Celebrate Secession!

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To honor the United States’ secessions (yes, that is meant to be plural; up until 1865, it was the “United States are” not the “United States is”) from the British Empire, the good folks at A Thousand Nations have been blogging on the topic of secession all week. You can find an index of posts here, and I highly recommend them, especially for those of you who have never given much thought to breaking up the United States into more manageable units.

Although those contributions to the debate are ample, allow me to offer my own take on why secession is still a good idea.

1) The most basic reason for supporting secession is that it makes government more accountable to the people it governs. The smaller a polity is, the easier it is for an individual’s objections to be heard whether that be through voting, petition, protest, etc. It also becomes harder for one group to oppress another the more they have to interact with each other. Dehumanizing some distant group is very easy; it is much harder to do with your next door neighbor. In the words of my all time favorite libertarian hero Karl Hess, “Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany is a horror; Adolf Hitler at a town meeting would be an asshole.”

But even if some Hitlerian figure were to take over an independent state or town, it is far easier to flee a small polity than a larger one. Getting out of the old Soviet Union was extremely difficult; getting out of Missouri, not so much.

2) The harmful effects of bad policies are seen and felt far more quickly the smaller the polity. A huge nation like the United States or China can easily persist in wealth (or even life) destroying policies for generations because their benefits are concentrated at special interest groups that agitate to continue the policies while the costs are dispersed onto the rest of the population. This is why our government subsidizes corn so heavily. But it would be nearly impossible for Iowa to continue those policies if it seceded. There would be fewer people to tax and more people expecting benefits, leading taxpayers to demand subsidy reductions and corn farmers to care less about keeping them as each individual farmer’s share of the loot would drop.

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July 6, 2009

John Payne is a social studies teacher at East Carter County High School in Southeast Missouri. He blogs at RoughOlBoy.com.