Three of the republican candidates for President, Bush, Christie and Kasich, boast that as governors they balanced the budgets of their states by cutting budgets and eliminating large numbers of government jobs without raising taxes. That is more or less what corporate raiders do when they take over a company. They cut expenses by firing large numbers of people to make larger profits and to sell the diminished corporation for more money than they paid. State raiders like Governor Snyder of Michigan cut expenses by fouling the water supply of the people of Flint. The water systems in many states are unhealthy and even deadly because of budget cuts by state raiders in the past. Americans need to live in a state that acts in the best interests of the majority of its citizens. But an American usually does not feel an identity with the state where he chooses to live that is as strong as the identity of a citizen of a national state. Our political leaders do not always feel a strong identity either which makes a state vulnerable. We can never be sure under our political system that a governor elected head of a state will act only in the interests of people residing in his state. People are coming in and out of our states all the time and sometimes governors are carpetbaggers who may not have any felt interest in a state where they were not born.
Somehow most of us believe we should not worry if we live in this or that state with this or that degree of protection against politicians with non-state interests because we have a federal government in Washington. But Washington can not and does not govern the whole of the United States as if it were one state and as though it was responsible for every political decision in it. It also has over the years done much to reduce the strong measure of sovereignty states had when they ratified the Constitution. It is a good thing that we are free to live and vote and have citizenship in any of our fifty states but it means we have often little or no authentic state identity. Our fifty states can never become well balanced politically unless other states in the world accept the same limited sovereign power of American states and join our union. In a united states of the world, the Washington government would no longer need to pretend it is the national government of a state and would become a de jure world government rather than just the de facto world government that it is now. All new states to our union would allow anyone from any state in the union to come to their state freely, to work and live and vote with full rights as citizens simply by taking up residence in a state of their choice. A governor could still be a carpetbagger and a state raider. But if less and less national states in the world gave their citizens an authentic identity using borders to keep foreign people out and lock their natives in, the lack of national authenticity in states in a worldwide union would be a price worth paying if millions of people worldwide became as free as we are in our free and open American states.
Daniel McNeill
Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at
Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.
Also available as a book for $5.99.
A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between
a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother
46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five
In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right
from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it
can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected
and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards
one liberating ending to all its beginnings.
Daniel McNeill
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