No Money, No Workey

It's not that I don't care about the fake shutdown, I just wish it was real and that the federal government would go out of business.  What good are they anyway?  All they do is bother people and tell them what to do.  They have troops stationed all over the world and they can't even defend their own borders.  Most of the important services are already handled by state and local governments, and they could do more if the feds got off their backs.  They might have to raise their taxes, but that shouldn't be hard since nobody would be paying federal taxes anymore.  Each state would have to print their own money, which might prove inconvenient, but there would be nothing to prevent some or all of the states from joining together to form a common economic system, something like they have in Europe only without all the other crap they have devised over the years.

Speaking of the states, this might be an opportunity for them to redraw their borders in a more logical fashion.  For instance, the northern parts of Michigan and Wisconsin could join together and detach their southern parts, which might be happier joined with the northern parts of Illinois and Indiana.  The southern parts of Illinois and Indiana certainly have more in common with each other than they have with their own northern parts.  All those tiny New England states could join together and make one decent sized state out of themselves.  California could join with Mexico since the Mexicans have pretty well taken it over anyway.

One way the fake shutdown might end, or be converted into a real shutdown, is if all those federal workers who are not getting paid would quit their jobs.  It is illegal for them to go on strike, but there is no law that says they can't just quit.  I think they are still paying all the branches of the military except the Coast Guard.  They can't just quit, but they can refuse to re-enlist when their current enlistment expires, and new recruits can stop joining.  In four years there would be nobody left to guard the coasts, so the states that have coasts would have to form their own coast guards, which they could just spin off of their National Guard organizations.  They couldn't call it the National Guard anymore, but they could go back to calling them state militias like they used to.

Of course this is just wishful speculation on my part.  All things are possible, but not all things are bloody likely.  What will probably happen is they will eventually work out some kind of temporary compromise deal that nobody will be happy with.

As for that "fake news" about the Wall already being built as we speak, I don't think it's entirely fake.  I read on my news app a month or so ago that they have been replacing the existing border barriers for some time now with something called "bollards", which are prefabricated steel panels that look like jailhouse bars.  These things are supposed to be unclimbable, but I have seen  pictures of people climbing all over them like monkeys.  It said that the Border Patrol guys prefer the bollards to a concrete structure because they can see what's happening on the other side so they know where to direct the tear gas.

There was a political cartoon in our local paper yesterday where a bunch of Indians were watching the Mayflower approach their shore, and one of them said, "We should have built a wall."  Good point!  If the Indians had kept the Euro-trash out of their country, it might still be their country.  We should learn from their mistake.