Yesterday, a group submitted its proposal to California’s Secretary of State for a ballot proposal for California to secede from the United States and become its own independent nation. “Calexit,” they’re calling it. On the website for the proposed referendum, it states:

“In our view, the United States of America represents so many things that conflict with Californian values, and our continued statehood means California will continue subsidizing the other states to our own detriment, and to the detriment of our children.”

So it’s time to secede! Become their own nation! The time is right for the People’s Republic of California! They must follow in the footsteps of Eritrea, East Timor, and South Sudan and really show Trumpistan what’s what! Here’s a look at some of the arguments the proponents put forth in favor of California’s independence:

1. PEACE AND SECURITY

The U.S. Government spends more on its military than the next several countries combined. Not only is California forced to subsidize this massive military budget with our taxes, but Californians are sent off to fight in wars that often do more to perpetuate terrorism than to abate it. The only reason terrorists might want to attack us is because we are part of the United States and are guilty by association.

No, the decadent filth made in California has nothing to do with why terrorists hate America. They’ve got no problems with California’s lavish gay weddings at all. And none of that money spent on the military does anything for California’s economy, does it?

2. ELECTIONS AND GOVERNMENT

California’s electoral votes haven’t affected a presidential election since 1876.

Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama didn’t benefit from California’s electoral votes at all, did they?

3. TRADE AND REGULATION

The U.S. Government maintains a burdensome trade system that hurts California’s economy by making trade more difficult and more expensive for California’s businesses. As long as California remains within this burdensome trade system, we will never be able to capitalize on the trade and investment opportunities that would be available to us as an independent country. On top of that, the United States is dragging California into the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement which conflicts with our values.

Because having to negotiate all new trade deals from scratch with nearly 200 countries will be a breeze – especially since you seem very protectionist? And man, isn’t that President Trump a jerk for pushing that TPP agreement?

4. DEBT AND TAXES

Independence means that all of our taxes will be kept in California based on the priorities we set, and we will be able to do so while repaying our debts and phasing out the current state income tax.

These guys must have some awesome weed.

5. IMMIGRATION

Independence means California will be able to decide what immigration policies make sense for our diverse and unique population, culture, and economy, and that we’ll be able to build an immigration system that is consistent with our values.

Open the doors! Everybody in! Yeah, that’s sustainable.

6. NATURAL RESOURCES

Independence means we will gain control of the 46% of California that is currently owned by the U.S. Government and its agencies. We will therefore take control of our natural resources and be the sole beneficiary of royalties collected if and when they are extracted from our lands.

“If and when.” Yeah, this is pointless because…

7. THE ENVIRONMENT

California is a global leader on environmental issues. However, as long as the other states continue debating whether or not climate change is real, they will continue holding up real efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Translation: “Thank goodness California has nice weather because we’re making electricity illegal.”

8. HEALTH AND MEDICINE

Finally, California can join the rest of the industrialized world in guaranteeing health care as a universal right for all of our people.

Yeah, but you’re also guaranteeing health care as a universal right to all of Mexico’s people, too…

9. EDUCATION

Independence means we will be able to fully fund public education, rebuild and modernize public schools, and pay public school teachers the salaries they deserve.

A mid-range teacher salary averages $68,000 in California; the upper range is over $88,000. This is too low? Should they be making neurosurgeon wages for a job that only works nine months a year? Unfortunately, all this money they dream of will go to the same place – their pensions, which average 105% of their pre-retirement earnings. And we wonder why Jose can’t read?

So let’s say those one-in-three Californians who are in favor of independence gets their way, and the Golden State becomes the Golden Nation. What might realistically happen in the wake of California’s secession?

Hollywood Secedes

In the 1988 film Working Girl, the business deal at the core of the plot revolves around a negotiating a client’s acquisition of a domestic broadcast company in order to prevent its hostile takeover by a Japanese firm. Under the Communications Act of 1934, foreign entities are limited in their ability to own American broadcast media (though this was weakened under the Obama administration), and if the corporation in the film bought a television or radio network, the Japanese firm trying to take it over would be blocked by the new asset. In short, American radio and television networks cannot be headquartered in foreign countries. That’s why Japan-based Sony – which owns a film studio – doesn’t also have its own affiliated television networks like Disney, Warner Bros., Fox, etc., a fact that puts it at a great strategic disadvantage.

