After the election people have been petitioning the Obama administration to allow their respective individual state to secede from the union:
More than 100,000 Americans have petitioned the White House to allow their states to secede from the US, after President Barack Obama’s re-election.
The appeals were filed on the White House’s We the People website.
Most of the 20 states with petitions voted for Republican Mitt Romney.
I think the people filing petitions have little understanding of secession and statism. Secession is not something you need permission for, you can secede from anything at any time you desire. You may be violently punished for seceding but it is still your right as a free human being to decide you no longer wish to association with an organization. That brings is to our second issue, statism. States exist from expropriating wealth from others. Each individual state expropriates wealth from the people living within its borders and the federal government expropriates wealth both from individuals living within its borders and the individual states that makeup the Union. Because of this petitioning the federal government to allow your individual state and, by association, yourself to secede is pointless. The federal government isn’t going to allow such a thing to happen because you and your individual state are sources of revenue for itself.
Wars aren’t cheap and the federal government is waging plenty of them. The United States military is dropping bombs that costs thousands of dollars from drones that cost millions of dollars. Fighter jets and bombers that cost millions of dollars are launched from aircraft carriers that cost billions of dollars. There’s no way the federal government is going to voluntarily allow a source of its revenue to leave. In fact the last time states and individuals tried to leave the Union the federal government used a great deal of violence to prevent them.
Secession is the right of every individual. Individual states should be allowed to secede from the federal government, counties should be allowed to secede from individual states, towns should be allowed to secede from counties, and people should be allowed to seceded from towns. Unfortunately each of the mentioned state entities will use violence to prevent secession because it goes against their interests.
“Thus the whole Revolution [of 1775–1783] turned upon, asserted, and, in theory, established, the right of each and every man, at his discretion, to release himself from the support of the government under which he had lived. And this principle was asserted, not as a right peculiar to themselves, or to that time, or as applicable only to the government then existing; but as a universal right of all men, at all times, and under all circumstances.”
What really bothers me is that people celebrate July 4th, a holiday based on secession, and then claim secession is bad. It’s like saying one should never, ever eat sugar, and then going trick-or-treating on Halloween and eating all the candy before you go to bed that night.