Secession, No. Federalism, Yes

You may have heard that the White House website now has petitions from all 50 states requesting permission to peacefully secede from the Union.  The most famous of these - and the one with the most signatures - is from Texas, naturally.  The whole thing is silly, but it reflects a real problem.  A whole lot of Americans are unhappy with the federal government, which makes perfect sense.  It's impossible to please 350,000,000 people at the same time.  It's highly unlikely that any state will actually attempt to secede, but the existence of so many disgruntled voters is no laughing matter.

There is, however, a very simple solution to this problem.

 Let the central government do the things that only central governments can do -- national defense, regulation of trade to keep the provinces from engaging in economic warfare with one another, protection of basic civil rights -- and then let the provinces go their own way in most other issues. Don't like the way things are run where you are? Move to a province that's more to your taste. Meanwhile, approaches that work in individual provinces can, after some experimentation, be adopted by the central government, thus lowering the risk of adopting untested policies at the national level. You get the benefits of secession without seceding.

Pretty simple, right?  If you want to live in a state with enormous debt, high taxes, business-stifling regulations, high unemployment, lots of poverty, welfare and income inequality, and crappy schools, move to California, New York or Illinois.   If you want to live in a state with low debt, low taxes, little regulation, lots of jobs and low unemployment rates, move to North Dakota, Texas or Utah.

It's not even a new idea.

Sound good? It should. It's called federalism, and it's the approach chosen by the United States when it adopted the Constitution in 1789. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State."

It's a nice plan. Beats secession. Maybe we should give it another try.

For a bunch of racist old white dudes, those Founding Fathers sure were smart!