Are States Too Small To Secede?

A recent post by John Payne from the "The American Conservative" explains why the objection to secession based on States being too small is completely erroneous. In his July 3rd post, entitled "Celebrate Secession", Payne provides four reasons why secession right now is a good idea. On the size of our States, he writes,

Many of our states are as large as most other countries. There are more people in California than Canada; more in New York than Taiwan, Australia, or North Korea; more in Florida than the Netherlands; almost as many in Missouri as Ireland; and more in Texas than Austria, Switzerland, and Isreal combined. Furthermore, our state economies are even larger than our populations relative to the rest of the world. Check out this map to see what country the GDP of each state matches up with; it’s pretty mind boggling. New Jersey is on par with Russia; Nebraska with the Czech Republic; North Carolina with that supposed paragon of social democracy Sweden. The most common objection I hear to secession is that the states are too small to survive on their own, but that position has no basis in reality.

The map is rather interesting. Virginia is on par in economic size relative to Sweden. No doubt with 1/3 of our incomes back, our economy would be much larger than the socialist Swedes.