In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that the kindest thing to do to California is to allow it to secede from the Union:
… some Californians bleat that they want to secede from a United States that threatens to make them straighten up and fly right. Superficially, that might be a workable idea: on paper, California has one of the largest, most powerful economies in the world — bigger than that of many independent nations. It has a long, wonderful coastline and a couple of really good natural ports. Its agricultural sector is second to none. There is oil and gas within easy reach. It has no real military defenses, but I’m sure they’d be more than willing to leech off America’s defenses, our Navy, our Air Force, and our nuclear umbrella, like the deadbeat pajama boys they resemble, living in their mothers’ basements.
But wait. On the reasonable assumption that the California secession movement is limited to people in the counties that voted for Hillary Clinton, and that people in the counties who voted for Donald Trump do not want to secede, I consulted a California county-by-county election map for 2016. Blue counties dominate all but a tiny spot on the northern coast, which is too bad; most of the interior — the most productive part of the state — is bright red.
So here’s my brilliant idea. Instead of fighting another bloody, stupid, senseless War of Secession like the one we had in 1865, let’s grandly and magnanimously permit the state of California to secede — even insist on it — one county at a time. Those counties that vote to secede may do so and create the People’s Republic of Californistan, or whatever.
In exchange for defending this dog’s breakfast of a polity, we will keep all of our military bases and installations, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay Naval Air Station in Cuba. I believe the legal term is “adverse possession”. Those counties that do not vote to secede — we wouldn’t want them to become like the captive peoples and nations of Europe during the Cold War — may remain in the Union, joining the adjacent state (mostly Nevada) or forming their own. To paraphrase the Borg, “We will add their productiveness to our own.”
However the trouble (for California, anyway), if you look at the map, is that county-by-county secession leaves the people’s Republic without visible means of support, a vagrant state, as it were, full of pencil-neck politicos and other worthless parasites, guilty of loitering on our Left Coast. They’re already bankrupt, after decades of Leninist-Stalinist policies. Now they will never recover with their productive counties gone — and we get their avocados!
Let them eat software.
