Good! Let us begin with a clean slate. As you know, every political view that I hold derives from the Noncoercion Principle, where coercion is defined as the initiation of force or deception. I therefore am concerned not with the size of government, but with its scope. The purpose of government, in my view, is to secure the rights of its citizens. All of those rights accrue from two original rights with which the citizens are born: (1) the right to life, and (2) the right to consent. The right to life is a manifestation of ownership of the body, and the right to consent is a manifestation of ownership of the mind. These rights are natural rights because they accrue to a natural event — birth, which defines the moment at which a person is a rights bearing entity distinguishable by identity from all others. Freedom is the absence of coercion; thus, it may be said that a government’s duty is to guarantee the freedom of its people. A context of freedom is a context of peace (no initial force) and honesty (no initial deception). Every person is entitled to acquire property by the use of her original property — her body and mind — or, put another way, to acquire rights by the use of her original rights — life and consent. Therefore, you may use your labor (your body) and your wits (your mind), acting peacefully and honestly, in whatever manner you believe most insures your safety and happiness. Whenever a government serves as an obstacle to the pursuit of happiness among peaceful honest people, it is tyrannical. Crime is defined as coercion. So it is that what government should do is suppress the initiation of force and deception. People who coerce are ethical criminals, and the ethical role of government is to restrain and punish them by whatever means necessary so that peaceful honest people may live out their lives pursuing their own happiness in their own way. These deductions lead me to my point, namely that no matter whether government is federal, state, or local, its regulatory interest ought to coincide with the Noncoercion Principle; that is to say that it what it ought to regulate is coercion and nothing else. Let a woman take risks so long as she exposes no one else to risks by force or deception. Let her take baths, if she wishes, in radioactive waste so long as her pollution is confined to her own property and does not leak over to her neighbor’s. Use ethical force — force that is not initial, but responsive — to insure the rights of whomever she might choose to force or deceive into being in danger. If she represents her factory as safe when it is not, then punish her. Take her rights and property and give them over to the people whom she deceived. But if they are voluntarily working in unsafe conditions, then leave them alone to succeed or fail by the choices they make.
Thank you for the thoughtful post, Lib. Now: Do you believe that state and local governments are better situated than the federal government (perhaps due to their relative proximity to the people) to 1) suppress the initiation of force and deception and 2) to limit themselves to suppressing the initiation of force and deception?
And a follow-up supposition: Let’s say that the federal government, due to greater resources, a more expansive jurisdiction, et cetera, is better able to regulate coercion than state and local governments. But, for many of the same reasons, the federal government is also less likely to limit itself only to the regulation of coercion. That is, state and local governments, by their natures, will allow more private coercion than the federal government, but the federal government, while doing a better job regulating coercion, will also sometimes regulate non-coercive activities. Which is your preferred alternative?
Surprisingly, perhaps, I do not. Local level tyranny has a long and storied history.
Rat poison or hemlock, eh? 
The problem is that when government imposes frivolous legislation, it has itself become a coercive entity. Thus, regulation of noncoercive activities is itself a coercion. Therefore, it is a question of whether I prefer to be mugged by men with guns and servants quarters or men with guns and jails. Since I prefer neither, I advocate that government have no legislative power, and that there be only one law: Every citizen shall be guaranteed freedom from coercion. As it stands, laws exist to protect government from its citizens. I advocate that it be the other way around.
Good grief, Gadarene, how the hell are you? We really ought to catch up.
Might as well get my digs in., at least in a general way.
This is highly representative of the classical liberal obsession with the indivudual.
What it does not admit is that to allow (theoretically) unfettered access to “the pursuit of happiness among honest people” in fact hinders such happiness in the aggregate. The rational behavior of utility-maximizing, “honest” people is often an enormous roadblock to the access of everyone to happiness and induces a state which actually limits the ability of individuals to “consent” to much of anything. Locating, modeling, and solving these problems is one of the obsessions of modern economics.
The noncoercion principle also ignores the distribution of prerequisites of happiness, and thus makes an inadequate foundation from which to derive more refined moral laws. Under the noncoercion principle alone, the prerequisites of happiness and thus happiness itself is stochastic. This is all well and good but for the fact that those who find themselves on the low tail have an extremely restricted basket of rights. Presumably they never would have consented in a theoretical original position to end up that way in the real world.
Consequently, I contend that a better theoretical starting point would admit the possibility that the distribution of the prerequisites of happiness be consensual, that is, the solution to a non-cooperative game. The distribution that individuals arrived at and consented to would be implemented by federal redistribution and regulation. This is no more tyrannical than the tyranny of probability that some classical liberals appear to support
One may argue until Ragnarok about just what the consensual distribution might be or whether or not our current society is missing the mark. These would, I am sure you understand, be complex hypotheticals that have little to do with the topic at hand.
There are some very good reasons why there aren’t too many 19th century liberals running around, and it probably has very little to do with the fact that “classical liberalism isn’t practical” or “some coercion is always necessary” or other such bromides. Classical liberalism’s complete disregard for aggregation renders it, in my opinion, inadequate for evaluating behavior in the political sphere.
Perhaps I should have been a bit more specific. I find your 51 different criminal law codes to be strange. Canada has a single criminal law code set by the federal parliament, but differing civil laws for each province, which I believe is fairly common for countries with a federal government system. I don’t think there is any other country with differing criminal laws for different areas in the country, or even different buildings on the same street when it comes to federal v.s state law. (In the majority of countries, even different civil laws would seem strange.)
As for why we have provinces? Same reason you have states and the Swiss have cantons - the provinces were there first and retained their identity after they decided to join together, with new additions expecting the same status as the original members.