It was a mistake to switch to direct election of Senators. Originally, they were appointed by and beholden to State legislatures. The system was designed this way to curb the tendency toward centralization of power. Who can argue that the federal imposition of the 55 mph law, or any number of other sweeping “reforms”, was better than letting 50 states experiment with and share solutions to various problems? To centralize everything is to lose a great deal of information and information-processing capabilities.

Right. Screw our immigration woes, stop trying to secure the U.S.-Mexican border with pathetic fence schemes, and simply take Mexico!

Yup, seize the country; divvy it up into a handful of new states; clean up the water; exploit the massive labor pool; tax the snot out of the tourism industry; and end the illegal immigration problem once & for all. Sound extreme? Maybe not so much. Would you rather continue to throw boatloads of money at useless border fences or earn $9 billion in tourism investment income?

The profits from the real estate boom on the beachfront property in those new states alone would be unimaginable — and the tax income could fund other vital infrastructure improvements in those new states.

Who’s up for a land grab?

The low vote totals for the independentistas indicate the debilitating effects of colonialism, as Luis Munoz Marin predicted in his brilliant “The Sad Case of Porto Rico” in the American Mercury (1929).

You may be right…but then again, at what point does that become a kind of “false consciousness” accusation, with all the potential for condescension that involves? It seems to me that, whatever else we can do in regards to building sovereign consciousness, we have to accept the people that are in a given place, and not wish for some other. (Someone who knows more about the history and psychology of colonialism might want to consider the odd fact that, from what I can tell, Hawaiians, as residents of a full-fledged state, have nonetheless developed a stronger and more complete independent cultural consciousness of themselves as a people than the Puerto Ricans have. But maybe ethnicity and demography helps account for those differences.)

Don’t put me in with those people! I lived in New York State for fifteen years; never went to NYC, or anywhere south of Poughkeepsie (including Poughkeepsie itself), and never wanted to. What they did or did not steal from Connecticut is no nevermind to me. As I understand it, though, most of southwestern Connecticut serves as commuter country for NYC; if that’s not the case, then my comment has to be altered.

I tend to lose my senses in joy and hope anytime someone tells me something big and inhuman might be broken down to human scale; Mystical Body of Christ excepted, of course, for obvious metaphysical reasons.

Rhode Island and all of New England provide excellent examples of state division. At one point or another the whole region had to deal with the theocrats in Massachusetts. And while they may have been happy to get rid of the folks in Connecticut and Rhode Island, they certainly made very valid claims on Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. If we were all pushovers, the whole region would be one big Massachusetts – just a little bigger than Washington I figure.

By the way forestwalker, as a New Englander, there is absolutely nothing wrong with six states for twelve percent of the population. Heck, I bet you could easily make 13 or 14 with that many people.

But since we don’t live in a big “what’s the BEST policy” laboratory, there are several major practical problems. Here’s three:

First, serious localists should never waste their limited political capital (which as of now, they haven’t even accumulated) on this. They should not try to initiate such efforts. Their primary aim should be to increase the power of the existing states vis-a-vis the feds, and even more so, localities vis-a-vis the feds and the states.

Second, who knows what the price-tag of splitting up and to some degree duplicating state bureacracies that presently are doing a whole hell of a lot of things is? It might be pretty huge.

Third, Art. IV, sect. 3, mandates congressional permission to split states. Why would the small states’ representatives have incentive to give permission? Every split would grant a greater share of Senatorial power to the other states, which of course from the large (population, we’re talkin’) states’ perspectives might be the most important motive for splitting in the first place. That present (and it will grow worse) disproportion of senatorial power is written into the Constitution’s ONE non-amendable part, Art. V., which contains the unambiguous words “provided that…no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the senate.”

Fox: More States equal more members of Congress equals more money needed from K Street and that just might finally bankrupt the Corporate Coffers once and for all.

Don’t know however, if we might be better served by formalizing what already exists anyway and consolidating the 50 into 1 big state called Confusion with the Ostrich as the State Bird, Possum as State Mammal, Poison Ivy as State Plant, Fools Gold as State rock and IOU scrip as the currency. 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall can be the National Anthem. The current New York Legislature can give a seminar on legislative conduct and then we might have two teams of two representatives placed on a rotating basis via the vehicle of a Reality Television show. Two liberal teams and the others conservative and everything can be decided in a Mexican Wrestling Match broadcast by CSpan. The masks will insure anonymity for the Representatives after their 90 days on the Wrestling Circuit is over.

I wonder about the comments regarding the electoral college, though. I had thought that the college was intended to provide a mediating, republican bulwark against a pure democracy so as to prevent precisely the kind of “election-as-popularity-contest” process that we have today.

As long as the federal government exists, it might be better, perhaps, to strengthen the institution of the electoral college.

California doesn’t have a history, except of people moving into its borders to either start over or get rich. The only connection is disconnectedness.

“thinking a little too much like Lind, and focusing mostly on how to handle populations in their several geographic regions.”

You say that like it’s a bad thing. Perhaps statehood is a step too far, but if geographic regions are not represented as regions but are instead arbitrarily divided up between various bureaucratic regimes (i.e. what we call states), how can they ever be governed as anything other than colonies or viewed as anything other than regions for resource exploitation (which is exactly how the portions of the Pacific forest, Sierra Nevada Mountains, and Mojave Desert that are ruled by Sacramento are viewed and governed)? It seems to me that shoring up true regional identity (i.e. understanding the connection between yourself and your community and the land it lies and depends on) is fundamental to the sort of embedded virtuous communities that are the goal of this site.