Everything Must Go

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
So, I’ve been thinking about this general topic for a while now. I think that the way this country is run, organized, divided up into states and all that shit needs to be completely redone. Everything right up to and including tearing up the Constitution and writing a new one. [/quote]

I stopped here. Sorry, that’s just dumb. You’re not going to get perfect government no matter how many times you ‘start over’. Starting over means blood, means war, means chaos. Without a strong federal, that’s what you will have. If you are seeking a do-over, you destroy the structure that is in place you will have chaos because without the rule of law, all kinds of nuts will come out of the woodwork.

There is no way to peacefully transform a government like that. Peaceful transitions only happen after a defeat in a war. Fuck that. Our government, despite all the idiots in it, actually runs really well for the most part.
I have been around the world and there is no place I would rather live than here, under the government that was founded by collection of geniuses the world will not soon see again in such concentration.[/quote]

If this is how you feel, then why do you complain about the way the country is run in so many of these threads? It sounds to me like you are resigned to the reality of the situation and have given up all hope of ever changing it. Your attitude is exactly like those who wanted to remain under a monarch at the time of the American Revolution.

[quote]tedro wrote:
DB,
Would you support a peaceful secession by the south & midwest? Would you support us if we wanted to (as varq already suggested) scrap the USC and start back with just the constitution, excluding the Bill of Rights and other ammendments? (I do agree with you on that point)[/quote]

I’m down with a peaceful secession of the South. Unfortunately for the South, all y’all would be begging to come back into the Union in no time at all. The southern states that originally seceded are for the most part the largest recipients of federal gov’t welfare in the country. The fact is that half of the southern states that would be first in line to secede are entirely dependent on federal money in order to remain solvent. Where is that massive source of southern income going to come from without the federal gov’t there to hand it out? Texas can’t support everyone. Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas and Mississippi would be completely fucked.

[quote]MaximusB wrote:
Hey Coop, did you see that a county up by you voted to secede from Cali, due to massive taxation, regulation, and lack of representation ?

[/quote]

That is exactly what precipitated this thread. But in the specific case of Siskiyou County, they would be fucked. There is absolutely NO source of income in Siskiyou. If they form their own state, fine. But they’ll want right back in when they realize that their only substantial source of money is state and federal handouts. The federal money would still be there, but literally nothing else.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
So, I’ve been thinking about this general topic for a while now. I think that the way this country is run, organized, divided up into states and all that shit needs to be completely redone. Everything right up to and including tearing up the Constitution and writing a new one. There is very, very little that we do today that we have done the same basic way for 250 years and is as integral to the way our lives unfold as the system of gov’t with which we live.
[/quote]

I think you’ve missed the point entirely. The Constitution, in its entirety, is based on the premise of personal liberty. It has nothing to do with what was done then and what is done now, only that the natural state of a human being is self-governance.

This doesn’t mean all for one. The evidence is strong that some personalities and some demographics lean towards a strong central government, which is exactly why so much power was given to the individual states. The 13 colonies were founded by a bunch of farmers with different outlooks on self-governance. Some felt it best to organize and work together as a whole and supported governments as such. Others supported more self-reliance. The Puritans of New England preferred more of a central government, while those towards the South (meaning Virginia in those days) preferred small local government with the heaviest emphasis on personal liberty as they developed their tobacco plantations.

It has nothing to do with geographical boundaries. States organized by political and religious beliefs. Once established, they simply aimed to gain as much as land as possible that they could maintain. The geographical boundaries only come in as a convenience.

This is where I think you confuse a constitutional republic with a democracy. The Senate is designed to give equal powers to every state to retain the powers of a republic and not fall to majority rule. One of the worst mistakes this country ever made was passing the 17th amendment to elect Senators by popular vote which completely disregarded the differences of view within an individual state. It’s the very reason I have Claire McCaskill as a senator while the Missouri legislature and most counties are dominated by Republicans. St. Louis and a small pocket of KC has a high enough population that they are able to direct the rest of the state.

