Is Scotland Big Enough To Go it Alone?

In a curious coincidence, 2014 Scotland and 1994 Quebec have nearly the same population: about 5–6 million. About the same as Denmark or Norway, and half-a-million more than Ireland. Even on physical area Scotland’s no slouch: about the size of Holland or Ireland, and three times the size of Jamaica. The fact that Ireland, Norway, and Jamaica are all considered sustainably-sized countries argues for the separatists here.

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is resoundingly “Yes!” Statistically speaking, at least. Why? Because according to numbers from the World Bank Development Indicators, among the 45 sovereign countries in Europe, small countries are nearly twice as wealthy as large countries. The gap between biggest-10 and smallest-10 ranges between 84 percent (for all of Europe) to 79 percent (for only Western Europe).

This is a huge difference: To put it in perspective, even a 79 percent change in wealth is about the gap between Russia and Denmark. That’s massive considering the historical and cultural similarities especially within Western Europe.

Even among linguistic siblings the differences are stark: Germany is poorer than the small German-speaking states (Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein), France is poorer than the small French-speaking states (Belgium, Andorra, Luxembourg, and Switzerland again and, of course, Monaco). Even Ireland, for centuries ravaged by the warmongering English, is today richer than their former masters in the United Kingdom, a country 15 times larger.

Why would this be? There are two reasons. First, smaller countries are often more responsive to their people. The smaller the country the stronger the policy feedback loop. Meaning truly awful ideas tend to get corrected earlier. Had Mao Tse Tung been working with an apartment complex instead of a country of nearly a billion-people, his wacky ideas wouldn’t have killed millions.

eg, let walk thru the steps of setting up an income tax:
-need a list of all taxpayers with their names, addresses and employers names and addresses: HM Revenue has that, supposed they are hard asses and won’t give it (now what, do you start going thru the phone book? voters list?)
-need a unique identifier for both taxpayers and businesses: HM Revenue has a taxpayer identifier, suppose they won’t share that database (now you need to set up a Social Security number registry)

For a programmer it looks very simple because all these steps are interlocked. For example:

A company must be registered, or else it may not buy and sell - not within the country, and certainly not across the border. To accomplish that, each company registers itself with the government via a Web form, and attaches scanned documents (incorporation papers, etc.) to the record. All done by computers. Only the cases of fraud are investigated by humans.

A company may employ only workers with Tax IDs. A Tax ID (or SSN) can be issued to a person only upon providing the name and the address. Each employee has to go to a Web site and register. A scanned birth certificate is needed only if there is no other proof of citizenship. All done by computers. Only the cases of fraud are investigated by humans.

The system works the same in the USA. There are no tax men who knock on the doors of every little business and go through the records. There are no INS (DHS) agents who routinely visit every house and ask for papers. The system is structured such that every participant in the economy is motivated to register himself, and these records are linked. A US citizen doesn't have to have an SSN; but then he will be cut off from the economy, as he cannot get a job, and cannot have a bank account, and cannot rent an apartment...

In practical terms, let's say that online papers are no good, and each citizen has to go to an office and spend 15 minutes there. How many offices one needs if the grace period is 1 year? 5 million / 260 days = 19,230 daily visits. If each office works 12 hours per day (which is easy to set up,) each employee handles 12 / 0.25 = 48 visitors per day. Let's say each office has four windows and four employees. Therefore you need 19,230 / 48 / 4 = 100 offices. This is a very small number; it's 2 offices per city, on average. Also consider that not every citizen needs the tax ID right away - children, for example.

This calculation shows that the real difficulties are not as high as one would intuitively perceive them.

a recipe for massive social benefits fraud, and massive employer tax credit fraud.

if you are accepting scanned documents off the internet, for individuals, how do you know that the proof of identity sent: is resident in scotland, belongs to the person who sent it, or even exists?

remember, any legal resident of the EEA can live and work in Scotland, that’s over 30 countries with over 500 mil people.

similarly for businesses, there would be approx 100-200k small businesses, many of which will not be incorporated. how do you validate that the business is owned by the person who sent the scan, operates in scotland, or even exists?

every social benefits fraudster and tax credit scammer in the world will be after scotland with this approach.

but, you know what, this is theory. i am pretty sure that scotland is going to vote yes, and we are going to have a live test that what you say can actually be done !

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.