Would Californians accept Alaskans having a saying in how they should manage their agriculture? Texas/Maine/oil?

The US federal model is considerably more devolved than most regions in most countries. The EU nations, particularly the so-called Eurozone where currency is shared and economies are tightly bound, are closer to US states than most other independent countries are. There's a spectrum.

So do the US and Zimbabwe.

The issue is only partly economic, it's also cultural. Europe's countries are far more culturally varied than US states; different opinions, different priorities, different norms. Crimea, Basque, Scot, Northern Ireland... The economies are also sufficiently varied that one ring to rule them all is absurd, resulting in tensions between the historical cultural groups, aka countries. The UK is increasingly interesting on this matter.

Um, yeah. Think you've misunderstood.

I'll just keep on turning it around - why would some folks in New York, for instance, decide for people living in Alabama, or Wyoming?

Plus, the cultural, historic, linguistic similarities between Alamaba and Woyming are infinitely greater than between the UK and Croatia. A person visiting Alabama from Texas isn't a "stranger", and wouldn't be treated or considered as one.

Move a city boy from New Jersey to Alaska or deep Lousiana and see how much of a stranger he ends up being, even if the language is technically the same.

Google "Westphalian Sovereignty" and go from there.

Is Scotland a country? Is Wales?

One can make arguments like "why would some folks in England, for instance, decide for people living in Scotland, or Northern Ireland?" but where do you draw the line? Wales has less autonomy than Scotland but is still a "country" on Wikipedia, are they oppressed? Inverness has social policy dictated from the Lowlands, is it not a true democracy then? `davidw in the next comment thread over isn't too happy with the amount of power Wyoming has over California, can it work in the long run? Or is it only EU federation that HN will complain about?

Let me ask you a question: why should people in Northrhine-Westphalia "decide for" people in Bavaria? Shouldn't we dissolve our federal parliament?

Having done that, why do the people living in Stuttgart "decide for" the people living in Karlsruhe? Shouldn't we dissolve the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg?

The answer is, of course, that decisions should be made at the lowest level where they are making sense. And in this regard the EU is imperfect.

But you're throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Far right parties are on the rise everywhere in Europe, regardless of the voting system.

See the vote today: There was an initiative about the abolition of flat taxes for rich non-working foreigners. It was broadly rejected around the country. But if a canton still wants to abolish it, they can do that (and some of them do it already).

That it strengthens extreme positions is rubbish. And even if it does, it would have a ridiculously small effect.

For instance, suppose the following: a majority of voters support Project A and a majority of voters support Project B, but Projects A and B are expensive and a majority of voters would oppose spending money on both Projects A and B.

If you do separate, parallel yes-or-no referendums on both A and B (as frequently happens in California), it is likely that both would pass, resulting in a sub-optimal outcome as a sub-majority wanted both.

With a smaller group of legislators, you can do things like non-binding votes to allow proponents to assess support and modify or withdraw their proposals accordingly (if A is more popular than B, then B can withdraw in favor of A) or sequential votes (if A has already passed, then people will vote no on B). The higher number of stakeholders involved with a referendum and the general cost of running an election make this less feasible with the direct democracy system.

Somewhat redundant measures in California that are proposed at the same time generally are legally conflicting, which means that if both are passed, only the measure with the greatest margin actually goes into effect. I can't think of any real examples of simultaneous, partially-redundant measures that both had majority support and had no legal conflict, so that both went into effect, where you could make a plausible case that the kind of problem you describe was in play. Can you present any?

On further thought, the real issue is more related to the budget ones. E.g. there is technically no conflict between "don't raise taxes" and "spend money on X". Edited accordingly.

A bigger problem, in my opinion, is that a bare majority is sufficient to amend the state Constitution. I think at least a 60% supermajority should be required.

Now, if we could get the entire population of the US into a room to argue over the budget for a week with a vote at the end I'm sure that the result would be better than our legislators would do but of course that's logistically impossible. So barring that I'll take representative democracy over referendums any day. Legislators know that voters have a distinct tendency to vote the bums out of office if they feel things are getting worse.

Because there wouldn't, ideally, "be" German or Greek or Spanish 'folks' in any sense other than culturally; i.e. complete free trade between these united zones of economic exchange is what it would 'supposedly' be all about, in the ideal Union sense. Germans get their beach houses, Spanish get their education and whatever else they might want from the Tutonic realms, and so around it goes. Imagine if the EU really was just a mass of citizens, who suddenly realized just what they had in common. Alas, its very difficult for such enlightenment to engage in Europe, it seems ..

(Not that I downvoted it, mind you)