[SFGate] At first, I was sad. After hundreds of years, after the travesty of slavery and the heartbreak of war, after the outrage of an aborted Reconstruction and the treasonous decades of Jim Crow - have these states learned nothing at all?
Yeah. All those people in those 37 or maybe 47 states are stoopid. Why folk in San Francisco can think rings around them...
Then I started thinking a little more strategically. Centuries of heavily enforced inequality in certain states have left them incapacitated for the modern economy. What do they contribute to the current union, anyway?
Ummm... That's where the economic growth has been?
What would happen if we just decided to let them go?
I remember reading precisely the same suggestion in a Soviet magazine sometime around 1991 or 1992. Those dumbass Baltic states were agitating to leave the Soviet Union, and there were similar movements, not quite so strong yet, in Ukraine and Moldavia and the Caucasus and Central Asia. The suggestion was to go ahead and let them sink or swim on their own. Russia (as opposed to the Soviet Union) would be better off without them. Russia was where the center was, Russia would thrive without them...
Imagine the possibilities.
And ignore the hazards...
After a short phase-out period (so that the panicked citizens of New Orleans; Austin; and Washington, D.C., can join us), we let these ungrateful states go. And pull up the borders after us - the electric fence they're always so interested in having.
Ahah. No more Caliphornia immigration into Colorado or Nevada. That'll show 'em.
My prediction? Absolute chaos in the Southern states as they realize we're possessed of 85 percent of the country's venture capital and entrepreneurs and two-thirds of the country's tax revenue.
And that's an accurate and never-changing state of affairs...
Meanwhile,
...back at the shattered spaceship, Fffflirgoll the Arcturan slithered stealthily toward the control room, where the humans had barricaded themselves...
nothing but happiness as the arugula-eating states lavish on projects like infrastructure and education those tax dollars we'd previously been sending to the red states.
Tax dollars obtained through ever-rising rates. Well, by golly, the whole place will look like Bell City. Won't the arugula eaters be in swine heaven!
But in case some of us feel so inclined, we could set up a visa system for the more industrious citizens of those states, because they'll certainly be interested in working in a more advanced economy.
An 'advanced economy' being defined as a thin layer of the very rich (you might even call them the One Percent®) supporting large numbers of urban dwellers and governed by Marxist professors and lawyers.
Call it a "guest worker" program for our neighbors. Congress might even be willing to consider a generous immigration reform for them.
Kind of like Ukrainians and Estonians and such are allowed to work in Russia, where all the economic activity is...
After several years of this experiment, my guess is that the Southern states will be begging to be let back into the Union.
And my guess is that the 99 percent will be eating golden omelettes.