So if California becomes an independent nation, what would ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, FX, Lifetime, Showtime, OWN, Disney Channel, E!, Spike, Bravo, and many more still keep their workings in Los Angeles? Many (though not all) of them may list their headquarters as New York on paper, but the vast majority of them are entirely situated in what would be a foreign country if California secedes. Would the FCC be satisfied if ABC said, “Our headquarters are technically in New York, but all of our executives live and work in Paraguay, make our shows in Paraguay, pay their taxes in Paraguay, hold Paraguayan citizenship, and want the network’s programming to reflect Paraguayan national values,” I somehow doubt that would pass muster. So why should such a thing hold true for an independent California – especially after a rancorous secession when the former state just poked America in the eye? I doubt paper headquarters would cut it, so I would expect all the major entertainment companies to pull up stakes and hightail it to their largest market, the United States. Disney would almost certainly become a Florida-based company; AT&T could just take its Time Warner assets to its home in Texas and save a bundle. So much production has already fled pricey California that the headquarters really do not need to be in the state, anyway. At the end of the day, the Far Left Hollywood types who pushed for California to leave the United States may end up pushing themselves out of California.

Silicon Valley Secedes

Much of Silicon Valley would be fine and dandy in the new People’s Republic of California; they don’t actually make things, so the new crush of regulations and taxation can be easily dodged. Corporations like Alphabet and Facebook would probably hold out for a while to bask in the Do-Gooder “feels” and to benefit from the lax immigration laws that will allow them to exploit cheap labor from Asia to offset the increased tax burden. But any corporation that actually has to make something? They are gone. So long, Apple. Nice knowing you, Cisco Systems. We had some good times, Intel. Visa, SanDisk, Tesla Motors, Applied Materials, Oracle, Nvidia, Electronic Arts, Cisco Systems – where did the time go? But it seems that you don’t want to be stuck with tariffs importing into that big, lucrative American market, and with more and more taxes hitting the California population, they’re not going to have money to buy products, anyhow. Everything has to start from scratch, and you can’t take the uncertainty of being a corporation based in a foreign country with no trade deals. And America is offering lower corporate taxes and less regulation, while California is promising higher taxes and more regulation? It’s a no-brainer. Don’t forget: For all the tree-hugging, rainbow-tribe Progressive hope-and-change rhetoric, the Silicon Valley companies were notorious for taking up Ireland on its cash-saving advantages in the European Union.

All the Other Companies Secede

I have a friend who works at Chevron in San Ramon, and she says that it’s just a matter of time until that company – the last petroleum company left in California – pulls up stakes and leaves for Texas. In fact, she knows when: It will be when the current CEO, who has to retire at a certain contractually mandated age, leaves the job. After that, Chevron is off to Houston. After all, the company is building more and more office space in there; it’s pretty much a fait accompli.

California is unique in the nation in that hourly employees eligible for overtime must be paid by the eight-hour workday, not the forty-hour work week, i.e., if an hourly employee’s time goes over eight hours in one day, that employee begins to accrue overtime, even if he or she has not worked forty hours that week. California is, of course, pushing the higher minimum wage laws – spearheaded by government employee unions, who will reap a huge windfall courtesy of the taxpayers, even while more low-end service sector jobs go to automation. As lawsuits have forced companies to pay interns the increasingly high minimum wage, internships have gotten harder to find as well. So why would a company remain in newly independent, regulation-heavy California? Why would they choose to pay such high, onerous taxes and deal with international trade regulations to do business with a much larger market? Why would any of the following companies currently based in California not move to another state before California becomes independent?

