That’s bull. The fed doesn’t have any legitimate ownership in state property at large, it did not spend its own money to buy properties generally. The states probably wouldn’t consent to chopping up their contiguous boundaries. Anything the fed had actually paid for, not taken by fiat, it would retain ownership of, sure, but only as equivalent to any other owner in that state, not as a special government entity. Its rights would be equal to everyone elses’.
Whatever you say. How did the federal government come to “own” that land again?
how did the state come to “own” that land?
states have formed from the king of england, and the usa federal government.
the federal government is the one that bought the louisiana purchase in the first place.
alaska is another purchased by the federal government, so why would a state have more claim than a federal government?
http://nevada.sierraclub.org/conservation/publands/publiclands.html
if the federal is not ok, the state cannot be ok
But the entity they bought it from didn’t own it either. That sale was a fraud.
Russia didn’t own it to sell it. In both cases they were just buying non-opposition to US-gov control of those regions.
State land is also not okay, we agree. Don’t you know the libertarian position?
However you asked what the states would do in my scenario, and they’d likely reject the Fed trying to break up their borders. That doesn’t say anything about who has a right to the property within those borders ultimately.
Yes, cab, the federal government bought the land from people who had no legitimate claim to it and with other people’s money.
“If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.”
Really now, what did you expect? To ask them if you can secede and have they say yes? This doesn’t seem the kind of thing you request; it’s something you just DO.
if a state wants to start a war with the federal government, that will be interesting. a bunch of illegitmate force against each other
Why in the hell would the state governments attack the federal government? That has to be one of the stupidest assertions I’ve seen all day.
people are suggesting states want to leave and keep federal property, that is a challenge to the federal government. to keep federal property would be a attack on federal property
A friend of mine once joked about what would happen if all fifty states declared independence making D.C. a country on it’s own, and then had all of the state militia invade D.C. Would Washington have the U.S. military defend the little spec of land that the District is?
So you accept property rights in some form, cabby?
Why didn’t Russia own Alaska? Who owned it?
Well there were some natives there, right?
@Aiser: WTH is your avatar?? I tried looking it up but just can’t find it… it looks awesome.
Clayton -
It’s the hybrid reaver from StarCraft 2.
+1
But I think this is part of what we need to change. In this respect, I’m coming full-circle to a kind of “pragmatic minarchism”, i.e. that we need to think about how to create governments that are inherently local and too structurally solid to be externally manipulated by colonial/imperial powers.
This approach is far more intellectually challenging than the bluntly anarcho-capitalist “push the Big Red Button” approach. There will never be a Big Red Button anyway, so it’s not even a strategic consideration. I think I’m starting to understand where Hayek was going with his Constitution of Liberty idea but maybe I’m reading my own agenda into it.
I see no reason we can’t have more “competition in governance” to put it in the language of seasteaders… there’s really no reason we need to put out to sea in order to do this and I see no real obvious advantage to being out at sea unless lots of seasteads are already there (collective action problem).
But the great political centers - Washington, DC, London, Brussells, etc. - are like magnets that suck up the vast majority of the intellectual and other talents that could be the building blocks of a distributed grid of mostly localized, competing jurisdictions. Something similar happened with Louis XIV and his constant diversion of the aristocracy while he built out a political structure of nearly total centralization of France’s political power in his own hands.
A blunter way to say this is: the lords - whatever their evils - protect us from the King! Without lords, we are exposed to direct expropriation and subjugation by the King. And when the King becomes even more adept at plundering us than the lords ever were, we suffer a twin evil - unrestrained abuse and expropriation. (As Leviathan becomes ever more concentrated, it has less and less incentive to preserve the capital value in its subjects as there is no “escape” anyway… you’ll be abused exactly the same no matter where you go).
In the past, peoples have courted a ruler from a foreign land for the express purpose of providing a blanket of protection. The arrangement is often uneasy as the transplant ruler has no kin or geographic loyalty to his rented subjects but that’s the rule in modern politics anyway. But maybe we need a change of mindset. Maybe sub-sovereign political units need to start shopping around for rulers who are skilled in all the arts of political machination, military strategy, financial warfare - essentially, a King - and who can engineer and pull off a secession in exchange for a constitutional monarchy modeled on something like Hayek’s constitution and maybe the British monarchy or another long-standing monarchy that has demonstrated a capacity for dealing with complex limits to its powers.
I know this is alien-speak to Joe Sixpack at this point in time. But that doesn’t mean that it will always stay that way. Perhaps it’s something we (liberty-oriented people) can start developing the intellectual foundations for.
Clayton -
The whole thing is idiotic. Oregon, Colorado, Florida, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Michigan voted for Obama in the election. And yet now they are going to secede? Just because a couple of people want to sign a worthless petition doesn’t mean anything.
Russia’s claim to Alaska was the same as Columbus’s claim to America. Show up, land on its shores, plant a flag, and ‘Claim this land for Spain!’
Nevermind that you haven’t done a single damn thing required to own property, like improve it, border it, setup permanent settlement. Nevermind that human beings already lived there.
It was the typical claim of a government, the claim which is actually the unspoken statement that ‘if another government moves in here we reserve the right to attack them’ and nothing more.
A claim alone is not enough.
Apparently, Scalia says there’s no right to secede.
What a joke.
I think Scalia’s right - what are you going to do, draft up a letter that says “Dear Sirs and Madams. This letter is to notify you that we, the undersigned, no longer desire to be a part of your organization. We are hereby tendering our collective resignation and would like you to cancel our names from the register and cease collection of membership dues forthwith. We sincerely appreciate your time and attention on this matter.”
The only answer you’ll ever get is “Hell no!”
But Scalia can only speak for the organization of which he is a part and the rights that it recognizes or not: USG. But if you can effect a secession no matter what USG thinks about it, then I guess you have exercised a “right” to secede, don’t you?
Clayton -