Decentralization and Secession

View Details

If Staten Island is allowed to secede, our national technocrats fear that might open up countless similar demands for self-determination across the nation. For the elites, the current status quo works quite well and they want to keep it that way.

Original Article: "Let Staten Island Secede!"

View Details

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at county and city-level secession movements and what it means for political self-determination. In a recent article, Ryan McMaken highlighted renewed calls for Staten Island to secede from New York City, but other recent examples include attempts by taxpayers in areas of Georgia and Alabama to break away from the control of mismanagement of local governments. Tho and Ryan look at the value these initiatives have, and the arguments used to try to stop them.

Recommended Reading"Let Staten Island Secede!" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_150_A

Download Anatomy of the State for free at Mises.org/Anatomy

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

New Radio Rothbard mugs are now available at the Mises Store. Get yours at Mises.org/RothMug

PROMO CODE: RothPod for 20% off

View Details

Michael Rectenwald talks with Paul Gottfried about Paleoconservatism, the left, Wokism, the identity and ethos of the ruling elite, and decentralization.

Join us in Nashville on September 23rd for a no-holds-barred discussion against the regime. Use code "Rekt23" for $45 off admission: Mises.org/Nashville23

View Details

The use of interstate compacts by US states shows that the states don't need the federal government to dictate or manage interstate relations.

Original Article: "States Can Curb Federal Power through "Soft Secession""

View Details

Ryan, Tho, and Kerry Baldwin take a look at why some politicians say they're "nationalists." Is nationalism a good thing or is it just another way to justify more government meddling in our lives?

New Radio Rothbard mugs are now available at the Mises Store. Get yours at Mises.org/RothMug

PROMO CODE: RothPod for 20% off

View Details

There are now more armed civilian federal agents than there are US Marines. These well-funded armies of federal enforcers from the alphabet agencies are there to be used against US citizens at the whims of federal policymakers. Every last one of them should be disarmed.

New Radio Rothbard mugs are now available at the Mises Store. Get yours at Mises.org/RothMug

PROMO CODE: RothPod for 20% off

View Details

Should political reform be the result of a much-discussed comprehensive plan? Or should it come about through decentralized decision-making that deals with the situations at hand?

Original Article: "Comprehensive Reform versus Piecemeal Reform"

View Details

Like the USA, Canada has had a central bank–fueled housing boom. Like all other booms, it also has an inevitable ending.

Original Article: "Canada’s Housing Boom Was a Bubble. Now Comes the Bust"

View Details

The real issue we face is not whether we should be in the red tribe or the blue tribe, but rather what will be the constituency for freedom.

Original Article: "Neither Red nor Blue, but Free"

View Details

If we have learned anything from hundreds of years of government oppression and atrocities, one thing is certain: government isn't our friend.

Original Article: "Government Is as Government Does"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

Tom Woods joins the show for a look at the hottest political topic of the day, namely national divorce. This is a spirited discussion of the politics, economics, and mechanics of how America might break up.

Watch 'The Economics of National Divorce Part I' with Ryan McMaken": Mises.org/HAP352

View Details

Western intellectuals and their political allies are pushing relentlessly toward a unipolar world. Freedom lies in the multipolar direction.

Original Article: "Why Libertarians Should Support the Multipolar World"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

It's been more than 150 years since most state boundaries were drawn in the US. Since then, demographic and political realities have changed enormously. The boundaries should change too.

Original Article: "The Borders Between US States Are Obsolete"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop call for breaking up the US into smaller states. While this idea sounds radical to some, there has been growing conversation about shifting state borders, including proposals to break up California and a recent vote on the Greater Idaho project. Ryan and Tho discuss what lessons the Swiss model of federalism, as well as consider the cynical political considerations of this humble proposal.

Recommended Reading"If American Federalism Were like Swiss Federalism, There Would be 1,300 States" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_116_A

"The Borders Between US States Are Obsolete" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_116_B

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

View Details

This week's show features a bare-knuckle discussion between Jeff and José Niño of "El Niño Speaks" on the biggest political, economic, and cultural events of 2022—and what they portend for 2023.

You don't want to miss Jeff's unvarnished thoughts on the Left, the Right, the economy, and what is sure to be a turbulent New Year.

Read José's Substack: josbcf.substack.com

View Details

Jeff and Bob break down the good, bad, and ugly behind Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter.

View Details

The international system we live in today is a system composed of numerous states. There are, in fact, about two hundred of them, most of which exercise a substantial amount of autonomy and sovereignty. They are functionally independent states. Moreover, the number of sovereign states in the world has nearly tripled since 1945. Because of this, the international order has become much more decentralized over the past eighty years, and this is largely due to the success of many secession movements.

The new states are smaller than the ones that came before them, however, and this all reminds us that there is a basic arithmetic to secession and decentralization in the world. Since the entire surface of the world—outside of Antarctica, of course—is already claimed by states, that means that when we split one political jurisdiction up into pieces, those new pieces will necessarily be smaller than the old state from which they came.

During the decolonization period following the Second World War, dozens of new states were formed out of the territories of the old empires they left. This meant the new status quo had a larger number of smaller states. The same thing occurred after the end of the Cold War. As the Soviet Union collapsed, it left fifteen new smaller states in its wake.

So, in the current world, secession—when successful—is an event that reduces the size and scope of states. It reduces the territory and the populations over which a single central institution exercises monopoly power.

Secession and State Size as Two Sides of One CoinSo, if we’re going to talk about secession, then, it’s also important to explicitly address the issue of what is the correct size of states. Is smaller better?

Now before we go further, I know my audience here, so there’s no need to come up to me afterward and say, “Well, states are bad, so the correct size of states is that they don’t exist at all.” I get it. I agree that’s the end goal. Moreover, political communities don’t have to be states at all. They could be other types of nonstate polities. But that’s all for another speech.

For now, we’ll stick to talking about states, as we are already saddled with living in a world composed of states right now. Until the day comes that a majority of the population wants to abolish all states, it makes sense to look to ways that will reduce the power of states, localize that power, and take at least some of it out of the hands of some of the most powerful ruling state elites.

And the reason we have to address the issue of the size of states is because many people do believe that bigger is better. They believe that larger states are essential for economic success, for peace, and for trade. Also, many people think that state size doesn’t matter at all. They think every problem of conflict within a political jurisdiction can be solved with democracy. Just let people vote, and there is no need for people to have political independence or a separate polity of their own. People who believe that are going to heartily oppose secession.

And, of course, states’ agents themselves will oppose it because states want to be big. Being big and getting bigger is an important goal of every state. It’s a major part of what we call state building. States want to consolidate power, annex territories, and increase their taxable population. What we want is the opposite of that. We want state unbuilding. State demolition.

For many in the public, however, the idea that bigger is good, or at least that size doesn’t matter, has its limits. For example, most people already have in their minds some upper limit as to the “correct” size of states. To see this, simply ask a person if he or she wants to live under a single global state.

Most people—not all, but I would suggest a sizable majority of people worldwide—would be opposed to this. Most people, just from casually observing the world, suspect that placing global governing power in the hands of some distant elite from another culture, from a different continent, and who uses a different language might not actually produce a desirable result.

On an instinctive level, then, many people recognize that something more local is necessary. Partly because of this instinct, radical decentralization in the form of many diverse polities has been the norm throughout human history. Even in the days of the Roman Empire, which viewed itself as having universal jurisdiction, the Romans never subjugated the Persians, the tribes of northern Europe, the Chinese, or the kingdoms of sub-Saharan Africa. The Romans didn’t even know about the Americas. The world has always been politically decentralized.

Yet, ignoring this, many people continue to insist that adding a new country to the large group of already existing countries would somehow bring on anarchy. Here’s the thing, though: the world is already in a state of anarchy. Everyone who’s read a serious book on international relations already knows this. It’s already accepted fact that the international system is anarchic. There is no final arbiter of law or policy internationally. There is no global monopolist.

So creating anarchy is hardly a danger. It’s already there.

How many independent polities should there be? How big should they be? That’s probably the harder question we must overcome with many people.

After all, thanks to status quo bias, many people seem to credulously believe that we’ve somehow magically arrived at exactly the correct number of states and they’re all of the “right size.” The UN has explicitly said as much. Among the international elites, it’s basically been dogma, since 1945, that the world’s existing borders as currently drawn shall never be moved or changed. There are exceptions, but “approved” secession—as in the case of Kosovo’s de facto secession—is only encouraged by the establishment when that secession serves the interests of certain great powers and their allies.

So just to get started when we’re going to engage in the thankless job of pushing secession, we have to make the case that smaller and more numerous states are better for the world. From the perspective of enhancing freedom and free markets, we can see three key ways that smaller and more numerous states are better. But let’s also look at the empirical evidence while we’re at it.

Smaller States Allow for More Choice and More Opportunities for ExitThe first reason that smaller states are beneficial is that they offer more opportunities for exit. This, in turn, makes states more inclined to respect property rights.

Lew Rockwell summed this principle up in 2005 in a great article called “What We Mean by Decentralization.” Rockwell writes:

Under decentralization, jurisdictions must compete for residents and capital, which provides some incentive for greater degrees of freedom, if only because local despotism is neither popular nor productive. If despots insist on ruling anyway, people and capital will find a way to leave.

This is most fully realized, of course, by the type of decentralization that results from secession. As Murray Rothbard put it in 1977: “Secession … means greater competition between governments of different geographical areas, enabling people of one State to zip across the border to relatively greater freedom more easily.”

Now, of course, ideally you wouldn’t have to physically relocate to escape despotism. But we don’t live in an ideal world. We have to work with what we have, and the fact is governments like to abuse rights. So the question is, Do we want governments that are huge and control vast swathes of land and that require us to move thousands of miles to escape them? Or do we want something smaller where exit is easier, albeit still not without cost? And, of course, keep in mind that in a world with only one state and no secession, there is no escape at all.

We’ve seen this issue of “exit” in the modern world, of course. It’s true in countless refugee situations, where the most oppressed people are only able to save their own lives by fleeing across an international border. We saw it in Venezuela over the past decade, when Venezuelans, desperate for food, had to escape across an international border just to get basic necessities. Thank goodness that border was there and limited the reach of the Venezuelan regime. Exit was possible. If only the Venezuelan state were even smaller and the people of that region had even more options for bordering states into which to exit and escape.

Historically, as well, we know this concept of exit has been an absolutely key factor in how the West rose to achieve the highest standards of living the world has ever known. As the historian Ralph Raico has noted in his essay “The European Miracle,” the fact that Europe has been so decentralized throughout its post-Roman history—in contrast to the huge empires of the East—meant that entrepreneurs and capital could indeed escape across Western Europe’s countless borders in a highly decentralized world. This was especially the case in Europe’s Middle Ages, and as historians Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell Jr. note in their book How the West Grew Rich, it was in these highly decentralized Middle Ages that the institutional groundwork was laid for Europe’s economic miracle.

Similarly, historian Jean Baechler showed this in his research, and he concluded, “The first condition for the maximization of economic efficiency is the liberation of civil society with respect to the state.”

So how did this liberation occur which led to the success of markets in Europe? Baechler tells us: “The expansion of capitalism [in Europe] owes its origins … to political anarchy.” That is, to the existence of a large number of small states, without any overriding imperial state power. Not since Rome has Europe been unified under a single government, and that has meant more freedom and more economic growth.

One reason this works is that in a region or world of small states, it is more difficult to even attempt autarky, so for a private entrepreneur, moving one’s capital from one place to another does not cut off one’s access to markets outside the borders of a small jurisdiction. Small states and principalities have always experienced big incentives toward doing business with surrounding areas. It means more trade. It means more efficient markets.

Opponents of secession and breaking up states are often opposed, however, on the grounds that smaller states will throw up trade barriers and be more inclined to violate rights. The reasons for this assumption are unclear, but this is a common objection.

On the contrary, small states want to attract capital, and it shows. This is why efforts to impose a single global minimum tax tend to meet the most resistance from smaller countries, like Ireland and Hungary, as they do today. Having lower taxes is a major way that small states attract wealth.

Moreover, in modern times, the empirical evidence supports the idea that small states tend to be more open to free trade, more open to a free flow of labor, more open to lower taxes.

For example, Sergio Castello and Terutomo Ozawa conclude in their study on small states that in a world of specialized and growing trade

small economies naturally grow more trade-oriented in both exports and imports…. Ceteris paribus, small nations thus become more trade-focused than large ones.

Economist Gary Becker in 1998 noted, “Since 1950 real per capita GDP [gross domestic product] has risen somewhat faster in smaller nations than it has in bigger ones.” Becker concluded that

the statistics on actual performance show that dire warnings about the economic price suffered by small nations are not all warranted…. Smallness can be an asset in the division of labor in the modern world, where economies are linked through international transactions. Of the fourteen countries with populations over 100 million, only the US and Japan are wealthy.

William Easterly and Aart Kraay conclude from their own study on small states: “Controlling for location, smaller states are actually richer than other states in per capita GDP…. Microstates have on average higher income and productivity levels than small states, and grow no more slowly than large states.”

So it turns out Rothbard was right when he suggested that small states are more likely to embrace free trade. As he wrote in the 1990s, this was also due to sociological reasons:

common response to a world of proliferating nations is to worry about the multitude of trade barriers that might be erected. But, other things being equal, the greater the number of new nations, and the smaller the size of each, the better. For it would be far more difficult to sow the illusion of self-sufficiency if the slogan were “Buy North Dakotan” or even “Buy 56th Street” than it now is to convince the public to “Buy American.” Similarly, “Down with South Dakota,” or “Down with 55th Street,” would be a more difficult sell than spreading fear or hatred of the Japanese.

In other words, bigness brings delusions of self-sufficiency, and it is actually large states that more often turn to protectionism and economic nationalism and control. Small states know that exit is easier for their residents, and thus these small states must be more responsible to capital to attract wealth.

Reducing the Size of States Offers a Solution When Democracy and Constitutionalism FailA second benefit of small states is that they offer a solution when constitutions and democracy often fail to protect minority rights.

We often encounter the argument that the size and scope of states don’t matter so long as there are elections and there are words written on parchment somewhere saying that the government—cross my heart and hope to die—will not violate our rights.

It’s great if that works for a time, but it quite often fails.

In reality, neither constitutions nor elections protect minority rights when minority groups are a permanent minority or minority interests diverge sufficiently from the interests of the ruling majority. We see this frequently with ethnic and linguistic minorities. Ludwig von Mises himself understood this when he wrote that

the situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.… At every turn the member of a national minority is made to feel that he lives among strangers and that he is, even if the letter of the law denies it, a second-class citizen.

Similarly, problems exist for ideological minorities, especially on issues where there is little room for compromise. For example, consider a state where about half the population thinks abortion is a basic human right and the other half thinks abortion is a grave violation of human rights. We can see a problem here, even in an allegedly decentralized political system like the United States. The Supreme Court has told the states to set their own policies, yet both sides continue to call for nationwide laws forcing their own preferred policies on the entire nation. Confederations only work when people in one region are willing to tolerate the “deviations” of the people in other regions. But much of the time, the impulse to impose uniform national policy on everyone within a state’s borders is inexorable, and without breaking states up to match regional preferences, the only choice losing minorities have is to turn to violence or simply accept their status of powerlessness.

In cases like this, democracy and constitutionalism offer no answer. Parchment guarantees of rights can be ignored by judges. We see it all the time. Elections are won by majorities. Constitutions may work for a time, but what happens when the majority gets large enough to amend the constitution and abolish the protections for the increasingly beleaguered minority? The losers become permanent losers.

In other words, over the long term, the ruling majority coalitions tend to win. And if you’re not a part of that coalition and it doesn’t serve your interests? You’re out of luck. Because Mises understood this, he supported the idea of local self-determination via secession and other types of decentralization. In Nation, State, and Economy he wrote: “No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.”

And in Liberalism he writes:

Whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with.

This is significant because Mises was a democrat. He thought democracy often worked. But he also recognized that without the safety valve of secession and a process to dismantle states and change their borders, it can lead to a loss of self-determination and basic human rights. Moreover, Mises specifically acknowledged that breaking states up into smaller pieces is a means of avoiding civil wars and revolutions.

We can see this issue illustrated with a thought experiment.

Suppose that in twenty years, some groups of elites in eastern Asia suggest it would be a great idea to form a confederation of states from the region: the United States of East Asia (USEA). It would include China, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Indonesia. This new union could be put together to facilitate free trade, free migration, and to generally increase economic prosperity and peaceful multilateralism. How should the governance of this organization be organized? Systems of democratic representation present an obvious problem: the Chinese themselves would easily outvote all the other countries on a regular basis. Even if South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan all voted together as a block, their relatively small population sizes could not possibly allow them to veto pro-China measures pushed by a majority of Chinese voters. Because of China’s size, any other members of the confederation would quickly realize that the USEA is really just a union dominated by China most of the time.

Sure, we could attempt a bill of rights or a senate with equal representation to temper these effects, but over the long term, state institutions have a way of favoring the largest groups and most numerous groups. Eventually the Japanese and the Koreans would want to leave this union. But if secession is not allowed? Then what? Endless civil wars are a likely outcome. It’s a prescription for disaster.

Along these lines, Rothbard often supported secession as a matter of national liberation. He considered the American Revolution—a secessionist cause, of course—to be among the world’s first wars for national liberation. He said the same about the secession of the new republics from the Soviet Union and the breakup of Czechoslovakia. And he supported all this in contradiction of the dominant elite narrative. At the time, the US foreign policy establishment and its friends in the national media actually opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union. Why? Because New York Times writers and Bush administration hacks were devoted to mass democracy rather than local self-determination. Although the Latvians would continue to be horribly outnumbered by ethnic Russians in the imagined new democratic USSR, we were told the USSR’s new democratic constitution would somehow allow a million Latvians to make their voice heard in the midst of one hundred million Russians. The real threat, the official narrative went, was that Europe was being “convulsed by nationalism” and that national minorities required large, powerful states to keep them in line. Taking a page from Mises, Rothbard instead insisted:

In short, every group, every nationality, should be allowed to secede from any nation-state and to join any other nation-state that agrees to have it.

Limiting the Power of Aggressive StatesFinally, a third reason for opposing large states is that large states tend to be the most dangerous ones. On this, Rockwell writes: “Tyranny on the local level minimizes damage to the same extent that macro-tyranny maximizes it.… If Hitler had ruled only Berlin, [and] Stalin only Moscow,” the history of the world may have been considerably less bloody. Large states are playgrounds for despots and dictators, while small states provide far fewer opportunities for ambitious politicians to spread their mayhem beyond their local communities.

But we don’t have to take Lew’s word for it. The highly influential political scientist Hannah Arendt has discussed how only larger states can hope to be truly totalitarian. She notes that a number of states in Europe at the time had pushed totalitarian ideas but, outside the Soviet Union, none managed to actually achieve the goal. She writes:

Although [totalitarian ideology] had served well enough to organize the masses until the movement seized power, the absolute size of the country then forced the would-be totalitarian ruler of masses into the more familiar patterns of class or party dictatorship. The truth is that these countries simply did not control enough human material to allow for total domination and its inherent great losses in population. Without much hope for the conquest of more heavily populated territories, the tyrants in these small countries were forced into a certain old-fashioned moderation lest they lose whatever people they had to rule. This is also why Nazism, up to the outbreak of the war and its expansion over Europe, lagged so far behind its Russian counterpart in consistency and ruthlessness; even the German people were not numerous enough to allow for the full development of this newest form of government. Only if Germany had won the war would she have known a fully developed totalitarian rulership.