[quote]
I also think there is absolutely no reason why we can’t rewrite the Constitution in more modern terms. It’s an outdated document, period. The values that the Constitution promotes and the idea of protecting basic, inalienable human rights is NEVER outdated, but the method of protecting such things CAN become outdated and I think our current Constitution is one such thing. I don’t think it is a perfect document by any means, and it never was. At best, it represents the culmination of a series of compromises between two basic factions within our Founding Fathers, and I don’t think that any of them were 100% satisfied with the result in and of itself. I think it was the best that they could come up with given the times and the circumstances, but I don’t think that any of the Founding Fathers would agree that it was a perfect document in an absolute sense. That will never be achieved, but I certainly think that the best and brightest minds in this country today are more capable of coming up with a more appropriate document for current society than the Founding Fathers were. They did an incredible job under circumstances far more difficult and with much more uncertainty than anything we would face today if we were to rewrite the Constitution, but the fact is that the country is a much different place now than it was then. If a piece of paper is going to be what ultimately lays out how my inalienable rights are going to be protected, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that document to be written by people living in the times that I live in or by people who lived in times much more comparable to the ones I live in.

The Constitution originally didn’t even contain a Bill of Rights, since enumerating rights back then were seen as something necessary only within a gov’t like a monarchy where the monarch’s rights and the people’s rights were inherently different. Enumerating the rights were basically a way of laying out for a monarch too ignorant of or totally unable to comprehend the idea of the people having rights in the first place. The thinking was that in a republic the people all would have such virtue that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary or redundant. It was added to our own Constitution as the result of a compromise between Madison and the anti-Federalists who worried that a strong central gov’t would eventually need to be “reminded” of the rights that the people and the individual states had. That’s a pretty big change/addition to the Constitution. I don’t see why we can’t continue to make wholesale changes, including tearing it up and starting over. Obviously, many of the same, integral parts of the original Constitution would find their way into the new one, but some of the bullshit, fluff and/or ambiguity could be removed.

What do you guys think? Should we tear it up and start over? Should our system of representation change? What other fundamental changes to the way this country runs should we make?[/quote]
I agree with a great deal of what you wrote in these last few paragraphs, but I think you still miss the point of a constitutional republic and the constitution in general. The constitution was written so that states can make these decisions and be as liberal or as conservative as they want. California has every right to be a socialist state, but they do not have the right to force legislation that requires every other state to be taxed to support their ill-conceived budget.

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]tedro wrote:
DB,
Would you support a peaceful secession by the south & midwest? Would you support us if we wanted to (as varq already suggested) scrap the USC and start back with just the constitution, excluding the Bill of Rights and other ammendments? (I do agree with you on that point)[/quote]

Hey Tedro, remember this map? This would be an interesting redivision of the continent. [/quote]

I don’t believe I’ve seen that one before. I almost flipped until I noticed the thin line of orange on the west coast as Mexico.

You draw me my own miniscule circle right in the middle of the map and you have a deal!

[quote]tedro wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]tedro wrote:
DB,
Would you support a peaceful secession by the south & midwest? Would you support us if we wanted to (as varq already suggested) scrap the USC and start back with just the constitution, excluding the Bill of Rights and other ammendments? (I do agree with you on that point)[/quote]

Hey Tedro, remember this map? This would be an interesting redivision of the continent. [/quote]

I don’t believe I’ve seen that one before. I almost flipped until I noticed the thin line of orange on the west coast as Mexico.

You draw me my own miniscule circle right in the middle of the map and you have a deal![/quote]

It was the product of two threads where a bunch of the PWI old-timers (myself, Mikeyali, Pushharder, tGunslinger, Rnjk and others carved up the United States and imagined what a new confederation or confederations would look like. Good times.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]tedro wrote:
DB,
Would you support a peaceful secession by the south & midwest? Would you support us if we wanted to (as varq already suggested) scrap the USC and start back with just the constitution, excluding the Bill of Rights and other ammendments? (I do agree with you on that point)[/quote]

I’m down with a peaceful secession of the South. Unfortunately for the South, all y’all would be begging to come back into the Union in no time at all. The southern states that originally seceded are for the most part the largest recipients of federal gov’t welfare in the country. The fact is that half of the southern states that would be first in line to secede are entirely dependent on federal money in order to remain solvent. Where is that massive source of southern income going to come from without the federal gov’t there to hand it out? Texas can’t support everyone. Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas and Mississippi would be completely fucked.[/quote]

You left out the midwest. Most Kansans, Missourians, and Nebraskans would gladly follow Oklahoma and Texas. I’m pretty sure the bulk of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming would as well. I’d even give a good half of Iowa the benefit of the doubt. The Dakotas very well may be best off on their own, but I’d claim them too.

