Spurred by disaffection with urban culture, federal control and the increased state regulation pressed by the Sacramento government seated to the south, a growing number of northern Californians are pushing for secession from their state.
At least two counties — Siskiyou and Modoc — have already reportedly voted for withdrawal; officials in another, Tehama County, recently voted to put a referendum for secession on the ballot in June of 2014; and seven other northern California counties now claim popular committees in support of the long-shot measure.
“We are staking our futures on our ability to live and thrive in this area,” Kayla Nicole Brown, a 23-year-old from Redding who is now a leader in Shasta County’s secession movement, told The Times. “And if we can’t, we have to leave.” [Source: The Los Angeles Times and FoxNews.com]
Is secession an answer to the growing intrusion on individual rights?
No. It’s a symptom. Secession, in today’s ideologically ignorant context, cannot solve anything. It’s merely a reflection of the fact that the primary government has ceased to uphold individual (including property) rights with any consistency. Only a restoration of a republican, individual rights-based, private property order could resolve anything. It’s unlikely that seceding counties seek to establish any such thing. Most likely, they would simply establish their own localized gangs.
Governments are supposed to protect individual rights. Instead, governments—especially state governments like California—are increasingly sacrificing some individuals for the sake of others. They do this through political regulation and defacto control of private companies, and confiscatory “progressive” taxation designed to take from some to give to politically favored others.
It stands to reason that when any government violates the rights of some groups long enough, then sooner or later those groups will rebel. California cannot go on like it is without eventually alienating the counties (or other geographically or demographically defined) groups who must pay the sacrifices for those in the “winning” cities and counties.
The same applies on the national level. There are secession movements afoot in some states, most notably Texas. The federal government is relentlessly taxing, regulating and confiscating for the sake of some individuals’ “rights” at the expense of others. Neither Congress nor the President show any willingness to stop. The Supreme Court has been largely worthless, as we found in the Obamacare decision which delcared democratic vote the only standard of rights. (Hitler enjoyed majority support.)
Just as counties in states like California seek to rebel, states in the federal United States might sooner or later seek to withdraw, or otherwise rebel against, this self-evidently raw deal.
No break-up of the United States seems imminent. At the same time, it’s revealing that talks of secession are gaining more ground than at any time since the Civil War of the nineteenth century.
Back then, the federal government had the moral upper hand. It could argue, persuasively in the context of slavery, that the Union government upheld individual rights, while the Southern states literally sought to enslave large numbers of individual citizens based on their race.
Governments like California have no moral claim in what they’re doing. All they can do is keep insisting that counties who benefit less from Big Government (or are harmed more) simply suck it up. The state of California has nothing to say in reply other than, “Shut up. You’re your brother’s keepers. Plus we have the guns.”
It’s the same on the federal level, particularly if the advocates of massive, redistributionist and ever-growing government continue to hold sway in the political agendas of both major parties.
It’s true that governments such as California and the Obama Administration have the big guns, and, in a strictly brutish, physical sense, they do win. But they don’t have morality or justice on their side. As all authoritarian governments have learned throughout history, sooner or later the sacrificed will rise up, rebel, passively withdraw or even secede in protest.
What form it will take in the United States, I don’t know how to predict. But you’re seeing the symptoms in places like California, and on our current course you’re going to see more and more symptoms of the same thing.
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