Comment: Could one State alone manage to pull off secession now?

I would say it is not likely to be successful at this point in history. Even when 13 States joined back in 1861 they failed.

I do think that eventually the US will breakup into separate nations, but the public sentiment would not support such an event now. Even in the red vs. blue states there was significant division in the 2012 election within each state, and even if you took the red States, how many of the Republicans would find secession unacceptable?

Conditions must be much worse before enough people conclude that a centralized government for the entire nation is unworkable or unaffordable.

I recently listened to a talk by one of the researchers who deals with the cost curve for oil production. The curve indicates exponential growth which means as time passes, the amount of energy that is used up to acquire oil increases with compounding. The rate of growth in the cost has been in the neighborhood on 3% since 1930, but as the economy booms and then busts in recession, there are short term fluctuation in the actual return since boom times and related strong prices encourage oil men to go after more expensive to acquire oil, while during bad times, more of the cheaper oil coming from older wells is bought.

It should be obvious that as the amount of energy that is consumed in acquiring oil increases, there is less available to fuel the economy. In a society with a low availability of oil, simply less things are available, and that society must prioritize. Interestingly one researcher has taken the well known Maslow hierarchy of needs and correlated it to various levels of cost for acquiring oil.

Here is a summary of the correlation:

Cost -- What can be afforded
7.1% -- Arts and luxuries
8.3% -- Health care
11.1% -- Education
14.3% -- Housing, clothing
20.0% -- Food
33.3% -- Transporting oil

The higher the cost, the less that can be afforded, and humans give up things, according to Maslow in the order indicated. For example, if costs to acquire oil climb above 7.1% then things like the arts, vacations, etc. are the first to go; if costs to acquire oil exceeds 8.3% then people can't any longer afford health care. If costs exceed 33.3% then all the oil is used up before it can be used to fuel the production of anything, and we are back to the 17th century for all practical purposes.

So the question becomes one of where we are on the cost curve, and at what point will we exceed each of the benchmark points listed above. In 1999 we reached the 7.1% level, in 2005 we reached the 8.3% level, in 2012 we reached the 11.1% level, in 2024 we could reach the 14.3% level, in 2035 we could reach the 20% level, and in 2054 we could reach the 33.3% level. All this is because costs are growing at 3%. Of course we are inventive, and are managing our way through this downward spiral.

When you look at gasoline deliveries to retailers today in the US they are about 1/2 of what they were in the 2003-2004 time frame. This is in part from the economic contraction set off by the high prices of oil reached back in 2007-2008, and in part conservation (giving up luxuries). Fewer people are working, and people are spending less on the luxuries that cost below 7.1% would otherwise afford.

What are two of the major problem areas for affordability today? Health care and education. That is because we have reached the point where the cost to acquire oil does not leave us enough to fuel an economy that includes modern health care and education, and these are things we will give up before housing, clothing, and food. It will become increasingly impossible for us as a society to afford luxuries, health care and education and in spite of political efforts these sectors of the economy will contract. Any efforts to provide more of them will mean that housing, clothing, and food will become more scarce because we can't afford all of them and government interference will thwart the choices of people as to what to give up first.

It seems clear to me that we need to eliminate the burden of maintaining a spendthrift and complex federal government. And as the pressure to survive daily life increases, I think there will be a realization that the federal government must go, and at that point the secession of which you speak will be possible. Even state level governments will probably become unworkable, and we will devolve into very localized economies and governments.

The sad part is that the population levels that can be supported by reverting to 17th century farming practices are only 1/7th or less of today's levels.

Now I know everyone thinks technology will come to the rescue, but the evidence is that no know alternative energy except natural gas has a sufficiently low cost to substitute for oil, and that gas will quickly rise in cost and disappear in supply as we gobble it up as a transportation fuel in an effort to survive. Coal can be converted to a liquid fuel, at a huge cost, which hardly solves the problem, and where will the energy come from to create the infrastructure to implement that substitution.

Nobody knows for sure how it will unfold, and what I have presented is just taking the know cost curve and projecting it into the future, using the correlation between different cost levels and their effect on our standard of living to estimate when the things we need will no longer be affordable.

The end of the federal government is near, and it won't go because of the obvious tyranny of the politicians who rule us, or even the corrupt, unstable, unsustainable monetary system, but because of the end of the industrial age for want of adequate cheap energy to fuel it.