secession

Secession is Still the Answer

Mark Noonan99 Comments

Surprised that nearly ten years have passed since I first wrote on this subject. I stand by it. I bring it up now because Marjorie Taylor Greene Tweeted about a national divorce and it has caused people – Right and Left – to lose their minds. But such things do need to be discussed – and acted upon after discussion.

The word “secession” has a bad connotation in American usage because of the Civil War. And, in truth, the secessionists of 1861 were entirely unjustified in their action. As we state in our Declaration of Independence, it can at times become necessary for a people to dissolve the bands which have connected them to another people. But as the Declaration also says, this is only justified if the other people have by a series of usurpations and and injustices proven that their aim is subjugation. The South had no such cause in 1861 – and, in fact, the incoming Lincoln Administration (used at the proximate cause for secession) had repeatedly pledged to take no action against Southern institutions. And any action that might be taken in the future would follow the Constitutional order which would take into consideration Southern demands. You can’t rebel because of what someone might do to you at some future date – you can only justly rebel over past, ongoing or obviously imminent injustices.

But secession is not an inherently bad thing. After all, the Founders were secessionists. They had determined that the British government was determined to treat the American colonies as a cash cow with no reference to the needs or desires of the colonists – to reduce the colonies to subjugation. And, so, they seceded. And they weren’t the only people to ever do this. Norway is a secession from Sweden. Slovakia a secession from Czechoslovakia. It happens. Some times people just can’t live together and it is better that they live apart. And it might be time for us to consider that.

Back in 2013 I only meant secession in the sense of breaking up the States. My prime example then was California which is, in reality, four States with three of them subjected to the State running from Long Beach to San Francisco. The people of North, South and East California are fully justified in seeking secession from California – if they want it – because the actions of that part of California running along the coast clearly seek to subject the rest of California to their dictates without the people in the subjected areas having any real power to affect policy. Other States which are clearly more than the one legal entity currently existing are Nevada, New York, Illinois, Washington and Oregon…and cases can be made for Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania. In order to really have self government, the States will eventually have to be broken up – we cannot forever allow a few high population areas within a State to dictate to the rest of the State. People have rights – and their primary political right is to live under the laws they wish, not under the laws someone else wishes for them.

But now I am starting to wonder if the United States can remain together. I’m wondering whether secession is not just the answer partially, but totally?

Of course, it isn’t a simple split – not State by State. In fact, the part of the country which is moving me to think of separation is about 20 cities. They just happen to be very large population cities and they control the political destiny of half the Country (at least). If we are to separate, it won’t really be so much, say, 30 States going one way and 20 going the other…it’ll be about 100 counties going one way and all the rest going another. Essentially, the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, New York and Chicago need to be dealt with. But I don’t mean dealt with as they wish to deal with us – I wish in no way to dictate to San Francisco how the people there live. I just want to make sure the people of San Francisco can’t dictate how I live. We need to figure out if there is a way to retain San Francisco in a union which includes Provo, Utah and where both San Francisco and Provo mind their own business.

Can we do that? I’m not sure. The trouble is that these cities by their inordinate political power control the government, the media and most of the education and corporate establishments. They don’t want to leave us alone. They feel a duty to force us to live by their rules, even if their rules are downright insane. It might prove impossible to reconcile the differences…and the biggest stumbling block is going to be that the other side consider it immoral to mind their own business.

But, meanwhile, if we can save the Union, our best shot is to break up the States – and maybe make the large cities into City-States. But one way or the other, secession is the answer…either in unity or disunity.

Hey, It’s January: How About Another Open Thread?

Mark Noonan59 Comments

We’ll have a lot of Presidents going forward, but I don’t think we’ll ever have such a Grand Master Troll on Twitter like Trump, again:

I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!

What is most amusing is that his opponents take such jokes seriously. They light their hair on fire every time he makes a joke like this…they have intense discussions of What It All Means and how We’re Doomed Because of This Tweet. It is a glorious thing to behold. I highly recommend getting on Twitter just to watch.

