First The UK, Then Scotland… Then Texas?
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
That didn't take long. Only hours after the final results came in for a British exit from the EU, political leaders in Scotland are talking about renewing their drive to secede from the United Kingdom.
Pointing to the fact that a large majority of Scots voted to remain in the EU, Scottish advocates for independence are now claiming (convincingly) that Scotland is leaving the EU against its will.
Many of us who advocated for Scottish secession in 2014 were, of course fine with Scottish secession at the time. And we're still fine with it now. Scotland should be free to say good bye and got its own way.
Some opponents of Scottish exit, however, have claimed that Scotland is too small “to go it alone.” Defenders of Scottish independence call this the “too wee, too poor, too stupid” argument.
Even the most rudimentary analysis, however, shows that size is not an issue for Scotland. With an official GDP of approximately 245 billion, Scotland is not too much different from Ireland, Finland, and Denmark. It's economy is much larger than that of Iceland (16.7 bln) and New Zealand (172 bln).
With a population of 5.3 million, this puts Scotland either similar to or larger than Denmark, Norway, Finland, New Zealand, and Ireland.
With a population this size, Scotland's GDP per capita comes out to around $45,000 which naturally is similar to the UK overall today, and also similar to Canada, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland, and a number of other European states, both large and small.
Some will argue that Scots cannot go it alone because they rely too much on English taxpayers for transfer payments such as pensions. This is no doubt partially true, although the UK government also extracts tax dollars from Scots, regulates Scottish trade with the EU and everyone else, and perhaps the Scottish simply want independence even if it means a temporary disruption in living standards.
Overall, though, there's no denying that Scotland even by itself is well within the realm of ordinary wealthy nation states, in terms of population, and the size of its economy. Scotland is in no way an outlier.
The claim that it is “too small” was repeated today, however, in this article by Roger Bootle at The Telegraph in which he writes:
Believe it or not, there is an extensive economic literature on the subject of the optimum size of a country, or more accurately, political association. From the economic point of view, as the size of political entities gets larger, there is scope for economies of scale in government and the provision of public goods such as defence. Equally, within a single political entity there are no restrictions on trade, such as tariffs or quotas so, other things being equal, the gains from trade are maximised as political entities grow larger.
Yet there are limits to the desirable size of political entities, such that, as things stand anyway, …read more
Source: First The UK, Then Scotland… Then Texas?
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