Sunday, 97% percent of voters in Puerto Rico voted in favor of joining the United States as the 51st state. The governor of Puerto Rico will now send two senators and five representatives to request statehood from Congress.
The Hill reports that the Puerto Rican efforts may not be successful as the voter turnout was only 23% and that low turnout was the main argument behind these efforts failing in 2012.
Should the island become the next state in the union, the US would be inheriting their $73 billion national debt. Puerto Rico has had a multitude of economic issues and declared bankruptcy in May.
Supporters of Puerto Rican statehood claim that the United States should allow them to become a state because of these abysmal conditions (of which is attributed to them being a territory of the US), while others claim that they should become their own independent nation in order to have the freedom to fix their own problems and that imposing statehood on a nation that may not want it would be extremely imperialistic.
Unfortunately, for Libertarians there’s no black and white answer to this situation. Imperialism is counter-intuitive to the ideology as it involves stripping natural and property rights from those conquered, but at the same time, adding more to the trillion dollar debt would be a bad idea.
It seems that both sides of the argument agree that this territorial, nearing colonial, agreement between the two countries should end in some fashion.
