Sexual harassment is wrong and a problem for many societies, but destructive lawsuits are not the solution.
Destructive lawsuits exist in large part in the US because of ethical conflicts of interest on the part of legal professionals, particularly in situations where all legal professionals -- as a class within society -- are in a position of conflict of interest.
A complex, confusing, slow, cumbersome, and / or contradictory legal system creates a huge demand for the services of legal professionals. As a simple matter of economics, this places ALL legal professionals in a position of conflict of interest with respect to many aspects of how the legal system works. If the legal professionals write the laws, implement the precedents, or judge the cases in a manner that makes the legal system complex, confusing, slow, cumbersome, or contradictory (whether actually or just apparently), then in the process they are guaranteeing more work and higher salaries for members of their profession OVER THE LONG TERM.
A rational observer, one not being led astray by ignorance, brainwashing, or conflict of interest, that looks at the US legal system will quickly come to the conclusion that it has many (or perhaps all) of these attributes. No country that has such a legal system can be considered in any way a free country, which the US is certainly supposed to be.
In theory, legal professionals are supposed to look after legal ethics, although that isn't actually written down in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. It's more something they've claimed dominion over.
In practice, if we as a people allow the sort of thing (which is similar to allowing the foxes to guard the hen-houses), then we should expect problems such as destructive lawsuits.
One solution is to start over with the whole revolution business, then develop a new system that will greatly reduce the frequency of these kinds of problems.
Another -- better -- solution is to figure out how to attack the whole problem of ethical conflicts of interest in the legal system without the need for a revolution.
James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be an open-ended document. The 9th Amendment provides for rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment provides for rights reserved to the people. This was done to address the dual issues (raised by the Anti-Federalists, and likely to kill ratification of the Constitution) that a) there was no Bill of Rights and b) that any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete.
Perhaps it is time to start taking advantage of this.
It has been argued that a fundamental right arising under the 9th Amendment, as a right "retained by the people" and "reserved to the people", is the right not to be subject to any law, rule, order, precedent, procedure, or process that can reasonably be supposed (by ordinary people, not by legal professionals) to involve conflicts of interest on the part of members of government or on the part of legal professionals (individually or as a class within society).
One possible point of attack on the current practice of destructive lawsuits would be to assert this right as a fundamental right, then start going after the legal professionals engaged in destructive lawsuits by pointing out that they are engaging in unethical conduct and a violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
"Plassman and Tideman break down the impact of concealed handgun laws not only across states but also by each year before and after the law... Appendix Figure 1.1 here reproduces the results they obtained for murder and the results are striking. For the ten states that adopted concealed handgun laws during the period that they studied, murder rates were rising or constant in all the states and falling after the law was passed. Indeed, with one exception, all the coefficients for murder, rape, and robbery for all ten states enacting the law from 1977 through 1992 imply that crime rates fell during the first full year that the laws were in effect. Even in that one exception (Oregon for robbery), the robbery rates were still much lower in the first three full years after enactment than in any of the five years before the law."
"David Olson and Michael Maltz use county-level data from the Supplemental Homicide Report (SHR).... The overall drop in homicides that Olson and Maltz find is roughly similar to what I originally reported using county level UCR data, but the county-level SHR data do produce different results in terms of how murders are committed and who benefits from gun ownership. Their results show that the criminals who continue to murder after the passage of concealed handgun laws rely much less frequently upon guns to commit murders. The results are striking: Murders with guns fall by 21 percent..."
"Using data from 1984 to 1996, David Mustard find that while waiting periods rarely have a significant effect one way or another on police deaths, concealed handgun laws are consistently and significantly related to fewer killings of police."
Studies discussed in John Lott, "The Bias Against Guns". 2003, Appendix 1
More fundamentally, James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be an open-ended document. The 9th Amendment provides for rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment provides for rights reserved to the people. This was done to address the dual issues (raised by the Anti-Federalists, and likely to kill ratification of the Constitution) that a) there was no Bill of Rights and b) that any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete.
By definition, rights retained by the people are "retained by the people", which to any reasonable person (i.e. one not being led astray by ignorance, brainwashing or conflict of interest), means they can't be stolen by any element or group within the government.
Legal professionals, as a class within society, are in a position of conflict with interest with respect to recognizing these rights "retained by the people".