But even if we’re not talking about something as terrible as totalitarianism, the fact remains that larger states are more able to monopolize more people, more wealth, and more resources with minimal transactions costs. This makes larger states more able to carry out truly abhorrent crimes.

The Problem of International WarSo we’ve seen three advantages of using secession to reduce the size and power of states. But we’re still likely to hear one big objection to breaking up today’s states into smaller states. That is the possibility of any remaining large states subjugating small states. It’s a frequent refrain: “Sure, secession sounds nice in theory, but if we reduce the power of the US government, or any other Western states, then China will step in and conquer the world.”

To this objection there are several answers. One is that small states are always free to enter into voluntary defense pacts, just as they always have been. States with similar interests, cultures, and languages can do this with relative ease, and have done so.

Moreover, assumptions that large states will always dominate in international relations are based on the mistaken notion that larger states (in terms of GDP and current access to military resources) are necessarily the more powerful ones. More accurately, however, it is wealthier states and blocs of states—not necessarily the larger states—that tend to be at an advantage in terms of military deterrence. In his innovative research, China expert Michael Beckley, for example, notes that the biggest variable here is actually GDP per capita, not overall GDP. And this helps explain why we can find many cases of smaller states successfully deterring and defeating larger states. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, both Japan and the United Kingdom repeatedly defeated and humiliated the much larger China. GDP and military manufacturing statistics alone would also suggest that the Soviet Union—three times the geographic size of the US and with an immense weapons industry—should have outlasted the United States.

The GDP measure also suggests that Israel is the weakest military power in the Middle East. Clearly, that is not the case. The Israeli case is instructive because it shows us that small states, rather than having to become big themselves, can simply free ride on larger states—as the State of Israel has managed to long exploit American wealth and taxpayer revenues without giving up its own independence.

Moreover, the possibility of nuclear deterrence diminishes the need for immense and expensive conventional forces, as—again—demonstrated by the State of Israel. Deterrent defense capability can thus be obtained even by Switzerland-sized states.

I go into some detail on this in my new book, Breaking Away. So, for example, were the United States to break up into smaller pieces, there is no reason to assume the new, smaller successor states would be at the mercy of larger states. There is every reason to assume that the new American states would be just as unified on foreign policy as they are now—which is to say almost totally in lockstep.

Unfortunately, no matter what might be said about small states and international relations, many will cling to the idea that—because of alleged foreign threats—virtually nothing could justify secession.

There is, of course, nothing new about this attitude. For centuries, states have justified their growth, strength, and taxation on the grounds that all that is necessary to protect against foreigners. It is a common habit to downplay concerns about the preservation of rights against abuses by one’s own state in order to focus on a perceived threat— however unlikely—from foreign states.

This was, after all, the dominant posture during the Cold War. Concerns about American freedoms were put on hold in the name of fighting the Communists. Conservatism’s standard bearer, William F. Buckley, said as much when he declared,

We have got to accept Big Government for the duration— for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.… [We must endure] large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington.

In other words, accept everything the central government wants to do to you. To do anything else is to invite conquest from the Commies. Or else the Commies win.

Yet, real-world experience suggests that fortune favors the decentralized in terms of wealth, freedom, and economic development. And on a moral level, decentralizing is always the right thing to do.

It is for these reasons that Rothbard supported what he called “universal rights, locally enforced.” As an adherent of natural rights, Rothbard believed rights are certainly universal. Yet he also understood that their enforcement must be local. As Rockwell explains, these two concepts— universalism and localism—are frequently in tension. But, Rockwell concludes,

if you give up one of the two principles [i.e., universal rights and local control] you risk giving up liberty. Both are important. Neither should prevail over the other. A local government that violates rights is intolerable. A central government that rules in the name of universal rights is similarly intolerable.

Experience has already shown—since at least as early as the Middle Ages—that the Western world has always embraced and benefited from some degree of radical political decentralization. We would benefit from much more of it today.

View Details

All too often, people equate their nationality with a particular state. Yet, as Mises noted, nationality does not depend at all upon a formal entity tied to a government.

Original Article: "Nationality and Statelessness: The Kuwaiti Bidoon"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '

View Details

Recorded at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona on October 7th, 2022.

Sponsored by Dr. Michael and Lisa Keller

View Details

Breaking Away differs from countless other books on secession and decentralization in that it considers examples and benefits of secession and radical decentralization in a much broader historical, geographical, and theoretical context. This book is for anyone interested in how issues of secession and decentralization come up again and again worldwide as communities of human beings seek self-determination, freedom, and economic prosperity. McMaken also examines small states which are often examples of successful cases of secession and radical decentralization.

The reader will come away with a better understanding of how political decentralization continues to be relevant, useful, and important in the modern world.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Carlo LottieriPrefaceIntroduction: Universal Rights, Locally Enforced

Part I: Big States, Small States, and Secession 1. More Choices, More Freedom, Less Monopoly Power 2. Political Anarchy Is How the West Got Rich 3. Why Regimes Prefer Big States and Centralized Power 4. Why the Classical Liberals Wanted Decentralization 5. Secession as a Path to Self-Determination 6. Nationalism as National Liberation: Lessons from the End of the Cold War 7. A Brief History of Secession Plebiscites in Europe 8. Why the US Supports Secession for Africans, but Not for Americans 9. From Taxes to Trade, More Secession Means More Freedom 10. If California Secedes, What Happens to Locals Who Opposed Secession? 11. How Small Is Too Small? 12. When It Comes to National Defense, It’s More than Size that Matters 13. If America Splits Up, What Happens to the Nukes?

Part II: Decentralization and Democracy 14. Why “One Man, One Vote” Doesn’t Work 15. Democracy Doesn’t Work Unless It’s Done Locally

Part III: Lessons from America’s Past, and Strategies for the Future 16. How Early Americans Decentralized Military Power 17. Before Roe v. Wade, Abortion Policy was a State and Local Matter 18. When Immigration Policy Was Decentralized 19. Why Indian Tribal Sovereignty Is Important 20. Sovereignty for Cities and Counties: Decentralizing the American States

Postscript: A Tale of Two Megastates: Why the EU Is Better (In Some Ways) than the USIndex

View Details

Radical Charles Dunoyer wanted "the municipalization of the world" by which states would be broken up and forced to compete both with the private sector and with countless other states.

Original Article: "The Secessionist French Classical Liberals: Molinari and Dunoyer"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '

View Details

With Queen Elizabeth II lying in state at Westminster Hall, hereditary monarchies are under attack as archaic & absurd. Has mass democracy in the West done any better? Ryan McMaken joins Jeff and Bob to discuss.

Read Ryan's Article on Monarchs: Mises.org/HAP361-1 Read Hoppe's Democracy: Mises.org/Democracy

View Details

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop are joined by Brandan Buck, a historian on the anti-war right and a recent participant at the Rothbard Graduate Seminar. The conversation looks at the parallels between modern American politics and the political climate that gave rise to America's foreign policy in the second half of the 20th Century. How did the American right get dragged into the project of liberal imperialism? Is China the new Evil Empire? How important are figures like Tucker Carlson in questioning the war narrative? These questions and more are answered in this episode.

SPECIAL OFFER: Use coupon code RothPod at the Mises Store to save 20% off of Murray Rothbard's classic The Betrayal of the American Right: Mises.org/Betray.

Follow Brandan Buck on Twitter: @Brandan_Buck

Recommended Reading "No ‘Putin apologia’ and certainly not new: the Old American Right on war" by Brandan Buck: Mises.org/RR_97_A

"Bear Any Burden: Military Sacrifice and Rise of American Populism" by Brandan Buck: Mises.org/RR_97_B

"A History of Distrust: How the Right Lost Faith in Institutions" by Brandan Buck: Mises.org/RR_97_C

"Fly Over Country, the Gunbelt, and the Nationalization of America Internationalism" by Brandan Buck: Mises.org/RR_97_D

The Betrayal of the American Right by Murray N. Rothbard: Mises.org/RR_97_E

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

View Details

In this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at the popularizing of the term "regime" being used against the Federal government. As a recent Bulwark article notes, this change in framing can be seen in conservative politicians like Ron DeSantis to publications like The Federalist. Ryan and Tho welcome the American right sounding more and more like Lew Rockwell, and touch on the contributions of paleoconservatives like Sam Francis.

Recommended Reading "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals" by Murray N. Rothbard: Mises.org/RR_96_A

"The Problem With Right-Wing Regime Talk" by Joshua Tait: Mises.org/RR_96_B

"The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters" by Sam Adler-Bell (New York Times): Mises.org/RR_96_C

"Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets" by James Pogue (Vanity Fair): Mises.org/RR_96_D

"The Paranoid Style in American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter (Harper’s Magazine): Mises.org/RR_96_E

"Secede From the Regime" with Ryan McMaken and Lew Rockwell: Mises.org/RR_96_F

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

View Details

In this celebratory episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at the fall of the Cheney and Bush dynasties and what it means for American politics. Other topics include former CIA directors declaring war on half of America, and just how much money Liz Cheney made in DC.

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

View Details

As political divisions worsen in the United States, one remedy besides secession might be to create semiautonomous regional territories.

Original Article: "Regional Territories: A Decentralization Plan for the USA"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

Lots of Americans now openly discuss the idea of National Divorce, focusing on the political, cultural, and social divisions in America. But what about the economics? How would issues like debt, entitlements, and defense be addressed if the US split into two or more new political entities?

Mises.org senior editor and economist Ryan McMaken joins Jeff to discuss.

Listen to Hoppe on centralization and secession: Mises.org/HAP352-1

View Details

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, pundits on the Left have demanded even more centralization of government. But federalism is the best way forward.

Original Article: "Federalism, Not Centralization, Is the Way out of the Current Conflicts"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

Indian tribe sovereignty has long been a much neglected, yet important, tool in decentralizing and limiting government power in the US.

Original Article: "SCOTUS Attacked Indian Tribe Sovereignty in Castro-Huerta, and That's a Bad Thing."

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

People often speak of the Constitution with reverence, as though it were infallible. However, the Constitution was a centralizing document that cast aside the decentralization of the Articles of Confederation.

Original Article: "Is the Constitution a Centralizing or Decentralizing Document?"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

The end of Roe may force many Americans to recognize that the United States is not one place. It is many places. The key is to reject uniform federal policy.

Original Article: "To Avoid Civil War, Learn to Tolerate Different Laws in Different States"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop discuss a recent Mises Wire article about how the state uses holidays as a culture war weapon. Independence Day offers the rare opportunity for opponents of the regime to strike back on a holiday that explicitly celebrates secession and self-determination.

Recommended Reading "Juneteenth and Secular Holidays as Tools of the Regime" by Tho Bishop: Mises.org/RR_88_A

"3 Things to Remember on Independence Day" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_88_B

"Was the American Revolution Radical?" by Murray N. Rothbard: Mises.org/RR_88_C

"The American Revolution Was a Culture War" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_88_D

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

View Details

The Mauritius government still denies Chagossians independence, continuing colonial policies.

Original Article: "Independence for Chagossians? Time to End Colonialist Policies"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop talk about the increasing decay of federal legitimacy. Republicans are threatening to nullify federal law. Democrats want to nullify Supreme Court decisions.

Oh, and the Supreme Court just eliminated one of the most political, ill-reasoned decisions in its history.

Recommended Reading "Abolish the Supreme Court" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_87_A

"Make Every State a Sanctuary State" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_87_B

"End Roe v. Wade: It's Time to Defederalize Abortion Policy" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_87_C

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

View Details

Social issues, from abortion to critical race theory to teaching gender identity in elementary schools, dominate our politics and media.

Original Article: "Why Social Issues Dominate"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

The EU is a prime example of a tendency toward territorial expansion and political centralization.

Original Article: "Decentralized and Neutral"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

Jeff is solo this week and hosts Tom Woods to ask a simple question: Why do social issues dominate our attention, to the detriment of economics and fiscal reality?

Read Jeff's article "Why Social Issues Dominate" Mises.org/Dominate

View Details

Why did Europe advance economically in the postmedieval period? Bas Spliet looks to the writings of Ralph Raico and Hans-Hermann Hoppe for answers.

Original Article: "Decentralization and the Rise of the West: The European Miracle Revisited"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

View Details

Recorded at the 2022 Austrian Economics Research Conference hosted at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, March 18–19, 2022.

The F.A. Hayek Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Greg and Joy Morin. Includes audience question and answer period.

The Austrian Economics Research Conference is the international, interdisciplinary meeting of the Austrian School, bringing together leading scholars doing research in this vibrant and influential intellectual tradition. The conference is hosted by the Mises Institute at its campus in Auburn, Alabama, and is directed by Joseph Salerno, professor of economics at Pace University and academic vice president of the Mises Institute.

View Details

In many ways, the liberal democracy that had its roots in nineteenth-century liberalism seems to have run its course. Can we revive it, or does something more authoritarian take its place?

Original Article: "The Progressives' Liberal Democracy Has Failed. Radical Decentralization Is the Answer."

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Lord Acton was one of the greatest classical liberal historians of the nineteenth century, but his view of the War between the States has in some circles occasioned dismay. Acton, in a letter of 1866 to Robert E. Lee, said, “I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”

For example, the political theorist Jacob Levy, who admires Acton’s pluralism, says that Acton’s insights “led him to analyses of the U.S. Civil War that were not merely wrong, but carefully and thoughtfully wickedly wrong. He identified the cause of the Confederacy as the cause of freedom, even knowing slavery to be evil, and he thought this with firm commitment, for many years.” (As we’ll see below, “wickedly” is a parody of something Acton says.)

If slavery is evil, how could Acton defend the cause of the Confederacy as the cause of freedom? Acton’s case for doing so is well argued and does not at all depend on doubting the badness of slavery. The case begins from the fact that a free society cannot be run by an absolute power but must make room for the rights of individuals. In saying this, Acton not only condemns absolute monarchy but unlimited majority rule as well. If anything, majority rule is worse, because it is much harder to resist. Many of the Founders, in particular those in the Federalist Party, recognized the dangers of democracy. As Acton explains in a lecture given in 1866,

[T]he authors of the most celebrated Democracy in history esteemed that the most formidable dangers which menaced the stability of their work were the very principles of Democracy itself. With them the establishment of a Republican government was not the result of theory, but of necessity. They possessed no aristocracy, and no king, but otherwise they inherited our English laws, and strove to adapt them as faithfully as possible to a society constituted so differently from that in which they had their origin. The earliest interpreters of the Constitution and the laws strove to be guided by English precedents, and to approach as nearly as they could to the English model. Hamilton is the chief expounder of these ideas: “It has been observed that a pure Democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient Democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny, their figure deformity. If we incline too much to Democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy. Those who mean to form a solid Republican government ought to proceed to the confines of another government. There are certain conjunctures when it may be necessary and proper to disregard the opinions which the majority of the people have formed. There ought to be a principle in government capable of resisting the popular current. The principle chiefly intended to be established is this, that there must be a permanent will.”

When Thomas Jefferson came to power, the principle of democracy moved to the fore, but the endeavor to limit democratic absolutism was not lost. Now the hope lay in the independent power of the states that formed the union. Acton takes John C. Calhoun to be the great theorist of federalism and agrees with him that a state should be able to nullify laws that promote the interests of one section of the country over another.

The philosopher of the South, Mr. Calhoun, of whom it was said, to describe his influence, that as often as he took a pinch of snuff all South Carolina sneezed, put forward what was called the theory of nullification. He maintained that if an interested majority passed a law injurious to the settled interests of any State, that State had a right to interpose a veto. He was answered by Daniel Webster, the most eloquent of Americans, who asserted the absolute right of a legislature where all were fairly represented, to make laws for all. Then Calhoun insisted that if a State could not prevent the execution of a law which it deemed unconstitutional and injurious, it had the right to withdraw from the Union which it had conditionally joined.

In his letter to Robert E. Lee, Acton says:

I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and his policy of waging war on the South meant the triumph of mass democracy over liberty. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, though it left the slaves in bad conditions, but the result of the war was a disaster for liberty. In a striking formulation, Acton says:

[S]lavery was not the cause of secession, but the reason of its failure. In almost every nation and every clime the time has come for the extinction of servitude. The same problem has sooner or later been forced on many governments, and all have bestowed on it their greatest legislative skill, lest in healing the evils of forced but certain labour, they should produce incurable evils of another kind. They attempted at least to moderate the effects of sudden unconditional change, to save those whom they despoiled from ruin, and those whom they liberated from destitution. But in the United States no such design seems to have presided over the work of emancipation. It has been an act of war, not of statesmanship or humanity. They have treated the slave-owner as an enemy, and have used the slave as an instrument for his destruction. They have not protected the white man from the vengeance of barbarians, nor the black from the pitiless cruelty of a selfish civilisation.

If, then, slavery is to be the criterion which shall determine the significance of the civil war, our verdict ought, I think, to be, that by one part of the nation it was wickedly defended, and by the other as wickedly removed.

This passage contains the phrase “wickedly removed” that led Jacob Levy to his parody. Whether Acton took adequate account of the evils of slavery I’ll leave to readers to judge; but his carefully argued position merits careful study and confirms his standing as an acute analyst of liberty.

View Details

The benefits of decentralization don't stop at the state level. State governments themselves must be broken up into decentralized confederations that allow for local vetoes, local sovereignty, and regional autonomy.

Original Article: "State-Level Secession Isn't Enough. The States Themselves Must Be Radically Decentralized."

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

The more the EU micromanages Polish internal affairs and punishes Poland for the simple act of exercising self-determination, more the benefits of leaving the bloc altogether will continue to increase.

Original Article: "Poland's Beef with the EU Shows the Dangers of Political Centralization"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

A big factor behind Youngkin’s electoral success in Virginia: the rural voter and their reaction to Richmond's overreach on guns, schools, and centralized political power.

Original Article: "Rural Voters, Guns, and Decentralization Sank the Democrats in Virginia"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

The ongoing success of the cannabis nullification effort has shown the uselessness of those who repeatedly chant slogans about “federal supremacy” and “If you don’t like the (federal) law, change it.”

Original Article: "Nullification Works: Republicans Look to Legalize Marijuana as States Ignore Federal Drug War"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Includes an introduction by Joey Clark. Recorded in St. Petersburg, Florida on October 22, 2021.

The weekend revolves around a discussion of strategy. Nearly 25 years ago, Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe delivered his famous "What Must Be Done" speech on the pressing topic of how—and whether—to engage the state. Today his prescription for a bottom-up ideological revolution beginning at the local level rings more true than ever. With Hoppe's admonitions in mind, all of our speakers and panels will consider three vital questions: Where are we? How Bad is it? And what should we do now?

View Details

Includes an introduction by Joey Clark. Recorded in St. Petersburg, Florida on October 22, 2021.

View Details

Bob covers some of the key points in his new pamphlet on restoring the Republic of Texas.

Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: Bob’s new pamphlet, COMMON SENSE: The Case for an Independent TexasBob’s recent appearance on Tim Pool’s showBob’s article on opting out of Social Security For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.

View Details

For the libertarian, the way forward is not joining in left-right political boxing matches, but secession. The success of libertarianism is independence from the state’s influence.

