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Roland Holland declares in his piece, “Secession: A Solution to the Washington Debt Threat,” that government plunder via taxation and debt creation threatens to destroy the financial life of future generations, and that secession is a way to solve these problems.
Well, secession is not a solution.
Holland is wrong in misleading the reader into thinking that government is always the villain and that corporations and Wall Street are the be all and end all to our financial ills. Plunder occurs in the private as well as the public sector, in business, finance, state or federal government as well. As long as we depend on a money-based system, we will always have coercion, avarice, and criminality, which are existential in the system and an intrinsic hazard for anyone seeking wealth creation.
It is a fallacy for anyone to believe that private or public money management and manipulation is a solution to humanity’s problems, no matter whether those problems are financial, or social. The undeniable truth is that unquenchable quest for wealth is the cause for humanity’s problems.
Interestingly, a number of states have introduced legislation declaring sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment: Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California, and Georgia, while there are about twelve states considering sovereignty. So, secession is not some unimaginable, off-the-wall notion.
Nevertheless, I don’t believe that a sovereign state would voluntarily participate in good faith within a confederation of states; their individual needs will always take priority and may come into conflict with another state’s priorities. Additionally, states would still be tied to the federal government by common interest in some important ways. Secession would be no more successful than that of the southern confederate states in the 1860s, which resulted in the American Civil War. The here and now of yesteryear and the here and now of today are complexly, geopolitically, demographically, culturally, and in every other way very different. Our country has significantly progressed and more sophisticated than the country known to our founding fathers.
Furthermore, the “Washington income tax,” as Holland refers to it, may be less as federal authority and services devolve to the states, but it would mean the states would levy equivalent taxes in order to provide those increased services. Therefore, nothing would actually be gained, except the states would benefit from having greater insight into their individual needs than that of the federal government. Additionally, states could not provide for their individual or collective national defense without dependence on a national department of defense, and therefore there would be a federal income tax or tax of some sort levied for defense.
Rather than secession, we should simply promote the devolution of some federal authority to the states; while over time transfer all authority to the states, then to communities. This would be logistically necessary in order to evolve to a moneyless structure. Community-based authority and control, amongst other measures, is how we will achieve heterarchical systems of governance, develop and retain efficiencies in resource management, affording authentic freedom, equality, and world peace.
Of course, moneyless systems would need to be applicable worldwide. In that, there would be a need to manage, regulate, and utilize resources in an equitable way, and this over time would require an accumulation of greater knowledge, an evolution to technologies that are more advanced, greater communication, greater national and international cooperation, resolve and commitment to an incremental process model leading to fruition.
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