I stole the idea from Skald The Rhymer’s thread.
Basically the same idea, but the walls surround the states of the US.
Texas and Alaska have most of the oil, but do they have the agriculture? Which states supply the electricity?
Here in WI, we got plenty of food. I think we’d survive, but not have all the luxuries of modern technology.
Rhode Island would likely be screwed.
Which state (if any) could keep the same way of life they have now?
No state could maintain the way of life they maintain currently, but I’d bet that California could survive pretty handily. We have the agriculture, the trained people, the people trained in grunt-work, and access to oil and nuclear power. They only catch would be access to fresh water, which I assume wouldn’t be affected by the scenario posited. In fact, if we no longer had to worry about treaties with Mexico, we could take all the water we wanted from the lower Colorado River. We don’t have any iron or coal, and we lack heavy manufacturing, but we have plenty of sunlight and already lead the country in recycling what we do have. We’d get by.
I think Washington State would be OK. Plenty of lumber, fishing, farmland, fresh water and hydroelectricity. Oil and metals might be a problem, though.
I’m not sure we have most of the oil anymore, but we do have a bit of agriculture
Warning, .pdf
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Ag_Overview/AgOverview_TX.pdf
I’d think PA would do pretty well–strong agriculture, good water supplies, coal and steel industries that have only recently been reduced to almost zip (i.e., they could probably be cranked up again within a decade, I’d imagine). No significant oil any more; would have to use coal as a fuel to power just about everything.
Consider ignorance fought. I thought most of Texas was too dry to farm.
TN might be ok, we don’t have a hideously high population to support, we have some of the most fertile farmland in the south, reliable hydroelectric power, a decent heavy industry capability, and the most diverse mineral resources in the south (one of the most diverse in the country for that matter)… everything from oil (though, let’s be clear… not enough), coal, clays, iron, copper, manganese, phosphate, bauxite… just about everything you’d need for a basic industrial civilization. We also have plenty of water and timber if carefully managed… I could see a very rail centric society with a high speed line running east to west. Some tropical fruits and vegetables would be missed… no more cheap citrus (though we could grow some lemons, I know one guy who does), chemical production might be a bottleneck… I think it would suck hugely but we could make it.
We also have a good number of ocean shipping ports, so we can bring in whatever we don’t already have.
It’s the interior states that would be screwed.
Uh… doesn’t that kinda miss the point of “self sufficient”?
Only if it got to you.
Here in CT-
The rest of you would be beggin’ us for insurance. And rocks.
We got lots of rocks.
One of those insurance companies has a really BIG rock.
But only a low speed one running west to east. 
I have met too many people in TN.
Idaho doesn’t much in the way of industry, and a lot of that is too dependent on outside resources (come to think of it… see below). We do well in agriculture and lumber. Of course with the stuff currently in state I understand that we could be a major league player as a nuclear power, which seems to be the trendy method for upgrading one’s nation status.
[from above]
I’m hard pressed to think of much in the way in industry that doesn’t rely on imports (be it from China, India, Canada or whatever). I assume that if we had a mass secession from the US there would still be an awful lot of trade within the old union. Unless there is a mass breakdown in society there is no way to go back to pre-industrial revolution style isolationism.
Nunavut.
Is that some kind of threat, Mountain Boy? 
As long as the Green River still flows, we’ll have water. Utah can’t steal all of it, and Arizona doesn’t have the infrastructure to divert more than a fraction. Nevada will cease to exist within 3 weeks of the walls going up, so there is no problem there.
I think brewha had in mind a state (like California for example) being surrounded by an mysterious fog that nothing can cross 
.
Again, as I said in the other thread, none of the states could, by themselves, maintain a technological infrastructure. With NO trade outside the state, there is no way that a single state could build all the things needed to create all the machines needed.
If trade were cut off completely to any smallish country or state, it would simply begin to collapse. I don’t know exactly where the threshold of population/resource is to be totally self-sufficient with a high-tech economy, but it’s pretty high.
A good example would be Cuba. The cars it has are 1950’s cars, mostly. The only ‘auto industry’ is a huge network of scrapyards and small mechanics who earn their living cannibilizing the dead cars to keep the live ones running. That’s what would happen in other countries. Agriculture would continue on for a while, until things started breaking. autos, refrigerators, power plants, and other infrastructure would get progressively older and decrepit. Productivity would fall, and eventually more and more people would be forced into industries dedicated to propping up the increasingly rickety infrastructure and producing food.
In 1900, 50% of the people in America lived on farms. Today, it’s about 2%. Mechanized agriculture is responsible for that. Take it away, and there would be massive flight from the cities back into the fields to grow enough food to survive. That would leave even fewer people to maintain the infrastructure.
I don’t think there’s a single state that would be immune from a complete economic collapse. The U.S. as a whole might do okay, in the sense that it might remain a reasonably high-tech functioning country, albeit with a much reduced standard of living.
California. Yes, we’d have to start seriously conserving Oil, but CA has the tech to do that*. CA does generate a reasonable amount of oil, mind you, and plenty of food. Lots of sun, wind, hydro, tidal and Geothermal power if we had to.
*100MPG plug in hybrids *right NOW. * Plants could be buidling them in a few months.
Texas is a Maybe.