William Jacobson Legal Insurrection goes over the Iranian crisis. Do read it. For me, I’ve been watching Elite Opinion cover itself in filth over the whole thing – trying to some how twist this yearning for freedom on the part of Iranians into a bad thing. They are just so desperate to preserve Obama’s legacy in the Iran Deal. I can only imagine its because they get paid – no one would be that stupid except for money.

Don Surber points out that the purveyors of Fake News just never seem to learn their lesson.

Further to that point, CNN’s Pentagon Correspondent wonders why the Secretary of the Navy would wear a sidearm in Afghanistan…I don’t know, maybe it’s because there’s a war going on, or something? Just my best guess, of course…

Deep State agent complains about Trump bringing attention to the Deep State.

That Grand Jury Mueller is using to railroad Trump people? There’s a bit of a perception of bias according to people in the know. Quite honestly, given the overwhelmingly Democrat make-up of the jury pool in the DC area, federal grand juries and trials should be held outside of the DC area…randomly select a city with a federal court for each case.

The Ghost of John Calhoun has settled in California.

Secession is the Answer Update

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Well, it’ll be on the ballot in California in 2016:

A proposal backed by venture capitalist Tim Draper to divide California into six states has received enough signatures to make the November 2016 ballot, according to the nonprofit Six Californias…

I expect it to be crushed at the polls – the last polling on it showed 59% of Californians opposed.  But, you got to start somewhere; in a democratic republic, nothing happens right away and, very often, the first time something is tested on the ballot, it goes down in flames. It takes education and political activity to bring something to majority support – and this is something that needs majority support.  In fact, this is the single most American political proposal in more than 100 years.  After all, the Founders were secessionists.

Draper’s proposal will fail – and part of the failure can be traced to the way he’s drawn the borders of the Six Californias. The purpose of secession in California is to free the people of California from the oppression of those who currently run California – San Francisco, Los Angeles and the Sacramento area. That should be one State, rather than being broken up into three…and the one State shouldn’t be rewarded with the Lake Tahoe area, especially as Tahoe has nothing in common with the Pacific Coast area it’s shackled to in Draper’s plan. No, no, no: liberal nitwits in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento have made California into a mess where a lot of people would like to get out – and no one other than the nitwit liberals of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento should be stuck with said nitwits. Draper’s “Jefferson” should be called “Northern California” and it should include the Tahoe area. Central California (though Central California could be called either East California or West Nevada) and South California are fine – so, with those modifications, you actually get Four Californias, not Six…and that would have a better chance of winning votes.  Of course, the other part of possible failure is that the poorer areas of the State (in my division, Northern California and Central California) might be scared off from secession because they would technically lose some benefits of taxes in the rich areas…but even here, a good public education campaign can show that what they’d lose in State spending they’d more than gain in economic growth by not being tied to the anti-growth liberals in West California (ie, SF, LA and Sacramento).

Getting back to the basics of it all, the primary purpose of secession is to provide political organisms which are united by a general set of common interests and thus are protected against rapacious or indifferent outsiders. That is, ultimately, what American government is all about.  The British government was rapacious and indifferent – and so we cut ourselves loose from it and made a government which wasn’t.  Or, more accurately, 13 governments which weren’t and which ceded enough of their power to a central government to protect us against foreign encroachment. To be sure, the theory can be carried too far – as it was in the Civil War when the South had all the protections it needed in its local relations, but decided to pull out altogether because they worried that at some theoretic point in the future, someone from the North might want to intefere directly in Southern life. But because someone once took it too far doesn’t mean the essential principal is wrong.

