"We have electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, a culture of militarism and war," Williams said. "If you care about democracy and self-governance and any kind of representative system, the only constitutional way to preserve what's left of the Republic is to peaceably take apart the empire."

From here.

And let me say, I completely agree. I would love to see California secede. I realize that practically it is implausible, or at least a long way off, but I don't think it's a bad thing to start talking about. In a way I think this goes back to my previous post on a left/right libertarian coalition. If we can join forces we could do exciting things like reduce the size of the national guard, thus reducing the power of the feds to take it over and fight wars. In lieu of the national guard we could institute a large state-wide emergency response organization, based not on centralized command but on decentralized aid efforts.

One of the reasons that Katrina was such a disaster was because the feds refused to allow private citizens with boats and transport into the city to help rescue people. Throughout history the initial response to large scale disasters has always been by private citizens. Go read about the earthquake in '89, it was the people on the scene of the freeway collapses, regular commuters not emergency personnel that saved the most people. Where as during the aftermath of Katrina there were literally lines of people with boats trying to get into the city to rescue people, but alas centralized authority must be maintained.

In an interesting aside; in imperial China the emperor would have been dethroned if he had acted the way bush did. Natural disasters were seen as a sort of omen; and, if the imperial government did not successfully mitigate the disaster their mandate to rule was thought to be revoked. So emperors have fallen for mistakes lesser than our current presidents.

Back to the point: We need to encourage all of these secessionist movements, they may not succeed, but they might bring about less centralized government control.