I also feel it is a problem, but perhaps for different reasons. As an illustration, my first thought regarding this particular CA law is that some people will p

I also feel it is a problem, but perhaps for different reasons. As an illustration, my first thought regarding this particular CA law is that some people will prefer gas vehicles and that is okay by me. Freedom matters - it isn’t just an empty slogan but something that really changes people’s perception of their life, their role as an actor with control, and their ability to undertake the activities they seek without fear of an intangible authority. To me, approaches that favor local choice are better - like pricing in the externalities (for both gas and electric vehicles) and letting people buy what they want. But as we create a larger and larger body of laws that move control into higher and higher levels of government, that sense of freedom gets eroded. It starts to feel like too many facets of our lives are subject to the whims of the government, which is to say, other people. It starts to force everyone to invest heavily in battling politically rather than saving that time for living their lives, because if they don’t, they will be subject to that loss of freedom based on the whims of those who are overly politically involved. A sufficiently complex legal system, like in west coast states, is also difficult to interpret and difficult to enforce fairly. You end up with the potential for abuse in the form of regulatory capture or selective enforcement or whatever else. The original vision for American government was a limited body that protected a small set of higher level principles (as you said), with everything else left to lower levels of government. There’s a lot of wisdom in that and I feel there’s a way to retain something closer to that instead of where we are today.