You can build a bank anywhere, but good luck getting sugar, cotton, corn, beans, wheat, etc. to grow in the rest of the country. Not even considering Houston, DFW, Atlanta, or any of the other big cities; you greatly underestimate the amount of business that flows through cities like Omaha (Union Pacific, Con Agra, Kiewit, Paypal, TD Ameritrade, and numerous insurance companies), Des Moines (Second only to Hartford in Insurance), Wichita (aircraft carriers anyone?), Bentonville, AR (not even naming who). I’m pretty sure we’ll be ok.

[quote]tedro wrote:

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
So, I’ve been thinking about this general topic for a while now. I think that the way this country is run, organized, divided up into states and all that shit needs to be completely redone. Everything right up to and including tearing up the Constitution and writing a new one. There is very, very little that we do today that we have done the same basic way for 250 years and is as integral to the way our lives unfold as the system of gov’t with which we live.
[/quote]

I think you’ve missed the point entirely. The Constitution, in its entirety, is based on the premise of personal liberty. It has nothing to do with what was done then and what is done now, only that the natural state of a human being is self-governance.

This doesn’t mean all for one. The evidence is strong that some personalities and some demographics lean towards a strong central government, which is exactly why so much power was given to the individual states. The 13 colonies were founded by a bunch of farmers with different outlooks on self-governance. Some felt it best to organize and work together as a whole and supported governments as such. Others supported more self-reliance. The Puritans of New England preferred more of a central government, while those towards the South (meaning Virginia in those days) preferred small local government with the heaviest emphasis on personal liberty as they developed their tobacco plantations.

It has nothing to do with geographical boundaries. States organized by political and religious beliefs. Once established, they simply aimed to gain as much as land as possible that they could maintain. The geographical boundaries only come in as a convenience.

This is where I think you confuse a constitutional republic with a democracy. The Senate is designed to give equal powers to every state to retain the powers of a republic and not fall to majority rule. One of the worst mistakes this country ever made was passing the 17th amendment to elect Senators by popular vote which completely disregarded the differences of view within an individual state. It’s the very reason I have Claire McCaskill as a senator while the Missouri legislature and most counties are dominated by Republicans. St. Louis and a small pocket of KC has a high enough population that they are able to direct the rest of the state.

[quote]
I also think there is absolutely no reason why we can’t rewrite the Constitution in more modern terms. It’s an outdated document, period. The values that the Constitution promotes and the idea of protecting basic, inalienable human rights is NEVER outdated, but the method of protecting such things CAN become outdated and I think our current Constitution is one such thing. I don’t think it is a perfect document by any means, and it never was. At best, it represents the culmination of a series of compromises between two basic factions within our Founding Fathers, and I don’t think that any of them were 100% satisfied with the result in and of itself. I think it was the best that they could come up with given the times and the circumstances, but I don’t think that any of the Founding Fathers would agree that it was a perfect document in an absolute sense. That will never be achieved, but I certainly think that the best and brightest minds in this country today are more capable of coming up with a more appropriate document for current society than the Founding Fathers were. They did an incredible job under circumstances far more difficult and with much more uncertainty than anything we would face today if we were to rewrite the Constitution, but the fact is that the country is a much different place now than it was then. If a piece of paper is going to be what ultimately lays out how my inalienable rights are going to be protected, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that document to be written by people living in the times that I live in or by people who lived in times much more comparable to the ones I live in.

The Constitution originally didn’t even contain a Bill of Rights, since enumerating rights back then were seen as something necessary only within a gov’t like a monarchy where the monarch’s rights and the people’s rights were inherently different. Enumerating the rights were basically a way of laying out for a monarch too ignorant of or totally unable to comprehend the idea of the people having rights in the first place. The thinking was that in a republic the people all would have such virtue that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary or redundant. It was added to our own Constitution as the result of a compromise between Madison and the anti-Federalists who worried that a strong central gov’t would eventually need to be “reminded” of the rights that the people and the individual states had. That’s a pretty big change/addition to the Constitution. I don’t see why we can’t continue to make wholesale changes, including tearing it up and starting over. Obviously, many of the same, integral parts of the original Constitution would find their way into the new one, but some of the bullshit, fluff and/or ambiguity could be removed.

