First the UK, then Scotland … then Texas?

That didn’t take long. Only hours after the final results came in for a British exit from the EU, political leaders in Scotland are talking about renewing their drive to secede from the United Kingdom.
Pointing to the fact that a large majority of Scots voted to remain in the EU, Scottish advocates for independence are now claiming (convincingly) that Scotland is leaving the EU against its will.
Many of us who advocated for Scottish secession in 2014 were, of course fine with Scottish secession at the time. And we’re still fine with it now. Scotland should be free to say good bye and got its own way.
Some opponents of Scottish exit, however, have claimed that Scotland is too small “to go it alone.” Defenders of Scottish independence call this the “too wee, too poor, too stupid” argument.
Even the most rudimentary analysis, however, shows that size is not an issue for Scotland. With an official GDP of approximately 245 billion, Scotland is not too much different from Ireland, Finland, and Denmark. It’s economy is much larger than that of Iceland (16.7 bln) and New Zealand (172 bln).
With a population of 5.3 million, this puts Scotland either similar to or larger than Denmark, Norway, Finland, New Zealand, and Ireland.

This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on 06/24/2016.