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IDEOLOGY AND ETHICS SURVEY SAMPLE ARGUMENTS

24.
 Can we justify secessionism?


(- 5) Decentralization (anarcho-libertarian) view: If you genuinely believe in decentralization and liberty, you must logically be open to the idea of secessionism. After all, big businesses often spin off subsidiaries to increase transparency, incentives, innovativeness, and responsiveness to consumers. Political decentralization can accomplish analogous ends. Furthermore, just as competition improves business products, if North America had lots of competing states, they would be less likely to overly tax or otherwise oppress their citizens, knowing that their most productive citizens could more easily go elsewhere. The fact that government by definition is the territorial monopolist on violence makes it inherently dangerous, and all the more reason to restrain it with the threat of secessionism. In fact, following the American Revolution, most Americans believed that the Federal government must be kept weaker than the state governments to prevent it from growing like a cancer. The existence of many independent states in North America does not necessarily mean they will war with each other any more than little Scandinavian countries have been at each other's throats.
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(+5) Centralization (authoritarian-statist) view: America did not lose 640,000 men during the Civil War so that a bunch of neo-Confederate, right wing kooks can repeat that gory episode with another round of secessionism. Regardless of its flaws, the U.S. Government today has the best legal minds and remains the embodiment of the accumulated historical experience and collective wisdom of the American people. We generally cannot trust secessionists to come up with something better than what we currently have to protect individual freedoms from sea to shining sea. Government is fundamentally different from businesses because it can legitimately demand patriotic devotion and hence command a quasi-religious power of life and death from its subjects in time of war. Therefore business analogies do not apply. Lastly, "secessionism" can have philosophical linkages to "white separatism" and "white nationalism" which is racist and potentially dangerous. If North America breaks apart into separate countries, they might continually fight each other like Balkan countries. Any tendency in this direction must be suppressed to help protect minorities and prevent a possible outbreak of violence that could lead to a general conflagration.


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