A scary, complex, confusing, actually (or even just seemingly) contradictory legal system artificially increases the demand for the services of legal professionals, and a number of fundamental rights that could reasonably be asserted under the 9th or 10th Amendments would naturally work against the tendency for the legal system to be any or all of these things.
For example: the right to "reasonable conduct under reasonable circumstances", where "reasonable" is defined by the people, not by the government.
Another example: the right to not have one's time wasted by the government.
Within the general scope of that right, a more specific right can be asserted that one to not be subject to laws, procedures, practices, precedents, executive orders, court orders, rules, and/or policies that can reasonably be supposed to be the result of or to involve security paranoia.
Furthermore, a judge who violated such rights -- at any point in their careers -- could be reasonably considered to be disqualified from holding any position of public trust or engaging in the practice of law, as a result of violating his or her oath to uphold the Bill of Rights. This -- in and of itself -- creates an ethical conflict of interest that tends to work against judges recognizing the authority of these amendments, as it opens up their entire careers to scrutiny.
Hence, if a judge -- by definition a legal professional -- is denying a trial by jury in a case that could reasonably be supposed to involve rights arising under the 9th Amendment, then it necessarily follows that the case will be decided by someone in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to recognizing those rights.
On the other hand, most jury members would have no understanding at all of the Bill of Rights, so it seems we have a choice between ignorance or conflict of interest. I don't know which scares me more...
I've had lots of great gaming experiences, with many different editions of the rules. In my experience, the really good GM's learned to adjust how things worked in their games, one way or another, to compensate for the quirks of, or problems with, the official rules.
For example, one way to deal with the problem of low dice rolls is to award bonus hit points every so often to characters that get a lot of combat experience. After all, learned combat survivability is really what the hit point concept is supposed to represent, at least for player characters, so this fits logically within "game reality". Soldiers that survive their first few combats have a far higher likelihood of surviving future combats than first timers, so this matches well with reality.
Balancing the races poses another problem when using the written rules. One option there is to give human characters some bonuses to make up for the racial abilities they are not getting from their race. For example, human players might be allowed some unique special ability, the ability to use a few extra spells, a special starting item, or some bonuses to their initial stats to compensate for the demi-human advantages of infravision or the ability to cast spells while wearing armor.
In my experience, the kinds of people that I want to play with are pretty understanding of this sort of thing: the players with demi-human characters know they've got some extra advantages and don't mind the GM adjusting things to provide a little game balance (especially for the starting characters). As long as the adjustment doesn't distort "game reality" too much it tends to go over well with good players. Good players are not concerned with having their characters be "better" than the characters played by their friends: they are interested in having fun with their friends.
Once the GM starts doing this sort of thing, of course, there is no reason to level cap demi-humans (the level-cap system does distort "game reality", as it is perceived as purely arbitrary by players). There is also no reason to prevent humans from multi-classing, something that many game masters were allowing long before the 3rd edition came out and made it official (or, for that matter, the Lankhmar rules).
Incidentally, awarding bonuses to weaker characters, classes, or races became a lot easier once the 3rd edition came out, as the creative GM can now use bonus skills and feats in addition to the more traditional bonuses, a point that often gets overlooked by those that criticize the "complexity" of the 3/3.5/Pathfinder systems.
There is a challenge here: the GM must carefully manage these adjustments without unbalancing the game or penalizing the players that build their characters in a more traditional manner. A little wisdom is required, and sometimes this means a willingness to learn from one's mistakes. Most GM's change the rules that affect character building and advancement more than they change the combat rules.
In a number of cases, I've played in pretty rules-intensive games that were still really fun, because problems with the rules were addressed in reasonable ways while still allowing the intricate and interesting combat that rules-intensive games permit (something the "story gamers" don't get to experience).
In my experience, the really good GMs could make these kinds of changes to their game without significantly altering the fundamental nature of the game. I've seen it happen lots of times, in games that lasted a long time and were a lot of fun to play in.
So it's not really a question of what rules you use, or what system you play, having a good RPG experience is about how you play and who you play with.
The unfortunate thing is that there is large pool of GM experience improving these games out in the world, but it rarely seems to get tapped when newer versions of the game rules are being written by the "professional" game writers.
For that matter, taxing the sales of non-fiction media is certainly a violation of fundamental rights in a free country: laws that do this are illegal laws and those that write or enforce such laws demonstrate their lack of fitness to hold any position of public trust or responsibility.
