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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 23 2016, @05:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can-go-your-own-way-♩♫♩♫ dept.

Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general's office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.

Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.

"We're doing it now because of all of the overwhelming attention," Evans said.

The Yes California group has been around for more than two years, Evans said. It is based around California taxpayers paying more money to the federal government than the state receives in spending, that Californians are culturally different from the rest of the country, and that national media and organizations routinely criticize Californians for being out of step with the rest of the U.S. 

Could California go it alone?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @09:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @09:33PM (#432133)

    No, my proposal was not serious, just a rebuttal to all the people saying "yeah, get rid of California!" It was basically a bit of satire to throw back.
    I understand now. It was not clear to me.

    Many of the Native Americans by and large had a much more egalitarian society where everyone worked together
    I studied native american history for a few years. It is not all the sunshine and lollipops that they show you on TV. It was a fairly brutal way to live. They got eviscerated by the very idea you are trying for. The idea no one owns anything. They found out that those who DO own things can afford to buy guns and people to man them. The concept of ownership was foreign to them. They understand it *very* well now. But back then they felt they were getting one over on 'the pale face'. To them it was nothing more than a game. By the point they realized they had been had it was too late. Take for example the oil thing happening now with one of the tribes. No one gave a damn about them until there was money and oil involved. A bunch of NIMBYs are taking advantage of them. They will realize again too late they have been had. Either by the gov, the NIMBYs, or the oil company.

    California is one of the economic powerhouses of the US
    If you remove apple and google it is not quite as sunny. Do not confuse the prosperity of a few companies that hire a small percentage of the population with the health of the rest of the economy. I picked those two as they are both companies that could conceivably pick up its entire labor force and move somewhere else if they liked. Labor participation rate is at a 40 year low right now. It sounds as if you are grasping at ways to fix it. There is no nice way to fix it. No clean fix. Basic income only works until the inflationary measure it creates catches up in the market. Low level base jobs are being automated away. With nothing to replace them. Min wage is going up and locking more people out of the labor pool. Companies are not doing as good so they hire as little as possible and skirt as many laws as they can get away with. We can tax the companies more but they just pass it on as an expense to those who already can not afford it.

    We have already reached the technological point where scarce resources are not that much of a problem for human survival, but you keep beating that dead horse. Other people are busy creating / supporting a better future.
    My points was the economies of all of the states are mingled. To remove one would hurt them all. Especially the one removed. Not about resources. I used resources as a point to show how unprepared cali would be for that sort of move. People with resources would take advantage of the situation and many would suffer for the 'noble' idea that cali is better than the others. We are americans. In the slogan of one of our presidential candidates. We are stronger together. Even if we disagree :)

    Only one thing leads to economic prosperity. That is building things (we both can agree on this I hope). I like to recommend this book to those who disagree and think you can just manage the money better. http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/contents.html [steshaw.org] I like to recommend this book as it shows why the very things we try to do to help others ends up harming them even worse. It is a good read even if you do not agree with it from an ideological POV. It shows the major pitfalls of the solutions we keep trying.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:13PM (#432159)

    I agree with most of those as well, except for the economics and native american bits.

    Native Americans understand private property now because that is the system they have to work with. On the reservation things are different, though they still have problems with private ownership and greed within the tribe.

    Economics: its all just a system to help humans exchange goods and services, at a certain point building more things is actually detrimental, and doing anything solely for the sake of "the economy" is a backwards approach. Do things to solve human problems, let the economy just be a secondary game hardly necessary for daily survival. I have spent lots of time optimizing things that have no monetary benefit to myself, so I don't believe we humans require a profit motive to accomplish things. I'm sure there are good points in that book you linked, but I stopped at the beginning of chapter 2 when he argues that a hoodlum breaking a window is actually beneficial to the economy. That may be true, but it fails to account for the environmental concerns of wasting energy / resources fixing something that shouldn't have needed fixing. It also takes resources away from building new housing. With such basic assumptions forming the foundation of his book I am not going to bother continuing since there will be subsequent errors built upon the flawed assumptions.

    Social safety nets should not be considered from a monetary perspective, when done that way it is near impossible to see the benefits. You need to view things from a human perspective first, and monetary concerns come second.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @01:09AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @01:09AM (#432223)

      You may want to actually finish the chapter. He makes his point in the last paragraph.

      The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.

      tl;dr you broke something, and other things are not done because of it.

      Also damn its like maybe 3 paragraphs of text... You read it with a closed mind and learned nothing. If you *read* the whole thing you will see why social programs tend to fail and why. If you want to build systems that work you *must* work around those issues. They are important if you actually want to help someone with those programs.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:38AM (#432274)

    Just scanned through your link, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.

    There is at least one huge unwritten premise behind his book -- that the markets are in some ways "fair". What we have now is possibly like a repeat of the Robber Baron era in the late 1800s, where a few super rich buy politicians to further enrich themselves...also known as corruption. Corruption on a scale never imagined. Nothing works right when there are billionaires throwing their weight around.

    Further, based on the examples set by the super rich, people that might act like good competing capitalists in "normal times" develop the great urge to become monopolists (while usually hiding behind a screen of "just a successful capitalist"). And the lack of regulation (through subversion of government) lets monopoly and other unfair practice grow.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @11:09AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @11:09AM (#432349)

      Jeezus!

      No system operates well with corruption. Blaming markets is just ignorant (no, they are not fair, they are self-correcting), and pulling out the Robber Baron trope is just ignorant (recall spending for Hilary was 10 to 1).

      You're being willfully obtuse.