzerland is a privatized system, with subsidized insurance. The Swiss system is, in some respects, comparable to the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, but with much stricter regulations and much more comprehensive coverage. Obamacare pales in comparison to the Swiss system, although it’s much better than the “let the sick, lowly peasants die in the streets” approach of the Republican Party.
Uhm, about drugs? Cannabis is still schedule 1 federally, but it hasn't stopped the states from doing their own de facto thing. I wonder... A few years before the first state legalised recreational marijuana, if you wanted to have a holiday in a place you could smoke weed, where'd you go?
Aaaahmm... Aaaaaaammmm... Amsterdam. Or Prague.
The drug practices vary wildly by country.
Sure, but I think you might agree that actually from country to country it might vary even more, seeing as your states all started from the same common law system and history of the system a few hundred years ago. Whereas there's hanging rocks and churches older than the US on my way to the city.
The point being that while we regulate our international unions systems and try to synchronize them despite most having been apart and developed into their own (from roman systems, over the course of two millenia), you have a federated system and want to set your own systems.
It's like. The opposites.
I may be on an ambiem or two currently. But it was a fascinating thought.