South Calif. Shouts for Independence

John Seiler:

Riverside County Supervisors Jeff Stone just gave up — at least for now — on his call for the secession of the new state of Southern California. Reported the Orange County Register, Stone “had proposed that 13 counties — 12 of them Republican — break away and become the 51st state of South California.”

It’s still a great idea. But instead of “secession,” which has bad connotations of the Civil War, advocates should talk of independence — as in the independence of the United States in 1776.

California’s population of 37 million is 12 times as big as the whole USA back in 1776. It’s even larger than the 30 million of the Civil War, 1861-65, when the whole country split apart.

There are obvious differences between the two separate states, North California and South California. South California is Texas with great weather: pro-business, anti-tax. An independent South California would, like Texas, have no income tax. It would be attracting businesses instead of repelling them.

North California is North Korea with great weather. It’s socialist and severely anti-business and high tax.

The archetype of a South Californian is John Wayne, who lived in Newport Beach and epitomized American independence and toughness, of straight talk and no nonsense.

The archetype of a North Californian is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who as governor imposed record high taxes and the jobs-killing AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 — while himself driving gas-guzzling Bentleys and Mercedes, and living in a massive, high-carbon-footprint compound in Brentwood. He’s a California Kim Jong Il.

Even current Gov. Jerry Brown’s father, Pat Brown, backed dividing the state in two in his 1970 book, “Reagan and Reality: The Two Californias.” He favored putting Los Angeles in South California, whereas Stone would put L.A. in North California. A lot has changed politically since 1970. L.A. once was much as Orange County is today. But politically, L.A. now has become another San Francisco.

South California has become a large Republican area routinely abused by the larger, Democratic North California. Money is stolen from the South and wasted in the North. It’s taxation without representation every bit as egregious as that imposed by the tyrant, King George III, in the 1770s, which led to the American Revolution.

The reason this idea keeps coming back is because it’s inevitable, like the independence of the United States. Check out these words from the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

Notice the words, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

That perfectly describes the repression of Southern California, which is yearning to breathe free of Northern California.