So Texas has officially put secession on the table.
Now the Republican leader of Texas joins the Republican leader of Alaska and a host of other conservative (Republican) leaders who support what the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, said was illegal. What should we make of all this? What should we do about Texas?
Well, let me give you a hint:
"This is John Galt speaking."
More on the flip
John Galt, of course, is the hero of every living Republican. He is the man who, in Atlas Shrugged, realizes there are two classes in America: the rich and those who live parasitically off the rich. These "looters" take what the steely-eyed individualists produce and mock them in the process. Galt realizes that Capitalism, which follows the law of supply and demand, can never fulfill its true destiny so long as there are those who demand what others supply. So he and his Aryan friends quietly withdraw from the world to a paradise where the producers only produce, don't use, and leave the looters to realize, too late, how much they need the mastery of the elite.
So if the Republicans of Texas and elsewhere are so disaffected that they wish to secede, why wait? There is no need for the Texas Legislature to pass a secession ordinance. There is no need for Texas to do anything at all. The United States government itself can simply stop, today - this minute - providing its unwanted federal presence to Texas. If Texas thinks the federal government is too big, too burdensome, too oppressive - why we can just leave the state.
In the dead of night, the federal government pulls up its stakes and slinks away in defeat.
Imagine it Texas: You can wake up tomorrow and find not a trace of the federal government in your lives. U.S. courthouses will be closed; military bases shuttered; all federal offices closed. What a time for celebration: Republicans, Libertarians and Conservatives alike will dance in front of the Alamo and wave the Texas flag of independence.
But what happens when the motor stops spinning? In the new, independent Texas, citizens will soon start getting medical bills for aging parents - and there will be no medicare money to pay them. There will be no Social Security to pad out meager fixed incomes. Tornados and wildfires may destroy property, but there will be no federal loan programs to help Texans start anew. Texans who hate federal taxes will discover that absence of federal government doesn't mean the end to taxes. Instead they will find taxes are much higher since state revenues are no longer subsidized by the 49 states of the United States.
Then will come the terrorists and thugs of all types pouring across the border, with only the Texas Rangers and Sheriff Billy Jack to stop them - until, of course, they reach the borders of Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas and Louisiana, states that will have the protection Texans found oppressive and all the benefits of the Union Texas opted out of.
Texas, don't mess with U.S. This is John Galt speaking.