Scary stuff

In thinking about what would get our country into an actual Civil War II, I wondered what it would take to get states to actually secede. Found this...

How Is America Going To End?Who's most likely to secede?

By Josh Levin

In the American end times, our government will take one of two forms. One possibility is that federalism will give way to an all-powerful central government. (In yesterday's global-warming thought experiment, this was the climate strongman scenario.) The other option is decentralization—in the absence of a unifying national interest, the United States of America will fragment and be supplanted by regional governance.

America was designed to avoid these two extremes—to keep the states and the national government in balance. The United States will end when the equilibrium mandated by the Constitution no longer holds.

Peter Schiff is one of the recession's biggest winners. The Connecticut stockbroker, once a cable news piñata on account of his predictions of economic catastrophe, is now celebrated for his eerily accurate prophecies. Schiff, who has formed an exploratory committee in anticipation of a potential 2010 Senate run, believes America is going under thanks to a "phony economy" built on borrowed cash. The stimulus, he argues, will make things worse by temporarily taping over structural problems with unsustainable borrowing and spending. "After we do the wrong thing and destroy [the value of] our money, are we going to become a totalitarianist country?" Schiff asks. "Will there be a Soviet revolution or an American revolution?"