Source: EconLog
by Pierre Lemieux
“Welcome to a little thought experiment. Suppose that Mississippi became a sovereign country. ‘Sovereign’ means that the state apparatus can make any decision, even one that violates international law. The flip side of sovereignty is that the state can also impose its decision on the country’s residents or a portion of them, and that other states in the world have no recognized right to intervene against that imposition. States and their rulers were recognized as sovereign by the treaties of Westphalia in the mid-17th century. Mississippi would be a poor country relative to the United States. The average hourly wage in Mississippi is $23.91 …. For the whole (current) USA, the average wage is $32.66 …. Voices would be raised in the (remaining) United States to claim that American businesses cannot compete against their Mississippian counterparts given the latter’s ‘unfair’ wage advantage.” (05/27/25)
https://www.econlib.org/if-mississippi-became-a-sovereign-country/