Public education does not even come close to giving people the knowledge that is needed to be competent at understanding the world they live in. Lifetime learning is required for the people to be able to figure out what is really going on, and to serve as a check and balance on their government, and non-fiction media is the foundation for lifetime learning. Taxing access to the items that people need for lifetime learning is fundamentally incompatible with the people being able to ultimately control their government. No legitimate government can apply sales or any other taxes to such items.
It's not really clear that the current copyright system in the US, in its current form, is even legal. It's important to remember that James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be an open-ended document: that's why the 9th Amendment retains unspecified rights to the people, and the 10th Amendment reserves rights to the people.
The current copyright system is certainly excessively and unnecessarily complex. To see this, just look at how hard it is to figure out whether or not something is still under copyright, or what is actually allowed under "fair use" rights.
Legal professionals as a class in society (which includes the lawyers in Congress who write the laws, the attorneys that prosecute violations of the laws, and the judges that decide cases regarding them) are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to complex laws: the more complex the legal system, the more demand created for the services of legal professionals.
Without a doubt, one of the most fundamental rights that can be asserted under the 9th Amendment would be a right to not be subject to laws, orders, judgments, rulings, precedents, etc... (i.e. anything that tends to be created by legal professionals) that can reasonably be supposed to involve conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals. Excessively complex laws violate this fundamental human right.
Another fundamental right that could be asserted would be a right to not have the legal system be allowed waste people's time (the human span of life being finite, all too short, and precious) which also works against excessively complex laws.
Making copyright law depend heavily on contract law (which is how it is currently implemented) also creates a huge conflict of interest for legal professionals, as a huge amount of the work that legal professionals do during their careers involves contracts in one form or another. Thus, having copyright (and patent) law depend upon contract law automatically guarantees lots of business to legal professionals as a class in society.
One possible way to handle copyright (and for that matter, patents) that would avoid contract law and issues of transfer of ownership, would be to give all persons involved in creating the work some reasonable share of the gross made by any commercial sales of items. This would also help with the abuse of authors, musicians, and so forth that routinely goes on in certain industries.
There would doubtless be some issues that would need to be thought through in detail to make such a system work, such as rights to protect authors from abuse of their names and reputations. Doubtless those details could be worked out.
There is also an issue with handling items that go out of print: things that go out of print for some (short) number of years should automatically be freely available for non-commercial purposes, rather than staying under copyright for some arbitrary period of time.
It has been argued that it is illegal violation of the Bill of Rights for state governments to attempt to tax purchases made out of state.
No state should be able to have any say over reasonable actions of people or their agents in another state. This is why we have a federal government.
In a free country, one should be free to go somewhere else to make purchases if local or state government is engaging in excessive taxation or otherwise engaging in abusive practices regarding reasonable commerce. Whether one travels electronically or physically is immaterial: fundamental rights do not change merely because technology permits more convenient forms of travel.
Putting this in other words, if one lives five minutes a border between two states, one should be able to drive to the supermarket five minutes across the border rather than having to drive to the market that is in ones own state, but thirty minutes away, without either state having any say in this. Modern technology simply makes that "border" closer to everyone.
Laws that interfere with this freedom can be considered to infringe fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). Preventing this sort of thing is why James Madison deliberately made the Bill of Rights open-ended.
If state, federal, and local governments are all involved in regulating inter-state commerce (taxing inter-state commerce is certainly a form of regulation), this creates unnecessary complexity in the legal system and makes it more confusing.
A complex, confusing, actually or seemingly contradictory legal system creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals. By the laws of economics, artificial demand increases the amount of money legal professionals can charge for their services. In other words, all legal professionals involved in writing or enforcing such state or local laws are in a position of ethical conflict of interest. This is clearly an undesirable situation.
One of the most fundamental rights that can be asserted under the 9th Amendment is the right to NOT be subject to laws, policies, rulings, orders, precedents, and so forth that involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals or members of government. Thus, creating or enforcing any such law would be unethical for members of either group.
Furthermore, another fundamental right that could be asserted under the 9th Amendment would be the right to not be subject to either excessive government or excessive bureaucracy. Again, this is a right that must exist in any country for that country to be considered a free country.
Laws that required one to keep track of all the purchases one makes and where those purchases are made would certainly involve both excessive government and excessive bureaucracy, and thus would be an illegal violation of fundamental rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Sexual harassment is wrong and a problem for many societies, but destructive lawsuits are not the solution.