Not only does California need to be broken up, but so does New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Nevada and probably several other States where population and economic changes over the past century have caused various parts of the States to develope organically into entities which have little or nothing in common with other parts of the State.  Take, for instance, Nevada – back when Statehood was secured, mining was pretty much it for the State; it is what Nevada did.  But now over time changes have come over it – mining is still huge but only in the northern part of the State, while the south (ie, Las Vegas) is nothing but gaming and tourism.  These days, Neavda politicians in the south of the State greedily eye mining profits in the northern part of the State and propose to tax such profits to pay for things in the southern part of the State (and, of course, dependent upon gaming and tourism – ie, bribed by gaming and tourism industry lobbyists – southern Nevada pols never seek to tax heavily their own gaming and tourism)…but what matter is it to, say, a person living in Winnemucca what the class size is in Las Vegas?  Why should a mine which pays enough taxes for the locals in Winnemucca (and provides good jobs for people in Winnemucca) pay for the schooling of kids in Las Vegas?  The State should be broken up – so that Tourist/Gaming Nevada will have to take care of it’s own while Mining Nevada will take care of it’s own, with neither being able to do anything to the other.

Now, to be sure, such a break up of the States would result in more Senators – which is not necessarily a good thing.  But it would also be a bit more fair – and I think we’d also have to increase the size of the House from 435 members to right around 651 in order to ensure good representation of the people. But the resultant government – at the State and federal levels – will be more responsive to the needs and desires of the people, and less able to be controlled by the fat cats of a few large, urban areas. Ultimately, I think it would strengthen the union if there were more parts to it – and that is why I praise this effort in California and hope that it will grow and spread over the next few decades.

 

 

 

 

Secession is the Answer Update

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Spreading like wildfire around the country:

There’s nothing like a guy with a few million bucks to lend instant credibility to a previously penny-ante movement to split up the state of California.

Venture capitalist Tim Draper of Silicon Valley has filed paperwork for a November ballot measure that would divide California into six states, calling the Golden State as presently constituted “too big and bloated.”

I think that six is a bit high, but the point still holds – California is too big and bloated.
I think this idea will start to get legs – people are tired of out of touch, remote government.

Secession is the Answer, Update

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Seems to be spreading like wildfire:

…West Virginia was the last state to break off from another. Now, 150 years later, a 49-year-old information technology consultant wants to apply the knife to Maryland’s five western counties. “The people are the sovereign,” says Scott Strzelczyk, leader of the fledgling Western Maryland Initiative, and the western sovereigns are fed up with Annapolis’s liberal majority, elected by the state’s other sovereigns.

“If you think you have a long list of grievances and it’s been going on for decades, and you can’t get it resolved, ultimately this is what you have to do,” says Strzelczyk, who lives in New Windsor, a historic town of 1,400 people in Carroll County. “Otherwise you are trapped.”…

Maryland is governed by the DC/Baltimore area of the State – holding the largest population and entirely dependent upon Big Government (federal and State), the people of those areas prefer their politicians to be Big Government boosters.  And no problem with that.  More power to them.  But this means that the people of western Maryland – much smaller in population and thus playing little role in either the legislative or executive branches of State government – are left out in the cold…and many of them don’t want a government which is keen mostly upon creating more government.

In government, smaller is better – the smaller the territory under any particular government the more attuned it will be to the needs of the local people.  The Founders knew this – and thus set up a federal Republic in order to secure local rule in most areas of government, leaving to the federal government only those limited powers necessary to secure the broad rights of all the people.  Over time, both the federal and State governments have engrossed power to themselves – and do not think that this was just some trick pulled by hucksters…for a very long time, starting in the misbegotten “progressive” era of the early 20th century, the people, themselves, sought government to “do something” about problems.  The trouble is that government “doing something” means government growing in power…and often not doing at all what people wanted.  Now the reaction has set in – and in a very American fashion, it is emerging on the national level as a revived “Jacksonian” desire to reign in the federal government, and a desire to break up the States in to smaller political units which can better be managed by the people, rather than being resigned to the Ruling Class and it’s permanent bureaucracy.

This is the revolution, folks – the Second American Revolution.  The people are leading it, and it will reform this great nation of ours.

