West-Coastia [or whatever you want to call it: the consolidation of WA/OR/CA] can have the world's 4th-5th largest economy, with global dominance in technology, entertainment, agriculture [including wine], defense, and transportation: the ports of Seattle, Portland, SF/Oakland and Long Beach can control all incoming shipments from Asia and charge tariffs [choose your adjective: adequate, excessive, punitive, ???] for trans-shipment of all that stuff to buyers in the Fly-Over States ... We change the balance of payments from net-negative tax dollars incoming to all dollars incoming, and we're no longer subject to the rule of people from Whichever Dakota .... There are holes in this ...it might have to be a rule that you cannot be a government official if you ever served in the CA legislature ... but it's so much more palatable than what we have ...most of the other issues here are due to short-sightedness ... In the end we'd avoid the Startup Failure issue by having a globally dominant market share from Day One: too big to fail! Yes? Shal we?