Destructive lawsuits exist in large part in the US because of ethical conflicts of interest on the part of legal professionals, particularly in situations where all legal professionals -- as a class within society -- are in a position of conflict of interest.
A complex, confusing, slow, cumbersome, and / or contradictory legal system creates a huge demand for the services of legal professionals. As a simple matter of economics, this places ALL legal professionals in a position of conflict of interest with respect to many aspects of how the legal system works. If the legal professionals write the laws, implement the precedents, or judge the cases in a manner that makes the legal system complex, confusing, slow, cumbersome, or contradictory (whether actually or just apparently), then in the process they are guaranteeing more work and higher salaries for members of their profession OVER THE LONG TERM.
A rational observer, one not being led astray by ignorance, brainwashing, or conflict of interest, that looks at the US legal system will quickly come to the conclusion that it has many (or perhaps all) of these attributes. No country that has such a legal system can be considered in any way a free country, which the US is certainly supposed to be.
In theory, legal professionals are supposed to look after legal ethics, although that isn't actually written down in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. It's more something they've claimed dominion over.
In practice, if we as a people allow the sort of thing (which is similar to allowing the foxes to guard the hen-houses), then we should expect problems such as destructive lawsuits.
One solution is to start over with the whole revolution business, then develop a new system that will greatly reduce the frequency of these kinds of problems.
Another -- better -- solution is to figure out how to attack the whole problem of ethical conflicts of interest in the legal system without the need for a revolution.
James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be an open-ended document. The 9th Amendment provides for rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment provides for rights reserved to the people. This was done to address the dual issues (raised by the Anti-Federalists, and likely to kill ratification of the Constitution) that a) there was no Bill of Rights and b) that any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete.
Perhaps it is time to start taking advantage of this.
It has been argued that a fundamental right arising under the 9th Amendment, as a right "retained by the people" and "reserved to the people", is the right not to be subject to any law, rule, order, precedent, procedure, or process that can reasonably be supposed (by ordinary people, not by legal professionals) to involve conflicts of interest on the part of members of government or on the part of legal professionals (individually or as a class within society).
One possible point of attack on the current practice of destructive lawsuits would be to assert this right as a fundamental right, then start going after the legal professionals engaged in destructive lawsuits by pointing out that they are engaging in unethical conduct and a violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
"Plassman and Tideman break down the impact of concealed handgun laws not only across states but also by each year before and after the law ...
Appendix Figure 1.1 here reproduces the results they obtained for murder and the results are striking. For the ten states that adopted concealed handgun laws during the period that they studied, murder rates were rising or constant in all the states and falling after the law was passed. Indeed, with one exception, all the coefficients for murder, rape, and robbery for all ten states enacting the law from 1977 through 1992 imply that crime rates fell during the first full year that the laws were in effect. Even in that one exception (Oregon for robbery), the robbery rates were still much lower in the first three full years after enactment than in any of the five years before the law."
"David Olson and Michael Maltz use county-level data from the Supplemental Homicide Report (SHR). ... The overall drop in homicides that Olson and Maltz find is roughly similar to what I originally reported using county level UCR data, but the county-level SHR data do produce different results in terms of how murders are committed and who benefits from gun ownership. Their results show that the criminals who continue to murder after the passage of concealed handgun laws rely much less frequently upon guns to commit murders. The results are striking: Murders with guns fall by 21 percent ..."
"Using data from 1984 to 1996, David Mustard find that while waiting periods rarely have a significant effect one way or another on police deaths, concealed handgun laws are consistently and significantly related to fewer killings of police."
Studies discussed in John Lott, "The Bias Against Guns". 2003, Appendix 1
More fundamentally, James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be an open-ended document. The 9th Amendment provides for rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment provides for rights reserved to the people. This was done to address the dual issues (raised by the Anti-Federalists, and likely to kill ratification of the Constitution) that a) there was no Bill of Rights and b) that any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete.
By definition, rights retained by the people are "retained by the people", which to any reasonable person (i.e. one not being led astray by ignorance, brainwashing or conflict of interest), means they can't be stolen by any element or group within the government.
Legal professionals, as a class within society, are in a position of conflict with interest with respect to recognizing these rights "retained by the people".
