A year-and-a-half after wildfires destroyed more than 2,000 homes on the Hawaiian island of Maui, just six have been rebuilt. In City Journal, Alex Hu explains how local elected officials determined to close Hawaii off from the rest of the world have brought restoration to a standstill. “Radical councilmembers have called their pro-building colleagues names like ‘colonizer’…and advocated for secession from the United States,” he writes of the deadlock.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
