1. According to the latest figures, for 2005, from the Tax Foundation
in Washington, more than half the states of the U.S. – 32 of 50 – get
more money from the federal government than they pay in. New Mexico
gets the most – $2.03 for every dollar it puts in – and New Jersey gets
the least – a meager 61 cents for every dollar.

Below is the chart with the news – dismal, in one sense, because it
makes the case for secession harder in those majority states that feed
high on the federal teat. (Although it must be noted that eight of the
states are in the South, where the case for secession is easier made
since there is an active secessionist movement there. But easier, by
the same token, for the states that would benefit financially if they
were independent, and as you can see they are the richer states to
begin with, hence with a greater chance at economic success.

A regional alliance of an independent New York-Jersey would have a
very strong reason for going it alone; throw in Connecticut, and you’d
have one of the strongest economies in the world, with an average
household income of $52,323 (using 2002-04 figures). That compares
nicely with $54,000 for Switzerland (and California!), the U.S. at
$46,000, Canada at $43,000, and the U.K. at $39,000. Talk about
economic viability.

A regional alliance of New England is also interesting in this regard,
since only Vermont and Maine get back more than they give in, and the
other states ought to be glad to have their independence. As an
independent nation New England would have a household income average of
$49,493 – not bad, and richer than the U.S. And you can see from the
chart it would be even richer if it wasn’t supporting the empire.

Vermont is an interesting case. It got 8 cents more back on the dollar
than it put in, and the citizens might not be so eager to give that
arrangement up. But looked at in a larger perspective, the state has
spent quite a bit of time paying out more than it got back. Indeed,
from 1985 to 1995 it was getting back only 88-94 cents for every dollar
sent to D.C. It’s been on the plus side since then, varying from 3-4
cents to 25-26 cents in the late 1990s, but just 8 cents in 2005 – with
the feds putting in $4.6 billion and taking back $4.1.

And that figure does not include the amount of money citizens and local
institutions have to spend in order to satisfy various federal laws and
regulations that in many cases impose real burdens. For example, the
federal No Child Left Behind Act places what the Heritage Foundation
calls “massive administrative and bureaucratic costs” on the states, as
on Connecticut which figures it spends $17 million a year to comply,
and Virginia which estimates $20 million. Using the same ratio, Vermont
would be spending around $3.4 million a year. And don’t forget
Vermont’s share of the federal cost of the program, set to be $24.4
billion next year.

Or take the example of U.S. Department of Agriculture rules on dairy
farming. Over the last 20 years or so the feds have insisted on
regulations that favored larger and larger farms and put a heavy
regulatory and compliance cost burden on smaller outfits. Federal
milk-price schemes have also worked to the advantage of larger farms,
mostly in California and the upper Midwest – one reason so many Vermont
family dairy farms have failed in recent years.

Right there should be enough incentive for secession.

2. The University of South Carolina put on a high-level academic
conference on secession in early December, free and open to the public.
Though it was odd, it didn’t really matter that the 30 professors
invited to give papers were people almost entirely unknown to secession
experts that have been involved in the recent secession movement –
Donald Livingston and Thomas Naylor, for example – or that not one of
them was connected to one of the 30 or so North American secessionist
organizations now operating. What was important was that the university
and its ARENA division (Association for Research on Ethnicity and
Nationalism in the Americas) saw fit to recognize secession as “an
international phenomenon” worthy of three days of discussion.

And that it was able to get grants for this from two of the
university’s prestigious institutes, its Office of Research and Health
Science, and its department of history, plus “major funding” from the
Watson Brown Foundation, a Georgia-based fund that supports
Southeastern colleges, and from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, which regularly funds museums, colleges, and cultural
centers, as well as Ken Burns’ Civil War series and the Library of
America. That would seem to give official blessing to the secessionist
cause, wouldn’t it?

Except that the conference really hadn’t anything to do with the
current secessionist cause, except the one in Taiwan and a handful in
Europe. It had papers on secession in Ireland, Africa, Chechnya,
Uruguay, Mexico, Iraq, but not a single one on secession in America –
except that one secession tried by the Confederacy 145 years ago, and
there were no fewer than 12 papers on that.

Some people – well, our own Thomas Naylor at least – worried that the
fact of the NEH’s endorsement meant that the administration (or the
ghost of Lynne Cheney, NEH head in 1986-1993) was attempting to take
over and neuter the movement. But the conference paid no attention
whatsoever to the movement, as far as we know, and I think it was more
likely a little academic exercise, people pushing their way up the
tenure ladder.

Still, it was good to have secession in the air.

Thomas Moore, who has coordinated the Southern National Congress’s
coordinating committee for the past several years and will lead it to
its first convention next December, has launched another organization,
the Southern Institute for Sustainable Living. You can get some idea of
its purpose and goals from the excerpt of the first part of its mission
statement, printed in the Middlebury Institute column in this issue.
And visit SISLINC.org for the full statement.