A scary, complex, confusing, actually (or even just seemingly) contradictory legal system artificially increases the demand for the services of legal professionals, and a number of fundamental rights that could reasonably be asserted under the 9th or 10th Amendments would naturally work against the tendency for the legal system to be any or all of these things.
For example: the right to "reasonable conduct under reasonable circumstances", where "reasonable" is defined by the people, not by the government.
Another example: the right to not have one's time wasted by the government.
Within the general scope of that right, a more specific right can be asserted that one to not be subject to laws, procedures, practices, precedents, executive orders, court orders, rules, and/or policies that can reasonably be supposed to be the result of or to involve security paranoia.
Furthermore, a judge who violated such rights -- at any point in their careers -- could be reasonably considered to be disqualified from holding any position of public trust or engaging in the practice of law, as a result of violating his or her oath to uphold the Bill of Rights. This -- in and of itself -- creates an ethical conflict of interest that tends to work against judges recognizing the authority of these amendments, as it opens up their entire careers to scrutiny.
Hence, if a judge -- by definition a legal professional -- is denying a trial by jury in a case that could reasonably be supposed to involve rights arising under the 9th Amendment, then it necessarily follows that the case will be decided by someone in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to recognizing those rights.
On the other hand, most jury members would have no understanding at all of the Bill of Rights, so it seems we have a choice between ignorance or conflict of interest. I don't know which scares me more ...
I've had lots of great gaming experiences, with many different editions of the rules. In my experience, the really good GM's learned to adjust how things worked in their games, one way or another, to compensate for the quirks of, or problems with, the official rules.
For example, one way to deal with the problem of low dice rolls is to award bonus hit points every so often to characters that get a lot of combat experience. After all, learned combat survivability is really what the hit point concept is supposed to represent, at least for player characters, so this fits logically within "game reality". Soldiers that survive their first few combats have a far higher likelihood of surviving future combats than first timers, so this matches well with reality.
Balancing the races poses another problem when using the written rules. One option there is to give human characters some bonuses to make up for the racial abilities they are not getting from their race. For example, human players might be allowed some unique special ability, the ability to use a few extra spells, a special starting item, or some bonuses to their initial stats to compensate for the demi-human advantages of infravision or the ability to cast spells while wearing armor.
In my experience, the kinds of people that I want to play with are pretty understanding of this sort of thing: the players with demi-human characters know they've got some extra advantages and don't mind the GM adjusting things to provide a little game balance (especially for the starting characters). As long as the adjustment doesn't distort "game reality" too much it tends to go over well with good players. Good players are not concerned with having their characters be "better" than the characters played by their friends: they are interested in having fun with their friends.
Once the GM starts doing this sort of thing, of course, there is no reason to level cap demi-humans (the level-cap system does distort "game reality", as it is perceived as purely arbitrary by players). There is also no reason to prevent humans from multi-classing, something that many game masters were allowing long before the 3rd edition came out and made it official (or, for that matter, the Lankhmar rules).
Incidentally, awarding bonuses to weaker characters, classes, or races became a lot easier once the 3rd edition came out, as the creative GM can now use bonus skills and feats in addition to the more traditional bonuses, a point that often gets overlooked by those that criticize the "complexity" of the 3/3.5/Pathfinder systems.
There is a challenge here: the GM must carefully manage these adjustments without unbalancing the game or penalizing the players that build their characters in a more traditional manner. A little wisdom is required, and sometimes this means a willingness to learn from one's mistakes. Most GM's change the rules that affect character building and advancement more than they change the combat rules.
In a number of cases, I've played in pretty rules-intensive games that were still really fun, because problems with the rules were addressed in reasonable ways while still allowing the intricate and interesting combat that rules-intensive games permit (something the "story gamers" don't get to experience).
In my experience, the really good GMs could make these kinds of changes to their game without significantly altering the fundamental nature of the game. I've seen it happen lots of times, in games that lasted a long time and were a lot of fun to play in.
So it's not really a question of what rules you use, or what system you play, having a good RPG experience is about how you play and who you play with.
The unfortunate thing is that there is large pool of GM experience improving these games out in the world, but it rarely seems to get tapped when newer versions of the game rules are being written by the "professional" game writers.
For that matter, taxing the sales of non-fiction media is certainly a violation of fundamental rights in a free country: laws that do this are illegal laws and those that write or enforce such laws demonstrate their lack of fitness to hold any position of public trust or responsibility.