What do you guys think? Should we tear it up and start over? Should our system of representation change? What other fundamental changes to the way this country runs should we make?[/quote]
I agree with a great deal of what you wrote in these last few paragraphs, but I think you still miss the point of a constitutional republic and the constitution in general. The constitution was written so that states can make these decisions and be as liberal or as conservative as they want. California has every right to be a socialist state, but they do not have the right to force legislation that requires every other state to be taxed to support their ill-conceived budget.[/quote]

I don’t think you quite understand who wrote the Constitution and why he wrote it. Madison wrote the large majority of the Constitution and one of his primary aims was not to instill a lot of power in the states at all but rather to establish a system that prevented majority tyranny within the states by limiting their powers. He specifically feared the behavior of the state legislatures, which he equated with the behavior of the very gov’t they had just gained independence from. At one point, Madison even argued that the states should have no sovereignty at all. His only major concession during the process of drafting the Constitution, a document he had a far larger hand than anyone else in drafting since it was basically a revision of his own Virginia Plan, was to add the Bill of Rights. Of course, this was to please the anti-Federalists who wanted something written down so that the federal gov’t had thresholds it could not cross. But Madison wrote the Bill of Rights and the only actual concession he made to the states in this respect was the 10th Amendment. The rest was his way of ensuring that the States had limited power by outlining what thresholds NEITHER gov’t could cross. The anti-Federalists hoped that the proposed Bill of Rights would include all sorts of Amendments that would weaken the federal gov’t to the States’ benefit. But Madison ensured that that would not happen.

[quote]tedro wrote:

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]tedro wrote:
DB,
Would you support a peaceful secession by the south & midwest? Would you support us if we wanted to (as varq already suggested) scrap the USC and start back with just the constitution, excluding the Bill of Rights and other ammendments? (I do agree with you on that point)[/quote]

I’m down with a peaceful secession of the South. Unfortunately for the South, all y’all would be begging to come back into the Union in no time at all. The southern states that originally seceded are for the most part the largest recipients of federal gov’t welfare in the country. The fact is that half of the southern states that would be first in line to secede are entirely dependent on federal money in order to remain solvent. Where is that massive source of southern income going to come from without the federal gov’t there to hand it out? Texas can’t support everyone. Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas and Mississippi would be completely fucked.[/quote]

You left out the midwest. Most Kansans, Missourians, and Nebraskans would gladly follow Oklahoma and Texas. I’m pretty sure the bulk of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming would as well. I’d even give a good half of Iowa the benefit of the doubt. The Dakotas very well may be best off on their own, but I’d claim them too.

You can build a bank anywhere, but good luck getting sugar, cotton, corn, beans, wheat, etc. to grow in the rest of the country. Not even considering Houston, DFW, Atlanta, or any of the other big cities; you greatly underestimate the amount of business that flows through cities like Omaha (Union Pacific, Con Agra, Kiewit, Paypal, TD Ameritrade, and numerous insurance companies), Des Moines (Second only to Hartford in Insurance), Wichita (aircraft carriers anyone?), Bentonville, AR (not even naming who). I’m pretty sure we’ll be ok.[/quote]

Perhaps the Midwest will be OK, but the South will not be OK at all. Also, I think you underestimate the amount of cotton, sugar, beans, wheat, etc. that is produced in California. Cal produces more cotton than every state in the country except for Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and Arkansas. Sugar is irrelevant since it’s barely produced anywhere in the U.S. and what is produced here is a tiny percentage of the global market. Corn is trending upward, but California doesn’t grow much of it anymore because they’ve moved on to FAR more valuable crops such as walnuts, almonds and especially olives. There isn’t any money in beans and the same goes for wheat when compared to what California grows in place of the wheat it used to grow. The fact is that while the Midwest is the largest producer of some very basic crops, California can or used to grow many of those same crops but has since moved on to more profitable and specialized crops. Shit, if weed becomes completely legal in the U.S. at some point it could represent one of the biggest potential cash crops in the country, and California is already a world-renowned producer of it as is.