Secession is the Answer Update

Mark Noonan2 Comments

Yet another move to bring rationality to American politics:

The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 this afternoon to pursue seceding from California.

More than 100 people packed the supervisors’ chambers late this morning for a discussion on whether the county should issue a declaration that it wants to secede from the state. Nearly all those in attendance appeared to be for the move…

Siskiyou County is a rural county in northern California which has zero effective representation in both the California legislature and the United States Senate…both places merely representing coastal/urban California with no thought to the rest of the State.  The country is burdened by taxes and regulations written by the coastal/urban areas which bear little relation to the needs and aspirations of the people of Siskiyou.  The only way these people can get representation is to have their own State and send their own Senators to DC.

More and more of this is what we need.

Secession is the Answer

Mark Noonan27 Comments

From the Washington Times:

You’ve got North Carolina and North Dakota, so why not Northern Colorado?

Voters in several rural Colorado counties will be asked whether they want to form a new state tentatively named Northern Colorado the November election, a reaction to the Democrat-controlled state legislature’s “war on rural Colorado.”

The Weld County Commissioners voted unanimously at Monday’s meeting to place a measure on the Nov. 5 ballot asking voters whether they want the county to join other rural counties in forming another state.

“The concerns of rural Coloradans have been ignored for years,”  William Garcia, chairman of the Weld County Commissioners, said in a statement. “The last session was the straw that broke the camel’s back for many people. They want change. They want to be heard.”

Three other rural counties — Cheyenne, Sedgwick and Yuma — also plan to place the 51st state referendum on the fall ballot. At least three more counties plan to consider the proposal this week at their commission meetings, said Jeffrey Hare, spokesman for the 51st State Initiative…

I’ve long argued in favor of this – you see, the government is just not responsive to the people, on the federal or State level.  This is especially true in the Western States where the States were created, willy-nilly, when they had tiny populations.  Gigantic geographic areas, mostly empty at the time of Statehood, were pushed within State boundaries and since that time, with population growth and economic development, the interests of the various regions of the States have often diverged.  More extreme than the Colorado example is the example of California.

There were fewer than 100,000 people living in California in 1850 when it became a State.  Most of the State, of course, was completely empty of people.  Over the past 163 years, the population has increased to more than 38 million and these people are spread out over the vast territory of the State and have developed lives of their own.  California isn’t a unified entity with a strong community of interests – it is a cobbled together grouping of several different communities which, however, are politically dominated by the two largest concentrations of people in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with LA and SF – they are people with a full right to decide for themselves how they want to live…the trouble is that by being in the same State as Victorville and Palmdale, which have vastly  different ideas than SF and LA, the people of LA and SF get to dictate to the smaller populations of Victorville and Palmdale.  That just isn’t fair – doesn’t matter how Palmdale votes, they will always get a government which adheres to the wishes of San Francisco and Los Angeles.  California is not one State – it is four States (at least) forced to live under the domination of one State (the coastal area of California running from Long Beach up to San Francisco).

By breaking up the States along lines of interest, we can have States which reflect the will of their people, broadly speaking, and which take care to protect the interests of the State (no more will northern California’s logging interests be at the mercy of anti-logging San Francisco, for instance).  Additionally, by breaking up the States we ensure that representation in the United States Senate more accurately reflects all of the people – right now, both of California’s Senators are from San Francisco and while they heartily and ably represent the interests of San Francisco (and Los Angeles), they aren’t really putting before the United States Senate the interests of the other States currently contained within California’s borders.  This break up of the States should also be coupled with increasing the size of the House to at least 601 members – thus making our House representatives more representative of the people.

The one thing I can’t stand is domination of one party by another.  People in their localities should pretty much do it as they want, limited only by the strictures of the Constitution.  It is way past time that we completely reformed American government to ensure that the local people rule their own lives.  Secession is the answer to the problem – by making government smaller and closer to the people, it will be less corrupt and oppressive.