Original Article: "Getting to Galt's Gulch: Everyday Secession"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 23 July 2021.

View Details

The United States has long supported the idea of secession and "self-determination" for some faraway colonies. But the US regime is careful to define self-determination so as to deny any chance of secession closer to home.

Original Article: "Why the US Supports Secession for Africans, but Not for Americans"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

In June 2021, Missouri passed a new law stating it would not assist in the enforcement of federal gun laws. Tho and Ryan discuss how states can use strategies like this to resist federal laws within the states. Marijuana legalization and opposition to the Fugitive Slave Acts provide compelling historical examples.

Articles Mentioned in this Episode "Missouri Tells the Feds: We Won't Enforce Your Gun Laws" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_58_01

"When Nullification Works, and When it Doesn’t" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_58_02

"The Feds Collect Most of the Taxes in America—So They Have Most of the Power" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_58_03

"Nebraska and Oklahoma Sue Colorado Over Legal Cannabis" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_58_04

"Nullification Works: Congress Ends Federal Ban on Medical Marijuana" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_58_05

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

View Details

Local nullification offers a practical guide to resisting tyranny in a way that reflects the real wishes of local community members against the ivory-tower mentality of their government “representatives.”

Original Article: "Local Nullification: A Way to Fight Both State and Federal Despots"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

From gun control to abortion, gridlock and polarization in Washington forces policymakers to look to state and local governments as the centers of political reform.

Original Article: "Polarization in Washington Is Forcing Politicians to Decentralize"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Using a recent Dave Smith interview of Michael Malice as a springboard, Bob elaborates his understanding of anarcho-capitalist principles to the thorny issues of vaccine passports, court rulings, and desegregation of the Old South.

Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: Part of the Problem episode from February 20, 2021, “They Don’t Care About You” featuring Michael MaliceBob’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism (featuring his analysis of racism in business)Bob Murphy Show ep. 176, “A Framework for Analyzing Big Tech Censorship.”Bob’s essay against mandatory vaccinationsBob’s Mises U talk, “The Market for Security” (explaining private law enforcement)Khan Academy page on the Rosa Parks bus boycottBob’s critique of an AIER article on private mask mandates

For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.

View Details

Ludwig von Mises understood that locally based governance "follows necessarily from the principle of the rights of man.” And it's why Rothbard supported secession and local governance right down to the most local level possible.

Original Article: "Decentralization Is a Step toward Self-Determination"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Forty years ago, the US had almost no legal concealed carry. Then over just a few decades, eighteen states adopted full-blown "constitutional carry" provisions, with many other states adopting concealed carry provisions as well.

Original Article: "Gun Laws and Decentralization: Lessons from "Constitutional Carry""

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Centralizing political power in the hands of the state government only sets the stage for abuses when a new administration takes over.

Original Article: "State Preemptions of Local Government Are a Bad Thing. Even When Ron DeSantis Does It. "

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

US government agencies like the FBI remain incapable of bringing foreign online scammers to justice. Fortunately, in their place, internet “vigilantes” have answered the call to action.

Original Article: "Scam Baiters Take an Active and Entertaining Role in Fighting Cybercrime'"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

The problem with the European Union is not that it seeks to integrate Europe's economies. The problem comes from attempts to integrate politics as well.

Original Article: "The EU's Woes Are a Political Problem, Not an Economic One"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

A state's borders should change over time to reflect demographic and ideological realities. By denying this, political leaders are effectively saying that the rights of minority populations don't matter.

Original Article: "Some Coloradoans Want to Break Off and Join Wyoming. They Should at Least Get to Vote On It."

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Raghuram Rajan has written a surprising book. Now teaching finance at the University of Chicago, he is an international bureaucrat in good standing, and not a minor one at that; he was chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Yet far from calling for an increase in “global governance,” as one might expect from someone with his background, he wants to strengthen the local, “proximate,” community.

“If more powers are delegated from the state to the local community level,” he tells us, “a community can shape its own future better, and will have more control over it. Some communities will have a specific ethnic concentration, and community culture will gravitate toward that ethnic group’s culture…. A strong local community could satisfy people’s need to live in a cohesive social structure with others of the same culture or religion…. None of this implies exclusion [but]—having monocultures that satisfy the tastes of those who want monocultures is as important as having multicultures.”

The problem with “populist nationalism,” then, is not that its advocates prefer national sovereignty to control by internationally minded elites. They are right to do so, given human nature as it is, and the leaders of the European Union neglected this truth to their cost. “The problem was that no one asked their people how much more Europe they wanted, and how much sovereignty they were willing to give up…. The process of integration was, therefore, profoundly undemocratic…. Ultimately, though, integration succeeds only when there is deep social empathy between people.” But if national sovereignty is better than rule by technocrats, still better is the local community.

Rajan’s defense of the local community is part of the ambitious theory of history suggested by his book’s subtitle. As he sees it, there must be a balance among the market, the state, and the local community. Each is dangerous if unchecked by the other two. In fact, though, the alleged dangers of the market stem largely, if not entirely, from “crony capitalism,” the partnership of the state and business interests to exploit consumers. Why not drastically limit the power of the state to block this unholy alliance rather than trust a strong state to limit the market?

The author’s failure to support the free market fully stems from an assumption that emerges in his history of capitalism in Europe and America. That account is well worth studying, and Rajan’s discussions of the end of feudalism and the rise of the gentry are especially good, though our confidence is a bit shaken by his calling Henri Pirenne, the greatest of all Belgian historians, French.

But matters take a turn for the worse when he reaches the rise of capitalism itself, and here, I regret to say, he has taken on board a controversial Marxist dogma. He rejects Marxist economics, which he calls “mostly wrong,” but he calls Marx “one of the greatest social thinkers of modern times.” It is a particular dogma that he has taken over from Marx and also, in his telling, from Adam Smith, that leads him to advocate a state strong enough to rein in the market. “The inexorable political tendency of a free, unfettered, unregulated market was for the producers, after experiencing the rigors of competition, to attempt cartelization.” He cites as an example John D. Rockefeller’s control of oil refining in the United States through his Standard Oil Company and deems justified the suit against the company under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but he omits any discussion of the revisionist scholarship that indicates Rockefeller often got the worst of battles with competing refineries and that the lawsuit was not a measure to promote competition but rather an attempt to advance the interests of J.P. Morgan and his associates against their rivals. Of this, interested readers will find a full account in Murray Rothbard’s The Progressive Era. It would seem the better part of wisdom not to rely on the state to fight alleged monopolies on grounds of efficiency but instead to curtail the power of the state so that “crony capitalism” cannot gain a foothold.

Despite his wrong path on this issue, though, the book on the whole is excellent and Rajan makes many useful points. We hear much today about the danger that automation will drive massive numbers of people out of work. Rajan is appropriately skeptical. Automation, like past innovations, can bring some jobs to an end, but this frees up labor to go elsewhere. “Routine jobs have been automated out of existence for decades now, regardless of whether the jobs required skills or not. Banks had hundreds of thousands of cashiers taking in and paying out cash, as well as counting it at the end of the day…. Automated teller machines (ATMs) and cash-counting machines displaced them…. Yet, if anything, employment in banking has gone up as more, cheaper, bank branches are opened, and tellers morph into relationship managers advising retail customers on their loan options and their investment portfolios.”

Some of those most fearful of automation, and others as well, have proposed a universal basic income (UBI) that would free people of the need to work by grants of sufficient money to live a life of leisure. Rajan raises against this proposal a devastating objection: “UBI is an all-or-nothing scheme, and as such, suffers from the traditional difficulties associated with such a scheme. UBI essentially assumes that most people will not have a job, and there will be no point in them searching for one or attempting to retrain themselves since no new jobs will be possible. It is a counsel of despair not just for job seekers but also for job creators, because after UBI is implemented, any new job will have to be more attractive in pay and responsibilities than paid leisure, a difficult line to cross.”

Another important discussion in the book returns us to the local community. Some have objected on egalitarian grounds to programs that stress community control. Given the commanding importance for one’s future income and social status of going to the “right” university, with the Ivy League schools at the top, won’t people who are fairly well off but who cannot afford the top private schools move to neighborhoods with “good” public schools? By doing so, it is claimed, they give their children an unfair advantage over children from poor families, because these families cannot afford housing in the expensive neighborhoods.

Rajan, who is not without egalitarian sympathies, for the most part takes this to be a genuine problem that he is at pains to mitigate. But in one place, he challenges directly one of the key myths of our time. University education is vastly overrated, and many children would do better with less compulsory schooling: “Companies seem to be rating jobs as requiring higher credentials simply because schools are not teaching basic skills well…. International assessments seem to verify the low average quality of US schooling…. The harm done is worse than simply too much time spent by students who do not need degrees acquiring them at great expense, firms over-paying for qualifications they do not need, and a higher-education system that consumes enormous resources. It causes professions to inflate their own minimum credential requirements as they try to gain in prestige…”

Rajan does not pursue the full implications of this challenge, but that he mentions the issue at all is a testament to the wisdom of his book.

View Details

Rajan does not pursue the full implications of this challenge, but that he mentions the issue at all is a testament to the wisdom of his book.

View Details

Not only will these amendments reduce the abuse of emergency declarations, but they will also help to decentralize power within Pennsylvania. While COVID-19 has allowed the executive branch to run wild, Pennsylvania is actually structured in a way that makes the decentralization of power easier.

Original Article: "Pennsylvanians May Amend Constitution to Stop Endless Lockdowns"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

This week's clash over federal attempts to control tribal drilling rights highlights the importance of tribal sovereignty in limiting federal power.

Original Article: "Why the Utes Opposed Biden's Plans to Limit Oil Drilling"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

America’s founders did not envision the federal government as the domineering senior partner in almost everything. What was once best described as “sovereign States, united solely for specified joint purposes” has been largely eviscerated.

Original Article: "Why Governments Want More Centralization—and Less Federalism"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Expect opponents of secession and decentralization to start claiming that neither option is acceptable because any big change to the status quo could endanger American "strength" in foreign policy. Don't listen to them.

Original Article: "Halfway to Secession: Unity on Foreign Policy, Disunity on Domestic Policy"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Joe Biden says: "I will work as hard for those who didn't vote for me as those who did." Does anyone actually believe that?

Original Article: "Red and Blue States: It's Time for a Multistate Solution".

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

Decentralized societies that value local customs, institutions, and governments are obstacles to the expansion of the regime's power. Not surprisingly, central governments do all they can to destroy this.

Original Article: "Why Governments Hate Decentralization and 'Local Control'"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

View Details

[Excerpt from a talk by the same name delivered at the Mises Institute’s annual Supporters Summit, Jekyll Island, Georgia, October 9, 2020.]

I’d like to talk to you this afternoon about two classes of Americans, and it may not be the two classes you think of, but nonetheless, there are two distinct classes in America, and we have to break up, and we have to break up sooner rather than later.

A nation that believes in itself and its future, a nation that means to stress the sure feeling that its members are bound to one another not merely by accident of birth but also by the common possession of a culture that is valuable above all to each of them, would necessarily be able to remain unperturbed when it saw individual persons shift to other nations. A people conscious of its own worth would refrain from forcibly detaining those who wanted to move away and from forcibly incorporating into the national community those who were not joining it of their own free will. To let the attractive force of its own culture prove itself in free competition with other peoples—that alone is worthy of a proud nation, that alone would be true national and cultural policy. The means of power and of political rule were in no way necessary for that.

Ludwig von Mises wrote this about a hundred years ago and it rings absolutely as true today as the day he wrote it and it’s all about the idea of letting people go if they want to form a different political union or political entity. At the end he mentions true national and cultural policy. And so I would ask all of you today to consider: Is America a nation at this point? I would argue no. Is it even a country? Barely. Or is it, as Ilana Mercer calls it, Walmart with nukes? And that’s what America feels like very much today. It feels like we’re all living in one big federal subdivision, doesn’t it?

Last night I mentioned that about a hundred years ago in the interwar period Mises wrote his great trilogy, three books, remarkable books: Nation, State, and Economy first, then Socialism, then Liberalism, all within a ten-year span. These three remarkable books basically laid out a blueprint for both organizing society in a prosperous and peaceful way and also a warning in Socialism about how to destroy it. Turns out it’s a lot easier to destroy than build.

Mises lays out his conception of what a liberal nationhood might look like. It’s rooted in property, of course, and rigorous self-determination at home, and what this means is that he’s always stressing the right of secession, back then, for political, linguistic, ethnic, economic minorities. They always have the right to secede, and of course, coming out of the patchwork of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and in Europe, he understood what it meant to be a linguistic minority in particular. So, for Mises, any kind of nation, any kind of real nationalism, liberal nationalism, requires laissez-faire at home, of course. It requires free trade with your neighbors, to avoid a tendency toward war and autarchy, and it requires a noninterventionist foreign policy to avoid war and empire.

When we think of these three books, we can only imagine what the West and what America might look like today if these books had been read and absorbed broadly at the time. If Western governments had been even somewhat reasonable, let’s say over the past century, consuming, let’s say, only 10 or 15 percent of private wealth in taxes, maintaining just somewhat reasonable currencies backed by gold, mostly staying out of education and banking and medicine, and most of all avoiding supernational wars and military entanglements. If governments had just been somewhat reasonable in the West, we might still live in a more gilded era, like Mises once enjoyed in Vienna, but with all the unimaginable benefits of our technology and material advances today.

The truth is that liberalism didn’t hold and we have to be honest with ourselves about it. It didn’t hold in the West, and it never took root in the full Misesian sense anywhere, at least not for long, and that’s why all of us are here today. If the world had listened to Mises even somewhat, if Western states had committed to the prescription of sound money, markets, peace, all of our libertarian anarcho-capitalist theory might have been completely unnecessary. We might be sitting here today just sort of grumbling about potholes and local property taxes and local schools. Instead, we’re here talking about the state as an existential threat to civilization. So, two very different scenarios. But again, the world didn’t listen to Mises; that’s why it got Rothbard and Hoppe, by the way.

One of the great progressive achievements of the last hundred years, which goes almost totally unremarked today, goes to the title of my talk: the degree to which the Imposers, we can call them, have been able to portray themselves as the Imposed Upon. It’s absolutely uncanny. We see it in every aspect of American society and every aspect of our politics today. We see it in the presidential election; we see it with the culture wars; we see it in academia in spades; we see it with Antifa in the streets. If we think about just the last hundred years since Mises wrote these three books—the past century in America—progressives of all stripes, of all political parties, I want to add, what have they given us? They’ve given us two world wars, quagmires in Korea and Vietnam, endless Middle East wars in Iraq, Afghanistan—Yemen maybe is coming soon, Iran, who knows? They imposed these enormous welfare schemes that Amity Shlaes has written so much about in the form of the New Deal and Great Society programs, which have ruined how many untold lives. They created all these alphabet soup federal agencies and departments to spy on us, tax us infinitely, regulate every aspect of our lives. And they built the military-industrial complex and the state media complex and the state education complex. They legislated violations of basic human property rights, which would absolutely shock our great grandfathers if they were alive, all with the courts nodding along in their acquiescence. And to pay for it all, they gave us central banking—the Federal Reserve System hatched up, schemed right here on this island, in November of 1910. What do they, the Imposers, call this? They call it liberalism. If you oppose it, they call you a reactionary.

To be a libertarian today is to be a reactionary against the state degradations and depredations and impositions of the twentieth century. The political class, either the Imposers themselves or their agents, what has the political class gotten us? Well, they managed to ruin peace, they managed to ruin diplomacy, money, banking, education, medicine, not to mention, along the way, culture, civility, and goodwill. And if you oppose the Imposers and the elites, they call you a populist for it. So, call me a populist.

All of this, of course, flows from the Imposers, from their positive rights worldview which animates them. It animates everything they do and that’s why they’re able to scream at Rand Paul, for example, for denying them healthcare. Once you accept a positive rights view of the world, then anyone who doesn’t go along with your program is taking from you, and this is how they see the world, the Imposers. If the twentieth century represents a triumph of liberalism, I’d hate to see illiberalism.

We all know what the Imposers have in store for us now in the fledgling twenty-first century. And I would add, as an aside, a good way to tell a Beltway person from a Rothbardian is to ask them the simple question of whether they consider the twentieth century in the West a triumph of liberalism or not. I think most Rothbardians would say it was not, and I think most Beltway types would say it was. They consider the twentieth century some sort of victory for liberalism.

So, what that got us, along with all of these other problems is, of course, a huge divide in society. What they’ve gotten us is an almost unbelievable and epic divide in society between the Imposers and the Imposed Upon. How divided are we and along what kind of lines?

This was a nice little vignette, which took place the other day on Twitter. We have Chris Hayes, from MSNBC, who says, Well, you know with covid, “the most responsible way to deal with all these people”—that sounds like Seinfeld, “those people”—“if we survive this, is some kind of truth and reconciliation commission.” Wow, that sounds fun. I suspect many of us in the room would be candidates for that. I don’t know if there’s boxcars outside. So he represents the progressive left in America today. And then along comes our friend from the neoconservative right, the great Bill Kristol, with whom we’ve all had enough but we always get more. I mean, this guy does not go away. He’s like when you take the fish oil capsule at seven in the morning, and then at noon, that’s Bill Kristol. So, he says, “How about truth and no reconciliation?”

The degree of open contempt and hatred that these lunatics have for us has in part been exposed by Trump and Trumpism. And to that extent we owe Trump a degree of gratitude for letting us see them for what they truly are. I would ask either one of these gentlemen: If you truly believe, let’s say, 40 percent of the United States is beyond redemption, irredeemable, what does that mean? What do you propose doing with them? Does that mean some sort of reeducation camp? Presumably it means that either you separate from them somehow or you vanquish them, and by vanquish, that could be economically, politically, or, in the horrific scenario which we’ve seen repeated throughout history, even physically.

The divide we have in this country today is not so simple as saying blue and red states or counties, Republicans and Democrats, or liberals and conservatives, or even by class. It’s a little more complicated than that. There’s a company out there called Survey Monkey, which took in a lot of data after the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. There was a big Washington Post story using this, and they grouped it in a bunch of very interesting ways. I wonder how many people in this room were aware of some of these divides in American culture.

Sadly, there’s a huge divide along racial lines in voting patterns. If only white people had voted in the 2016 election, Trump would have won forty-one states and if only nonwhite people had voted, Hillary Clinton would have won forty-seven states. I view this as basically a testament to the Democrat’s ability to sell some kind of sick victimhood and dependency and to the Republican’s failure to sell any sense of real ownership or opportunity or capitalism. But nonetheless, that’s the divide. It’s real.

How about union members? If only union member households—in other words, a household with at least one union member—had voted, Hillary Clinton would have won forty states. And if no union members, Donald Trump would have won thirty-seven.

When we get into religion, things get even more stark. What about households that claim that the inhabitants are either atheists or no particular religion? Hillary Clinton would have won at least forty-six states, if only nonreligious people had voted. How about if households which claim Protestant or Catholic membership would have been the sole voters? Trump would have won forty-five states. Evangelical voters only, Trump would have won forty-seven states. People who attend church weekly, Trump would have won forty-eight states. People who seldom or never attend church or synagogue, Hillary Clinton would have won forty-three states.

t strikes me as we go through some of these numbers that these divides are awfully hard to overcome politically. I’m not sure how you do that. How about unmarried people? Hillary Clinton would have won thirty-nine states if only unmarried people had voted. Trump would have won forty-three states if only married people had voted, another huge quiet cultural and political gap in this country.

