. . . a desire for independence, and all other Scots, for that matter, would do well to read John Fund’s fascinating new article over on the homepage. He explains how a Yes vote on independence could help Scotland, Great Britain generally, and the British Tories specifically. I urge people to read the piece in its entirety, but as an American of Slovak ancestry I was especially delighted to read this part:

I was in the Slovak capital of Bratislava in early 1993 when Czechoslovakia peacefully broke up. The two halves of the country had struggled for three years after the fall of Communism to stay together, but the Slovaks thought the state was too centered on the Czech capital of Prague, and the Czechs resented subsidies and over-representation of Slovaks in key bodies. The same complaints are echoed in Britain . . .
There were strains and disputes in the Czech-Slovak divorce, especially over jointly owned gold reserves, but after a few years all was sorted out. Back then, Czechs viewed the Slovaks as more statist and slower to seize economic opportunities than they were. But today, both countries have shown remarkable improvement in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom; and last year, Slovakia’s economy grew by 2.1 percent — three and a half times faster than it’s grown in the Czech Republic.
“We are doing very well,” Miroslav Lajcak, Slovakia’s deputy prime minister, told the BBC last year. “The Czech republic is doing well, and our friendship is better than ever,” he said.
Slovakia’s population of 5.4 million is almost precisely that of Scotland, and its success shows how small countries can do well on their own.
There was also one other tangible benefit of separation to Slovakia, though it’s one many don’t want to discuss. “After we became independent, people couldn’t blame every problem on Prague anymore or look to it for subsidies,” a former top minister in Slovakia’s government told me. “We had to drop some outmoded socialist thinking and scapegoating and stand on our own two feet.”

That last part rings especially true: There’s nothing like responsibility to get people to start rethinking socialist nostrums, and being willing to try things — such as economic freedom – that might actually work in improving a country’s plight. American conservatives love the phrase “self-government,” because it captures this notion: When you can’t blame someone else for your problems, as Slovaks did with Prague and lefty Scots like Alex Salmond do with the U.K., you have a pretty big incentive to start getting serious about fixing the mess.

This story is getting a lot of attention this weekend, because of the first poll ever that has shown the “Yes” vote in the lead. Ironically, I think this story in itself makes it less likely that Scotland will vote “Yes” — because there’s a reason all of the earlier polls had “No” leading, usually by a large margin: Most Scots don’t want to rock the boat. The imminent prospect of a “Yes” victory will probably boost the “No” turnout, which in the absence of polling showing “Yes” with the lead might be much lower, as the result would appear to be a foregone conclusion. (Something similar to this happened in our own 1992 presidential election. Governor Clinton had a big lead, which shrank and shrank until, the weekend before the election, momentum suddenly reversed. My theory is that many voters who had seen Clinton’s lead and had doubts about him were forced, at the last minute, to focus on President George H. W. Bush again — because it looked like he could win. If they didn’t know that the polls were narrowing, they might have kept their focus on Clinton — and rejected him on Election Day.)

Still, it’s good that the Scots have an opportunity to refocus on this question for the next eleven days, because their decision is important and the outcome is in doubt. It’s their choice, as it should be.