24 Hour Fitness • AECOM • Avery Dennison • Beats Electronics • Charles Schwab Corporation • CKE Restaurants • The Clorox Company • Del Monte Foods • DirecTV • Dole Food Company • Farmers Insurance Group • Gap, Inc. • Guitar Center • Health Net • IHOP • Jack in the Box • Levi Strauss & Co. • Linksys • Mattel • The North Face • PacSun • Panda Express • Qualcomm • Quiksilver • Safeway, Inc. • Taco Bell • Wells Fargo • Western Digital • Williams-Sonoma

California has already lost so many other businesses, from finance (Bank of America) to hospitality (Hilton Worldwide) to automotive (Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A.). Southern California used to be the nation’s capital for the aerospace industry: Bendix, Douglas Aircraft, Ford Aerospace, Genisco, Hughes Aircraft, Hughes Helicopters, Lockheed, Marquardt, and North American Aviation have all been merged off and relocated long ago – if they didn’t just go bankrupt. The entertainment industry used to be a mere sideshow to the aerospace industry in L.A., but the terrible business climate means that the aerospace industry is just a shadow of its former self here now. If California becomes separates from America, the U.S. government will surely pull up its extensive military bases and Jet Propulsion Laboratory from Pasadena. What few high-paying aerospace jobs are left will almost certainly retreat to Texas, Virginia, and New York.

A great deal of money comes into the state via shipping; the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are America’s first- and second-busiest container ports, respectively. But secession would make these foreign ports; it would be much more desirable to send that cargo through America’s fourth busiest container port at Seattle/Tacoma. The widening of the Panama Canal has made Houston and Miami more viable options, too. So if California secedes, what industries will it have left?

The Water Secedes

The seven states in the Colorado River basin – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – hammered out and agreement known as the Colorado River Compact in 1922. The agreement allocated the water of the river and its tributaries among the seven states, requiring the states in the upper portion not to deplete the river’s waters for the ones in the lower basin. The lower basin waters are divided between Arizona, California, and Nevada, with California’s getting the largest share. Arizona especially has been unhappy with this, going so far as to take California to the Supreme Court to get the allocation adjusted. Nevada has seen significant growth since 1922, and its allocation is coming up short to its needs. So if California becomes a foreign nation, the other six states would almost certainly declare the compact null and void; California would have to renegotiate the pact on much tougher terms. The U.S. has a treaty obligation to provide a certain amount to Mexico at the border; aside from that, the six states largely have the whip hand. And seeing as California pushed for secession in order to advance its green, pro-environment agenda, the new nation would not really be in a position to demand more depletion of a natural resource, would it? Thirsty California would almost certainly get even thirstier.

The Energy Secedes

As mentioned earlier, Chevron will eventually move to Texas, secession or not. In part, this is because California has made it clear that they don’t want Chevron in their state. Unlike in states like Texas and Louisiana, where refineries are located relatively far from major cities, major urban areas have grown up around California’s refineries like ivy. Residents around the state’s few remaining oil refineries in cities such as Richmond, El Segundo, Torrance, Redondo Beach, and Wilmington (a neighborhood of Los Angeles) constantly battle with the refineries over smells and sounds. Given the expense of building refineries, the difficulty of the state’s regulatory climate, the hostility of Californians to any refineries, and the unavailability of land – especially on the coast or near rivers, a necessity for an oil refinery – building a new refinery is just too unprofitable. Meanwhile, the ones currently operating are in poor condition and subject to major accidents. Because of the state’s environmental laws, gasoline from other states’ refineries can’t be used, so when one refinery catches fire, the state’s already expensive gas prices rocket even higher. And this is what just one industry faces. Producing gasoline for California’s cars is a major ordeal, and it won’t be any easier in an independent nation of California.

The same goes for electricity. Lobbyists attack any sort of power plant, especially the cleanest kind, nuclear. Treehuggers went nuclear (pun intended) when a small leak was found at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station; the plant is now retired. Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant will be decommissioned in less than a decade. California will have no carbon-free power generation from then on. Wind turbines and solar panels are terribly inefficient and are not enough to replace the two nuclear plants, let alone the coal and gas power plants; besides, they do terrible damage to their local environment, such as chopping up eagles. Many locations such as Los Angeles get their power from Arizona – that would be a foreign country is California secedes. Californians want the freedom to make energy expensive and impossible to generate in their new independent utopia, and they will probably get exactly what they want.

