Thought this was interesting. No surprise here though http://www.examiner.com/article/oba...ll-50-states-petition-the-president-to-secede
I love how the initiators of the petition movement want some states to double up so that there are 57 state petitions - as a poke to Obummer who once claimed to have campaigned in 'all 57 states'. Would be interesting to see if Texas or Arizona could break away. They could easily support themselves independantly.
Correction: Anyone can go to 'We The People' page on the White House website and start a petition e.g. there are currently 1,283 people who'd like to see Delaware secede from the United States.
Saw that too. Big difference to "22 state governments are petitioning..." which could easily be read.
There is no way the federal govt would ever let a state secede peacefully even with a successful referendum. Apparently it's impossible for secession under current law. So much for the land of the free and the global defender of "democracy".
I don't see why a state has to be large to survive on it's own. There are plenty of small prosperous states for example Singapore, Hong Kong, Monaco, Luxembourg, Taiwan etc. Plus, there are places like Japan which are prosperous with no natural resources. Conversely, most big empires collapse after a certain amount of time. I've often though it would be better in Australia if the states were independent countries rather than having one big Federal govt. At least then you would have a degree of competition between them and if one of them decided to start behaving like the Federals are now, you could just move to another one. They would have to compete for workers and businesses essentially.
Think of countries like systems (which is what they are). The bigger they become the less manageable they are. Things will always go wrong somewhere in the world. This is humans we are talking about. We aren't perfect. But if you have smaller systems, then damage is contained. Gather everything into one huge system and little problems metastasise into system wide problems. Decentralisation makes sense. Look at the internet.
Centuries of warfare before the EU was created isn't exactly a ringing endorsement for complete independence though...
Theoretically yes, however the internet is not really a decentralised network. If you look at it on the small scale it seems so, but when taking a larger view of the internet you generally find that it is a very hierarchical network. The trick is that it is a dynamic hierarchical network and as such can adapt to some level of disruption. That being said, I do agree that we do need to take a less centralist view when it comes to government. The exception being when dealing with continent spanning infrastructure projects, in these cases I would argue that the (federal) government should act more as a standards body than an operational one.
End of WW2 - 1945 Start of EU - roughly 2000 50 years of not killing each other. How did they manage it?
The point I was making is there is no central control. The entire US continent could go offline tomorrow and the internet would still exist, because it is the protocol and connections, not the computers. There is no computer, or group of computers, that is essential to it's functioning.
Just as well people in the former Yugoslavia were only killing each other and not warring with other Countries. Is the former USSR a part of Europe? Nice peaceful part of the world in the Baltic Countries. Chechneya springs to mind. Lovely peaceful place is Europe.
Given the amount of tyrants involved...Gustalph Adolph of Sweden, Phillip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon III of France, the Prussian elite and Austrian corporal. Often these men led campaigns lasting decades developing their empires. Gustalph excepted, they all wanted to control all Europe. The difference today is the tyrants in the European Commission, unelected, unaccountable, unimpeachible, have developed their European empire slowly. But it's still an empire no nation or culture is allowed to leave. Add in the centuries of war fighting off the Huns, Vandals, Vikings,Arabs, Mongolians,Turks, Almohads, Turks, Barbary pirates on white slave raids and more Turks. The fighting prowess to combat them couldn't be retired for the 30 years between invasion waves. It needed to be retained, with the effect of lots of Barons perfecting their martial arts on...each other. Without that martial prowess we'd all be a part of a different culture (ie an invader), most likely one that never independantly developed, oh I don't know...private property, representative government, universal literacy, Common Law, human rights. All the good things.
Overwhemling US military presence in NATO, and common fear of the Soviets. But it wasn't all peaceful. The Red Brigades, November 18 style groups, plenty of others wanted to bomb their way out of peace in discos and buses and assassinations.