You’ve heard a lot about urban versus rural voters; it’s a motif which keeps coming up again and again. For purposes of the Survey Monkey data, an urban county is one with greater than 530 voters per square mile and a rural county is one with fewer than ninety voters per square mile. Again, only urban counties vote, Hillary Clinton wins forty states. Only rural voters vote, Donald Trump wins forty-seven states.

The last stat I’ll throw out is gun-owning households. (I know that none of you own firearms, but there are people who do. They lock them up and just shoot deer with them. They don’t have Uzis, or modified weapons....And I know there’s no The last stat I’ll throw out is gun-owning households. (I know that none of you own firearms, but there are people who do. They lock them up and just shoot deer with them. They don’t have Uzis, or modified weapons....And I know there’s no weapons in this room today; I feel comfortable with that statement.) If only gun-owning households voted, Donald Trump wins forty-nine states. Guess which one he loses? The only one he loses is Bernie Sanders’s Vermont, because I think up there you just have a gun anyway just because you’re in Vermont but you vote for Bernie. So, if households with no firearms of any kind were the sole voters in America, Hillary Clinton also wins forty-nine states and guess which one she loses? West Virginia, another anomaly.

The point here is that these kinds of divides and problems cannot be neatly solved by politics, especially national politics, and if you think about them, they don’t cleave neatly along geographic lines. This isn’t the Mason-Dixon line. These kinds of divides exist in every state, they exist within counties. If you go to California, which we all think of as a deep blue state, then go twenty miles inland. You know what it is? It’s Trump flags, it’s country music, and it’s Mexican rancheros. That’s what it is. We don’t have the Mason-Dixon line in America in 2020. And more importantly, what we have to understand is: even if you could win some national election, if you could somehow get 51 percent of the voters to vote for a candidate like a Rand Paul, it doesn’t really matter, because hearts and minds haven’t changed. Politically vanquished people never really go away. This is what we have to understand; this is why we have to break up.

A couple of years ago, Bloomberg did some polling in the former Soviet Union, now Russia. There are millions of Russians, especially elderly Russians, who still absolutely pine for the Soviet days when they knew what their job was, they didn’t have to pay for their apartment, etc. Seventy percent of those people have overall a generally beneficial view about Stalin, in 2019. They view him as the great reformer who helped save their country from the Nazis, etc. In other words, despite all the historical examples that the twentieth century provided us, despite the fall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite all of the obvious benefits of capitalism, there is still a significant amount of nostalgia for the old system. Politically vanquished people don’t just go away. And the Hillary Clinton people thought that the deplorables were going to do just that. They thought they were dying, they thought they were aging out, and they thought there were fewer of them than there were, and that’s what happened in 2016 and that sent the entire country into basically some kind of psychosis, which we’re still suffering under today.

I know the concept of decentralization is one that’s obvious and clear to all of you. I know secession seems like a tough go, but I want to just throw out to you some happy facts, things that are happening slowly right under our noses, some very decentralist impulses which are at work. Of course, they have been absolutely intensified by the covid issue and by these terrible riots which have been roiling across the United States this summer and now into the fall. As it turns out, all crises happen to be local. What do I mean by that?

One beautiful thing about covid is that it has done further damage to our sort of credulousness when it comes to so-called authorities. Neither the UN nor the World Health Organization nor our own CDC has been able to project any sort of authority whatsoever amongst people. They have been able to drive no consensus. As a result, we’ve had vastly different approaches to covid across international lines and even within our fifty states, and even within some areas within various cities.

No central authority was able to sort of seize it and boss everyone around and tell everyone what to do. Of course, outlets like the New York Times tried to do that, but that’s just in the United States. It’s been absolutely fascinating to watch how places like Singapore and Hong Kong and Sweden have been relatively open and places like the province in China where it happened were drastically locked down. Some places like San Francisco have been drastically locked down, so there’ve been different approaches in this decentralized effort. And none of this is because people woke up one day and said ideologically, Wow, maybe we should try a more decentralized approach. No, it’s just what naturally happens in crises.

Even the vaunted Schengen Area Agreement in Europe, which allows free travel between the member countries, immediately broke down. All of a sudden, a German is a German again and a Frenchman is a Frenchman, and you can’t even drive across. I don’t think that Americans can drive or fly into Canada right now, even as we speak, with the liberal—supposedly liberal—Trudeau administration up there.

It turns out that when it comes to a crisis, things really get local very, very quickly. No matter who you are, even if you’re Bill Gates and you can buy ten vacation houses and go to New Zealand on your yacht, you have to be somewhere physically; you have to exist in an analog world, and that means you need calories, you need kilowatts of energy and air conditioning coming into your home or your abode, you might need some healthcare or some prescription drugs, and all of this becomes unavoidable in a crisis. You have to be somewhere. Even Jeff Bezos had a bunch of protestors surrounding his house, his swanky house in DC. Now I don’t know if he happened to be there at the time, but the point is even Jeff Bezos could conceivably be contained in his home by a mob that you can’t escape. This idea that we’re now on this sort of new global happy plane is being sorely tested, I think, by covid. I think that the idea of political globalism—the bad kind of globalism—is showing its strain. I think it’s cracking very badly.

Let’s talk about the great relocation that’s happening in America, this incredible movement of people out of cities. What’s the charm of a New York, a Manhattan, or a Chicago without the restaurants, and the theaters, and the food, and the museums? High rent, high crime, no fun? We find that a lot of younger people are starting to rethink things. I think this form of de facto secession away from these big cities, which tend to be very, very left-wing in orientation, is a wonderful development to see, because some of that political power that the big cities tend to hold is going to be attenuated. Atlanta tends to control Georgia; Nashville increasingly controls Tennessee. We see this in a lot of states. Las Vegas controls Nevada. But if people start to move away from these big cities, then some of that political power similarly is going to go with them.

This decentralist impulse is really the untold story of the twenty-first century: we see it in companies in the way they organize and manage their teams. Now we see all kinds of teleworking (which I think is a mixed bag, but nonetheless it’s happening, one way or another). Look at distribution systems, what used to be the old hub-and-spoke model of getting your products, like the JCPenney catalogue, or how you got a sweater forty years ago. We’re now looking at companies like Amazon that have a very decentralized system of spider webs. The distribution of goods and services is becoming radically decentralized.

How do we obtain information? It wasn’t that long ago, thirty years or so, you had to go to your local mall and they might have Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose or John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society. They didn’t have Rothbard. So, libraries and universities and professors were almost kind of like the new versions of monks. They were the literate ones, and you had to go to them to get information. But that’s no longer the case. You have something in your pocket the size of a deck of cards that has basically all of human history on it. That’s hugely decentralizing.

What we’re seeing right now in the education revolution is just absolutely phenomenal. Even before covid came along we had Khan Academy and all kinds of new platforms springing up. We had the student loan debt crisis. We had parents questioning the value of sending their kids to school for $40,000 a year so that they can get a degree which doesn’t get them a job and then when they come home after those four years they hate your guts. It turns out that that’s not such a good value proposition.

Money and banking itself is becoming increasingly decentralized. We have all kinds of payment gateways now. We have systems like PayPal, we have bitcoin, and so really it’s just that top layer of banking that is happening at major banks.

All of these things are happy facts and we ought to be celebrating and thinking about them when we consider the political landscape.

I’m not so sure that what matters for our immediate future is whether Trump or Biden wins. We all know what Biden is and what he will do. We don’t know what the hell Trump is or what he will do. That’s what it means to be Trump. But nonetheless, I think some of these impulses which are happening are inexorable. I’m not sure that even a Kamala Harris or a Joe Biden can stop them. We ought to celebrate that.

What’s interesting is that the one thing which still seems awfully centralized in our world is the political world. In other words, in all these other areas of life, all these things I’ve just been mentioning, decentralization is something that’s happening naturally, it’s happening by market force, it’s happening inexorably, and it’s happening by free choice of people. But the one area out of our lives where we still accept gross centralization, and all the inefficiencies it brings, is government.

Many things that used to be decided at the city level are now decided at the regional or the state level. Things that used to be decided at the state level, decided at the federal level—and then sometimes even at the international level. That’s really the political story of the twentieth century, the centralization of politics at higher and higher levels, which is of course antidemocratic, even though all of these people are telling us about our sacred democracy. Every level of government that’s further removed from you is attenuated by definition, is less democratic, because your input and your consent, so-called, is less and less meaningful. But I wonder if there aren’t even some hopeful signs when it comes to politics and the decentralization of political power.

At an event last fall in Vienna, Austria, Hans-Hermann Hoppe was on a panel, and one thing that struck me about what he said was, if you look at the nationalist impulses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the patchwork of former Europe came together—if you think of Germany as all these principalities and regions, and Bavaria and Prussia, these areas came together. He said nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth century was mostly a centralizing impulse. That’s what nationalism meant. When it becomes belligerent and spills over its borders, you get aggressive, you get Nazi Germany. But he said in the twenty-first century, from his perspective, nationalist movements tend to be decentralist. In other words, they’re moving away from this sort of global government model which we all thought was going to be our future in the late twentieth century.

Hoppe says, If we look at things like the Brexit vote, if we look at what’s happening in countries like Poland and Hungary, if we look at Catalonia—the Catalonian secession movement in Barcelona in the Catalonian region of Spain—these tend to be breakaway decentralist secessionist movements. That’s the difference between some of the national movements of today versus yesteryear. And I think this is coming soon to a city near you in the United States.

This kind of talk is really becoming reality. Ryan McMaken, who is the editor of mises.org, just wrote an article about how even the mainstream publications now are talking quite openly and seriously about secession, and I think that’s because on some level, nervously, they still think Trump could win. I think that’s what’s driving it.

There have been very serious people on both left and right, not wild-eyed radicals like me, who have been talking about this for the last several years. Frank Buckley, a law professor at George Mason University—oh, we can’t say that anymore, sorry; it’s GMU. It turns out George Mason had a slave or two. Buckley wrote a very serious book about what secession might look like just a year ago. And this is a sober conservative guy. Similarly, Angelo Codevilla, who writes for the Claremont Institute, a retired political science professor at Boston University, wrote an article back in 2016 called “The Cold Civil War.” You can find it at Claremont.org. Again, a very sober, serious conservative, the kind of guy who still uses the lexicon and things like statecraft; you know what I mean. And they’re talking about this. Similarly, people at places on the left, at places like the New Republic and The Nation, are talking about this like never before. Gavin Newsom, governor of California, has applied the term nation-state to his own state.

What happens in the fall, in a month, if somehow, some way Trump manages to win this election—I don’t know what that’s going to look like. I think we are going to see, first of all, an outpouring of grief and psychosis and outright violence from a significant portion of the country that we’re just not prepared for. But when that subsides, you’re going to simply see blue state governors saying, No, we’re walking away. The sanctuary-city talk will become more and more pronounced, and I think that’ll be a beautiful and helpful thing for this country.

Now, the flip side—and when I say who wins, I should say who’s actually installed in January; we don’t know anything about these ballots and postal delivery carriers dropping them in sewers or whatever it might be. But whoever wins—if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are installed—I think what you’re going to see is nothing short of a new Reconstruction in America. I think you are going to see outright and open attempts, gleeful attempts in the media class to impose themselves on the red states and punish them. Not only for having the audacity to put Donald Trump in the White House instead of Hillary Clinton—who we all knew was going to win—but more importantly on a more macro level, for coming along and interrupting that arc of history that progressives believe in so deeply: that we’re always improving and that we’re always getting better, the past is always bad and retrograde. To have that upended by Trump is a sin which they still haven’t gotten over.

If Biden and Kamala Harris win, the sales tax deduction for state taxes will be immediately reintroduced so that those blue states can start deducting things again. I think you’ll see it in myriad ways. You will see sort of an outpouring, a collective outpouring from the Left that wants to use the state as sort of a laser focus, you know, to bludgeon us, the rest of us. And that, in turn, will cause the red state folks and the red state voters to be thinking very seriously about an exit strategy. I wish I could give you something more hopeful than that, because as I mentioned before, the problem here is that nothing goes along neat geographic lines. But the lines are there nonetheless, and we can’t ignore them.

I’ll close with this: Tom Woods, our friend who spoke earlier, he reminds us political arrangements exist to serve us, not the other way around. Who the hell said that we have to put up with all of this? Can we change ours without bloodshed? That’s the question of the twenty-first century. I think the question of the twentieth century was socialism versus property. I think the question of the twenty-first century is centralized versus decentralized. So, in postpersuasion America, where we seem to live, it’s not just a matter of intellectual error. There’s more to it than that. It’s not just about convincing academics and journalists and politicians that our cause is right and you should agree with us. Because it’s also about self-interest and power. They don’t see for themselves a path to greater self-interest and a path to greater power in the kind of society which all of us in this room would prefer to live in, and they’re not just going to let us have it without some effort on our part. And I hope very strongly that that path does not involve bloodshed.

There is reason for optimism: there is a decentralist impulse that is working its way across the world. It’s coming to America, and I think that is where we have to put our hopes and our efforts.

View Details

"Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided…. We’re less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War."

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

Original Article: "The Benefits of Secession Are Becoming Increasingly Obvious".

View Details

Lawyer and libertarian theorist Stephan Kinsella joins the show to discuss the middle chapters of Hoppe's Democracy, The God That Failed—in particular dealing with "desocialization" of collective property, immigration, and free trade. These are the most controversial and widely-discussed parts of the book, and Kinsella provides a fascinating analysis of property vs. wealth, the problems with public ownership and forced integration, and the concept of rule-setting for state property. And don't miss the final part of the show for his explanation of "Hoppephobia."

Kinsella's article on LewRockwell.com: "A Simple Libertarian Argument Against Unrestricted Immigration and Open Borders"

Read Stephan Kinsella's Against Intellectual Property at Mises.org/KinsellaBook

Use the code HAPOD for a discount on Democracy: The God That Failed from our bookstore: Mises.org/BuyHoppe

View Details

With an ugly presidential election just three weeks away, we dive into Hans Hoppe's classic Democracy: The God That Failed to puncture some of the myths surrounding democracy and voting. Jayant Bhandari joins the show to discuss Hoppe's controversial thesis concerning monarchy and democracy, time preference and its manifestation in the two systems, the forces constraining monarchs, and the terrible incentives created for democratic rulers. This is a must-listen show for anyone interested in Hoppe's most famous work and its application to the problems western states face today.

Find more from Jayant Bhandari on his website (JayantGhandari.com) and his Twitter account (@JayantBhandari5).

Use the code HAPOD for a discount on Democracy: The God That Failed from our bookstore: Mises.org/BuyHoppe

View Details

In Brazil, the most effective reforms seem to be accumulating at the state and local levels. There has been real success in pushing back against tax increases and more.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

Original Article: "Hoppe's Localist, Decentralist Strategy Is Working in Brazil".

View Details

Europe needs more than ever the principles that made it successful: decentralization, free trade, and sound markets.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "The EU's Drive toward Political Centralization Will Doom Its Economy".

View Details

For the foreseeable future, war between Armenia and Azerbaijan will be on the table, occasionally turning hot, just as it has in the last weeks. This conflict has no peaceful solution possible other than the one offered by Ludwig von Mises.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "Political Self-Determination and the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict".

View Details

Even if the idea of democracy were a good one, there is a myriad of problems that come with translating the will of the voters into "representation" in political institutions.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "Three Reasons Representative Democracy Doesn't Work".

View Details

The Supreme Court this week limited a state government's control over what is supposed to be a sovereign Indian tribe. The next step lies in limiting federal control over the tribe also.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "What the Supreme Court Got Right in Its Indian Tribe Ruling".

View Details

EU membership is a sort of bait-and-switch for states that were sold on membership as an opportunity to join a free trade bloc and a chance to participate in a more cooperative Europe.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "Why the EU Keeps Fighting Brexit".

View Details

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 17 July 2020.

View Details

The Republic of Genoa provides an example of how a small "state" managed to defend itself against much larger states using military resources that were overwhelmingly owned and controlled by private parties.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "Private Defense in the History of Genoa".

View Details

Who has the best claim to government property?

Narrated by Daniella Bassi.

Original Article: "Seattle's CHAZ: Homesteaders or Illegal Squatters?".

View Details

COVID-19 is not really a "national" issue. It has affected different areas in very different ways.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "New York: The Corona Crisis Shows the Benefits of Localism Yet Again"

View Details

A high German court recently ruled that the European Central Bank has overstepped the bounds of its power. The angry response from high-ranking European bureaucrats tells us a lot about what they want for the EU.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "The German Court's Unexpected Blow to the ECB"

View Details

The lockdowns of the past month have not been conducive to the common good. While they have saved the lives of many people, they have also endangered—and are still endangering—the lives and livelihoods of many others. They have created a new and dangerous political precedent.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "A Protest from France"

View Details

Thanks to the growth of the state over time, political stakes have become much higher, and groups fear that they will be crushed by the other side if they lose. Crisis-induced cohesion is not a silver bullet, but rather a ticking time bomb.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "This Crisis Will Not Bring Americans Together and Maybe That Is a Good Thing"

View Details

So far, when it comes to disarming the population, governments haven't been quite as terrible as one might have predicted during the COVID-19 panic.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "Gun Control: Americans Have Been Lucky during the COVID-19 Panic, but It's Still a Toss-Up"

View Details

The lasting and far-reaching harms caused by this authoritarian precedent far outweigh those caused by the COVID-19 virus. The American people must decide for themselves how and when to reopen society and return to their daily lives.

Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

Original Article: "End the Shutdown"

View Details

Tho Bishop joins David Gornoski on A Neighbor's Choice to discuss China's actions and the US government's attacks against small businesses.

View Details

Against the Left explores something basic to libertarianism that many people today have forgotten. As everyone knows, libertarians view the State and the individual as fundamentally opposed. People who freely interact in the market create on their own a wonderful society that advances progress.

In Against the Left, we examine some key battlegrounds in the struggle to preserve and advance real libertarianism against its enemies. These include the assault on the family, civil rights and "disabilities," immigration, environmentalism, economic egalitarianism, and the left-libertarian imposters who want to take libertarianism away from us.

View Details

F.H. Buckley, a Canadian lawyer, political philosopher, and economist who now teaches at the Scalia School of Law at George Mason University, has written a book that challenges conventional wisdom and is all the better for that. America, he tells us, is so bitterly divided that we should consider breaking it up into several separate countries. To do so would not be without risk, but it has many advantages. People tend to be happier in smaller countries, and as Buckley makes clear, this is no accident.

One might object that political discord is hardly new in American history, but, aside from the Civil War, this has not resulted in a breakup of our nation. Why should things be different now? Buckley answers that

we’re less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War, divided by politics, religion and culture. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we are already divided into two nations just as much as in 1861. The contempt for opponents, the Twitter mobs, online shaming and no-platforming, the growing tolerance of violence—it all suggests we’d be happier in separate countries. The split in America includes but is not confined to the division between North and South, and some Southerners, including the philosopher Don Livingston, call for secession as a way to preserve the distinctive values of the South. That is a belief long prevalent there, and Buckley cites the nineteenth-century South Carolina lawyer James Pettigru, who thought that his state was “too small for a republic but too large for an insane asylum.”

