Many states have groups that want their state to be divided into two or more states; you just hear about California more in the news because they're bigger. One less prominent example is eastern vs. western Washington, where the farmers in the east feel dominated by the liberals in Seattle; I believe they even voted on it in the past. If we divide up states into homogeneous sections, pretty soon every neighborhood will be its own state.
"If we divide up states into homogeneous sections, pretty soon every neighborhood will be its own state."
Some science fiction writers have hypothesized about this for a while. Technology is trending towards empowering ever smaller groups to manage their affairs quite effectively, and enabling those groups to rapidly snap together with other groups on an as-needed basis. It isn't that hard to look out 50-100 years hence and ask what all these massive centralized governments are really doing for us that couldn't be done by much finer-grained bands of smaller ones. (Don't think something like every county fully a nation in the modern sense, think something more like the relation of states to the federal government, and counties doing things like perhaps buying into pre-existing health care plans or something, across a wide array of such issues.) There are days when the US government's current trend toward centralization seems downright anachronistic to me.
I recall one science fiction story in Analog where after significant advances in nanotechnology, the minimum self-sustaining unit of civilization became a single house. It was literally possible to seal off a suburban house plot and it could survive solely on the incoming solar energy and the technologies it had. After the homeowner got in some trouble with the local law enforcement, he has the bright idea of simply seceding from the nation, though various legal handwavery and appeals to the ancient question of the social contract. It was one of those interesting, thought-provoking stories that at least made me think. Yes, I am well aware of the other tradeoffs involved and how important defense and preventing the tragedy of the commons is, the point is not that this is obviously a good idea, the point is that it is not unthinkable that we may indeed be trending towards smaller polities in the future. The outcome of the battle between centralization and decentralization haven't been written yet.
One of the core ideas of Mao in the mid-20th century was to divide China into completely self-sufficient entities of about 3 mln. people, who should produce EVERYTHING without any trade whatsoever - because trade breeds wealth, which breeds inequality. They were supposed to mine their own iron and smelt their own steel from their own territory, for example.
I find I cannot pidginhole this statement in an easy anti-communism idiom. While it may be addressing the failures of communism (read centralized planning), it actually holds rather well on a long view historical suggestion. Mao was talking about peasant-farmer communities, and ones of around three million people, with strategically divided borders, could easily continue their existence at a turn of the century (for North America) standard of living.
Just saying, there's nothing structurally wrong with the idea.
Back in the heady days of secession, the mayor of New York suggested that it could become an independent state, along the lines of the old Hanseatic cities. That didn't work out, and eventually he decided he was a uniter, not a divider, and helped created the 5-borough city of today.
I've lived in Washington for about eight years, now, and I'm tired of people east of the Cascades bleating about how Western Washingtonians have the East under our thumb.
The tl; dr version is that King county taxpayers (which includes Seattle) receive $0.62 back in benefits for every dollar they pay to the state, whereas people in Republican-leaning counties (i.e the eastern part of the state) get back an average of $1.40 for every buck they kick into state coffers.
A good bit of that extra money Eastern Washington gets back goes towards things like maintaining irrigation canals that make it possible for farmers to grow food for the rest of the state. Some of it goes towards maintaining the dams that provide a lot of power to the state. And some of it goes towards cleaning up Hanford - the federal government hasn't picked up the entire tab for that, even though it should. Some of it goes towards education, of course. --Let's be honest, agriculture has brought a lot of immigrants to that side of the State, and the Pasco School District, for example, has the highest percentage of ESL students than any other school district in the state.
Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with the political leanings of much of Eastern Washington, and even now I have no desire to ever move back there, but having grown up there, I can certainly attest to the fact that things are much more complex than you seem to believe.
Could you explain to someone completely unfamilliar with the internal economies of Washington state why the western portion of the state is forced to buy food from the western portion, or why it couldn't buy the electricity from a separate state of Eastern Washinton?
The regional issues such as education and the Hanford site...are regional issues, if I'm not putting too sharp a realpolitc edge on my examination.
New York, too, has a divide between the Southern ("downstate") area of the state (New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area) and the Northern ("upstate," though this is sometimes used as a casual description of any place north of where one is). The two have different priorities for funding (the south needs transit subsidies, the north agricultural ones) and very little compromise (nor between parties). There are many parts of upstate New York that are closer to Boston than The City and root for the Red Socks.
I've seen a proposal to throw out all the existing states, and partition the US into several regions, where if two areas were adjacent and were similar geographically, agriculturally, and economically, they would be in the same region. Boundaries would thus tend to be along things like mountain ranges, major bodies of water, and the like.
I have been unable to find this proposal via Google. I seem to recall it had around a dozen regions, or maybe twice that.
>Many states have groups that want their state to be divided into two or more states; you just hear about California more in the news because they're bigger.
Perhaps we should split the cries for California to be separated into two groups - arguments for it from northern Californians and arguments for it from Southern Californians.
I'm kidding, of course, but I think that what you say vaguely supports shawnee_'s point.
(Edit: Apparently it's so common there's a Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_partition_pr...)