California: Anarchism and Conditional Support for Secession

As regular readers of this blog are aware, I’m not particularly interested in making government policy work. I am about to make a rare policy suggestion, though — with other notable ones being stuff like “quit waging war” and so forth.

The Cato Institute recently published an article about how great it would be for the California state budget and economy if the tyrannical bastards in Sacramento eased up on all of the licensing board bullshit — as if they have any business requiring permission slips to engage in productive activity (without harassment by their agents) in the first place.

While such liberalization would be an improvement, that’s because peaceful and productive people have a natural human right to be left alone in the first place. The reason I’d like to see it happen has nothing to do with the California state budget crisis. Also, it’s not clear that such liberalization would, alone, address the California state budget crisis.

What would have a fair chance of really addressing the California state budget crisis, without a Federal bailout, would be California secession from the United States — complete with impoundment of outgoing Federal tax payments and across the board 50% refunds. The state budget and overall economy would likely improve, considering there’d be a lot less ruling class parasitism draining wealth from the productive economy. As a bonus for the conscientious, there’d be that much less imperialism being financed abroad.

Secession, though, is one of those topics where the anarchist often has difficulty with wholeheartedly offering either support or opposition. Anarchism itself can perhaps be understood, at its core, as support for a right of all individuals to “secede” from anything — freedom of association, in other words. Conventionally, though, political secession involves supporting a new or potential smaller state in its efforts to break away from a larger state. And since we don’t support states, the seeming dilemna arises.

A big part of the obstacle for the anarchist is simply the hypocrisy of the typical statist secessionist, who says “We should be free to separate from them, but you shouldn’t be free to separate from us“. Which the anarchist, of course, recognizes as balderdash.

As the US Empire races toward ever greater economic meltdown, though, questions of secession will arise with greater and greater frequency. As the federal cancer metastasizes, it’s only natural to think “We could do better locally or regionally”. In many cases, fears of a new localist authoritarianism can add to the confusion and uncertainty. What I propose, then, is a simple standard for limited, conditional support by anarchists for secession efforts.

It seems to me that, AT A MINIMUM, conditional support for a secession effort by any political sub-division would require that political sub-division extend an explicit guarantee of the same right of secession to AT LEAST the next smaller size political sub-division that constitutes it.

Discuss.