The Money Secedes

If the Euro crisis taught nations anything, it was never be in a monetary union in a basketcase economy like Greece. With its upside-down pyramid of unfunded union liabilities, massive bureaucrat class, and hostility to business, California is America’s Greece. So there is no way the rest of the United States would want to remain in a monetary union with an independent California so the seceding state could drag the dollar down; California would have to make its own califa or eureka or whatever. And with as the corporations flee the state, and the people flee the state, the capital would soon… flee the state. The world has seen what happens: There are bank runs, then regulations to prevent bank runs. How much California could prevent its soon-to-be citizens from moving their cash to a bank in another state before secession is official would almost certainly be a question that comes up in negotiations. Wouldn’t everyone choose to keep the bulk of their money in same U.S. dollars instead of whatever new, unbacked California currency will be introduced? But before that happens, there will certainly be people rushing to get their hands on as many dollars as they can, especially in poor areas. This happened in the banking crises in Greece and Cyprus just in the last few years. Will California limit the amount of money people can take from ATM machines? Will it prevent people from taking cash from out of the state to stop the inevitable capital flight?

No matter what precautions California takes, the money will go. By the time independence rolls around, the new California grizzly or whatever it’s called would be virtually worthless due to a chronic lack of foreign currency. The state would almost certainly see an inflation crisis, and the U.S. dollar – brought in from across trips across the border, sent in as remittances from now-foreign friends and relatives, or exchanged by black market money changers – will become a de facto but not de jure currency as it is in countries like Zimbabwe and Ecuador.

The Safety Secedes

America is too mean, too nasty. California is about love. It’s about kindness and empathy. It’s not about death penalties or locking people in jail forever. The new nation of California believes in second chances. And third chances. And sixteenth chances. Criminal reform means lighter sentences, less jail time, reduced spending on correctional services, more “alternative” sentencing like talk therapy from car thieves and such. Because California cares. California understands that the criminals are the real victims of crime. Of course, that means California will become a much more murderous, rapey, assaulty sort of place: Every day will be like The Purge in independent California.

That spirit of love and kindness is also what will make California open its borders to anyone. Not many people will come over from the United States; no one seems to want to take up that offer. Initially there would be a big rush from Mexico, but that will quickly slow down, especially as much of its poverty flows into California, improving its economy. People will still come over, but… only a certain kind. Since California is not big on cops or jails or punishment, it will be a great place to be a drug dealer, a murderer, a pedophile, a pimp, or just anyone of unsavory character. And they won’t just come from Mexico, either. The Japanese yakuza, the Chinese triads, the Korean kkangpae, the Russian Bratva, the Armenian mafia – they will all find an easy entrance into the U.S. through lawless California. And since the California government is increasingly unable to pay its bills, institutional corruption is the only way most civil servants can make a living these days, so they are more than happy to look the other way from any unscrupulous goings-on.

These are just a few of the issues that would plague California were it to get its wish for secession. Like all Lefty-Liberal-Progressive utopian fantasies, Californian secession is built on a notion that all the good things California has going for it – namely, the large economy that it currently has as a component of the larger American economy – would not change, nor would large portions of the business base or population flee if secession were seriously to happen. If millions of people were to learn that they were about to lose their American citizenship, passports, and all the protections afforded by them, would they really want to stay in California just because they like knowing two dudes can get hitched here? Is it worth sacrificing the protection of the world’s strongest military to know one is doing one’s part to save an endangered bait fish near Sacramento? The whole premise of secession rests on “Everything will be great, and nothing will be bad.” But a quick reality check will show that… almost everything about secession would be bad, very bad for California. The only people who seem to benefit are the citizens of the other forty-nine states who no longer have that big Lefty thumb on the scale queering the nation’s politics for the worse.

So if I lived in Texas or Idaho or West Virginia or Indiana, I would be donating generously to the California secession movement. (I’m sure it would be popular; in 2014, a poll sponsored by Fox News found that, of Americans wanting to eject another state from the Union, fifty-three percent of respondents wanted to kick California out of the fifty states.) It’s the best way to ensure a brighter, better tomorrow – for America. Not so much for California…