Even if secession has much to be said for it, isn’t it unconstitutional? Buckley maintains that it is far from clear that it is. An influential argument against secession is found in Texas v. White (1869). Chief Justice Salmon Chase said that the Constitution has as its purpose to form a “more perfect” union than the one already existing under the Articles of Confederation, which was already “perpetual.” For that reason, the Constitution is also perpetual and indissoluble.

Buckley shows that this was by no means the stance taken by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. They readily contemplated the breakup of the United States into separate republics:

The delegates thought of the government under the Articles of Confederation, and then under the Constitution they were drafting, as a compact among thirteen states, and they believed that when one state thought its rights had been traduced by the federal government, it could withdraw from the compact, even as one party can rescind a contract when the other party has breached it. That’s what Madison argued. . . .Virginia’s ratification of the Constitution was expressly conditioned on a right of secession. How then could it be deemed unconstitutional? Not everything that is constitutional is desirable. Should we regard secession as a regrettable necessity, or is it rather a positive good? Buckley shows that there is much to be said for the latter view. “When we look at the evidence from SWB [subjective well-being studies] we find that [Roger] Sherman was right, along with Montesquieu and Rousseau, while Hume and Madison were wrong. People in small countries are happier. Bigness is badness.” By the way, Buckley holds that Roger Sherman was more influential than Madison at the Constitutional Convention. Madison’s nationalist proposals were rejected.

Why are people happier is small states? For one thing,

big states are more corrupt. As Montesquieu and Rousseau argued, there’s a greater sense of solidarity in smaller states, such as Finland, where people are less diverse and more trusting of each other. . . .Montesquieu was also right in thinking that small countries won’t have so many wasteful interest groups as larger ones. In sum, governments will be more attuned to the interests of their citizens in smaller states. The case is not all on one side. Sometimes local governments are corrupt, and the federal government brings them to justice.

Again we’re looking at tradeoffs. If a state seceded from the United States, its citizens would lose the benefit of the federal government’s oversight of local criminal corruption. On the other hand, being smaller, the seceding state would be less affected by noncriminal corruption. . . .There would be fewer dollars in play, and a smaller set of interest groups and dollars diverting public dollars to their private ends through legal means. And it’s the noncriminal corruption that’s ordinarily more troubling. To my mind, Buckley’s best argument that small governments are better than large ones has to do with the military. Large states like to “throw their weight around,” and the United Sates, the largest military empire in world history, is a prime offender.

The costs of a large military, in money and in lives, might be acceptable if you like a strong military for its own sake, and regional or world dominance. So then you might favor a large country with a huge population. But if you’re not sure that military glory is worth the cost, you might prefer a small state, with a modest military budget. And that might be an argument for secession. Imagine what the last fifty years of history would have looked like if America had been split into two or three different countries. There would likely have been no Vietnam War and almost certainly no second Iraq war. Buckley also argues that small states are more likely to be free than large ones, though this is not always the case.

If bigness invites rule by a dictator, dictators also like bigness. With greater size comes grander palaces and more power to push neighbors around. . . .[S]ecession would serve to bring the government closer to the people, and in so doing it would make people freer. Small states also tend to be wealthier than large states, though again the evidence is not all on one side.

The evidence. . .suggests that bigness is not an economic advantage for a country. . . .The advantages of bigness, in terms of things like internal free trade, don’t appear to outweigh the disadvantages. . . .Like a huge conglomerate whose managers are incompetent to oversee its varied divisions, an overlarge country wastes resources because its officials can’t govern efficiently. To some extent, in my view unfortunately, Buckley retreats in the last part of the book from full support for secession. He calls for “secession lite,” that is to say, devolution of power to the states and localities, while retaining in place the federal government. I wish he had moved in the other direction and explored the ways people can solve their problems without resort to the state. If “Tiebout competition” between states is good, why is not competition between private individuals and firms even better?

Buckley would I am sure have a forceful answer to this challenge. All friends of freedom can learn a great deal from this outstanding book.

View Details

In attempting to promote the libertarian viewpoint, particularly in its anarchic variety, one is faced with a variety of problems. Some problems are theoretical and are well treated in the comprehensive literature;A division may be drawn between libertarians and nonlibertarians, with nonlibertarians running the gamut from ultraconservative Individualists to ultrasocialist statists. The keenest dispute, however, is within the libertarian camp between those libertarians who espouse anarchism (such as Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe) and those who do not (such as Ludwig von Mises and Tibor Machan). In The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, Mises writes as follows:peaceful human cooperation…cannot exist without a social apparatus of coercion and compulsion, i.e., without a government. The evils of violence, robbery, and murder can be prevented only by an institution that itself, whenever needed, resorts to the very methods of acting for the prevention of which it is established. There emerges a distinction between the illegal employment of violence and the legitimate recourse to it. In cognizance of this fact some people have called government an evil, although admitting that it is a necessary evil. However, what is required to attain an end sought and considered as beneficial is not an evil in the moral connotation of this term, but a means, the price to be paid for it. Yet that fact remains that actions that are deemed highly objectionable and criminal when perpetrated by “unauthorized” individuals are approved when committed by the ‘authorities. (pp. 59–60) other problems, however, are practical or rhetorical and, while the theoretical problems (and their solution) are intrinsically the more important, it is vital that the practical/rhetorical problems be overcome if the theoretical points are to get a fair hearing.See the Mises Economics Blog on Polycentric Law, July 2005 to January 2007. http://blog.mises.org/archives/003803.asp. As human beings, we perceive and understand in accordance with our needs, our desires and our interests.Quidquid recipitur recipitur secundum modum recipientis—“whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.” No matter how marvellous a theory may be, it is useless if its intended audience is unreceptive. The point of rhetoric, then, is to open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf so that they may see and hear.

THE GRIP OF MYTH Someday I’d like to write a book entitled Things We All Know That Just Ain’t So! Included in this book will be the following: There was a time when everybody believed the world was flat—maybe, but not any half-educated person in the last two thousand years. The Barbarians brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages. No, they didn’t, at least not without significant help from the Romans. Galileo was an apostle of reason, brutally treated by a tyrannical and obscurantist Church. He wasn’t and it didn’t. These “facts,” however misguided, are refutable in principle. However, some of our epistemic structures go deeper and are more difficult to dislodge.

Our patterns of belief are constituted by myth. As I use the term “myth,” it is not a euphemistic way of saying that something is untrue but simply a way of naming the foundational narratives, the ultimate framing devices, in the context of which our humdrum beliefs and practices find their place. Such myths, whatever their ultimate truth, cannot be called into question from within—from that point of view, their falsity is literally unthinkable. The English philosopher R. G. Collingwood referred to such a set of such myths as “absolute presuppositions” (Collingwood 1940); similarly, Wittgenstein recognized a functional class of propositions as “standing fast” in relation to any given mode of thought (Wittgenstein 1969, passim). Because we see through (by means of) myths, we find it difficult to see through them, i.e., to recognize their nonnecessity, their lack of foundation, their contingency.

Political theory—and, I suggest, most political practice—is dominated by a myth to the effect that the state is necessary, for many things, perhaps, but primarily for the provision of peace and security; without the state (the state being that group of people which wields a territorial monopoly of alleged legitimate force financed by a compulsory levy of the inhabitants of that territory) there would be anarchy—anarchy being understood to be widespread disorder, violence, and chaos. In the words of Bruce Ackerman, without the state and its laws, we would live in a world “where everyone is free to grab anything he can without ever being obliged to justify his conduct before any institution charged with settling disputes” (Ackerman 1980, p. 252, n. 8).

Such is the power of being first in the field (“positioning” in advertising terms) that the state can literally get away with murder if it can foster the notion that it is legitimate. As Murray Rothbard puts it,

One of the crucial factors that permits governments to do the monstrous things they habitually do is the sense of legitimacy on the part of the stupefied public. The average citizen…has been imbued with the idea—carefully indoctrinated by centuries of governmental propaganda—that the government is his legitimate sovereign, and that it would be wicked or mad to refuse to obey its dictates. It is this sense of legitimacy that the State’s intellectuals have fostered over the ages, aided and abetted by all the trappings of legitimacy: flags, rituals, ceremonies, awards, constitutions, etc. (Rothbard 1973, p. 35)

The important rhetorical point of the historical examples of functioning anarchic societies and the contemporary evidence of functionally anarchic elements in Statist societies is, among other things, to emphasize the sheer contingency of what seems like a necessity—to show that it wasn’t always like this, that it isn’t like this everywhere or in every respect even now, and that it doesn’t have to be like this. For example, Bruce Benson, in the second chapter of The Enterprise of LawSee also Benson (1991, pp. 41–65; 2007, pp. 624–38). (1990), shows clearly that the system of criminal law which we now possess—state legislatures,Parliament was originally not a lawmaking body but a tax-granting body opposed to the executive. After the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689, the opposition gradually disappeared so that tax-levying was unopposed. (War was primarily a private business, a matter of hostile [actual, as distinct from metaphorical] takeovers, as it were!). public prosecution, prisons, juries, crimes against the State, public police forces—all of which seem as if they sprang, like Venus, fully armed from the head of Jove, are merely historically contingent developments. Moreover, the pressure for these developments came not from any perceived increase in efficiency but from motives that were far less noble. And Harold Berman demonstrated in his remarkable book Law and Revolution that polycentrism was the norm in medieval Europe.

EARLY IRISH SOCIETY REVISITED In Austrian treatments of anarchism it is not unusual to point to Medieval Iceland (Friedman 1979) and Medieval Ireland, inter alia, as examples of societies that functioned successfully for substantial periods of time without coercive central government.

Joseph Peden published his groundbreaking article on early Irish Law in 1977. Much of what he had to stay still stands. Since his article was published, a diplomatic edition of the surviving legal material has been published (Binchy 1978) and an introductory but comprehensive guide was published by Fergus Kelly in 1988. This was followed by Stacey’s The Road to Judgment (1994) and McLeod’s Early Irish Contract Law (1992) so that we now have a much fuller and more detailed picture of how things were some 1500 years ago. None of this material contradicts any of Peden’s substantive points (Peden 1977).See also Kelly 1988, McLeod 1992, and Stacey 1994.

The Irish law texts originated in the seventh–eighth centuries, surviving in fourteenth–sixteenth century manuscripts.The material immediately following is a précis of Kelly. While not completely coherent, the texts manifest a basic unity.

The society in which these texts found a home was a largely self-sufficient mixed farming economy, with pasture for cattle, sheep and pigs, and cereal production. Lord and client related to one another economically. Society also supported a set of professionals—poets, judges, smiths, physicians and wrights.

The tuath was the basic territorial unit, ruled over by a king (ri). There were approximately 150 of these tuatha in the whole country. The population of Ireland at this period was about five hundred thousand with, approximately three thousand people per tuath.

The king, as the wealthiest and most powerful man in the neighborhood, was central to the affairs of the tuath. All free men owed him loyalty and paid a special tax. He could call upon the freemen to repel invaders or to attack a neighboring tuath. He also had the power to convene an oenach (a fair) for political, social, and commercial purposes. Another type of meeting was the aireacht (meeting of freemen) at which legal business was transacted. Freemen generally stayed within their own tuath; only the professionals normally travelled outside the tuath’s borders. The large degree of legal uniformity suggests that the tuath’s lawyers kept in close touch with their colleagues in other tuatha.

The kingThe role of the king was quasi-sacerdotal, no doubt reflecting an earlier stage of social development, which persisted in other societies and recurred with surprising frequency until relatively recently, e.g., the Chinese emperor, the Egyptian pharaoh, the Roman and Byzantine emperors, and the notion of the divine right of kings. was responsible for external relations, treaty making, treaties of this kind being confirmed at an oenach. Under such treaties, a victim of a crime in one tuath committed by a member of another was entitled to legal redress. Crimes that were redressable included homicide, rape, wounding, and robbery with violence, theft, housebreaking, arson, and satire.

It is important to realize that early Irish society was not egalitarian. One’s legal rights and obligations were a reflection of one’s social status, though upward and downward social mobility was an accepted fact of life. The measure of a person’s status was what was called his honor-price (log n-enech—literally, the price of his face). The greater one’s honor-price, the greater the cost of any injury done to one: the honor-price of a provincial king could be as much as 42 milch cows, whereas that of a young man still living at home could be as little as a yearling heifer. There was a basic distinction between outsiders and those with legal standing in the tuath. Generally, those without a place in a tuath were either ambuae (nonpersons), “grey dogs” (cu glas)—exiles from overseas—or castaways (murchoirthe).

The basic distinction in Irish society was between those who were nemed and those who were not, and those who were free (soer) and those who were unfree (doer). The basic unit of currency was the female slave (cumal) or various kinds of cows. A typical ocaire (small free farmer) was said to possess a dwelling house nineteen feet in diameter and an outhouse of fourteen feet. His land was worth seven cumals and supported seven cows, one bull, seven pigs, seven sheep and a horse. Additionally, he had a share in a plough-team (one-quarter) and a share in a kiln, mill, and barn.

The categorization of nemed/non-nemed, and soer/doer can be diagrammatically (see Figure 1).

A nemed had special privileges. There were limits to the distraint of his property and some legal obligations did not fall on him. Nemed failing in their duties or obligations were liable to be reduced in rank. Cowardly kings, sexually immoral bishops, fraudulent poets, and dishonest lords could be degraded to commoner rank. Similarly, a lord who could not maintain the requisite number of clients was similarly degraded. Upward mobility was possible, if not for a given individual, then for his children or their children. A customary expression in Irish literature is “A man is better than his birth.” Typically, a boaire would become wealthy enough to attract and retain clients. In so doing, he moved into a grey area between commoner and lord. If his sons could maintain or increase this level of wealth and retainership, they or their children would attain nemed status.

[[{"fid":"87714","view_mode":"image_no_caption","fields":{"format":"image_no_caption","alignment":"center","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Categorization of Nemed/Non-Nemed and Soer/Doer","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_caption_text[und][0][value]":"","field_image_file_link[und][0][value]":""},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"image_no_caption","alignment":"center","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Categorization of Nemed/Non-Nemed and Soer/Doer","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_caption_text[und][0][value]":"","field_image_file_link[und][0][value]":""}},"attributes":{"alt":"Categorization of Nemed/Non-Nemed and Soer/Doer","class":"media-element file-image-no-caption media-wysiwyg-align-center","data-delta":"1"}}]]

According to Peden, private ownership played a critical role in the social and legal institutions of early Irish society: “Thus ownership of property in all its forms was the basis of a man’s legal status and marked the extent of his participation in and protection within the legal system” (Peden 1977, p. 87).See Dillon and Chadwick (1967, pp. 98–99). Peden remarks on social mobility as a striking characteristic of early Irish society. So, while economic self-sufficiency was the hallmark of free status, someone unfree could, with the accumulation of wealth, or the possession of a particular talent or skill, achieve that status.

Not only was early Irish society not egalitarian, it was also not one in which individualism was unrestrained. The kin-group (derbfine), all those descended from the same great-grandfather, exercised legal powers over its members. Each kin-group had its own land; an individual’s share in such common land could not be alienated contrary to the wishes of the rest of the group. It was possible to own land outside the kin-group and such land could be alienated freely. The kin-group was, in certain circumstances, responsible for the crimes and debts of its members, being obliged to pay the debts or fines of one who absconded after judgement. The body-fine (eraic) due when a member of a kingroup had been illegally killed was payable to the kin-group. The head of a kin-group was chosen, largely on the basis of his wealth, rank and demonstrated good sense.

While many early law codes in other societies were instigated by powerful kings “there is little evidence of royal involvement in the composition of the Old Irish law-texts” (Kelly 1988, p. 21). In fact, the law and its formulation seems to have been the preserve of a special class of practitioners, more or less dispersed through the whole country, and not under the control of any king. Kelly attributes this low- or noninvolvement of the kings in the lawmaking process to what he terms the “political fragmentation” of the country at the time of their composition/redaction, clearly seeing this as a negative point and assuming, without grounds for so doing, a prior state of nonfragmentation. Kings could, however, issue emergency legislation (after defeat in battle or in the presence of a plague). If the king was not involved in lawmaking, neither was he involved in law implementation. This was done via a tort-like process involving suretyship, pledging and distraint.

Irish society in the historic period up to the seventeenth century constitutes one of the best examples of a functioning anarchic society. Irish law was the product of a body of private and professional jurists (called brithim or brehons) and was flexible and capable of development in response to evolving social conditions (Peden 1977, p. 82). Law was a (largely) family business, enjoying high status. It is important to note that Irish law did not differentiate between what we now distinguish as tort and criminal law, in this respect resembling most systems of customary law that seem to come late, if at all, to this distinction. From the point of view of traditional law, crimes against the person tend to be regarded a special kind of offense against property.

The jurists gave judgement—enforcement was effected via a system of sureties. Sureties came in three forms: (1) a surety might guarantee payment by pledging his eneclann; or (2) a surety could pledge his person and freedom; or (3) the surety could guarantee the payment in the case of default. As Peden puts it, “Law and order, and the adjustment of conflicting interests, were achieved through the giving of sureties rather than State-monopolized coercion” (Peden 1977, p. 83).Peden notes that while the Irish had kings, it is important to realize that they were not lawmakers. Moreover, they could, in fact, be sued, just as any other freeman albeit with difficulty. Each freeman had what was known as his honorprice, his dire or enclann. This honor-price was essential to the working of the systems of sureties. In taking or in defending an action, a petitioner or a defendant took sureties to ensure the honoring of the judgement of the brehon court. See also Hughes (1966).

Irish society, organized on anarchical principles, lasted for almost twenty-five hundred years! During that time it showed a capacity, vital to any organic and developing system of social organization, to absorb alien elements and internalize them. The Brehon Law was adapted by the English/Norman invaders/settlers, despite repeated attempts to dissuade them (e.g., statutes of Kilkenny, etc.), so much so that, to the disgust of the English authorities, they became “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” The Irish legal system came to an end only when native Irish society collapsed after the Battle of Kinsale and the Flight of the Earls. It ended, not as the result of insupportable internal strains, but as a consequence of external assault. To sum up its salient characteristics:

the possession of property, with its rights and duties, was central to one’s legal standing;there was no substantive distinction between criminal law and tort law;the legal system was private, customary, evolutionary, and agreed-upon;justice was primarily restorative, with restitution going to the victims rather than to a state; enforcement operated via a system of sureties and pledges, the ultimately recalcitrant being excluded from society and its protections.See Whiston (2002); Runolfsson Solvason (no date); Murphy (2005); Friedman (1979); Long (2002); and Morrow (2007). The Icelandic case provides an interesting counterpoint to the Irish experience. Unlike the Irish situation, we have an historical beginning to the Icelandic Commonwealth and a date for its end. In contrast, the Irish case has no discernible beginning. When the records start, it is already in operation and has been so for who knows how long. Whereas in the Icelandic case, one’s connection with a godi was extraterritorial, in the case of Ireland, one’s connection was fixed via the tuath in which one resided or in which one had property. Whereas the Icelandic Commonwealth lasted for about three hundred years, the Irish system lasted from probably 1000 BC until the beginning of the seventeenth century. In both cases, the precipitating cause of the change was political; in the case of Iceland, a reduction in competition caused by the emergence of five large families—in the case of Ireland, the impact of the Anglo-Norman invasion was to add impetus to an already present tendency on the part of the Irish kings to a more assertive and dominant role.

