House of Eratosthenes

They will never convince us to allow abortion on demand. We will never convince them that spending taxpayers’ money like it’s going out of style is a bad thing.

Kind of a rehash of the divorce agreement.

The strongest argument against such a thing, IMO, is that it would take the revolution of 1776 and turn everything that took place between that moment and this one and turn it into one spin on a silly-go-round. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth…” and all that.

We tell the liberals, like it says in the divorce agreement, “You can have your beloved homeless, homeboys, hippies, and illegal aliens. We’ll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO’s, and rednecks. We’ll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood.” Since this is essentially the same thing the Founding Fathers told the British after Yorktown, it would effectively impose on freedom itself something of a half-life. How many generations pass in the half that is Hot Hockey Mom America, before some pipsqueak says “Hey, I just think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody!” And his fellow Hot-Hockey-Mom-Americans fail to banish him to what FrankJ calls “Sissy America”? And then there would have to be another divorce, and another, and another. In about a thousand years, the Hot Hockey Mom, Hot Meat and Cold Beer America would be carved down to a patch of earth the size of Rhode Island.

Strongest argument in favor? Our liberals. They’re feeling angry all of the time, and what angers them is anybody who doesn’t agree with them about everything. They’re feeling ripped off. Liberals are like that; they get a study in hand that tells them what they want to hear, and they never look at it in terms of doing any sort of sanity check. In this case, one of the “blue states” subsidizing all the rest, is mine, California…heh heh heh. Anyway, Patterico’s separation would draw a boundary around the various social experiments of liberals, that liberals cannot draw themselves. Each sane experiment requires a perimeter, and it’s just plain hard to live around today’s liberals because they don’t want to fix things within such a perimeter. They find out someone started a business and is making a profit…or, just enjoying a plate of hot wings and beer brought to him by a cute young lady in short-shorts…and it doesn’t matter where the poor sonofabitch is, they have to go fix it. A wall, say, twenty feet high, would be most helpful.

Victim?

The Hollywood people would all be on the sissy, weepy-apologia side. Wait, that’s not fair; maybe eight in ten of them would be on that side. Alright, so they’d have a tax base, at least to start with. They could make lots of movies about how awful things are going on the Strong Side. And any time their own government runs out of money, they could raise taxes on the same Hollywood people over and over again, and they could enforce their strong union rules on the Hollywood people, then the Hollywood people would raise movie ticket prices on the proles, who wouldn’t have anything else to do with their time other than listen to the same cuts of music on their iPods. I figure Steve Jobs would be on that side, and every couple years he’d release something and everyone on that side of the wall would have to buy it to find out what it does. Then he’d be about the richest guy there, and they’d tax the shit out of him.

All the pretty girls would be on my side. Because let’s face it, even if the pretty girls wanted to go to the other side, they wouldn’t be allowed in. Look how the liberals have been treating Sarah Palin for the last two years. I rest my case.

You start a business over here, you can keep your money. And drill-baby-drill. If we’re going to talk about having an economic recovery, and bringing down the price of oil & gas, then stop-talkin’-start-doin’.

Which half would have the doctors? Hmmm…

Which half would have most of the food?

And what of Patterico’s questions? What would the crime statistics look like in each half? In which half would kids be abusing drugs? Knocking each other up? Catching STDs? Breaking into houses? Robbing liquor stores?

The death tax would highlight the philosophical difference better than anything, I think. You die in the weak side, your money goes to the government there; the thinking would be, it always belonged to the government, they were just graciously allowing you to use it. You die on the strong side, and your money is your property, you already paid taxes on it, you can divide it up among your heirs.

Would it be fair to presume the unemployment rate in “left” America would be very close to where it is now, since once Obama became our President it zipped on up to 9.5 to 10 and just stayed there…or maybe something much higher, since their message to businesses would be one of “What the hell are you gonna give us today?” And in “right” America it would be down somewhere around five and a half, since throughout much of the Bush Presidency that’s where it stayed.

Regardless of whether the plan is ultimately executed, it’s an interesting thought experiment. Maybe a good compromise would be to establish a national “Wall Day” where we can think hard about it. Ezra Klein can trot out the latest study that says blue-staters are supporting the red-staters, and people of all ideological stripes can read his latest write-up and think “Yeah, I believe that! Er…yeah…sure I do. Yeah.” Then we’d flip to the rest of the newspaper, covered with stories about budget deficits, and oh dear our local pension system is out of control, so is our state pension system, and Social Security, and we need more programs, and more taxes, ad infinitum. National Wall Day. What-Would-Happen-Day. Somewhere before Election Day, late September sometime, before everyone starts thinking about candy, costumes and family holiday schedules.

A national day of giving it some real thought.

The blue staters want this? They don’t need us as much as we need them? Yes, let us give that some real quality thought. Not Ezra Klein thought…but the kind of thought you give things when you want to get real work done, and want things to work.

I love it, but it’d never work. All liberalism needs to develop and flourish is a certain, very low critical mass of “intellectuals” in Thomas Sowell’s sense — people whose work begins and ends with ideas. Unless you implement some kind of truly universal draft, within a generation you’ll have that critical mass of folks who have never had to produce something measurable, tangible, or testable for a paycheck. That to me is the definition of a liberal, and since it’s also pretty much the definition of “a teacher” (also “a teenager”) the cycle will soon start all over again.*

Prosperity is, ultimately, self-defeating. People get more and more comfortable until they completely forget the skills which made them so. For these folks, wealth/comfort/all the conveniences of modern life are just kinda… there, so why can they just be there for everybody? Hence the wealth-spreaders. Which is one of the few silver linings I hope is lurking in the cloud of the Great Recession — maybe some folks will start to realize that tertiary-educated Ivy League clowns who’ve never been within missile range of a real job aren’t exactly on the same page as folks who work for a living…

*[yeah, I know kids theoretically have to pass tests, which theoretically measure teacher effectiveness — No Child Left Behind and all that. But how’s that working out? And I speak as one with a lot of experience with teachers, especially at the college level where most of the really damaging “ideas” come from].
- Severian | 08/16/2010 @ 08:24
Plain old-style federalism, end the fed, return toward the 3% government to GNP ratio of 1925, or just stop the squirming and hand them the keys.
- jamzw | 08/16/2010 @ 11:23
[…] Morgan Freeberg Carve it up and call it a day? […]
- Cassy Fiano | 08/17/2010 @ 18:35
>>> In about a thousand years, the Hot Hockey Mom, Hot Meat and Cold Beer America would be carved down to a patch of earth the size of Rhode Island. <<<

I think you underestimate the liberals (I never thought I’d ever say that…)
Small pockets of Sissy America would “see the light” and come back, hopefully bringing their land with them. Long term, Sissy America would pretend to side up with Grown-Up America, which would eventually weaken and let them (or most of them) back in.

And the cycle continues…
- stevehorth | 08/19/2010 @ 07:39

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Carve it Up and Call it a Day?Monday, August 16th, 2010

Carve it Up and Call it a Day?
Monday, August 16th, 2010