Supporting Warmongers and Reactionaries
Did you know that Minnesotans pay over 100% more into the coffers of the government in Washington, DC, than they receive in benefits? (See map above and chart below, courtesy of "The Economist" at: http://tiny.cc/o62ui.) The state is being fleeced.
Given that Washington also launches and forces us to participate in illegal, interminable and colossally expensive wars of aggression, wars that will bleed us for generations; that it botches foreign policy in other ways that hurt us, such as maintaining the trade embargo on Cuba; and that it constantly emanates toxins from a depraved media and political culture; wouldn't it be better for Minnesota to secede from the Union?
Our state would have been better off waltzing out of the USA circa 1970, when Vietnam and Nixon had made it clear how terribly the country had veered off course, and when Minnesota did even better relative to the rest of the country on socioeconomic indicators. But it's not too late, even now.
Minnesota used to produce enlightened politicians, even statesmen, like Eugene McCarthy and Paul Wellstone. Even presidential election losers Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale would tower over contemporary national political figures. Now, however, infected by the reactionary zeitgeist in the rest of the country and funded by Texas oilmen and the Koch brothers, the state produces intellectual midgets and/or demagogues such as Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. We even harbor our own PNAC monster, Vin Weber. It's hard to believe any of these latter domestic evildoers would have had a leg to stand on if Minnesota were its own nation-state, free of benighted forces from beyond its borders.
So, rather than being subjected to rule by sadistic troglodytes like George W. Bush (and, potentially, Rick Perry), wouldn't it be almost infinitely better if we Minnesotans could govern ourselves according to our own traditional values, among which I would count a belief in shared prosperity, equality of opportunity, and quiet competence? The alternative is to allow greed, jingoism, ignorance and pettiness -- the hallmarks of Washington, DC, and much of the rest of the country, particularly the South -- to continue to corrode our state.
It would be hard enough to assert that paying a premium of 100% for the fruits of an excellent national political system is worth it. But given the reality of the debacle that Washington, DC, has become, it seems almost impossible to argue that we should stay in the federal game. The moral noxiousness and financial dysfunction that the capital foists on us should be cauterized while Minnesota remains a distinctive, productive and viable society. The USA is killing us.
