MOLON LABE

A few more thoughts on secession and a lack of imagination.

Let's pretend for a moment that, truly, all the Blue Areas and all the Red Areas separated from each other, as was once eloquently proposed by Seattle's bastion of tolerance and reason, The Stranger, in the seminal essay, "Urban Archipelago."  Look at the map and think about it for a second.  Let's assume away the national debt and the state debts for a minute--although those are not small issues, but that would be complicated to resolve, and I suspect the full power of our nation's cadre of wonks would have to be deployed to really work it out.  Let's assume, though, that otherwise the land that goes with red voters would be turned into Red-land and have the revenues and debts associated with those localities, and the tiny urbanized patches of Blue-istan would have the land, debts, and revenues currently associated with them.  Let's assume, also, for the sake of simplicity that the assets (e.g., roads, buildings, railroads, etc.) on those lands would continue to exist, more or less as they currently do.

Red-land would contain virtually all public lands now administered by various departments including the BLM and US Forest Service.  It would also house the vast majority of accessible natural resources, including nigh inconceivable quantities of natural gas and oil, along with a well-managed timber supply.  It would contain virtually all of America's bounteous farmland, from the apple orchards of Washington State to the ranchlands of Texas and the rice paddies of the South.  It contains most of the nation's military installations, including missile silos in Montana and the Dakotas.  Additionally, of course, most of the US Armed Forces comes from these red areas.  There is a low level of public debt in these areas as well.

Consider for a moment Blue-istan.  There are high levels of public debt in these areas.  These levels of public debt have already forced some blue cities in California into bankruptcy.  There is a high concentration of very well educated people doing creative things; there is also a high concentration of criminals and the urban poor, both groups (and let's not pretend that there isn't a good deal of overlap there) living primarily off the wealth produced by the aforementioned highly educated people doing creative things.  Obviously, the centers of finance and corporate headquarters are centered in these areas, as are the federal bureaucracies and so forth.

It is obvious that both new nations would have something to offer the other, assuming trade agreements could be made.  Red-land would allow overland shipping through our flyover shitholes to continue.  Blue-istan would need food, energy, and other resources that Red-land has in spades.  Red-land, for its part, would probably continue to want iPods and Hollywood films.  Banks and other financial services might continue to be headquartered in Blue-istan, too, although I would guess that Red-land would eventually develop its own such centers.

Blue-istan, having lost most of the military to Red-land (assuming most soldiers would side primarily with their home states, which in most cases is where their families are) and having little tradition of soldiering, would have little means of defense.  Having relatively large numbers of welfare recipients who are accustomed to relatively generous benefits, urbanized Blue-istan would likely be forced to tax the wealthy elites at increasingly high rates, along with corporate profits and capital gains.  Or perhaps joining the military could be a new form of workfare.

Meanwhile, one assumes that since the denizens of Red-land favor low taxes and less business regulation (in general), those conditions would hold, even as Blue-istan increased regulations (such as environmental regulations) along with taxes.  Let's assume that most wealthy Blue individuals would be patriotic enough to Blue-istan and true enough to their espoused ideals that they wouldn't flee to lower tax areas; we still can't assume that they wouldn't move their wealth to lower tax Red-land since we see this happen all the time (even Bono, in turns out, moves his no doubt vast wealth to lower-tax areas).  Corporations and banks, on the other hand, typically feel no such patriotism and would be likely to relocate so long as they felt assured that Red-land was basically stable.  So, some of that particular balance of power would be likely to shift, but perhaps not all.

And Blue-istan's bureaucrats, you ask?  At the federal level, you could expect some of them to become unemployed, since the federal departments they work for would have fewer states to regulate to the pain.  You can probably also expect that the FBI, CIA, and State Department--not to mention the Homeland Security fuckwits--would continue with their plan to reduce liberty on earth to undetectable quantities, especially now that those Rethuglican terrorists were their own country.  Meanwhile, the EPA and FDA and other such agencies would likely continue to regulate in their fashion, making it difficult to do business in Blue-istan.

Which would likely result in yet more businesses moving to Red-land.

And on it would go.

Look, Blue Man Group, I know you think that because you have high concentrations of wealth and people currently, that this is stupid on the part of the Red Herrings.  However, you also have a very high concentration of persistent problems and little in the way of necessary resources.  The recent hurricane Sandy has thrown into alarmingly sharp relief just how fragile your environment is and how poor your survival skills are.  I had always thought that the ability to harness the power of fire was one of the primary things that made us human, as opposed to just another species of primate, but apparently many New Yorkers have forgotten that primitive skill and would rather bitch until someone brings them a blanket.