Ask HN: Would America be better off as 50 separate countries?

When California realised just how much they'd be spending on water if they had to pay a fair market price for it without the fed helping them out I'm sure they'd decide life is better as a state.

I don't think it would work well economically. It's a libertarian utopia, but unfortunately, the moment some of the 50 states decide to do stuff like taxing out of state purchases or something like that, it would become very annoying.

I currently live in Uruguay, which is a small country which should have been a part of either Argentina or Brazil if you consider things geographically. Political considerations and Britain's foreign policy turned us into an independent country instead.

Being a small country (we're what states like Montana or North Dakota would be as a country) has quite a lot of economic disadvantages - smaller internal market, lots of friction when buying and selling, some bureaucracy doesn't get economies of scale and becomes bloated.

It does have several advantages if you disagree with neighbouring countries' politics and policies though, which is why Britain voted for Brexit and what you're mentioning.

It might work well for some states and be horrible for others.

The Dakotas and Montana, for example, would probably be keen to have some sort of better access to shipping ports - as would somewhere like Kansas and Oklahoma. Some states just don't have much to offer themselves: Rhode Island, for example, is small, but they'd survive. Hawaii and alaska might not notice as much change, though their tax rates would probably go up. Both need to import a great deal of food, for example: Alaska has a vast area to cover with infrastructure. Out West there are water issues. And a lot can go wrong getting what the states need since there wouldn't be the federal government to smooth things over.

Not only that, but travel suddenly becomes an issue. Each state needs a passport and to secure borders or to have something akin to EU-style borders. Things that used to be shipped across the country now would be going international. Some businesses would have to reorganize and add some more layers just to deal with the added regulation differences.

States would have to petition other countries to recognize all the different countries.

And even more large would be trying to divide up the military into the different states. How do you decide who gets an aircraft carrier? Are small states just doomed to be weakish?

The closest I can work out to something resembling 'working' would be to divide into regions instead of states - at least it would solve some of the issues, anyway. The military issue really gets to be a pickle no matter how I look at it, though, and would probably be based more on where existing bases are.

Given the trend towards multinational unions, such as the European Union andvits Euro currency, I think "devolve" is the right description of this idea. I think this is a terrible idea. I believe we are moving gradually towards a world government via an emergence pathway.

Though I would not be at all surprised if current politics lead to an attempt to secede, as such talk has increased in recent months: http://fortune.com/2016/07/25/us-state-secession-brexit-elec...

Alaska seems the most likely candidate for a serious attempt and potentially viable position. Alaska is radically different from the rest of the US and my understanding is its oil is a big deal, financially speaking.

That sounds a lot like the US, before events like the Civil War, 16th Amendment, Great Depression, etc increased the size and scope of the federal government.

It's hard to predict with some being less viable alone than others. Over time some sort of reorganisation of states and state borders (perhaps involving war) would ensue.

Best case, you'd have something like the EU. Worst case, something more akin to medieval Europe.

That said I like that Trump having been elected President seems to have gotten people thinking about alternative ways of organising the world.

It seems like we've more or less been coasting along before because things were running kind of smoothly for us.