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Make Your Own Nation

Sick Of Our Federal Government? Think You Can Do Better?

By: BigGator5 (Diary)  |  February 24th, 2013 at 10:00 AM  | 

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I am so sick of our federal government, I began to think to myself: If I was given total control, how would I start a nation-state?

I have been thinking about this a lot actually. Then I begin to think to myself, what would other people think of doing? So, how would organized your nation-state?

To help jump-start you, I have for you a map and a scenario:

All of sudden, this island* appeared out of nowhere, just south of Florida. 400K Americans from all over the United States quickly moved in and declared they want nothing to do with the U.S. anymore. They also quickly divid the island into five territories. That is where the agreements end. In order to advoid a conflict, they have chosen YOU to make all their choices for them. Make for them any government you want and they’re in no matter what, the sky’s the limit. They have given you just three simple tasks:

1) Name the nation-state.

2) Name the five territories.

3) Write a constitution that governs the government, not the people.

That’s it. Remember, you can have any kind of government you want or you can create a new one. You can be as vauge as you want or very specific. It can be a “control everything” oligarchy or you can push the envolope of anarchy. Will it have a strong centeral government, or will federalism rule the day? A theistic or secular government? Constitutional Monarchy? Parliamentary Government? Separation Of Powers?

And above all, have fun. This is a thought experiment meant to see what would you do. This should not be personal or hurt anyone’s feelings. In one week’s time, I will post what I come up with as well.

You also don’t have to be a conservative to partake in this experiment. I would like to see what my liberal/progressive brothers and sisters have come up with as well. Please tweet me what you have and I will list all that I get here.

BigGator5.net
@BigGator5

*For anyone interested, this is a slightly alter political map of the island of Antigua. This has no baring on the thought experiment.

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COMMENTS

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  • ipolitics

    Simple: Start with the Constituition of the USA, and rip out the Commerce Clause. The Commerce clause has been responsible for more Federal government bloat in the last 200 plus years than anything else, I’d wager. Dump that, keep everything else and call it good. Adding a Constitutionally-guaranteed right to privacy might be a good idea also.

    • Viet71

      What sort of privacy guaranty do you envision? I ask because that’s an area where the Supreme Court has found substantial individual liberty.

    • http://twitter.com/biggator5 BigGator5

      Yeah, thanks for getting into the spirit of this thought experiment.
      *rolleyes*

  • Grant

    In an ideal system, the government would have no power to tax income.

  • theodysseus

    I’d take the US Constitution with the following changes::

    1)Provide a means to remove judges who disrespect/ignore/override/[insert term here] the original meaning of the Constitution.

    2)Require a 2/3rds vote in both chambers of the legislature to increase taxes, whether by closing loopholes and/or raising rates on old ones, or introducing new ones.

    3)Redefine the Necessary and Proper clause as only allowing legislation under the expressed powers already present and tighten the commerce clause to restriction of monopoly, and settling disputes between states.

    4)Require photo ID to vote in any election.

    5)Establish a test for clear stupidity and a poll tax as requirements for voting, to keep out the sheep and the poor, who, if given the chance will “vote themselves largess out of the public treasury” (Bastiat, The Law).

    6)Clarify the right to bear arms as an individual right by defining the militia as the entire citizenry who have reached age of majority.

    7)Enshrine the right to life as guaranteed from conception, except when the life of the mother is at risk.

    8)Define marriage as one man, one woman, for all purposes of federal benefits and recognition. If the individual provinces wish to allow civil unions, that’s their business, not mine.

    9)Mandate that every budget be balanced, with no accounting gimmicks (by subjecting the government to all financial regulations on the private sector), except in time of declared war.

  • fromthesidelines

    Awesome question. I hope you don’t mind if I take your challenge at exactly face-value. I am especially grateful for the openness of your invitation. I consider myself a guest, and that its my job to be respectful while here. I realize my answer might not be exactly what others would hope to hear, but I don’t mean it in a way to kick-up dust storms. Just responding to the invitation..

    In any case, I think your question very neatly highlights some of the practical challenges a nation, especially a new nation of this sort, would face.. without further ado..

    The first thing I might consider is that a small country described in the manner you have described will have an extremely difficult time competing in the global economy based on its internal talent and resources. In order to achieve even a remote semblance of our standard of living, the first order of business would be to attract massive amounts of foreign investment from the US and other first world economies.

    In order to do this, foreign investors would have to have immense assurances that the value of their investments would not face hyper-inflationary pressures. In order to provide this assurance, a strong central authority would be required with regards to national fiscal policy. Absent this strong central authority over fiscal policy, foreign investment will not materialize, and the citizens of this new nation will suffer mightily with a standard of living that few people in the US would find tolerable.

    Thus, inherently, a distributed, non-centralized approach with regards to taxation, spending and commerce would be unworkable. Individual provinces could, I think, be given some latitude to experiment with different laws as it pertains to the types of social behaviors the local community was willing to tolerate; however, as it comes to fiscal matters, these individual provinces would have little, if any, say. Matters of taxation, commerce, and so on, would be governed exclusively at the federal level. Correspondingly, there would also need to be ironclad rules, with strong penalties with regards contract law, also enforced at the federal level.

    This new nation will need to borrow tremendous sums to build the infrastructure necessary to allow for private investment to realize a return. Airports, roads, hospitals, etc, will need to be built, not only requiring foreign capital, but also foreign equipment, personnel and expertise. The start-up costs would be astronomical, even under the best of circumstances. Individual provinces can certainly sell their own bonds but, again, I think their ability to compete will be hampered by their limited scale. Worse still, the little country will pay incredibly high prices on the global market for debt; ie, interest rates would be extraordinarily high, relative to those of their closest competitors. In order to reduce those costs to their bare minimum, the most cost-effective solution would be for the federal government to take on most of this burden, to borrow and spend to build the infrastructure necessary, at the lowest costs possible, from a borrowing standpoint. It will still be expensive, but less expensive than having redundant and smaller scale provincial governments competing against each other for scarce resources and capital. As a result, the federal government would likewise require virtually unchecked authority over local governments to claim land as needed, to expedite road-building as needed…

    I could go on, but I suspect that the answer is — your new nation might produce a Constitution not terribly dissimilar from our own, with a federal government that has near absolute primacy over local governments as it pertains to commerce, taxation and infrastructure, as that would be its best, and probably only, chance to survive in a global economy. That said, it may yet allow for individual communities to experiment, perhaps quite broadly, with regards to social policy.This last point, with regards to social policy, could be an interesting point of distinction relative to our Constitution.