SECEDE & SURVIVE

SECEDE & SURVIVE: Let's Dissolve the USofA

by Carol Moore

I'm back! After 4 weeks of probable walking pneumonia which my roommate brought back from an operation and overnight at the hospital. The hospital tried to charge his insurance company $42,000 just for the overnight, not including the operation! They settled for $18,000. But let's not start on the failings of our big government managed health care system.

Anyway, I've got a couple new articles cooking up on the stove, so today I'm just going to include some quotes from and a link to another article. The other day I read somewhere frenzied criticism of Thomas Naylor for not just talking about Vermont secession - but about dissolving the United States government. Hadn't the author ever heard of anarchism? Not to mention radical political decentralization? Well here's less than 500 words of retired Professor of Finance Michael S. Rozeff’s manifesto On Dissolving the United States published today. Enjoy!

The United States of America is a political union of fifty states and a federal district, commonly considered to be operating under the authority of the U.S. Constitution that was first adopted in 1787. The Union known as the U.S.A. was a creation of the then-existing thirteen states of the Union.

Lysander Spooner has provided ironclad arguments that this Constitution is an invalid authority for Americans of today. If that is so, and I believe it is, then no "legal" moves need to be taken to dissolve the U.S.A. It is already an entity that has no legal authority. In this case, the Union does not legally exist.

To demonstrate that fact and make it operative, however, requires that the Union be effectively shattered; and that requires the successful secession of any person or any political entity within the jurisdiction of the U.S.A...

I endorse dissolving the U.S.A. This does not mean that I endorse the 50 states or whatever political combinations of states result as a final ideal political system. I simply view that outcome, which ends the national (usually called the federal) government as greatly preferable to what we now have. Individual states could profitably break up too, but that is another matter.

The idea of dissolving the U.S.A. and its Constitution is not really as radical or extreme as it seems at first sight. The United Kingdom is on its way to dissolving. Majorities in both Scotland and England favor full independence for Scotland. The Soviet Union, in 1990-1991, dissolved into 15 separate states. Although this entailed some bloodshed, turmoil, and uncertainty over a 2-year period, it was by and large not at all a terrible happening. There was no major civil war anything like the War for Southern Independence. The aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union has certainly been largely benign as at least some of the individual states that resulted have moved in the direction of free-market policies that have benefited them. The progress of Russia itself has been far greater than when it was part of the Soviet Union...

What is the logical result of Union? Centralization of power and an increase in oppression and the likelihood of further oppression. If we do not think about dissolving the U.S.A. now, we will be thinking about it later when we, as did the citizens of the Soviet Union, begin to chafe and grumble at how bad things are. But why wait for those sad days that are nearing when Medicare and Social Security both fail, or when bombs are dropping on American cities, or when our roads develop even more potholes, or even more bridges collapse, or we find that our dollars are worthless? Why wait?

Dissolving the U.S.A. is becoming more and more an urgent and visible matter. Let us do a favor for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren. Let us place dissolving the U.S.A. at the top of our political agenda.