Don’t Listen to the Scaremongers Political elites around the world are scared of independence movements. Whether it is the allegedly sacrosanct territorial integrity of Ukraine or Iraq, the possible secession of Catalonia from Spain, of Sardinia from Italy, or the vote on Scottish independence: in all cases, visions of calamity are painted in vivid colors if the overarching nation states were to split into two or more parts.
These fears are understandable from the point of view of the ruling elites: the agents representing the force monopolist State always want to have as big a territory under their control as possible. It means more power for them and a larger tax base to exploit. However, the bigger the territory under the control of a single force monopolist, the less the individual counts, the more the State’s policies will tend toward a mixture of warfare and welfare, both of which as a rule prove disastrous for the average citizen.
Ask yourself why the most prosperous places on earth are all tiny political entities. There is a reason for that. No-one expects Liechtenstein to bomb ISIS in Iraq, or whoever the US enemy du jour is. Liechtenstein doesn’t even have a military. It doesn’t need one, because it is not busy making enemies left and right. Contrary to the larger European nations, it is also not up to its proverbial eyebrows in red tape and taxes. Incidentally, no Islamist extremists have yet thought of attacking Liechtenstein; most probably they don’t even know where it is, and if they did, they wouldn’t regard it as attack-worthy. After all, it has never meddled in the affairs of their homelands.
The UK on the other hand can be expected to waste both blood and treasure on every single war cooked up in Washington, no matter how cockamamie a scheme it is. Just remember the effort to free Iraq of Saddam’s mythical ‘WMD’ and the associated fairy tale chemical rockets, which Mr. Blair asserted ‘could reach London in 45 minutes’. As long as Scotland is part of the UK, everyone in Scotland is involved in these schemes as well (at a minimum as a payer), whether they want to or not.
What about the alleged inability of Scotland to go it alone on economic grounds, or on grounds of being ‘too small’, or any of the other reasons that have been dragged up in recent weeks?
This post was published at Acting-Man on September 16, 2014.
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