R.K.: I agree.
K.S.: We gathered around some fifty of us trying to figure out what to do. What do serious responsible people do in the world? And we talked about politics, party politics, for awhile but we were just witness to how party politics works in this country and it's generally corrupt and always inefficient and always installs people that you don't want in office. And when they get into office, never do any of the valuable things that they ought to be doing.
So we gave up on big politics. Well, we thought about third party politics for awhile, but we looked at the history of that and that does not work either and it seems to just draw votes away from one bad guy to another bad guy who wins. Well, if you don't do party politics, what are your other choices? Well, you can try to reform the system. We talked about that for quite awhile and then we all talked about the kinds of reforms that we have variously tried to seek in our lives and work for that got absolutely nowhere.
And so we gave up on reform and then the next section was about revolution. Well, there were a number of people who were quite serious and saying let's do revolution. Instead, you know, we could join up with Quebec if we were in Vermont and we could get our armaments from Canada and we could fight. It was laughed down! Laughed down! Nobody wanted to go along with that because it just seemed so ridiculous. You can't militarily try against the world. So what is left? And then we came up with the idea of secession.
And we looked at the world around and we saw that the great part of the world had been formed by secession, or at least separatism, and that there were fifty four nations, I think it was, when the United Nations was formed and there's now something like two hundred and seven. That's been happening throughout the 20th century. That is the phenomenon of our time. So we said, okay, well, how would we go about that? Would we do it by trying to divide the United States up into, say, nine nations as one book had described it? Or twelve nations? And that was favored by many.
But I say it would be more realistic to work within the units we already have, the states that we already have, and not try to contrive whole new states and not try to contrive something by the way like socialism, or doing away with capitalism, or anything that radical. The idea was that the states could work through their existing organizations as they had done, after all, a hundred and fifty years ago.
And people would be familiar with the machinery around them. But once they got control of their states on a small scale then they might be able to establish the reforms, create true democracy, and have control over the decisions that are made in their lives which was, by the way, one of S.D.S.'s great slogans. And that seemed to generally hit a chord and we came up with a manifesto out of that meeting, a declaration. And we talked about this being the only peaceable way for responsible people to have some voice in what goes on in their land.
So I set up a Middlebury Institute devoted to this subject for the study of separatism, secession, and self determination and for ten years I have been pushing this idea. Not with a whole lot of success I have to say. There are secessional organizations in about twenty states, but they are of varying quality and none, of course, has achieved anything close to success yet. But that still remains a possibility it seems.
I mean, the idea of trying to change the government of the US itself seems to me preposterous.
But the idea of trying to have your own state government, have control over your own state government and that becomes a nation unto itself. That doesn't seem too preposterous to me and so that's what I wrote in this article I had done and I had previously examined the question of what size would be right for a nation, a small nation.
And I looked through the world and I found out what are the most successful nations financially. They're all small. All small and what are the most successful in human rights in democracies? They're small nations. And I came up with a feeling that it's somewhere between three and seven million people would be about right. You wouldn't want to get bigger than that...
R.K.: But, wait. Let me just ask you what makes it... when you say, a certain size of a nation is more likely to be successful, what are the criteria that you base success on?
K.S.: Well, you take a list of the countries of the world at random by GDP, or per capita, or the per capita wealth and you'll find, except for maybe the United States which will come in at ten, or twenty on these lists, that the nations are small nations. And then if you look at ranks of the most democratic countries, there are organizations that put out those figures. Freedom House puts out a Freedom List every year of the freest nations.
And overwhelmingly they turn out to be the small nations. And so you go to those and you average them up and you see what their size is and it comes between three and seven million almost unfailingly. And that's why I said that that was the size that people ought to try to get in their lives.
And it so happens that I am in South Carolina, which is a secession state of course from history, and it's about the right size. It's about a little under five million people and geographically the right size. So it could be a viable democratic state. Now there's no guarantee that once you secede that you will have all the good things that you hope to have. It might be that the people of your state will decide certain things that you didn't want them to decide.
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