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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31933 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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  1. As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.

The reasons for a "national divorce" aren't necessarily economic. Much more important are

  1. The ability to do smaller scale experiments in policy. We could see first hand what a Western country with low immigration looks like, or what the consequences of school choice writ large are.
  2. Having competition between states for highly productive people forces the states to treat them well. Right now the only real choice for many highly skilled people is to work under U.S. law and taxes.

Don't forget that the pain of a national divorce would absolutely not be evenly distributed. If you're a member of a population that's disadvantaged by the current arrangement and could do much better without it, supporting a national divorce is absolutely in your best interest even if it would be bad for the "economy" as a whole. This is one of the reasons that making sure your internal proletariat get a voice at the table and a share of the goodies is so important.

The problem is it’s a huge drag on economies of scale. A big reason tech is US is because it’s easy to scale domestically. And it even matters for a lot of manufacturers to have a certain market size to make buying a million dollar machine for a niche product.

I mean, you could have a new confederacy and a progressive paradise and they’d both be huge.

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