- Civil War Part II

In the past I've been very critical of all my friends who are stockpiling ammunition in preparation for the day when the American experiment ends and the country falls apart. I've been saying it for so long that I can even quote myself:

"Countries don't collapse that way." I usually say "Take a look at what happened when the Soviet Union ran out of other people's money. The bureaucracy collapses under it's own weight and only the real criminals are left. But by then the system works so poorly that for most people it's a relief. The power vacuum ends up getting filled by the bloods and crips in some places and the Shriners in others. Most people won't even notice.

It took Rome three centuries to fall apart and even then almost everyone still thought of themselves as Roman for another century. We may decline but we'll do it in pieces. California will fall apart a full generation before Texas finally does. There won't be any large scale shooting war. At worst it will be two armies that square off against each other over the right to be 'the real' America. Apart from being no police to call when someone tries to rob you, there won't be any need for all that ammo."


But today I've read the first piece ever that has made me think I might have that wrong. Read the following from hopefully not too prescient Mark Steyn:

Insofar as it works at all, Big Government works best in small countries, with a sufficiently homogeneous population to have common interests. There’s a fascinating book by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore called The Size of Nations, in which the authors note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above 1 million: America (300 million people), Switzerland (7 million), Norway (4 million), and Singapore (3 million). Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule because it’s a highly decentralized federation.

But, as Messrs. Alesina and Spolaore put it, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up. That theory is now being tested by the Obamacare Democrats, and, as we see with the wretched Ben Nelson’s cornhusker kickback or the blank check given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when American-style Big Government starts “buying off ethnic and regional factions,” the sky’s the limit. To attempt to impose European-style centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history. Which is to say that, domestically, Washington’s retreat from la gloire will be of an entirely different order of business from Paris’s.



Oy... I hope this piece isn't nearly as good as I think it is. I hope it turns out to be the ramblings of some Canadian jokester who was too depressed over new taxes to think coherently. Bets anyone?