Taxing Commerce

During February vacation, I went to Florida for a week or so. In the state of Florida there is a network of toll roads for drivers, and so often a decent amount of money has to be paid to the state. But if you drive outside of the state of Florida, coming from a Florida toll road, you still have to pay the toll. Essentially, then, Florida is taxing you to leave its own state. Technically, since I could have passed over state lines, this would have resulted in me being part of the system of interstate commerce. And who's job is it to regulate that? Not Florida's, but the federal government's. In the landmark Supreme Court case Gibbons v. Ogden the Supreme Court gave the control of interstate commerce to the government at the federal level. If, hypothetically, the federal government was controlling the tolls out of the state of Florida, though, it would be of questionable legality. The US Constitution prevents the federal government from taxing exports, but do exports apply to the state level as well as the national level? If they do, then the State of Florida is disobeying the law by collecting a tax on interstate commerce, and the federal government is disobeying the law by letting Florida tax exports, and since the process of interstate commerce falls under federal control, it would fall on Washington's shoulders to answer to the possibly unconstitutional action of taxing people that leave the State of Florida.

Mindless Conformism

People make decisions by weighing morals in their head, but what are morals? And what are decisions? People can think that are individual, that they are unique, but our society is structured to beat out any nonconformism. You can make a decision, but ultimately that decision will be based less on what you actually believe than what you want people to think you believe. If you were told that you had an entire day to do whatever you wanted, how many of you would do something because it would be frowned upon if you didn't? That's the POINT. People don't understand what is outside the realm of societal conformity. Even if you were the needle in the haystack that actually defied the rules in your time of freedom, there remains the fact that you are consciously defying rules, which are societal creations. The only way to truly be individual is to do what is best for yourself, and not a single person can even do that. The truth remains that we are all mindless servants to society, and whether society is good or bad, we still can't escape it even if we wanted to.