Public education does not even come close to giving people the knowledge that is needed to be competent at understanding the world they live in. Lifetime learning is required for the people to be able to figure out what is really going on, and to serve as a check and balance on their government, and non-fiction media is the foundation for lifetime learning. Taxing access to the items that people need for lifetime learning is fundamentally incompatible with the people being able to ultimately control their government. No legitimate government can apply sales or any other taxes to such items.
It's not really clear that the current copyright system in the US, in its current form, is even legal. It's important to remember that James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be an open-ended document: that's why the 9th Amendment retains unspecified rights to the people, and the 10th Amendment reserves rights to the people.
The current copyright system is certainly excessively and unnecessarily complex. To see this, just look at how hard it is to figure out whether or not something is still under copyright, or what is actually allowed under "fair use" rights.
Legal professionals as a class in society (which includes the lawyers in Congress who write the laws, the attorneys that prosecute violations of the laws, and the judges that decide cases regarding them) are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to complex laws: the more complex the legal system, the more demand created for the services of legal professionals.
Without a doubt, one of the most fundamental rights that can be asserted under the 9th Amendment would be a right to not be subject to laws, orders, judgments, rulings, precedents, etc ... (i.e. anything that tends to be created by legal professionals) that can reasonably be supposed to involve conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals. Excessively complex laws violate this fundamental human right.
Another fundamental right that could be asserted would be a right to not have the legal system be allowed waste people's time (the human span of life being finite, all too short, and precious) which also works against excessively complex laws.
Making copyright law depend heavily on contract law (which is how it is currently implemented) also creates a huge conflict of interest for legal professionals, as a huge amount of the work that legal professionals do during their careers involves contracts in one form or another. Thus, having copyright (and patent) law depend upon contract law automatically guarantees lots of business to legal professionals as a class in society.
One possible way to handle copyright (and for that matter, patents) that would avoid contract law and issues of transfer of ownership, would be to give all persons involved in creating the work some reasonable share of the gross made by any commercial sales of items. This would also help with the abuse of authors, musicians, and so forth that routinely goes on in certain industries.
There would doubtless be some issues that would need to be thought through in detail to make such a system work, such as rights to protect authors from abuse of their names and reputations. Doubtless those details could be worked out.
There is also an issue with handling items that go out of print: things that go out of print for some (short) number of years should automatically be freely available for non-commercial purposes, rather than staying under copyright for some arbitrary period of time.
It has been argued that it is illegal violation of the Bill of Rights for state governments to attempt to tax purchases made out of state.
No state should be able to have any say over reasonable actions of people or their agents in another state. This is why we have a federal government.
In a free country, one should be free to go somewhere else to make purchases if local or state government is engaging in excessive taxation or otherwise engaging in abusive practices regarding reasonable commerce. Whether one travels electronically or physically is immaterial: fundamental rights do not change merely because technology permits more convenient forms of travel.
Putting this in other words, if one lives five minutes a border between two states, one should be able to drive to the supermarket five minutes across the border rather than having to drive to the market that is in ones own state, but thirty minutes away, without either state having any say in this. Modern technology simply makes that "border" closer to everyone.
Laws that interfere with this freedom can be considered to infringe fundamental rights arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). Preventing this sort of thing is why James Madison deliberately made the Bill of Rights open-ended.
If state, federal, and local governments are all involved in regulating inter-state commerce (taxing inter-state commerce is certainly a form of regulation), this creates unnecessary complexity in the legal system and makes it more confusing.
A complex, confusing, actually or seemingly contradictory legal system creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals. By the laws of economics, artificial demand increases the amount of money legal professionals can charge for their services. In other words, all legal professionals involved in writing or enforcing such state or local laws are in a position of ethical conflict of interest. This is clearly an undesirable situation.
One of the most fundamental rights that can be asserted under the 9th Amendment is the right to NOT be subject to laws, policies, rulings, orders, precedents, and so forth that involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals or members of government. Thus, creating or enforcing any such law would be unethical for members of either group.
Furthermore, another fundamental right that could be asserted under the 9th Amendment would be the right to not be subject to either excessive government or excessive bureaucracy. Again, this is a right that must exist in any country for that country to be considered a free country.
Laws that required one to keep track of all the purchases one makes and where those purchases are made would certainly involve both excessive government and excessive bureaucracy, and thus would be an illegal violation of fundamental rights.