If Midwestern and Southern states secede and then withhold the products they produce so that what’s left of the country has to suffice without them, that would be fine with the rest of the country. California in particular is capable of producing many of those same things and it also produces many essentials and/or luxury items that are not produced elsewhere. The Bay Area in particular could thrive all by itself as its own little country if need be. The Silicon Valley economy is probably larger than the entire Midwest or the entire South. Agriculture accounts for 1% of the entire country’s GDP. There simply isn’t any money in it, which is why a lot of agriculture in this country is on welfare/subsidized.

Real estate is the largest single industry in the U.S. in terms of percentage of the GDP, and the real estate in California is the most valuable, followed primarily by states that would not be seceding. The entertainment industry, which is also based primarily in California, is actually a larger percentage of the GDP than mining and ag combined.

Most of the states you listed rank in the lower half if we were to list each state by their contribution to the country’s GDP. California is obviously the top spot, followed by Texas. The states you listed:
Missouri-22nd
Arizona-18th
Colorado-20th
Oklahoma-29th
Iowa-30th
Kansas-31st
Utah-33rd
Nebraska-37th
South Dakota-47th
Wyoming-48th
North Dakota-49th

California represents 13% of the entire GDP; Texas is second at 8% and all of the states you listed combined are only about 22%. I think the U.S. will be just fine if those states you listed were to secede. Losing Texas would hurt, but most of the top economies by state in the country would remain in the U.S. The states that are the ones most frequently talking about seceding would still be entirely dependent upon the country from which they seceded, especially Texas since most of the states you listed also don’t use anywhere close to the amount of oil that NY and California alone use AND since many pipelines running into Texas would have to run through the U.S. The price of allowing those pipes to continue operating on U.S. soil would be sky-high for a state that just seceded from the U.S. There’s only one country Texas could realistically run its oil through but there are plenty of countries the U.S. could get its oil from.

[quote]tedro wrote:

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]tedro wrote:
DB,
Would you support a peaceful secession by the south & midwest? Would you support us if we wanted to (as varq already suggested) scrap the USC and start back with just the constitution, excluding the Bill of Rights and other ammendments? (I do agree with you on that point)[/quote]

I’m down with a peaceful secession of the South. Unfortunately for the South, all y’all would be begging to come back into the Union in no time at all. The southern states that originally seceded are for the most part the largest recipients of federal gov’t welfare in the country. The fact is that half of the southern states that would be first in line to secede are entirely dependent on federal money in order to remain solvent. Where is that massive source of southern income going to come from without the federal gov’t there to hand it out? Texas can’t support everyone. Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas and Mississippi would be completely fucked.[/quote]

You left out the midwest. Most Kansans, Missourians, and Nebraskans would gladly follow Oklahoma and Texas. I’m pretty sure the bulk of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming would as well. I’d even give a good half of Iowa the benefit of the doubt. The Dakotas very well may be best off on their own, but I’d claim them too.

You can build a bank anywhere, but good luck getting sugar, cotton, corn, beans, wheat, etc. to grow in the rest of the country. Not even considering Houston, DFW, Atlanta, or any of the other big cities; you greatly underestimate the amount of business that flows through cities like Omaha (Union Pacific, Con Agra, Kiewit, Paypal, TD Ameritrade, and numerous insurance companies), Des Moines (Second only to Hartford in Insurance), Wichita (aircraft carriers anyone?), Bentonville, AR (not even naming who). I’m pretty sure we’ll be ok.[/quote]

Add the Dakotas, Montana and Idaho and we’d have wheat fields, timber and enough grazing land for cattle. Nevada and Alaska for gold and silver (if we’re going back to the constitution, then we go back to a bimetallic monetary standard). Between Texas and Alaska there should be enough oil to be self-sufficient. Oh, and did I mention we’d also have all the nukes?