ANARCHIC LIFE-SIGNS IN A STATIST WORLD In the early 1990s, Tom Bell, then a student at University of Chicago Law School and now a law professor at Chapman, wrote a paper on legal polycentrism for some courses taught by Richard Posner. This paper was primarily an attempt to provide a theoretical justification for nonstatist legal systems, for which Bell adapted (presumably from Michael Polanyi) the term “polycentric law,” its subcategories being customary law and privately produced law. Around the same time, Bell published a paper on the same topic in the Human Studies Review and still later, a short paper on practical applications in a Cato Policy Report in 1998 (Bell 1991–92, 1992, and 1998).

Bell notes that, once one becomes familiar with the notion of polycentric law, one sees instances of it everywhere—in churches, clubs, businesses, and so on. Without the focusing lens of the concept, polycentric law is largely invisible. Although he provides a concise account of some historical examples of polycentric legal systems, Bell notes that a justification of polycentric law requires more than case studies of small and/or insular societies; it requires a justification for how polycentric law would work here and now. Following Benson, he isolates six features common to most systems of customary law, the first five of which would likely be mirrored in systems of privately produced law. Modified slightly, these are:

individual rights and private property take centre stage;victims are the enforcers of the law;violence is avoided by the emergence of standard (and, I would add, mutually agreeable) adjudicative procedures;restitution/reparation (primarily economic) would follow from treating offenses as torts (invasions of personal rights) rather than crimes (offenses against the state);the enforcement mechanism is ostracism, blackballing, blacklisting, banishment, exclusion from society;legal change comes about by evolution rather than by (legislative) revolution. One can immediately see that these features are all characteristic of early Irish law.

Critics of anarchistic theory have not been slow to point out that Medieval Ireland is dead and gone (likewise Medieval Iceland). “It is all very well to point to historical instances of anarchic order but what,” they ask, “has anarchism done for us recently?” A complete answer to this question would take us well beyond the confines of this paper but, following Bell’s lead, some green shoots of contemporary anarchic order can be detected in the emergence and flourishing of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) institutions, private communities, and the internet.

With its historical antecedents in the medieval Law Merchant and the Maghribi law of the Mediterranean, ADR today is a fast-growing alternative to State-Law. As Bell notes: “The largest private provider of ADR services in the United States, the American Arbitration Association, administered 62,423 cases in 1995,” twice as much as it had handled twenty years earlier. There are about one thousand other agencies competing with the AAA. Bell writes: “The state’s courts have less and less time to find the law for civil litigants because their dockets overflow with criminal prosecutions enforcing legislation. That the Drug War generates most of those prosecutions merely illustrates the manifold hazards of unjust legislation.” (Bell 1998, p. 10)

In 1970 there were about ten thousand private communities in the USA. This rose to 55,000 in 1980 and 130,000 in 1990. In 1992 the number reached 150,000, encompassing some 28 million people. I don’t have the latest figures but projections would indicate that the numbers should be significantly higher. Bell writes: “Residents of private communities experience polycentric law, not as a theoretical abstraction, but as a working reality. Those people have deliberately removed themselves from the inefficient political machinations of municipal governments, seeking instead to live under regulations of their own choice and making. Faced with the futility of trying to exercise any real influence over the politicians and bureaucrats, who would run their lives, residents of private communities have rediscovered the pleasures—and undoubtedly the pains—of reaching consensus with their neighbors.” (Bell 1998, p. 10)

The internet is, perhaps, the most spectacular example of emergent order in contemporary society. Although originating in a military environment, it quickly migrated into the academic world and then moved into the worlds of business and the general public. Through the use of email and the World Wide Web, anyone with a computer and the appropriate connection is now a part of a worldwide community with access to a staggeringly large and oftentimes bewildering amount of data.

No longer can the gatekeepers of society regulate, channel and censor what there is to know. Of course, no one can guarantee the quality of the information available online, but that simply restores to each individual the responsibility to judge the value of what is received. Within the WWW world, Wikipedia must stand as an outstanding example of what can be done from the bottom up. The material contained therein is variable in quality but it contains some outstanding entries and, of course, the alert users of the resource are at liberty to question and dispute controversial material.

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE Finally, even within Statist circles, the feeling that all is not well with the criminal justice system is growing. Victim-impact statements, flawed as they might be, are recognition that the one offended in the commission of most crimes is not the state, but Joe Soap.

Just recently, in Ireland, we have been experimenting with what is being called “Restorative Justice.” Such programs are in use in other countries, and the Irish government is keen to evaluate their effectiveness. My cynical impression is that this is motivated not so much by concern for victims of crime or the welfare of criminals as it is by a concern for the spiralling cost of imprisonment.

The director of the experimental pilot program, Máire Hoctor, notes in the Irish Times, 10 March 2007, “It has given offenders an opportunity to rebuild their life without a criminal record.” She adds: “It’s also very cost-effective. For example, our voluntary service here costs €40,000 to run for a year and deals with around 20 offenders. In contrast, it costs €80,000 a year to keep one person in jail.” Assuming a better or at least the same rate of recidivism (and the indications are that around 70 percent of offenders do not reoffend), then the Restorative Justice program is fiscally more effective by a factor of 4,000 percent!

There is much to commend in the notion of restorative justice. The basic principle of law, or what should be its basic principle, namely, the restoration of the status quo ante, is the desideratum. The victim, so often shunted to one side as a kind of disagreeable ghost at the wedding in your standard criminal justice system, takes centre stage, and the offender makes reparation directly to the victim, not to the state.

In keeping offenders out of jail, the state not only saves massively (money which it would be idle to hope would be returned to the long-suffering taxpayer), but also keeps the neophyte criminal away from being better tutored in crime, and limits the creation of criminal networks. Of course, this restorative justice system is intended to work alongside the bloated and ineffective criminal justice system; it is not intended as a substitute. However, we live in hope.

CONCLUSION Much of the resistance to libertarian anarchic proposals stems from a genuine inability on the part of one’s audience to entertain such proposals as serious alternatives to the status quo. To be able to demonstrate convincingly to that audience that what one is proposing has already been done and continues to be done, albeit in different historical circumstances or in a variety of (not-so-obvious) ways, cannot but have a salutary effect on the receptivity of that audience to the theoretical arguments.

View Details

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 18 July 2019.

View Details

What is particularly scary is that the whole argument for the new law was not really about saving lives or reducing gun violence, but is about Brussels ordering Switzerland to modify gun laws to comply with EU gun control standards.Original Article: "Why the Swiss Voted for More Gun Control"

View Details

Keith Smith is an anesthesiologist who founded the Oklahoma Surgery Center and the Free Market Medical Association. He is a medical doctor, but also a student of economics. Bob and Keith discuss the recent FMMA conference in Dallas, and explain how patients and doctors right now can break out of our broken healthcare-insurance system.

For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.

View Details

Our in-house economist and editor Ryan McMaken joins the Human Action Podcast for a deep dive into Mises's seminal 1927 book Liberalism. This is the definitive podcast on the definitive book on liberal society: its foundations, what it means for property, freedom, peace, economic policy, and immigration.

Readings Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition by Ludwig von Mises"Was Mises a Neoliberal?" by Jeff Deist"Immigration Roundtable: Ludwig von Mises" by Jeff Deist

Subscribe and listen on iTunes, YouTube, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play, Spotify, or via RSS.

View Details

Compiled by Edward W. FullerEdited with an Introduction by David Gordon

Are you a Murray Rothbard fan? Do you love his writing? His clarity and style? His razor-sharp economic analysis? His penchant for slaying sacred cows?

One of the most remarkable aspects of Murray Rothbard's career wasn't simply the power of his ideas, or his razor-sharp wit, but the sheer breadth of his knowledge.

A brilliant economist, revolutionary political philosopher, bold revisionist historian, and even joyful cultural commentator, Rothbard was one of the most prolific scholars — perhaps one of the most quotable.

This is the ultimate Rothbard reference book, and your single source for his best excerpts and quotes on all the core subjects: economics, philosophy, epistemology, ethics, history, law, and libertarianism.

Considering Rothbard's 62-page bibliography — consisting of 30 full-length books, 100 full chapters for edited works, and more than 1,000 scholarly and popular articles — consuming all of his work is almost impossible. Now, thanks to Rothbard A to Z, the ability to search for Rothbard's unique views on hundreds of topics is now at your fingertips.

Compiled by Edward W. Fuller and edited by David Gordon, this massive book is a must-have for any true Rothbard aficionado.

Prolific and radical hardly begin to describe him — but his important work has never been brought together like this, a reference guide and a fun book you can open at random for the best “Murrayisms” on any topic!

Here are just a few teasers:

Deflation, far from being a catastrophe, is the hallmark of sound and dynamic economic growth. Deflation — Making Economic Sense, p. 16 ...throughout history, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society. For States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the “emperor has clothes.” Intellectuals — For a New Liberty, p. 14 Integration cannot be achieved by law and coercion; it must first come willingly into the hearts of men. Racism — Left and Right, p. 491 Professor Mises has keenly pointed out the paradox of interventionists who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for or against politicians whom they do not know and on policies which they scarcely understand. To put it another way, the partisans of intervention assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them, but also assume that these same individuals are competent to vote for these experts at the ballot box. Democracy — Man, Economy, and State, p. 886 Secession is a crucial part of the libertarian philosophy: that every state be allowed to secede from the nation, every sub-state from the state, every neighborhood from the city, and logically, every individual or group from the neighborhood. Secession — Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 17

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 228–229 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part II. Concept. Pages 156–167 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 246–258 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 176–188 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 230–235 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 195–204 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 168–175 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part I. Laying the Groundwork. Pages 14–22 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part I. Laying the Groundwork. Pages 94–103 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Pages 7–8 in the text. Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part I. Laying the Groundwork. Pages 27–93 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part II. Concept. Pages 104–111 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part II. Concept. Pages 112–117 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part II. Concept. Pages 118–125 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 218–221 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part IV. Future. Pages 259–263 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 205–208 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 189–194 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 209–217 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 222–227 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 236–240 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part I. Laying the Groundwork. Pages 9–13 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part IV. Future. Pages 264–271 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part I. Laying the Groundwork. Pages 23–26 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part II. Concept. Pages 126–151 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part II. Concept. Pages 152–155 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Part IV. Future. Pages 272–276 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Titus Gebel lays out a model of private companies competing to provide protection of life, liberty, and property. He explains how services like internal and external security, legal and regulatory systems, and independent dispute resolution could be implemented, and he addresses the problems that a social order like this must face.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

Download the complete audiobook (28 MP3 files) here. This audiobook is also available on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and via RSS.

View Details

Part III. Implementation. Pages 241–245 in the text.

Narrated by Scott R. Pollak.

View Details

Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist FutureKirkpatrick SaleChelsea Green Publishing, 2017411 pages

What attitude should supporters of the free market take toward decentralization? Should libertarians support the movement for Catalonian autonomy, for example, even if leaders of that movement are unfriendly to the free market? Do we have a duty to spread free-market institutions far and wide through globalization? Or, on the contrary, should we leave to their own devices communities and nations that interfere with the free market and civil liberties?

On all these questions, Kirkpatrick Sale is a useful guide. This is at first sight surprising, because he does not support the free market. To the argument of Mises and Rothbard that capitalism generates prosperity, he would shrug his shoulders. He thinks that the virtues of material prosperity are grossly overstated. In his view, life was better in the Stone Age; and he would, if he could, return us to the happy conditions that he maintains then prevailed. When he writes about the “steady state economy” and extols environmentalism and economic self-sufficiency, we can only turn away in dismay.

Nevertheless, he has much to teach us, because he holds no illusions about the state. The state, he argues, is a destructive force; and if we must have a state, the smaller the better. “Governments, whether meaning to or not, always seem to create more havoc as they grow larger, and the largest of them historically have tended to be the most destructive and bellicose. ... Indeed, so regularly does one encounter this phenomenon in the reading of history that I am emboldened to advance this as a full-blown maxim, what we may call the Law of Government Size: Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation or state.”

What is the evidence for this law? We cannot prove that this law must hold true, as do the laws of Austrian economics, but it is a widely repeated pattern. Sale appeals to the great English historian Arnold Toynbee: “Time after time he shows that civilizations begin to decay after they are unified and centralized under a single large-scale government, and he posits that the next-to-last stage of any society, leading directly to its collapse, ‘is its forcible political unification in a universal [by which he means united and centralized] state.’ ... There is, Toynbee concludes, ‘the slow and steady fire of a universal state where we shall in due course be reduced to dust and ashes.’” Ironically, in the face of his own studies, Toynbee was himself a supporter of world government.

Sale appeals also to another thinker, who has influenced him even more than Toynbee, the historian of cities Lewis Mumford: “Throughout history, he has shown, the consolidation of nations and the rise of governments have gone hand in hand with the development of slavery, the creation of empires, the division of citizens into classes, the recurrence of civil protests and disorders, the erection of useless monuments, the despoliation of the land, and the waging of larger and ever-larger wars.” It is again ironic that, despite his insights, Mumford vehemently denounced Charles Austin Beard for his opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s bellicose foreign policy.

Small states, Sale argues, are much less likely to engage in war than large ones: “It is an interesting fact that when the peoples of Germany were divided into dozens of little principalities and duchies and kingdoms and sovereign cities — from about the twelfth century to the nineteenth — they engaged in fewer wars than any other peoples of Europe. ... Not that there was total peace, nothing so otherworldly as that. But there were long stretches without war, and those (mostly internecine) wars that did erupt tended not to be so intense or so lasting as those on the rest of the continent. All that changed, of course, with the unification of Germany and the establishment of one government over 25 million people and 70,000 square miles.” Readers should not fear that Sale has forgotten the Thirty Years War, the disastrous effects of which he discusses at length, but his point here is about the frequency of wars.

Sale takes the polarity between the vast centralized state and the local, self-governing community as fundamental. Small wonder that many people do not vote. Why should they, when they have not the remotest chance of affecting the outcome?

With great insight, he uses this polarity to help us understand American history. “The decentralist tradition, manifested in a persistent anti-authoritarianism and a quite exuberant localism, is basic to the American character ... resistance to unwanted laws and the flouting of colonial authority were common well before the Revolution itself, and riots and rebellions ... were recurrent. These fledgling Americans wanted to be left alone, to sink their roots how and where they pleased.”

The American Revolution only served to intensify these tendencies, and Sale in this connection cites a striking remark by Thomas Paine: “For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American War, and for a longer period in several of the American states, there were no established forms of government. The old governments had been abolished and the country was too much occupied in defense to employ its attention in establishing new governments; yet during this interval order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country of Europe.”

Like Murray Rothbard, Sale supports the Articles of Confederation over the centralizing Constitution, and he is a vigorous partisan of Jefferson’s plan, unfortunately never put into effect, for small republics. “Around 1816, after having served his stint in the presidency, perhaps not wisely nor too well, he began to revive an idea that had long been part of his creed: ward government. A system of small ‘elementary republics,’ he began to feel — units of perhaps a hundred men or two populations of 500–1000 in all — was essential to the salvation of the American state, and a better alternative than his earlier notion of recurring revolutions.”

The Civil War weakened the American decentralist tradition, but it did not destroy it altogether. “The illegal war of 1861 and its centralizing aftermath — wars are always centralizing: that’s why governments have them — brought a temporary halt to the Jeffersonian tradition and weakened the principle of states’ rights forever.”

The situation worsened in the next century. “With the first two decades of the twentieth century, the triumph of federal power was made manifest. The central government was acknowledged as supreme, its authority over its population’s pockets (the Income Tax Amendment of 1913) and habits (the Prohibition Amendment of 1919) and even lives (the Selective Service Act of 1917) fully established. ... What happened then in the 1930s and ’40s, with the familiar events of New Deal consolidation, seemed only a natural extension of the past autocracy.”

Against this centralizing trend, Sale counterposes the other term of his polarity, the self-governing local community. In particular, he admires the New England town meeting. “Here at the very beginnings of American society, here at the fount of the American soul, we find the most developed, the most settled, the most reasonable demonstration of the worth and happiness of life without the state.”

In one of the most valuable parts of the book, Sale confronts an objection. Even if the large centralized state brings with it great evils, can human society survive without it? Sale takes as his foil the famous Yale political scientist Robert Dahl, who said, “As for making all large political systems vanish into thin air, when the silk scarf is pulled away there in full sight are matters that cannot be handled by completely autonomous communities.”

One of the foremost reasons alleged for the necessity of a large state is defense. How could a small autonomous community protect itself against the onslaught of a powerful state? As one might expect, Sale is not convinced. “Larger states, far from providing peace, merely provide larger wars, having more human and material resources to pour into them. … Moreover, in the course of attempting to provide its defense the state exercises its own forms of coercion and violence ... such a state, preoccupied with defense, begins to justify all acts, however dangerous.”

How, though, does this respond to the difficulty? However bad the large state may be, how can small communities survive without it? Sale answers in this way: “Historically the response of small states to the threat of such large-scale aggression has been temporary confederation and mutual defense, and indeed the simple threat of such unity, in the form of defense treaties and leagues and alliances, has sometimes been a sufficient deterrent. ... Moreover, the difficulties for any large power trying to subdue a host of smaller societies are truly formidable and would be additionally so if those societies, in a human-scale world, were efficiently governed, harmonious and homogeneous, and concertedly self-protective.”

Sale has no more use for another frequent justification for the large state, the claim that people cannot provide on their own for “public goods,” such as roads, control of pollution, and education. “As with pollution, so with the other public services of the state. There is not a one of them, not one, that has not in the past been the province of the community or some agency within the community (family, church, guild) and that has been taken on by the state only because it first destroyed that province. ... Indeed, there is not one public service, not one, that could not be better supplied at the local level, where the problem is understood best and quickest.”

Not only does Sale oppose centralized control of the economy, but he also manages to sound remarkably like Mises and Rothbard in doing so. “Simply as a result of the inefficiencies and inequities of their size ... big governments tend to set in motion forces that they are unable to control, or understand, with consequences they are unable to foresee ... regardless of any other attributes, beyond a modest size a government cannot be expected to perform optimally, and the larger it gets, and the more distended the policy, the more likely it is that it will be increasingly inefficient, autocratic, wasteful, corrupt, and harmful.”

Sale’s remarkable book, the product of wide reading in many different fields, will impress everyone who values personal liberty and rejects the Leviathan state’s endeavor to steamroller us into conformity with its maleficent plans.

View Details

Allen Mendenhall from Faulkner University Law School joins Jeff Deist to break down the hyper-politicized spectacle of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. How did the Supreme Court become so wildly powerful, even while rubber-stamping the excesses of the executive and legislative branches? How much longer can America survive having deeply contentious issues like abortion and gun control decided by a de facto super-legislature? Why is the Constitution a malleable "living document" but Supreme Court precedents are sacrosanct? And how will we ever overcome deep-seated public misconceptions about the role and powers of the Court?

View Details

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 18, 2018.

View Details

Caitlin Long recently joined us in San Francisco for an inside look at how blockchain technology might blow up the financial service and banking industries. This is a presentation you won't want to miss from someone at the cutting edge of both blockchain technology and the legal landscape surrounding it.

