Before now I was unclear on why California should be divvied up into six smaller states. But I didn’t feel bad. Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist billionaire guy who is trying to collect enough signatures to put a California Balkanization proposition on the ballot, seemed unclear about his idea too.
Thanks for George Skelton’s column, however, Draper has finally shed some light on why California should fade into history, replaced by six new states (assuming Congress were to admit them to the Union), one of which would be called, um, Jefferson.
Skelton explains: “Draper’s split-up-California proposal, he contends, would result in more local control and focus on regional problems.”
Local control! Bien sur.
Draper may or may not be nuts, but you can’t reflexively dismiss the argument that Sacramento may be a too far away to understand the issues affecting people 600 miles away in Calexico.
But that’s where I get stuck.
If more local control is better, and if the way to get more local control is to divide the state into smaller statelets, the question locally follows: why six? Why not seven or eight?
Connecticut is a small state. It’s well run. Why not cut California into 49 Connecticut-sized states?
Actually, scratch that “well run” part. The Nutmeg State ranks 41st out of 50.
Um, Rhode Island? Smallest of them all?
Number 47.
Anyway.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there was evidence to support the notion that smaller is better. Where does it stop? Why not declare every one of California’s 38 million people the sole citizen of their own state, with their home their capitals? With 76 million United States Senators, that would give The States Formerly Known as California serious juice in Congress.
(Draper argues that ex-California would have 12 Senators, which would be better than two. Though he doesn’t explain why they’d necessarily cooperate with each other, what with having gone their separate ways in the first place specifically because they don’t have enough in common to stay together.)
Speaking of inconvenient truths, few people have brought up the fact that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow new states to be created by splitting up existing states (as happened, for example, when West Virginia left Virginia) without approval of Congress. With the Senate controlled by Democrats, it’s unlikely they’d sign off on a new configuration that would add a net of Republican seats.
Everything said, I don’t know if splitting the state would be a net benefit or net disaster. What I find fascinating is the transparently faulty logic being floated for a project with breathtaking implications — from a man who’s obviously smart enough to know better.
5 Comments.
Ted, every time you talk about this you keep forgetting to talk about devolution, because that is 99% of what Draper and his ilk want. This is also why they sound so confused in pitching their won split-up proposal because none of them will talk about this – the actual reason they want the split up.
The idea of devolution is simple. Smaller local governments are easier for corporations and businessmen to bully to get more resources while larger ones are harder. Bully and bribing the US government is hard and takes a lot of money. Sure it is being done constantly, but only the big players have the resources to do it. Meanwhile bullying a little state into giving up its resources and getting tax breaks is easy, even mid sized business can do it. California, however, is so big that it is like a small country – only the big players can currently bully and bribe it to fully extract its resources and be its effective behind-the-scenes overlords. So if you are a mid-sized player the obvious solution is to break California into Manageable chunks that would be within the ability of the middle sized guys like Draper to bully and control.
Why only six and not 38 million new states? This is obvious. Six states would be small enough to bully and corrupt within his resources (at least those among the new states worth corrupting and owning). However those six states would still be large enough to diminish the chance of getting a populous uprising and subsequently an incorruptible populous government elected like a bunch of small close town ships or counties might do if bullied. Down at the full 38,000,000 level to get what he would want he would have to bully and bribe everyone, which is now more expensive then doing so to California in its current form. Six or so states is probably the sweet-spot of his divide and conquer plan.
A minor point. Bribing these guys is NOT expensive. It isn’t that only the big corps have the resources to do it. A common thread seen when judges and other corrupt officials are caught is how cheaply they sold themselves for. A $25,000 bribe for a multimillion dollar payoff. Shit, what the real smart people ought to do is put up a campaign on kickstarter. If the corporation will bribe you $100K, we’ll get 50,000 people to kick in $5 each: a quarter-million.
“A minor point. Bribing these guys is NOT expensive. It isn’t that only the big corps have the resources to do it.”
Bribing one or two of these guys at a time isn’t expensive. Reducing the whole state to perpetual vessel-hood for your private empire costs considerably more.
CALIFORNIA
area: 163,696 sq mi
population: 38,332,521
senators: 2 ( 0.052 senators per million people )
NEW YORK AND POINTS EAST
area: 126,548 sq mi
population: 34,095,992
senators: 14 ( 0.411 senators per million people )
To have equivalent per-capita representation in the Senate to what the Northeast has, the current state of California would need to be subdivided into eight different states, not just six.
We’ve got gerrymandering to contend with as well. So here’s a thought – when our current representational system was developed, we were primarily agrarian and long-distance communication was difficult.
Neither of those things are true today, I contend that representation by geographical location is obsolete. Why couldn’t we divide by profession, for instance?
The number of Representatives would still be based on population, so engineers and garbagemen would have more representatives than CEOs would. You wouldn’t want Senators allocated per profession, so how about allocating them based on each profession’s *contribution*?
Engineers and gargagemen would have lots of senators while CEOs would have zero…