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

I don’t think you quite understand who wrote the Constitution and why he wrote it. Madison wrote the large majority of the Constitution and one of his primary aims was not to instill a lot of power in the states at all but rather to establish a system that prevented majority tyranny within the states by limiting their powers. He specifically feared the behavior of the state legislatures, which he equated with the behavior of the very gov’t they had just gained independence from. At one point, Madison even argued that the states should have no sovereignty at all. His only major concession during the process of drafting the Constitution, a document he had a far larger hand than anyone else in drafting since it was basically a revision of his own Virginia Plan, was to add the Bill of Rights. Of course, this was to please the anti-Federalists who wanted something written down so that the federal gov’t had thresholds it could not cross. But Madison wrote the Bill of Rights and the only actual concession he made to the states in this respect was the 10th Amendment. The rest was his way of ensuring that the States had limited power by outlining what thresholds NEITHER gov’t could cross. The anti-Federalists hoped that the proposed Bill of Rights would include all sorts of Amendments that would weaken the federal gov’t to the States’ benefit. But Madison ensured that that would not happen.[/quote]

And I think you are confusing the federalism of Madison and Jefferson with that of the Federalists of Hamilton and John Adams or even Washington, while mistakenly believing that Madison wrote the constitution instead of modifying the works of British scholars like Locke.

Madison’s primary concern with state sovereignty was democracy itself. While the original anti-federalists like Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams felt the states could deal with a tyrannical majority on their own accord, Madison believed that only a strong national government could squelch a democracy; and thus the beginnings of the constitutional republic. In short, both sides had the same goal to promote personal liberty over most everything else. Madison believed a central government was the best way to accomplish this, while others felt the states could handle it themselves.

Shortly after the constitution was ratified, it was Madison and Jefferson that were the Anti-Federalists when they formed the Democratic-Republic party. As soon as the constitution was ratified and Madison believed democracy was unable to prevail, he made state’s rights his foremost priority.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
Perhaps the Midwest will be OK, but the South will not be OK at all. Also, I think you underestimate the amount of cotton, sugar, beans, wheat, etc. that is produced in California. Cal produces more cotton than every state in the country except for Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and Arkansas. Sugar is irrelevant since it’s barely produced anywhere in the U.S. and what is produced here is a tiny percentage of the global market. Corn is trending upward, but California doesn’t grow much of it anymore because they’ve moved on to FAR more valuable crops such as walnuts, almonds and especially olives. There isn’t any money in beans and the same goes for wheat when compared to what California grows in place of the wheat it used to grow. The fact is that while the Midwest is the largest producer of some very basic crops, California can or used to grow many of those same crops but has since moved on to more profitable and specialized crops. Shit, if weed becomes completely legal in the U.S. at some point it could represent one of the biggest potential cash crops in the country, and California is already a world-renowned producer of it as is.
[/quote]
The issue isn’t one of production with California, it’s one of consumption. The most liberal states also tend to be the ones with the highest debt per capita, which is precisely the problem that the rest of the country has with those states, and yes, some of our own residents as well.

Really? The fact that it’s subsidized is precisely why prices are artificially low. There are many of extremely wealthy farmers in the area, they just don’t make the headlines. I see no reason why secession would need to limit trade, but you take away the subsidies and the prices of those basic commodities will skyrocket. The price per bushel may be small, but the power is in the scale.

Yep, I get it. A lot of wealthy people live in California. I don’t doubt the ability to produce, but I have grave doubt in the ability to balance a budget.

[quote]
Most of the states you listed rank in the lower half if we were to list each state by their contribution to the country’s GDP. California is obviously the top spot, followed by Texas. The states you listed:
Missouri-22nd
Arizona-18th
Colorado-20th
Oklahoma-29th
Iowa-30th
Kansas-31st
Utah-33rd
Nebraska-37th
South Dakota-47th
Wyoming-48th
North Dakota-49th

California represents 13% of the entire GDP; Texas is second at 8% and all of the states you listed combined are only about 22%. I think the U.S. will be just fine if those states you listed were to secede. Losing Texas would hurt, but most of the top economies by state in the country would remain in the U.S. The states that are the ones most frequently talking about seceding would still be entirely dependent upon the country from which they seceded, especially Texas since most of the states you listed also don’t use anywhere close to the amount of oil that NY and California alone use AND since many pipelines running into Texas would have to run through the U.S. The price of allowing those pipes to continue operating on U.S. soil would be sky-high for a state that just seceded from the U.S. There’s only one country Texas could realistically run its oil through but there are plenty of countries the U.S. could get its oil from.[/quote]

Again, this is all meaningless. It’s not about GDP, but net product per capita. Let’s see how those rankings work out.