View Details

Mises.org editor Ryan McMaken joins Jeff Deist for an entertaining look at the California ballot measure that would split the Golden State into three distinct parts. It's long overdue, says Ryan, and not as far-fetched as it sounds.

View Details

Jeff Deist interviews Titus Gebel on the Free Private Cities Project. Find more about Free Private Cities here.

View Details

With welfare, the US outspends Canada and Australia, and is on a par with Switzerland. On government healthcare, the US outspends nearly everyone. Text version: The Myth of America's "Stingy" Welfare State.

View Details

Michael Boldin from the Tenth Amendment Center joins Jeff Deist to discuss the philosophical, electoral, and logistic realities standing in the way of creating a more politically decentralized America. Beyond thorny questions about federal land, federal entitlements, and "national defense," there are a million small ways to move power away from Washington. Both conservatives and progressives claim to want just that—so what holds us back? Michael, a onetime progressive, has the strategic and practical answers for liberty-minded people.

View Details

Our guest Trey Goff drafted a remarkable "Voluntaryist Constitution" designed to serve as the foundational legal document for a private society. Trey attempts nothing less than to define the characteristics and rules underlying a common law society, in the form of a polycentric constitutional order as envisioned by Murray Rothbard and legal scholar Randy Barnett. His goal was to create a blueprint for libertarians organizing startup or breakaway societies, one that deals with private property, rights, contracts, justice, and coercion in a rational and humane manner. The result is an inspiring and controversial document, as discussed in this great interview.

View Details

Libertarians tend to focus on two important units of analysis: the individual and the state. And yet, one of the most dramatic and significant events of our time has been the reemergence—with a bang—in the last five years of a third and much neglected aspect of the real world, the "nation." When the "nation" has been thought of at all, it usually comes attached to the state, as in the common word, "the nation-state," but this concept takes a particular development of recent centuries and elaborates it into a universal maxim. In the last five years, however, we have seen, as a corollary of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, a vivid and startlingly swift decomposition of the centralized State or alleged nation-State into its constituent nationalities. The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic reappearance on the world stage.

I. THE REEMERGENCE OF THE NATION The "nation," of course, is not the same thing as the state, a difference that earlier libertarians and classical liberals such as Ludwig von Mises and Albert Jay Nock understood full well. Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a "country." He is always born into a specific historical context of time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.

The modern European nation-state, the typical "major power," began not as a nation at all, but as an "imperial" conquest of one nationality—usually at the "center" of the resulting country, and based in the capital city—over other nationalities at the periphery. Since a "nation" is a complex of subjective feelings of nationality based on objective realities, the imperial central states have had varying degrees of success in forging among their subject nationalities at the periphery a sense of national unity incorporating submission to the imperial center. In Great Britain, the English have never truly eradicated national aspirations among the submerged Celtic nationalities, the Scots and the Welsh, although Cornish nationalism seems to have been mostly stamped out. In Spain, the conquering Castilians, based in Madrid, have never managed—as the world saw at the Barcelona Olympics—to erase nationalism among the Catalans, the Basques, or even the Galicians or Andalusians. The French, moving out from their base in Paris, have never totally tamed the Bretons, the Basques, or the people of the Languedoc.

It is now well known that the collapse of the centralizing and imperial Russian Soviet Union has lifted the lid on the dozens of previously suppressed nationalisms within the former U.S.S.R., and it is now becoming clear that Russia itself, or rather "the Russian Federated Republic," is simply a slightly older imperial formation in which the Russians, moving out from their Moscow center, forcibly incorporated many nationalities including the Tartars, the Yakuts, the Chechens, and many others. Much of the U.S.S.R. stemmed from imperial Russian conquest in the nineteenth century, during which the clashing Russians and British managed to carve up much of central Asia.

The "nation" cannot be precisely defined; it is a complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups, or religions. Some nations or nationalities, such as the Slovenes, are both a separate ethnic group and a language; others, such as the warring groups in Bosnia, are the same ethnic group whose language is the same but who differ in the form of alphabet, and who clash fiercely on religion (the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, the Catholic Croats, and the Bosnian Muslims, who, to make matters more complicated, were originally champions of the Manichaean Bogomil heresy).

The question of nationality is made more complex by the interplay of objectively existing reality and subjective perceptions. In some cases, such as Eastern European nationalities under the Habsburgs or the Irish under the British, nationalisms, including submerged and sometimes dying languages, had to be consciously preserved, generated, and expanded. In the nineteenth century this was done by a determined intellectual elite, struggling to revive peripheries living under, and partially absorbed by, the imperial center.

II. THE FALLACY OF "COLLECTIVE SECURITY" The problem of the nation has been aggravated in the twentieth century by the overriding influence of Wilsonianism on U.S. and world-wide foreign policy. I refer not to the idea of "national self-determination," observed mainly in the breach after World War I, but to the concept of "collective security against aggression." The fatal flaw in this seductive concept is that it treats nation-states by an analogy with individual aggressors, with the "world community" in the guise of a cop-on-the-corner. The cop, for example, sees A aggressing against, or stealing the property of B; the cop naturally rushes to defend B's private property, in his person or possessions. In the same way, wars between two nations or states are assumed to have a similar aspect: State A invades, or "aggresses against," State B; State A is promptly designated "the aggressor" by the "international policeman" or his presumptive surrogate, be it the League of Nations, the United Nations, the U.S. President or Secretary of State, or the editorial writer of the August New York Times. Then the world police force, whatever it may be, is supposed to swing promptly into action to stop the "principle of aggression," or to prevent the "aggressor," be it Saddam Hussein or the Serbian guerrillas in Bosnia, from fulfilling their presumed goals of swimming across the Atlantic and murdering every resident of New York or Washington, D.C.

A crucial flaw in this popular line of argument goes deeper than the usual discussion of whether or not American air power or troops can really eradicate Iraqis or Serbs without too much difficulty. The crucial flaw is the implicit assumption of the entire analysis: that every nation-state "owns" its entire geographical area in the same just and proper way that every individual property owner owns his person and the property that he has inherited, worked for, or gained in voluntary exchange. Is the boundary of the typical nation-state really as just or as beyond cavil as your or my house, estate, or factory!

It seems to me that not only the classical liberal or the libertarian, but anyone of good sense who thinks about this problem, must answer a resounding "No." It is absurd to designate every nation-state, with its self-proclaimed boundary as it exists at any one time, as somehow right and sacrosanct, each with its "territorial integrity" to remain as spotless and unbreached as your or my bodily person or private property. Invariably, of course, these boundaries have been acquired by force and violence, or by interstate agreement above and beyond the heads of the inhabitants on the spot, and invariably these boundaries shift a great deal over time in ways that make proclamations of "territorial integrity" truly ludicrous.

Take, for example, the current mess in Bosnia. Only a couple of years ago, Establishment opinion, Received Opinion of Left, Right, or Center, loudly proclaimed the importance of maintaining "the territorial integrity" of Yugoslavia, and bitterly denounced all secession movements. Now, only a short time later, the same Establishment, only recently defending the Serbs as champions of "the Yugoslav nation" against vicious secessionist movements trying to destroy that "integrity," now reviles and wishes to crush the Serbs for "aggression" against the "territorial integrity" of "Bosnia" or "Bosnia-Herzegovina," a trumped-up "nation" that had no more existence than the "nation of Nebraska" before 1991. But these are the pitfalls in which we are bound to fall if we remain trapped by the mythology of the "nation-state" whose chance boundary at time t must be upheld as a property-owning entity with its own sacred and inviolable "rights," in a deeply flawed analogy with the rights of private property.

To adopt an excellent stratagem of Ludwig von Mises in abstracting from contemporary emotions: Let us postulate two contiguous nation-states, "Ruritania" and "Fredonia." Let us assume that Ruritania has suddenly invaded eastern Fredonia, and claims it as its own. Must we automatically condemn Ruritania for its evil "act of aggression" against Fredonia, and send troops, either literally or metaphorically, against the brutal Ruritanians and in behalf of "brave, little" Fredonia? By no means. For it is very possible that, say, two years ago, eastern Fredonia had been part and parcel of Ruritania, was indeed western Ruritania, and that the Rurs, ethnic and national denizens of the land, have been crying out for the past two years against Fredonian oppression. In short, in international disputes in particular, in the immortal words of W. S. Gilbert:

Things are seldom what they seem,

Skim milk masquerades as cream.

The Beloved international cop, whether it be Boutros Boutros-Ghali or U.S. troops or the New York Times editorialist had best think more than twice before leaping into the fray.

Americans are especially unsuited for their self-proclaimed Wilsonian role as world moralists and policemen. Nationalism in the U.S. is peculiarly recent, and is more of an idea than it is rooted in long-standing ethnic or nationality groups or struggles. Add to that deadly mix the fact that Americans have virtually no historical memory, and this makes Americans peculiarly unsuited to barreling in to intervene in the Balkans, where who took what side at what place in the war against the Turkish invaders in the fifteenth century is far more intensely real to most of the contenders than is yesterday's dinner.

Libertarians and classical liberals, who are particularly well-equipped to rethink the entire muddled area of the nation-state and foreign affairs, have been too wrapped up in the Cold War against communism and the Soviet Union to engage in fundamental thinking on these issues. Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed and the Cold War is over, perhaps classical liberals will feel free to think anew about these critically important problems.

III. RETHINKING SECESSION First, we can conclude that not all state boundaries are just. One goal for libertarians should be to transform existing nation-states into national entities whose boundaries could be called just, in the same sense that private property boundaries are just; that is, to decompose existing coercive nation-states into genuine nations, or nations by consent.

In the case, for example, of the eastern Fredonians, the inhabitants should be able to secede voluntarily from Fredonia and join their comrades in Ruritania. Again, classical liberals should resist the impulse to say that national boundaries "don't make any difference." It's true, of course, as classical liberals have long proclaimed, that the less the degree of government intervention in either Fredonia or Ruritania, the less difference such a boundary will make. But even under a minimal state, national boundaries would still make a difference, often a big one to the inhabitants of the area. For in what language—Ruritanian or Fredonian or both?—will be the street signs, telephone books, court proceedings, or school classes of the area?

In short, every group, every nationality, should be allowed to secede from any nation-state and to join any other nation-state that agrees to have it. That simple reform would go a long way toward establishing nations by consent. The Scots, if they want to, should be allowed by the English to leave the United Kingdom, and to become independent, and even to join a Gaelic Confederation, if the constituents so desire.

A common response to a world of proliferating nations is to worry about the multitude of trade barriers that might be erected. But, other things being equal, the greater the number of new nations, and the smaller the size of each, the better. For it would be far more difficult to sow the illusion of self-sufficiency if the slogan were "Buy North Dakotan" or even "Buy 56th Street" than it now is to convince the public to "Buy American." Similarly, "Down with South Dakota," or a fanion, "Down with 55th Street," would be a more difficult sell than spreading fear or hatred of the Japanese. Similarly, the absurdities and the unfortunate consequences of fiat paper money would be far more evident if each province or each neighborhood or street block were to print its own currency. A more decentralized world would be far more likely to turn to sound market commodities, such as gold or silver, for its money.

IV. THE PURE ANARCHO-CAPITALIST MODEL I raise the pure anarcho-capitalist model in this paper, not so much to advocate the model per se as to propose it as a guide for settling vexed current disputes about nationality. The pure model, simply, is that no land areas, no square footage in the world, shall remain "public"; every square foot of land area, be they streets, squares, or neighborhoods, is privatized. Total privatization would help solve nationality problems, often in surprising ways, and I suggest that existing states, or classical liberal states, try to approach such a system even while some land areas remain in the governmental sphere.

Open Borders, or the Camp-of-the-Saints Problem The question of open borders, or free immigration, has become an accelerating problem for classical liberals. This is first, because the welfare state increasingly subsidizes immigrants to enter and receive permanent assistance, and second, because cultural boundaries have become increasingly swamped. I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples. Previously, it had been easy to dismiss as unrealistic Jean Raspail's anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, in which virtually the entire population of India decides to move, in small boats, into France, and the French, infected by liberal ideology, cannot summon the will to prevent economic and cultural national destruction. As cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail's concerns any longer.

However, on rethinking immigration on the basis of the anarcho-capitalist model, it became clear to me that a totally privatized country would not have "open borders" at all. If every piece of land in a country were owned by some person, group, or corporation, this would mean that no immigrant could enter there unless invited to enter and allowed to rent, or purchase, property. A totally privatized country would be as "closed" as the particular inhabitants and property owners desire. It seems clear, then, that the regime of open borders that exists de facto in the U.S. really amounts to a compulsory opening by the central state, the state in charge of all streets and public land areas, and does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors.

Under total privatization, many local conflicts and "externality" problems—not merely the immigration problem—would be neatly settled. With every locale and neighborhood owned by private firms, corporations, or contractual communities, true diversity would reign, in accordance with the preferences of each community. Some neighborhoods would be ethnically or economically diverse, while others would be ethnically or economically homogeneous. Some localities would permit pornography or prostitution or drugs or abortions, others would prohibit any or all of them. The prohibitions would not be state imposed, but would simply be requirements for residence or use of some person's or community's land area. While statists who have the itch to impose their values on everyone else would be disappointed, every group or interest would at least have the satisfaction of living in neighborhoods of people who share its values and preferences. While neighborhood ownership would not provide Utopia or a panacea for all conflict, it would at least provide a "second-best" solution that most people might be willing to live with.

Enclaves and Exclaves One obvious problem with the secession of nationalities from centralized states concerns mixed areas, or enclaves and exclaves. Decomposing the swollen central nation-state of Yugoslavia into constituent parts has solved many conflicts by providing independent nationhood for Slovenes, Serbs, and Croats, but what about Bosnia, where many towns and villages are mixed? One solution is to encourage more of the same, through still more decentralization. If, for example, eastern Sarajevo is Serb and western Sarajevo is Muslim, then they become parts of their respective separate nations.

But this of course will result in a large number of enclaves, parts of nations surrounded by other nations. How can this be solved? In the first place, the enclave/exclave problem exists right now. One of the most vicious existing conflicts, in which the US has not yet meddled because it has not yet been shown on CNN, is the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian exclave totally surrounded by, and therefore formally within, Azerbaijan. Nagorno-Karabakh should clearly be part of Armenia. But, how then, will Armenians of Karabakh avoid their present fate of blockade by Azeris, and how will they avoid military battles in trying to keep open a land corridor to Armenia?

Under total privatization, of course, these problems would disappear. Nowadays, no one in the U.S. buys land without making sure that his title to the land is clear; in the same way, in a fully privatized world, access rights would obviously be a crucial part of land ownership. In such a world, then, Karabakh property owners would make sure that they had purchased access rights through an Azeri land corridor.

Decentralization also provides a workable solution for the seemingly insoluble permanent conflict in Northern Ireland. When the British partitioned Ireland in the early 1920s, they agreed to perform a second, a more micro-managed, partition. They never carried through on this promise. If the British would permit a detailed, parish by parish, partition vote in Northern Ireland, however, most of the land area, which is majority Catholic, would probably hive off and join the Republic: such counties as Tyrone and Fermanagh, southern Down, and southern Armagh, for example. The Protestants would probably be left with Belfast, county Antrim, and other areas north of Belfast. The major remaining problem would be the Catholic enclave within the city of Belfast, but again, an approach to the anarcho-capitalist model could be attained by permitting the purchase of access rights to the enclave.

Pending total privatization, it is clear that our model could be approached, and conflicts minimized, by permitting secessions and local control, down to the micro-neighborhood level, and by developing contractual access rights for enclaves and exclaves. In the U.S., it becomes important, in moving toward such radical decentralization, for libertarians and classical liberals—indeed, for many other minority or dissident groups—to begin to lay the greatest stress on the forgotten Tenth Amendment and to try to decompose the role and power of the centralizing Supreme Court. Rather than trying to get people of one's own ideological persuasion on the Supreme Court, its power should be rolled back and minimized as far as possible, and its power decomposed into state, or even local, judicial bodies.

Citizenship and Voting Rights One vexing current problem centers on who becomes the citizen of a given country, since citizenship confers voting rights. The Anglo-American model, in which every baby born in the country's land area automatically becomes a citizen, clearly invites welfare immigration by expectant parents. In the U.S., for example, a current problem is illegal immigrants whose babies, if born on American soil, automatically become citizens and therefore entitle themselves and their parents to permanent welfare payments and free medical care. Clearly the French system, in which one has to be born to a citizen to become an automatic citizen, is far closer to the idea of a nation-by-consent.

It is also important to rethink the entire concept and function of voting. Should anyone have a "right" to vote? Rose Wilder Lane, the mid-twentieth century U.S. libertarian theorist, was once asked if she believed in womens' suffrage. "No," she replied, "and I'm against male suffrage as well." The Latvians and Estonians have cogently tackled the problem of Russian immigrants by allowing them to continue permanently as residents, but not granting them citizenship or therefore the right to vote. The Swiss welcome temporary guest-workers, but severely discourage permanent immigration, and, a fortiori, citizenship and voting.

Let us turn for enlightenment, once again, to the anarcho-capitalist model. What would voting be like in a totally privatized society? Not only would voting be diverse, but more importantly, who would really care? Probably the most deeply satisfying form of voting to an economist is the corporation, or joint-stock company, in which voting is proportionate to one's share of ownership of the firm's assets. But also there are, and would be, a myriad of private clubs of all sorts. It is usually assumed that club decisions are made on the basis of one vote per member, but that is generally untrue. Undoubtedly, the best-run and most pleasant clubs are those run by a small, self-perpetuating oligarchy of the ablest and most interested, a system most pleasant for the rank-and-file nonvoting member as well as for the elite. If I am a rank-and-file member of, say a chess club, why should I worry about voting if I am satisfied with the way the club is run? And if I am interested in running things, I would probably be asked to join the ruling elite by the grateful oligarchy, always on the lookout for energetic members. And finally, if I am unhappy about the way the club is run, I can readily quit and join another club, or even form one of my own. That, of course, is one of the great virtues of a free and privatized society, whether we are considering a chess club or a contractual neighborhood community.

Clearly, as we begin to work toward the pure model, as more and more areas and parts of life become either privatized or micro-decentralized, the less important voting will become. Of course, we are a long way from this goal. But it is important to begin, and particularly to change our political culture, which treats "democracy," or the "right" to vote, as the supreme political good. In fact, the voting process should be considered trivial and unimportant at best, and never a "right," apart from a possible mechanism stemming from a consensual contract. In the modern world, democracy or voting is only important either to join in or ratify the use of the government to control others, or to use it as a way of preventing one's self or one's group from being controlled. Voting, however, is at best, an inefficient instrument for self-defense, and it is far better to replace it by breaking up central government power altogether.

In sum, if we proceed with the decomposition and decentralization of the modern centralizing and coercive nation-state, deconstructing that state into constituent nationalities and neighborhoods, we shall at one and the same time reduce the scope of government power, the scope and importance of voting and the extent of social conflict. The scope of private contract, and of voluntary consent, will be enhanced, and the brutal and repressive state will be gradually dissolved into a harmonious and increasingly prosperous social order.

Originally published in The Journal of Libertarian Studies (Fall 1994)

View Details

Dr. Kevin Gutzman is a history professor at Western Connecticut State University, a New York Times best-selling author, and one of the leading Constitutional scholars in the country today. He and Jeff talk about his new book, Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical's Struggle to Remake America. Dr. Gutzman discusses some of the overlooked ways Jefferson shaped America, and how his radical views are often underplayed by many academics today. Jefferson’s views on self-governance freedom of conscious, and rejection of centralized control made him perhaps the most libertarian Founding Father — one whose ideas are still relevant today.

