A nation is a social construct that California could certainly fit into. Hell, Jerry Brown called it one. Examples of nations: Palestine, the Kurdish nation, Tibet.
The legal construct is called statehood. States can bind themselves into larger legal entities by giving up some of their own rights. Examples include: the US federal government, the European Union, and the United Kingdom.
I don't know anything about Jerry Brown but he doesn't sound very bright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation
I studied these topics at a university level. A nation is not a legal entity. Sovereignty is a legal property, and it can be applied to nations.
The stable community is the USA. We share highways, military resources, language, government, traditions, laws, etc. This is a ridiculous argument.
I highly disagree with this sentiment. Very few of the US institutions are well designed, and I suspect that there will be a decline of American hegemony worldwide.
Jerry Brown was Governor of California, for four terms, and not knowing who he is in this context seems rather ignorant.
"Nation" has become colloquially synonymous with "nation-state", which lead to your confusion. But the legal aspect is from the "state" part, not the "nation" part. There have been historical states (eg. the Holy Roman Empire, Hapsburg Austrian Empire, Ottoman empire) that were not nations, and there are present day nations (the grandparent mentioned some: Palestine, Kurdistan, Tibet, as well as Basques, Zulus, and others) that are not states. Some present day nation-states (eg. Germany & Italy) were nations since medieval times but did not achieve unified statehood until quite recently (1871). The U.S. started as a state (technically, 13 states and one federated government) but did not really become a nation until after the Civil War.
If you can convince other people to identify with you, you absolutely can found your own nation. It won't be a state, though, so while might have your own customs good luck on having your own laws.
PG&E is big, but it doesn't cover the entire state. For example, much of San Diego is served by SDG&E, much of LA is served by SoCal Edison, and several larger LA satellites like Riverside (~400k pop) have their own city-managed power utilities.
edit - I'm looking this up and having trouble finding evidence of this outside of AB 1980 (proposition to break the state-sanctioned monopoly and allow competition among energy suppliers), which was from 1996
This obviously doesn't pan out when you've got a monopoly or captive audience. Around me we have a choice of energy retailers, so we get to deal with the "efficiency" of several competing bureaucracies instead of the "bloated" government one.
Politicians love it because it abstracts them from any accountability to the people, even our left wing parties are pro-privatization these days.
A private company would eradicate it since its effecting the bottom line, but public companies may choose to ignore because the people stealing may be a voting bloc to curry favor.
It may not be the case in US, but you are trading one set of problems with another and that is the best case.
Say what? PG&E diverted money earmarked for safety to executive bonuses. Is that not graft?
I’d predict it also tied up the collective conscious on funding its own mundane internal issues
We tried nationalizing in Europe, within a capitalist framework: it just doesn't work. The TL;DR of 70 years of that experiment is that the State (gov and legis) is an extremely bad steward of any business endeavor; whereas lack of competition basically means no innovation and rent situations (it becomes sort of a tax in disguise to just hike prices or keep them stable when they should decrease).
Most unregulated big markets devolve into some kind of cartel after concentration, though, so that's yet another dead end after a 50-year cycle generally (telecom shows it well, TV as well, construction too).
What seems to work, for now, is a sort of regulated hybrid framework:
- networks and transport (of elec, data, whatever) is opened to a few companies, which can only sell access to said infrastructure to other actors, not market it to end clients.
- classic "operators" thus rent infrastructure capacity to these major actors and sell it to customers.
This allows very small actors to emerge (like "virtual" ISPs and telcos, we now have very small energy companies all over Europe). It's a recent development but these new startups provide great customer service and modern end/site equipment (easy to monitor, plug to some IS, etc).
The infrastructure caretaker status is typically "slightly public", with a non-profit mandate to maintain the infrastructure and develop it, using influx of for-profit investments by the operators, some citizen oversight, special status by law, etc. Basically, we try to make sure it costs as little as it should (it doesn't always work, rails are in a very bad situation for instance, and the caretaker is so deep in debt it's a failure, but the oversight of that dates to 100% public times with government-appointed CEOs).
TL;DR / conclusion: find the right medium between "private/unregulated" and "public/monopoly". Both are disastrous, but there are sweet spots in-between. Note that I have no idea how to pull off such change in the US, elec or telco markets are simply too entrenched / congress too corrupted it seems. We have that problem too but currently we're circumventing most democratic systems (whether citizen opinion or lawmakers corruption) by invoking the EU: “we must do it, no choice, it's EU law now”. That works most of the time and is the reason why the EU is so hated yet so quintessential. I'm not sure the Federal level would carry as much authoritarian weight in US States.
Well, even if the mission isn't too difficult, the prowess of being a great counterexample should be noted and praised.
Now if you guys could just write the book so we can export your ideas... ; )