> given the people, local or non-local, have power
That's not a given. Governments only have power to the extent that citizens agree to abide by the government's laws. If enough citizens get fed up with the laws, they stop abiding by them. Sometimes it's open revolution, as happened for instance in the United States in the late 1700s. Sometimes it's just selective noncompliance when people know a law is unenforceable, as for instance the way most Americans today treat speed limits and many other traffic laws.
A more difficult situation is when a society at large is split between two very different views of what kinds of laws are good social policy. IMO, in such cases neither side should have the power to get their preferred laws passed; laws affecting entire societies should only be passed when there is a broad consensus that they are good laws, or at least acceptable.
If a corrupt government is given power to decide any punishment it pleases for not abiding by its laws, and given the power technical and legal to preclude non-local actors from interfering with its actions, then good luck with your non-compliance. Personally, my experience has been that such circumstances only yield busier gulags, but your mileage may vary.
And I mean really, social policy? So what if people in Mississipi decide they still want slavery or jim crow? Those are binary choices. There is no way to implement your "neither side should have the power to get their preferred laws passed" legislative scheme. What I mean in practice is that you either have slavery, or you do not have slavery. There is no state that a free portion of society can be in where they both have and don't have slavery. At some point, you have to choose. What I'm asking, is what happens when the inevitably corrupt government officials choose to infringe on the freedoms of the citizens? Of course, we hope that they will never make choices that infringe on the freedoms of citizens. But humor me, what happens if they do?
> If a corrupt government is given power to decide any punishment it pleases for not abiding by its laws, and given the power technical and legal to preclude non-local actors from interfering with its actions
Who is giving the corrupt local government that power? The answer, historically, has always been: a higher-level government. And that's also the answer with corrupt localities today. They only survive because they have political friends in higher places.
> my experience has been that such circumstances only yield busier gulags
Which places with gulags have you lived in? (That's a serious question, btw: we have had posters on here who are from the former Soviet Union or one of its satellites and who have had direct personal experience of such things.)
> So what if people in Mississipi decide they still want slavery
They can't just decide they want slavery: they would have to get people in the same community to become slaves. Historically, that's never happened. Slavery has never been a local process; it's never that some people in a particular community just decide to enslave the others. It always happens as a result of non-local invasions (usually wars of conquest). Maintaining slavery as an institution also has never, historically, been done locally; it has always needed higher level non-local enforcement. For example, slavery only survived in the antebellum US South because both State and Federal governments enforced it. And even then they couldn't really enforce it; purposeful non-compliance by many people in the North with things like fugitive slave laws was common and almost never punished.
> What I'm asking, is what happens when the inevitably corrupt government officials choose to infringe on the freedoms of the citizens?
I've already answered this: citizens start finding ways not to comply, because enforcement can never be perfect; and eventually, if things get bad enough, they revolt.
The worst case is something like the Soviet Union or China, where a high-level central government is willing to use enough force even to put down open revolt. However, first, this is obviously not a local government doing this--no local government in history has had that much force at its disposal--and second, even that won't last: the Soviet Union fell apart, and if history is any indication, China will eventually do the same if its government continues with the level of repression it has shown thus far.
That's not a given. Governments only have power to the extent that citizens agree to abide by the government's laws. If enough citizens get fed up with the laws, they stop abiding by them. Sometimes it's open revolution, as happened for instance in the United States in the late 1700s. Sometimes it's just selective noncompliance when people know a law is unenforceable, as for instance the way most Americans today treat speed limits and many other traffic laws.
A more difficult situation is when a society at large is split between two very different views of what kinds of laws are good social policy. IMO, in such cases neither side should have the power to get their preferred laws passed; laws affecting entire societies should only be passed when there is a broad consensus that they are good laws, or at least acceptable.