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.
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So we cannot support secession unless the seceding state essentially stops being a state?
Seems to me that secession is ALWAYS a game of political brinksmanship, with a given group trying to get away with an act that the larger group fundamentally wants to prevent them from performing. It’s a narrow political strategy, not a principled move. Therefore, it seems silly to expect a state to formulate such a magnanimous policy.
Well, first, this is only posted here as a way of helping me think through the issue. It’s only my tentative position. I welcome substantive disagreement on the matter.
re: “So we cannot support secession unless the seceding state essentially stops being a state?”
That’s not quite what I suggested. California would only “stop acting like a state” if it recognized an individual right of secession. What I’m suggesting is that if a seceding state explicitly recognized a right of secession for the next smaller size down sub-division, it might be worthy of conditional support (for the secession effort, anyway). The next smaller size down sub-division for the state of California would be its constituent counties and/or large municipalities.
Secession is clearly an important part of the path toward greater freedom. I think having Long Island secede from New York state would be an excellent thing, and was pleased to see it being discussed earnestly in recent weeks.
There’s no doubt that the USA is weird. It is full of bizarre people, with bizarre ideas, wacky religions, and kooky behaviors. But, Americans rightly blame it all on California. So, if California seceded, we could get back to something akin to normal.
California is admittedly outrageous. Those of us who have lived there and traveled in California extensively know this to be true. It is full of bizarreness, weird ideas, crazy oddballs with heretical religions, and behaviors that would make a nun perish from shock. Californians, with complete justice, blame it all on Los Angeles. So if Los Angeles seceded, the rest of California could get on with encouraging San Francisco and Silicon Valley to secede.
Now, Los Angeles is freaky beyond belief. To suggest that some lunatics are roaming free in LA is to promote the idea that Angelenos are not all entirely nuts. I’ve spent many unpleasant weeks in the LA basin, and I know it is true. What’s more, many Angelenos are quite willing to admit it, but they blame it all on Hollywood. You can hear them doing so from time to time, nearly anywhere you go in LA. So if Hollywood seceded, the rest of LA could get on with getting on. Or pretending that there is something in the San Fernando valley besides vacuous shoppers and barely legal porn starlets.
Hollywood blames it on West Hollywood, and who can argue? It’s “turtles turtles turtles, all the way down.”
The interesting thing about Brad’s proposal is that the secessions could continue down to the quantum unit of political energy, the individual. And if that were done, we might at last find the one weirdo who is making reality his bitch. When he secedes….a splendid time for all.
I wonder if the typical statist secessionist can spell separate.
Personal agreement from this individual with the proposed standard, if “support” is defined as “work with, promote, donate to” and so on.
Aside from that, I’ve also been known to cheer secession of any sort. My thought is that if we are to have states, we’re better off having as many as possible. It’s difficult to imagine the horrors of the World Wars, for example, if Germany had remained a loose confederation of roughly-sovereign principalities bound together as part of the Holy Roman Empire instead of becoming a roughly modern nation-state at unification. Likewise America under the Articles of Confederation, with reference to the War of Northern Aggression and everything going on today.
What Mike said. Also, though with caution concerning the reason for any PARTICULAR one, secessions can further discredit states on simple chaos grounds if the pace of them builds. Try to imagine how stretched pro-government arguments would get in the midst of them splitting like atoms…
I’m not crazy about formally supporting any state in anything but anything that reduces centralized power seems like a good trend to cheer on.