Dear Louisiana:
You cannot remove yourself from a union that pays to feed, educate, shelter, and clothe a large portion of your population, subsidizes the vast majority of your economy, provides border-free tourism to support your largest university’s athletics department and your largest cities, and routinely makes massive payments to protect, restore, and rebuild your shores.
You would have to create treaties and pay tariffs in order to import, refine, and then export for sale any oil pulled from offshore. You would have to pay a fine to continue using any interstate roads, pipelines, trains, etc. You would no longer benefit from the use of Border Patrol, ICE, The Navy, Air Force, Marines, NASA, Army, or the nationally funded National Guard. You would also need to create your own air space controller system, and have those people interact routinely with now international airspace controllers.
Speaking of, any use of aircraft near the border of your airspace is a threat, and outside of your airspace is an attack.
You are now not allowed to use nuclear power, losing Louisiana many thousands of jobs and requiring you to purchase all electricity from the USA. Sorry, but new countries with nuclear powers are a threat, remember?
Do you have family in the USA? You cannot visit without a visa, and any attempt to do so is illegal immigration. Your students are no longer accepted as licensed professionals outside of your borders without retaking any licensing exams and the federal money given to your schools is no longer, so the higher education program will collapse. Healthcare companies no longer have any bylaws or contracts, so health insurance effectively does not exist in this new country. There go the hospitals.
Your police force cannot cross the border, so anyone leaving your state after committing any crime is safe under amnesty laws, and you will have to pay a high price to extradite them- and put them in now unfunded prisons.
I could go on but surely you see the idiocy of this idea by now?
Thought so.
One last note: Your agriculture is now entirely unable to be sold anywhere but Louisiana due to import and quarantine laws- both animals and plants.
Leaving the union sounds great when you are cherry picking your issues, but in reality, the USA needs you infinitely less than you need it.
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Originally published: Nov 29, 2012