Homage to Catalonia independence

Is there still hope for the Six Californias initiative of entrepreneur Tom Draper? This year it failed to get enough signatures to make it to the 2016 ballot. The next attempt would be 2018.

If so, hope comes from Catalonia, the region of Spain that just voted 80 percent for independence. Although it was only an “advisory” vote, the centralized autocracy in Madrid insists it never will give Catalonia its freedom.

Like Draper’s Silicon Valley, Catalonia is an economic powerhouse pulling the rest of its territory — Spain or California — behind it. It pays way more taxes than other regions that essentially parasite off it.

There are other similarities. Both California and Spain have a lot of Spanish speakers, a beautiful Mediterranean climate and creative people. For California, as well as for Spain, a centralized autocracy — the California state government in Sacramento or Spain’s in Madrid — sucks the life’s blood out of productive citizens.

California even wants to build a high-speed rail boondoggle like the one that already bankrupted Spain. Thomas Sowell wrote of it:

“Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can all live off somebody else. Spain’s high-speed rail system is not even covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty in the high-speed trains in Spain.

“That is what happens when you don’t have the population density required for passengers to cover the operating costs. You would need the hordes of Genghis Khan riding the high-speed rail system to cover the additional costs of the rails and the trains.

“An economics professor at the University of Barcelona says that Spain ‘has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment’.”

The Madrid bureaucrats aren’t easily going to give up their cash cow in Barcelona, just as California’s politicians won’t easily give up their cushy jobs and mammoth pensions paid for by the state’s wealthier regions.

But independence is in the air. Even the Scottish vote for independence, which got only 45 percent, shows that freedom from centralized bureaucratic monstrosities are gaining support.

As a famous document once began:

“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….”