JERUSALEM (MarketWatch) — Having toured what then was a desolate frontier, Samuel Johnson emerged with the bestselling travelogue “A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland,” in which he reported that “a man of the Hebrides, as soon as he appears in the morning, swallows a glass of whiskey.”

Despite this habit, he quickly added, the Scots seldom got drunk. But that was in 1773. Now, judging by polls ahead of next week’s referendum over Scottish independence, a critical mass of Scots seem politically drunk, and ready to deal Scotland, England, and Europe a blow we might all live to regret.

Scotland is a great country. Its landscapes are pristine, its people are peaceful, and Scots like philosopher David Hume, economist Adam Smith, and inventor James Watt helped inspire the enlightenment, the age of capitalism, and the industrial revolution. Still, this is no reason to bid England farewell, especially recalling that Scotland’s intellectual fertility followed rather than preceded the two’s union in 1707.

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The secessionists say Scotland is economically viable. They are right. With a population the size of Colorado’s sitting in a land the size of Hungary atop Europe’s largest oil well — an independent Scotland can prosper much like Norway, Qatar, and Kuwait. Even so, secession would be economically ruinous, socially immoral, and politically disastrous.

Forget currency union

Economically, the secessionists conveniently ignore the fact that Scotland’s estimated gross domestic product of $250 billion will be immediately overburdened by the business of nation building.

Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond’s brave assumption, that he will bid England farewell and at the same time use its currency — this week proved as frivolous as his entire cause. Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney’s statement Tuesday that a currency union would be “incompatible with sovereignty,” a stance backed by Prime Minister Dave Cameron and Opposition Leader Ed Miliband, means Salmond’s unilateral plan, to continue sharing a bank account with the spouse he plans to divorce — will not materialize.

Carney’s statement explains the pound’s stabilization Tuesday GBPUSD, +0.22% just above the psychological barrier of $1.60, after having steadily slid 6% since July’s $1.715 rate. Evidently, the markets think that a pound shared by an estranged Scotland and England would be a painful divorce’s abused child.

Now, with his monetary formula buried, Salmond will have to issue a new currency while building from scratch entire agencies — from a secret service, a foreign service, and an immigration police to a coast guard that will patrol a 7,300-mile shoreline and 790 islands.

A Scottish currency will struggle in financial markets because it will be under constant pressure to expand spending, a temptation that easy petrodollars will make difficult to resist, while fiscal generosity will make labor costs rise and national debt swell, and all this because of 5 million people’s quest to do alone what they until now were doing well as part of 65 million people.

The British government’s assessment that secession would cost every Scottish citizen an annual £1,400 ($2,254) may be partial, but it is still convincing.

Secession, in short, is fraught with economic risks that national romanticism can hardly excuse.

Yes, Britain’s dissolution would be nothing like Yugoslavia’s bloodied breakup. It would be as bloodless as Czechoslovakia’s velvet divorce in 1992. Yet the Czechs and Slovaks had emerged from an era of Soviet oppression and were anyhow assigned with building their futures almost from scratch.

The Scots are oppressed by no one, and in fact most people in the world would give a lot for a future as peaceful, prosperous, and progressive as Scotland can expect under London’s rule.

Yet Scotland’s secessionists are toying with 60 million fellow Brits’ future, and also with the stability of the entire world.

Other people’s troubles

The costs of an English retreat from Scotland would be exorbitant. The secessionists already say they will demand British nuclear warheads’ departure. From there the momentum will surely lead to all military and naval bases, the relocation of which would cost billions.

Meanwhile, Britain’s sudden shrinkage might trigger a centrifugal momentum. Welsh nationalists already are mulling a sectionalist path of their own. What Scottish independence might unleash in Northern Ireland needs no elaboration. The rest of Britain, meanwhile, would feel that what began with retreat from empire is now morphing into national demise.

The English don’t deserve this, and neither does the world.

If Britain breaks up there might be no stopping Belgium’s fission between the Flemish and Walloons, the Catalonians and Basques would abandon Spain, and the momentum will then proceed to France’s Corsica, to Italy’s Lombardy and wherenot.

With Europe’s eastern frontiers encroached by Russian militias while its social frontiers are challenged by Muslim immigrants, the last thing the continent needs is truncated states and limping governments.

Alas, all this hardly impresses Scotland’s secessionists who would like us to think they are driven by a quest for social compassion. If victorious, the vow, they will spend more on health, education, and welfare.

Well for one thing, that is the kind of cause for which one fights from within the system, not by breaking it. But more importantly, what is the moral value of a new hospital in Glasgow that is built not in addition to, but instead of a hospital in Carlisle, and all just because God placed oil closer to the Scots?

That is not justice, indeed it is injustice; the sanctimonious reincarnation of what Italian fascists once called sacred egoism.