Good riddance to Texas

Two hundred twenty-five years ago, America's Southern colonies had to be persuaded to enter the Union via a bizarre Faustian bargain: That their slaves be counted, for purposes of representation, as three-fifths of a human being apiece. This provision didn't mean that the slaves would be granted any civil (or for that matter human) status, but that their existence would redound to the demographic profit of their white masters, whose electoral votes would be enhanced by the presence of slaves who couldn't vote.

William Lloyd Garrison called this a compact forged in Hell, and he was right. Seventy years later, the Union was torn apart by the issue of slavery, at a cost of 700,000 white lives and hundreds of thousands of black ones.

Was the United States of America worth it? Abraham Lincoln thought so, and apparently Steven Spielberg does too.

Myself, I wonder.

Tragic legacy

Slavery didn't end with the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment. It morphed into Jim Crow, and in that form it poisoned every corner of the land.

Slavery would have ended in the South in any case by the end of the 19th Century, as it did everywhere else in the Americas, with perhaps less bitterness among its whites and less disillusionment for its blacks. Race relations would never have been a picnic, but they wouldn't have carried the tragic legacy of the War Between the States. The U.S. wouldn't have been a continental empire, and thus, perhaps, not tempted to become a world one.

To be sure, this is water under the bridge. But it's brought to mind not only by Spielberg's recent film, Lincoln, but also by the new secessionist petition organized by one Micah Hurd, an engineering student at the University of Texas at Arlington and a member of the Texas National Guard. Hurd thinks Texas should secede from the Union, and he has collected 125,000 signatures to support his idea.

Two problems

Hurd's reasoning is that Texas, like California, is on its own one of the world's larger economies, and that it would be far better off outside the Union. After all, Texas balances its state budget (as every state but Vermont is legally required to), and its Republican-leaning voters have no desire to indulge the federal government in its profligate accumulation of debt, or to bear the further burden of it.

There are two problems with this reasoning. The public debt of the United States doesn't belong to the government but to its citizens, including those of Texas. For Texas to walk out of the Union and repudiate its share of the debt would be to leave a proportionately greater share of it on everyone else. Deadbeats aren't generally appreciated, and the Texas National Guard had better be exceedingly well prepared if the rest of the nation decides to collect from the Lone Star Republic.

The second problem is that Texas receives annual funding from federal tax revenues, and it is typical of Southern states, which, with their higher rates of poverty, illiteracy and economic inequality, receive a higher proportion of those revenues than they pay in.

Financial wash

Washington also maintains Texas's long border with Mexico. Last year, it poured billions of dollars in emergency relief into Texas to help the state cope with its catastrophic drought, a problem that (with equally expensive hurricanes and tornadoes) is likely to recur. An independent Texas would be proud, free and considerably poorer.

For the rest of us, all this might be a financial wash. We would have to assume Texas's share of the national debt, but, since that debt is never paid off (at least, not since Andrew Jackson), we would only have to make up its part of the interest payment. On the other hand, we would save on the transfer payments and tax breaks that support the lifestyles of Texas oil billionaires.

Politically and culturally, we'd all be better off too. We would never again have a Texan president— a Lyndon Johnson to lead us into Vietnam or a George W. Bush into Afghanistan and Iraq. Talk about wasteful federal expenditures— those capers really broke the bank.

The national population of televangelists, creationists and other snake charmers would be cut in half. We'd never have to hear about Roger Clemens again. We'd lift both the national economy and the national IQ at a single stroke.

The White House replies

So, why does the Obama administration oppose an independent Texas? According to Jon Carson, the head of the White House Office of Public Engagement (now, there's one federal bureaucracy that's well hidden in the fine print), the U.S. is "a perpetual union," although one "that allows people of different beliefs to debate the issues."

In short, you can talk all you like about freeing yourself from the oppressive hand of the federal government; you just can't get out from under it.

What is Washington really afraid of? We won't even have to redesign the flag if Texas leaves the Union; we could simply advertise for a replacement state. Puerto Rico is all teed up. Cuba might like to formalize its ties to us once the Castros are gone.

But my own choice would be Ontario. It has a wonderful health care system we might care to investigate some day, and half of our Hollywood movies are made in Toronto already.

But who knows how many applicants we might get? Argentina, anybody?

We could, of course, get really lucky, and have the entire South decide to secede again. This time, if we're smart, we'll hold the door open wide. For the meantime, Texas would represent at least a beginning.♦


To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.