Flogging a Dead Horse

The more I think about it, I think I'm flogging a dead horse with this global government thing. The idea arose from the ashes of World War II, but it seems to have died out with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The theory was that, if everybody lived under one flag, there wouldn't be any more wars. The counter theory was that, if everybody lived under one flag, there would be no place to go when you wanted to vote with your feet. People seem to be voting with their feet more now than ever before, and the biggest threat to world peace is not coming from national or international governments, it's coming from tribes, gangs, and cults. I guess I was paranoid about the EU because it reminded me of the UN,  but even the UN seems to have turned out to be a paper tiger. It is my understanding that the EU is an attempt to organize Europe into something resembling a federal republic. The Russians have a competing organization called the Eurasian Union. That's why they are mad at the Ukraine, because they want them to join the Eurasian Union, and the Ukraine wants to join the European Union. I don't think there's a danger of these two EUs merging together anytime soon. I know that some Europeans are concerned about giving up any of their national sovereignty, but so were some Americans back in the day.

I really believe that one of the biggest mistakes our Founding Fathers made was not providing a peaceful, orderly procedure for states to secede from the union. They didn't have to fight a war to join the union, why should they have to fight a war to leave it? I haven't been keeping up with the Libertarians for over a decade now, so I don't know if they have changed their position on this secession thing. I agree that you can't have people jumping in and out of a union at the drop of a hat, but the Brexit thing is supposed to take at least two years to play out, and I would hardly call that a drop of a hat. I don't know how long the Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia took, but they seem to have parted amicably and, last I heard, they were still getting along with each other. What's wrong with something like that?

I don't think I'm against free trade. It has caused some dislocations in the US economy, but we've had dislocations before free trade was ever invented. The thing about the economy is that there are so many variables simultaneously at play that it's hard to pin the blame on any one thing when there is any kind of turbulence. It's like I said about the bailouts of the last decade. They told us that, if we didn't have the bailouts, the economy would go to hell, so we had the bailouts and the economy went to hell anyway. There is no way of knowing if the bailouts made things better or worse, or what would have happened if there had been no bailouts. Too bad real life isn't like a video game where, if you crash and burn, you can just reset the game and start over, trying a different tactic this time. In real life, everything you do is piled on top of everything else you have done, and everything everybody else has done, and there are no do overs.

Immigration built this country and made it what it is today, but what has it done for us lately? Our predecessors took the land way from the Indians, which wasn't right, but we're here now. How would turning the country over to the Mexicans and Muslims compensate the Indians for their loss? Another thing is that immigration was encouraged in the past to provide cheap labor. What is the point of bringing more people into the country at the same time the jobs are moving out of the country? I hear that Red China is still looking for cheap help. Why not send the immigrants over there?

When you say that 80% of Americans live in urban areas, you must mean the suburbs, because the core cities have been steadily losing population for decades. It's not that people are moving to the cities, it's that the cities are sprawling out into the countryside. I don't know what to do about that because people have to live somewhere, and I certainly don't want them crowding me out of my swamp. I was just kidding about the walls, but I still think it might be a good idea for states to be able to detach troublesome neighborhoods. Kicking people off their land is not considered cool nowadays, so we would have to give up the land along with the people. It would be a win-win, they wouldn't have to put up with us anymore, and we wouldn't have to put up with them. We could still be friends, like The Czech Republic and Slovakia, but we wouldn't tell them what to do and they wouldn't tell us what to do, What's wrong with that?