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 am mulling the idea for my next book (after the macro book). I am thinking of how to implement a radical form of federalism, so that the U.S. could be broken into states the size of Singapore or Norway.
How would giving California 10 more Senators increase liberty given the current status of federalism in Washington D.C.?
Well, it would probably help end the war on drugs, anti-war sentiment seems strong out there, and it’s a pretty pro-immigrant state.
But more importantly, as the founders well knew, “The foundation of… liberty, and of all free government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council.” Breaking california up would give it a more proportional representation in the senate, and proportional representation in legislatures is more-or-less what the founders’ concept of liberty was all about. I also think it would lead to better policy outcomes (goodbye farm subsidies!). Of course, if just California does it it’s merely another kind of distortion, but if all the populous states did it it would probably be for the good, and California doing it would probably push high population states like Texas over the edge. All of which is academic, since you need congressional permission to sub-divide your state.
Anyways, here’s another good example of the founders not necessarily thinking “liberty” means the same thing as a modern libertarian would:
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/07/what-ben-franklin-really-said/#.UtVgdn-9KK0
Personally, I think federalism is a bad tool for the libertarian project. At the founding, federalism was about state sovereignty, balance of powers was about preventing tyranny, rights were about limiting government, and liberty was about democracy. The desire for untrammeled personal freedom from democratic government just wasn’t in the mix, and as such federalism wasn’t particularily conceived of and has only weakly worked as a way to maximize individual liberty via foot voting. There’s too many factors unrelated to government that limit migration. Basically Jim Crow was way too bad and the great migration left way too many African Americans behind for me to have any faith in federalism. A big federal democracy working through the civil and voting rights acts did the job that federalism could not.
That said, rights *were* conceived of by the founders as a way to limit government, and during the lochner era strong interpretations of the right to contract did push the law in a libertarian direction. I think trying to get back to robust property and contractual rights is a better move than trying to get back to federalism.
Or, you know, libertarians could actually try to convince people their ideas are good and that they should vote for them. That’s my preferred option.
Just need to get away from the symbolism…being against stars and stripes is like being against children…
what feeds the beast is the ability to tax. If you can’t constrain IRS’s power to take away a third of your income then you can’t federalize/cecede or whatever you want to call it. the only way is up towards the ever more bloated central power until the collapse.
The book “America 3.0” (http://www.americathreepointzero.com/) had this as one of their features of the future. It went together with a radical shift of power and responsibility to states and localities.
These proposed divisions are always in the wrong direction, favoring the creation of more rural areas and more concentrated urban ones where a more appropriate division would be a selection of radial wedges of the largest cities. If you really want to promote freedom, you should favor a larger (area, population) and more distant government because the real threats are smaller, closer, more efficient ones.
Well, if there is to be a breakup, I propose there be the Nation of Sea Breeze, or The Evergreen Nation, formerly Washington State, as the people here are distinct in economic nature, having agriculture, and aerospace and biotechnology in the north. The entire eastern part of the state should go to Gun Land, which extends all the way east through Idaho to include all of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. All of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona would be Sunland. Oregon would be Coastland.
Great news, Arnold is a supporter.
I think 50 states are enough, and it would be a huge headache to change them, what with all the databases that include states, and the problems of new senators, etc.
Instead, let counties on state borders vote to change states. Then the northern California counties that feel burdened can switch to Oregon. The central valley can switch to Nevada. The “Inland Empire” areas can switch to Arizona. And so forth.
As border counties changed, new counties would be on the border and over time, the states would grow or shrink to include like-minded areas.
This is good.
And let the border counties reverse their decision forcing inner ones back. Nothing like being subject to the will of others without say.
Trivial. Roads. Not to mention making better the enemy of currently worse.
Like how politicians already gerrymander except only to make things worse for voters- and how more centrally politicians want to control the gerrymandering…except to make things worse for citizens.
Once both border and inner counties had switched, the original border counties would no longer be on the border, and thus not eligible.
Isn’t the US already divided into states about the size of Singapore and Norway? The average US state has a population of about 300 million / 50 = 6 million; only 7 of the states have populations in excess of 10 million. The populations of Singapore and Norway are each just over 5 million.
Breaking up the US could help alleviate some stress from Peter Turchin’s “overproduction of elites” by giving more elites the chance to be big-cheeses in smaller polities, but perhaps that would be bad if some of them decided to lead their statelets into wars.