How to Be an Expat Without Leaving Home

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"If the majority of the people here had wanted to stop Wal-Mart, we couldn't under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution," Naylor notes. "But if we were an independent country we could.

"The benefits of independence," he adds, "are that we have more control of our destiny. We can stop sending our tax dollars to an empire that's corrupt. We can confront corporate America. We can be more honest and honorable."

That might sound attractive to many of us living through an American era characterized by corporate greed, military interventions, environmental destruction, and a president who took office despite getting a half-million fewer votes than his opponent. But isn't it impossible for Vermont to leave the union under the Constitution? Didn't we prove that in the Civil War?

Not at all, replies Naylor, who interestingly enough grew up Mississippi but harbors no love for the Confederacy. "I refused to stand up when the band played 'Dixie' at Ole Miss football games," he recalls.

While Abraham Lincoln asserted that the union must be preserved (contradicting views he expressed earlier as a congressman), there is plentiful historical evidence that it's perfectly constitutional for a state to go its own way. New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island explicitly claimed the right in state constitutions, Naylor notes. Indeed, even after the Civil War, six Southern states were forced to adopt state constitutions that forbid them to secede from the union again, according to Pepperdine University law professor H. Newcomb Morse. So if you live anywhere but South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, Florida, and Arkansas, it appears to be perfectly legal to launch your own independence movement.

Naylor has discovered more than 40 Web sites devoted to other independence movements across America. The Alaska Independence Party has more than 18,000 members, roughly 4 percent of all eligible voters, he notes, and various Indian tribes are claiming their lands as sovereign nations.

But even if a state seeking independence is constitutional, wouldn't it be a really stupid idea, economically, in this age of globalization? Hardly, replies Naylor, the emeritus economics professor who consulted for Fortune 500 companies and governments in more than 30 countries. He rattles off a list of the world's 10 richest countries in per capita income, five of which have less population than Vermont: Iceland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands. He finds further inspiration in other small, prosperous nations -- Denmark, Sweden, and especially Switzerland -- for economic, social, or environmental policies he proposes for an independent Vermont.

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