The best reason for breaking up the states is also the most obvious: there’s way too many of them. The idea that one government can effectively govern 300 million people spread over 4 million square miles and worth about $23 trillion is absurd. There’s no way the interests of Maine, Kentucky, New Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii align even half the time. Give statehood to Puerto Rico and it becomes even more ridiculous.
It’s not that we’re hostile to each other. We don’t even know each other. Why does some putz in Chicago get a say in how much I pay for taxes? And why should I get a say in what his kids learn at school? Actually, Chicago has twice the population of New Hampshire. That one city not only makes my state irrelevant: it buries us. How is that fair?
The numbers just don’t work out. California has as many eligible voters as Utah, Nevada, Iowa, Alaska, Mississippi, Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska, Idaho, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming put together. The ten most populous states contain more people than the other 40. And despite the Electoral College (long to reign over us), those big states still manage to bully the little ’uns. That’s why, if you’re a Democrat, you’d better be a San Francisco Democrat. That’s also why the GOP is chronically saddled with mediocre Texans like Bush Jr. and Ted Cruz, though mediocre Floridians also seem to be having a moment.
And here we come to our second point. There’s too much freedom of movement within the United States. As we speak, thousands of Boston commuters are moving to New Hampshire, not because they love the Granite State but because they can’t afford the Bay State. The North Shore of Massachusetts is too expensive, and the suburbs are too dangerous. They come here, where property is a bit cheaper and taxes are much lower (especially for renters).
But, naturally, this influx of white-collar office workers is driving up real estate costs. Farming communities like Hollis are being leveled by developers. Whole forests are mowed down, with row after row of condos and McMansions sown in their place.
Naturally, these newcomers are bringing their liberal values with them. In just a couple of election cycles, New Hampshire has gone from a libertarian stronghold to fielding an all-Democratic congressional delegation. Our governor is a moderate, small-government Republican, but he has to keep vetoing legislation that would create New Hampshire’s first-ever income tax. (New Hampshire has the lowest poverty rate in the country.) Since the whole Rittenhouse affair, Democrats have also been trying to enact our first-ever open carry ban. (New Hampshire also has the lowest homicide rate in the country.)
These days, Massachusetts isn’t just browbeating New Hampshire. It’s colonizing us.
The same thing is happening all over the country. Liberals have destroyed their own states, so now they’re moving to prosperous red states, turning them blue, and wrecking them, too. Most famous is the California-to-Texas pipeline, which has formed as progressives flee the literal shitholes they’ve created in Los Angeles and San Francisco. A friend of mine just went to visit family in Sacramento. When I asked him how it was, he said, “It rained the night before we flew in so there wasn’t as much feces on the sidewalk as last year.” That’s a good day in the Golden State.
But what if I like New Hampshire the way it is? What if I want to keep the guns, the low taxes, and the family farms? And what if Texans don’t want their state to become another California? What if they don’t want their kids to see a bunch of half-naked, leather-clad BDSM freaks marching down the street during the town’s weekly Pride Parade? “Listen, pardner: ’round here, we wear Levi’s under our chaps.”
This is why states’ rights matter, and I don’t want to hear any of that smarmy APUSH crap. Try to make a nuanced point and some genius will say, “Oh, sure. The Civil War was only fighting for states’ rights—to own slaves.” Then he’ll dance around the room like it’s the cleverest thing he’s ever said, probably because it is. Now flash-forward 160 years. Texans have to sit on their hands while Californians migrate to their state en masse, shoot heroin at the bus stop, take a dump on the sidewalk, and use tax dollars to pay for their kid’s sex change. That’s wrong.
It’s wrong because red states shouldn’t have those failed, blue-state policies imposed on them. But it’s also wrong because liberals should be made to live with the consequences of their own bad policies. If they did, they wouldn’t enact those policies. As it stands, they’re just going to keep defraying the economic, social, and cultural cost across the entire country. They won’t stop until every town in America is as rich as Detroit, as safe as Chicago, as clean as New York City.
[Read the whole thing at The American Conservative.]
North of Boston 