[Maybe THIS is why the Imperium 'doesn’t meddle in member states’ affairs" they eventually and painfully learned their lesson?]

Although I don't find it realistic, I do like the amount of latitude that is given to local governments in the OTU. In some ways, this might be a good model for a future RL superstate to adopt (though I find this outcome, no matter how desirable, to be extremely unlikely given my views on how governments tend to operate).

However, I'm then reminded that whatever you legalize, no matter how perverse, will ultimately be practiced. Case in point: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html?_r=0

It's this sort of stuff that raises questions on what sort of political powers a laissez-faire (hands-off) superstate (such as the Imperium) should have in order to circumscribe the powers of its constituent members (the planetary governments).

Now, there are two ways of doing this. The first is to focus on individual rights, such as declaring that slavery is illegal, which is the tactic apparently taken in the OTU. However, this has some problems.

The first is that you'd need to compile a list of rights, and this can be tricky, as what what we regard as human rights seems to be in a state of flux. Should children have the right to a subsidized education? It depends on when and where you were born. Should poor people have a right to subsidized health care? Again, some would yes, so at first glance this appears to be a moving target.

Then, even after you figure out what's a right and what's not, which I think is an impossible exercise, then you have to figure out what exactly constitutes a violation, and once you get into the details, this too can get tricky. For instance, do company towns constitute slave plantations? Some would say yes, and some would say no. It just seems to me that there's no purely logical/scientific way to determine the answers to these sorts of questions.

Hence, you end up having to resort to politics. Well, an autocratic empire is certainly one solution, but suppose that we wanted a democratic republic? How would we design it? For example, let's assume that all the member states could vote on what sort of rules they want the superstate to enforce upon all of them. Well, you wouldn't want something like this to be determined by a simple majority vote, because then pluralism would be essentially nullified. Instead of having highly-autonomous states, you'd have only a single mega-state. Even if you demanded a two-thirds majority, still, I think there would be a tyranny of the majority, where small subcultures could be wiped out ("Watch out for those D&D players. They're worshiping the devil.") But if you require a 99% majority, then you'll probably end up with NAMBLA and a certain segment of the fundamentalist Islamic population getting together and forming a state where you really wouldn't want to grow up. Ya get my drift?