Anyway, except this reasoning, I'm very keen on the idea of city states, I'd like to try something like that, the city I live in is most likely the first thing I try to identify with, and it is perhaps the authority that affects my life the most (and I even can't vote in the city where I live now…).
Bay Area as a City State
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Re: Bay Area as a City State
#12Re: Bay Area as a City State
#13Of course a bay area city state would vote to spend no money on the military industrial complex, and then an orange county city state would invade and conquer them.
Re: Bay Area as a City State
#14Of course a bay area city state would vote to spend no money on the military industrial complex, and then an orange county city state would invade and conquer them.
Re: Bay Area as a City State
#15Of course a bay area city state would vote to spend no money on the military industrial complex, and then an orange county city state would invade and conquer them.
We would shut off OC's GPS access and their fleet of armed SUVs would be useless - they'd never make it beyond LA
Re: Bay Area as a City State
#16"In an age when nations have become so large that their citizens no longer identify with distant governments..." What? it would seem like the complete opposite of this is true. I would say that nationalism and national identity, in the US and most other places in the world, is stronger now than it has been in the past 50 years.
Re: Bay Area as a City State
#17Google is incorporated in Delaware. Apple (through Braeburn Capital since the mid-2000s) manages most of its assets in Nevada. They're not paying state corporate income taxes to anyone, let alone California. Perhaps they're not using any of the services that California state taxes provide. But it's sort of a complicated argument. The state has a long history. Perhaps this article is a good way to break the deadlock.…
Also, often capitals are moved outside of major cities due to population and infrastructure, as sometimes larger cities can't sustain any more growth (which is what happened to Malaysia).
San Francisco has interestingly never been a contender for the capital, as before Sacramento it was Monterey (and Benicia and Vallejo but those were just stints). And if it were, the odds of the State focusing on the Bay Area before anywhere else could indeed become an issue.
Re: Bay Area as a City State
#18If I were in charge of California, an independent Bay Area would be paying through the nose for water.
Residential users use about 10% of the water, last time I looked. Larger users are alpha, hay, and rice. So if we ban growing rice in the desert, we will have plenty for the people. CA rice is probably for export, because it is the shor grain variety, not the long grain that most of us eat.
This is probably the one biggest reason why nation-states exist as they do today. The sum of the parts is less than the whole. This leads to some interesting ideas. What if societies go through downturns (and even collapse) because the central bureaucracy becomes a net negative instead of a net positive, as is happening in California today? But this digresses from the topic at hand.
Re: Bay Area as a City State
#19Residents pay taxes to the feds and the state, some of that money trickles back down to the state, and some of that money trickles back down to the city. Wake me up when we can pay taxes to our city-states, and some of that money trickles up to the state, and some of that money trickles up to the feds.
You would love CA then, where the state seizes local taxes to pay state bills and the republicans rant on about lowering taxes. The cities are feeling the pinch and have to cut local services.
I want trickle-up instead of trickle-down taxes, ie, the city controls the purse strings instead of the federal and state governments.
Re: Bay Area as a City State
#20Google is incorporated in Delaware. Apple (through Braeburn Capital since the mid-2000s) manages most of its assets in Nevada. They're not paying state corporate income taxes to anyone, let alone California. Perhaps they're not using any of the services that California state taxes provide. But it's sort of a complicated argument. The state has a long history. Perhaps this article is a good way to break the deadlock.…