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]tedro wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]tedro wrote:
DB,
Would you support a peaceful secession by the south & midwest? Would you support us if we wanted to (as varq already suggested) scrap the USC and start back with just the constitution, excluding the Bill of Rights and other ammendments? (I do agree with you on that point)[/quote]

Hey Tedro, remember this map? This would be an interesting redivision of the continent. [/quote]

I don’t believe I’ve seen that one before. I almost flipped until I noticed the thin line of orange on the west coast as Mexico.

You draw me my own miniscule circle right in the middle of the map and you have a deal![/quote]

It was the product of two threads where a bunch of the PWI old-timers (myself, Mikeyali, Pushharder, tGunslinger, Rnjk and others carved up the United States and imagined what a new confederation or confederations would look like. Good times.

I knew we’d find a reason to post that map again! I’m glad I persuaded you to retain Kansas and its wheat and silos into the new confederacy lol.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
Nebraska-37th
[/quote]

YAY! We’re not 50th!

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]tedro wrote:
DB,
Would you support a peaceful secession by the south & midwest? Would you support us if we wanted to (as varq already suggested) scrap the USC and start back with just the constitution, excluding the Bill of Rights and other ammendments? (I do agree with you on that point)[/quote]

Hey Tedro, remember this map? This would be an interesting redivision of the continent. [/quote]

Mexico gets the Pacific coast north of San Francisco Bay? WTF? Where did that come from?[/quote]

Yeah, I’m gonna have to revise that map. I was just up in Humboldt county and I’d hate for the Mexicans to get their hands on that.

From the Abolut Aztlan thread:

I will revise this opinion, however, and cede only the coast south of Marin County. Then we’ll have full access to the Bay.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
So, I’ve been thinking about this general topic for a while now. I think that the way this country is run, organized, divided up into states and all that shit needs to be completely redone. Everything right up to and including tearing up the Constitution and writing a new one. [/quote]

I stopped here. Sorry, that’s just dumb. You’re not going to get perfect government no matter how many times you ‘start over’. Starting over means blood, means war, means chaos. Without a strong federal, that’s what you will have. If you are seeking a do-over, you destroy the structure that is in place you will have chaos because without the rule of law, all kinds of nuts will come out of the woodwork.

There is no way to peacefully transform a government like that. Peaceful transitions only happen after a defeat in a war. Fuck that. Our government, despite all the idiots in it, actually runs really well for the most part.
I have been around the world and there is no place I would rather live than here, under the government that was founded by collection of geniuses the world will not soon see again in such concentration.[/quote]

If this is how you feel, then why do you complain about the way the country is run in so many of these threads? It sounds to me like you are resigned to the reality of the situation and have given up all hope of ever changing it. Your attitude is exactly like those who wanted to remain under a monarch at the time of the American Revolution.[/quote]

So, if I am not in favor of shredding the constitution, then I don’t have the right to complain about things and also a Torrie? Sound logic.

There is a method setup in the structure to make changes to the way things are done. Voting and speaking out. I do both, I write my elected representatives when I have a beef and I vote for the people that most closely represent my views.
The constitution is also a fluid document in that it can be amended, so it’s technically always under construction.

The difficulty of setting up a new government is beyond the pale, getting people to respect that new government as rule of law is even worse.

[quote]VTBalla34 wrote:

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
They don’t follow it now, so what assurances would we have that they’ll follow it if it’s rewritten?

GIven the current state of the union, can you IMAGINE how fucked up it would be? We’d all be getting tracking implants “for our own protection”.

Leave it alone. The opportunity to rewrite it will come soon enough when the rotting husk of the current empire collapses upon itself.

The only changes I would make now would be to set term limits, like the presidency. For congress and the judicial branch. I think that would eliminate much of the problems.[/quote]

In addition to campaign finance limits, and the length of time the campaigns actually last, and I am all for it…
[/quote]

All that shit can be implemented without writing it into the constitution. Or, if you really want it to be a constitutional law, that can be done through amendments.