View Details

This weekend, we welcome back Michael Boldin, founder of the Tenth Amendment Center and fearless advocate for political decentralization. Michael joins us next weekend at our event in San Diego, so we decided to ask him about the burgeoning CalExit movement and the Left's newfound appreciation for secession. Think California couldn't survive as an independent country? Think the current US boundaries are written in stone? If so, Michael will change how you think about the possibility of local rule in a deeply divided America. Stay tuned.

View Details

What is Europe? It seems that no rigorous answer can be provided. Europe is not exactly a continent. It is not a political entity. It is not a united people. The best definition, in fact, may be that Europe is the outcome of a long historical process that engendered unique institutions and a unique vision of what men ought to be. The idea that men ought to be free from violent government interference. Europe has no founding fathers. Its birth was not orchestrated but completely spontaneous. Its development was not imposed by armies and governments but was the voluntary product of clerics, merchants, serfs, and intellectuals who were seeking to interact freely with each other. Europeans were united by their freedoms and divided by their governments. In other words, Europe was built against States and their arbitrary restrictions, not by them.

After the fall of the Roman Empire a period of political anarchy followed where cities, aristocrats, kings, and the church all competed with each other. Therefore, as Dr. Ralph Raico noted in his article “The European Miracle,”

Although geographical factors played a role, the key to western development is to be found in the fact that, while Europe constituted a single civilization — Latin Christendom — it was at the same time radically decentralized. In contrast to other cultures — especially China, India, and the Islamic world — Europe comprised a system of divided and, hence, competing powers and jurisdictions.

In other words, over the centuries, a long evolution of the institutions gave birth to personal liberty. Although the European aristocracies and states were restricting freedom, they were forced to grant more autonomy to their subjects, for, if they did not, people were opting out by migrating or using black markets. As Leonard Liggio puts it, after 1000 A.D.:

While bound by the chains of the Peace and Truce of God from looting the people, the uncountable manors and baronies meant uncounted competing jurisdictions in close proximity. ... This polycentric system created a check on politicians; the artisan or merchant could move down the road to another jurisdiction if taxes or regulation were imposed.

Europe was where the road to freedom began. It was in Europe that the values of individualism, liberalism, and autonomy rose from history and gave humanity a sense of progress that no civilization had ever experienced to such an extent before. Unfortunately, the values and institutions that made Europe great vanished under the pressure of political centralization, nationalism, statism, socialism, and fascism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, however, a new danger looms over Europe — the European Union.

The European Institutions Against the Free MarketContrary to what is often said, the European Union has nothing to do with peace, freedom, free trade, free capital and migration movement, cooperation, or stability. All this can very well be provided in a decentralized system. The European Union is nothing more than a cartel of governments that tries to gain power by harmonizing the fiscal and regulatory legislation in every member State. Article 99 of the Treaty of Rome (1957) clearly states that indirect taxation “can be harmonized in the interest of the Common Market” by the European Commission. As for Article 101 of the same Treaty, it explicitly restrains regulatory competition “where the Commission finds that a disparity existing between the legislative or administrative provisions of the Member States distorts the conditions of competition in the Common Market.”

Since the very beginning, with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, the European institutions were more planning agencies than anything else. Indeed, the coal and steel industries at the time were mostly nationalized and the goal of the ECSC was to coordinate governments’ activities in these two sectors, not to liberalize activity. The fact that the ECSC was not about free trade but about government planning was known by everybody at the time. It was Robert Schuman, the French minister of foreign affairs, who proposed in his declaration of 9 May 1950, that the Franco-German coal and steel production be placed under a common High Authority within the framework of an organization in which other European countries could participate. Also, the ECSC created for the first time European anti-trust legislation, which as Austrians know, is nothing less than government planning in the name of an erroneous vision of what competition is. Even the Treaty of Rome (1957), the basis of the EU as we know it, despite enacting the free movement of goods, capital, and persons, remains a highly statist treaty. Indeed, it is often forgotten that among other things, the Treaty of Rome created a “European Investment Bank,” a “European Social Fund,” the highly protectionist “common agricultural policy,” the “common transport policy,” and reinforced European anti-trust legislation. Therefore, if in the short and medium run, the Treaty of Rome, by breaking the neck of protectionism, was a boon for the European economy, it created institutions that could easily expand their regulatory power in the future, and that is exactly what they did.

Many free marketers support the European Union on the ground that even if their regulations are bad, they are still far better than those produced by our very prolific national governments. Such a line of argument, often used in more socialist countries such as France, is sheer nonsense. It is the equivalent of saying: “I don’t mind being robbed twice because the second thief will be much nicer to me.” The question is not how to make “better” regulations but how to expand free trade.

Europeanism: True and FalseIn 1946, F.A. Hayek wrote a pathbreaking article named “Individualism: True and False” where he distinguished two different individualist intellectual traditions. One, as Hayek calls it, is “true individualism,” based on evolutionism, the idea that institutions and individuals’ behaviors are not planned consciously but are rather the result of a spontaneous process. True individualism follows the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. False individualism, on the contrary, is based on extreme rationalism and solipsism. False individualism is based on the idea that society, freedom, and markets, can be planned and should be planned. This false individualism is the heir of the 1789 and — even more clearly — of the 1793 French Revolutionaries.

These two sorts of individualism are today at the root of two different sorts of Europeanism. True Europeanism admits that most of what made Europe was not planned but rather spontaneous. The implications are that we ought to have as much decentralization as possible for Europe to continue to strive and to safeguard human liberties. On the other hand, false Europeanism thinks that Europe can only truly become Europe if planning by common political institutions exists. False Europeanists believe that the only alternative is between Nation States and the European Union. Their defense of a centralized European political entity is based on the erroneous idea that political centralization is positively linked to the process of civilization because society, law, markets, prosperity, and the “European spirit” ought to be designed by rulers. Europe during the Middle Ages, those thinkers say, lacked trade integration because it lacked political unification. It follows that we must be grateful today for the existence of the European Union. In their narrative, economic progress took place only when “Europe” slowly began to develop new trading alliances that combined some aspects of military protection with something akin to a free-trade area. But this version of history is very far from the truth. In the Middle Ages for instance, the lex mercatoria, the law of merchants, was purely private. Furthermore, the protective tariffs were mostly ignored anyway by Europeans. Smuggling was so widespread that England in the late Middle Ages should be in fact considered as a nation of smugglers rather than a nation of merchants. As Murray Rothbard noted in Conceived in Liberty:

Too many historians have fallen under the spell of the interpretation of the late nineteenth-century German economic historians (for example, Schmoller, Bucher, Ehrenberg): that the development of a strong centralized nation-state was requisite to the development of capitalism in the early modern period. Not only is this thesis refuted by the flourishing of commercial capitalism in the Middle Ages in the local and non-centralized cities of northern Italy, the Hanseatic League, and the fairs of Champagne. … It is also refuted by the outstanding growth of the capitalist economy in free, localized Antwerp and Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus the Dutch came to outstrip the rest of Europe while retaining medieval local autonomy and eschewing state-building, mercantilism, government participation in enterprise — and aggressive war.

Thus, the idea that a centralized authority, in our case the European Union, is necessary for free trade is pure fantasy, It is false Europeanism. Its constructivist approach has prevailed in European institutions since the beginning. For example, one of the goals advanced by the Treaty of Rome was to “create markets” through a unified European Anti-trust legislation. Similarly, the official justification of the Common Agricultural Policy introduced in 1962 was to create a unified agricultural market. But markets do not need States or treaties to exist and they certainly do not need the European Union.

The parallel between false Europeanism and false individualism is also relevant when it comes to their respective imperialistic tendencies. Whereas the French revolutionaries wanted to invade Europe to impose their “universal values” through force, the European Union does not tolerate, in the name of Europe, independent States that do not want to submit to Brussels. Switzerland, for instance, is forced by the European Union to adopt countless regulations concerning food safety and gun ownership. If the Swiss confederation does not comply with many provisions of European law, the European Union threatens to cut Switzerland’s access to the single market.

The most incredible political success of the European Union zealots is their constant shaming of those who refuse to submit to a European hegemonic super-State. But we must understand that only so-called “Euro sceptics” can truly be pro-Europe. Only “Euro sceptics” can be loyal toward the history and liberal values of their continent. In other words, the European Union is a highly anti-European institution.

We Need DecentralizationOn June 23, 2016, the British will vote on whether they want to stay in the EU or not. If the NO vote wins, it might be the end of the European Union as we know it. Historically, Britain played a major role in the maintenance of a fairly decentralized European order. Whether it was with Napoleonic France, or the German 2nd Reich, or Nazi Germany, it has always been Britain that ultimately helped to break up the hegemonic endeavors of empires on continental Europe. The question is, then, will Britain play its historical role this summer against the imperialistic European Union? We should consider any attempt to establish a more decentralized system with more competition between States as a boon for Europe and the Europeans. To be sure, the Nation-States must be dismantled, but not if it means the creation of an even bigger European Leviathan. It is, on the contrary, the regionalists and independence movements that must be supported, whether it is Scotland, Catalonia, or Corsica. The European miracle can be revived only through extreme political decentralization. What history teaches us is that Europe is greater than the individuals that compose it only insofar as it respects liberty. Insofar as it is controlled or directed by a monolithic and central political authority or by bellicose Nation-States, Europe is limited by the inability of Europeans to escape the arbitrary restrictions of their governments.

View Details

The costs of centralizing information are higher than people understand. Until they have worked in actual organizations that have missions like fighting a war or making a profit, people tend to underestimate just how expensive it can be to centralize information.

If our mental picture of the world is like the pointy-haired manager in the Dilbert cartoons, we’ll tend to favor institutions where knowledge comes from the knowledge frontier, and is then moved to the central office where the managers sit and cogitate. The managers then push stupid orders back to the frontier.

And that pretty much describes the way collectivists want to organize the world. They don’t want there to be peer-to-peer consent because they think they can save a bunch of time and cost if everything can be centralized.

Hayek understood this well, especially in his 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” This article influenced Thomas Sowell’s work in his books A Conflict of Visions and Knowledge and Decisions. And all of these works influenced me.

Thanks to the works of Hayek and Sowell, I’ve come to appreciate that whether we’re talking about business or social matters, life is all about avoiding the costs of centralizing information to some higher power that then spits orders out.

How To Build Enduring Organizations that Use Decentralized InformationI know the last thing I want to be is the Dilbert manager who sits in the corner and thinks he has all the answers. I know the smart people are on the front lines; the smart people with the ideas; the smart people who understand the marketplace and customer. So my job is building institutions that let that distributed intelligence express itself. So, in my businesses, I have built various mechanisms that let innovation come from the front lines, from customer agents, from people in marketing.

I want an institution that can let the knowledge of 2,000 colleagues form the new ideas, and their colleagues can work together to decide how to use the knowledge.

I want a system to crowdsource innovation. The wisdom of crowds is smarter, and more consistently intelligent, than any single person.

As owner I must sometimes say “I think you got that wrong, I have to veto you.” And by its nature, sometimes, employees, for legal reasons, can’t know everything about the company. But for the most part, I can let the company run, and by giving the employees what they need, they just get smarter and smarter, and do more and more.

There’s a field that evolved in the last seven years called Enterprise 2.0. The idea is to use online technology to keep organizations flat and to avoid hierarchy — and people collaborate through technology. A very simple example of this model is Wikipedia, and closely related to this is a field called “idea management.” Think of it as a super-sophisticated suggestion box in which people are making suggestions and other people are seeing their suggestions. People then vote others’ suggestions up and down. For example, suppose 200 ideas get proposed over a two-month period. Using idea management, we then have the crowd decide the best ten. And then we have the crowd rank them and decide which are best and which we should put capital into.

Here’s another example: at the end of last year, I knew I wanted to give my employees a $4 million raise. They had many suggestions including changes to the 401k, an addition of day care services, or just a simple pay raise. I gave their ideas to the accounting department to figure out what each one would cost. We put a price tag on each one, and I gave the list back to the 2,000 employees. They ranked each, and we ended up with a ranking, and we went down from the top, until we got to $4 million.

So more and more decisions are being made in our company, not by me, but by our people in general. The philosophy underlying this all comes from Hayek and Mises — the true knowledge among our colleagues is all out there.

I’ve got the staff that can figure out what each option will cost. But the truth is I don’t know which one is going to work, but I have found that when I turn that over to the group, the result is more intelligent than the executive group can do or what I can do by myself.

Why We Have Centralized Government InstitutionsNaturally, this has applications far beyond some private companies. When we look at government in Washington, or what’s happening on Wall Street, we see so much centralization. But really, our goals should be to eliminate and overcome these central institutions.

And in recent years we have gained powerful new tools to do this, and most significant among those is the block chain, which is the software behind Bitcoin. But it’s so much bigger than just Bitcoin.

I’m not sure that even in our pro-freedom movement, that people are understanding the significance of the block chain. I discussed the topic at length in Wired, but even more important was a recent article in Politico in which my work with the block chain was featured, as was the central problem of consensual exchange in the marketplace.

This is where the block chain is most useful and revolutionary. It helps us to overcome the problem of mutual trust in exchange, which will in turn make many of our modern central institutions unnecessary.

So what is this problem of trust in mutual exchange? Well, if I have a camel and you’re going to give me a gold coin in exchange for it, I have to trust that you did not debase this coin.

Certain groups will then attempt to develop a business model that can address this problem. For example, an organization (i.e., a monarch) that has a monopoly on violence in some area can monetize this monopoly by saying “I will mint gold coins and put my face on them, and if anyone tries to debase those coins, I’ll kill him.”

That’s just a business model, and we happen to call that business model “government.”

So the question is: can we just have consensual exchange, or do we have to pick some central institution that we can trust, so we don’t have to trust each other?

There are, of course, many other examples of the usefulness of central institutions in exchange. If we want to buy and sell land, and we don’t trust each other, we can use a central institution called a land title office, which will ensure that the sellers actually own the land they’re selling. Governments all across the world are involved in this every day. And as Hernando de Soto discussed in his book The Mystery of Capital, it is difficult to have capital formation when you don’t know for sure who owns what.

So, throughout human history, we have relied on these central institutions to help us overcome this problem of trust in exchange.

But, as we know, there are problems that arise from these systems, as well.

Decentralizing Wall StreetNot all of these central institutions are what we call government. Yes, many of these institutions are run by guys in two-piece suits in Washington. And some are run by guys in black robes. Some are done by people with badges and guns. But many of them are done by guys in three-piece suits on Wall Street.

Wall Street, however, is not immune to fraud and abuse, and this problem is often made worse by centralization. But most people don’t know how these central institutions work.

When you watch a movie, for example, you know there are things going on behind the scenes, and you probably assume the same is true for Wall Street. But on Wall Street, that behind-the-scenes stuff works a lot differently than you think it does.

Unbeknownst to many, Wall Street now relies on central institutions that were created in the 1970s all allegedly with the purpose of accomplishing what’s called “settlement” which is the process through which securities actually change hands in exchange for payment.

These central institutions were created to replace the old “stock-jobbers” who carried around sacks of stock certificates in the old days, but who couldn’t keep up with the tripling of trading volume that occurred during the 1960s.

So we now have these central institutions that handle the problem of settlement by controlling the flow of information and the stocks themselves. But new problems have arisen as a result. As of 2008, for example, it was quite possible that Merrill Lynch was sending you a statement at the end of the month saying you own 100 shares of IBM, and other people saying the same thing. But back at Merrill Lynch, they only had 100 shares. They were telling five different people they had 100 shares.

On most days that won’t make a difference. But deep down that’s a game that looks a lot like fractional reserve banking.

And as a result, the system was being looted, and just like if someone practiced fractional reserve banking and wasn’t telling anyone, someone could loot that vault and take advantage of investors for a long time before anyone noticed.

And just in general, this is what happens when you have centralized institutions.

Getting Rid of CentralizationThe key to overcoming the problems in these central institutions is the block chain. Because, with the block chain, for the first time, we no longer need these central institutions for settlement, or for guaranteeing the value of coins, or for land titling. All of these functions can be replaced by a transparent public ledger that is safe from tampering, and which can make value and ownership clear and open for everyone. This is information that is decentralized, and is not controlled by any central organization. We don’t need central institutions to control or protect this information anymore. Using the block chain, we can disrupt all these systems — and much more, too — and the institutions behind them. In turn, this spreads decision-making and the use of knowledge to a much larger number of people and institutions. The advantages of decentralization that are already being employed in private companies can then be felt society-wide.

In other words, with the block chain, we liberals — those of us who have been fighting authoritarianism, whether it’s socialism or fascism or “social justice-ism,” for 500 years — just got “the bomb” in this fight. It’s something new.

And this is why the block chain and I got so much attention in response to that recent Politico article. I was told that the article was being talked about all over Washington. And they were talking about it because these institutions that are threatened by the block chain have finally figured out that they’re in trouble.

The CEO of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, for example, wrote a letter to shareholders in April that basically freaked out over the block chain. He told shareholders that “Silicon Valley is coming to eat Wall Street’s lunch.” Since he did that, everybody on Wall Street in the last three months — it seems every day, there is a new announcement coming from another corporation — whether UBS, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, saying “we have to study this and get involved.”

But it’s too late for them. A year and a half ago, we started on this, and we’ve been very aggressive about developing new systems that can challenge these old central institutions.

I’m not doing this because I want to create a new monopoly. On the contrary, I want to create a bomb to blow up these central institutions.

Whether it’s a single company, or a stock exchange, or an entire society, we know — thanks to Hayek — that information is best used when it’s not centralized and when it’s not being monopolized by some central institution. We know that flat and non-hierarchical systems use information best. I’ve tried to do that with my own company because it works better that way. And society at large will work better as well, if we can get rid of these old institutions and hierarchies. New innovations like the block chain can make this possible.

We knew when the internet was being created, that it was going to cause profound changes. But this new invention and the crypto revolution is going to be more significant than the internet itself.

View Details

Last month, the United States Supreme Court declined to take up a case involving Arizona’s and Kansas’s attempts to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. The two states sought SCOTUS review in an attempt to overturn a prohibition imposed by lower federal courts. Had the two states been allowed to impose more stringent citizenship requirements, the effect on the voting population would have likely been small, but the overall legal effect of the court’s decision is significant.

The refusal of the Supreme Court to hear the case yet again sends a message to state and local governments that the federal government shall continue to centrally direct election and immigration law. As noted in The Hill:

“This is a very big deal,” Rick Hasen, a University of California Irvine law professor, wrote on his election law blog. “Kobach had the potential to shift more power away from the federal government in administering elections toward the states.”

Centrally Planning Immigration PolicyThe Arizona and Kansas voting restrictions had been efforts to affect national immigration policy via state laws. But, as has been the trend over the past century, the federal government has repeatedly asserted itself as the last word in policymaking in citizenship and immigration matters.

Indeed, the Federal Courts explicitly declared the states powerless to attempt to control immigration within their own borders when Federal Judge Mariana Pfaelzer struck down California’s voter-approved Proposition 187 in 1994 and wrote:

California is powerless to enact its own legislative scheme to regulate immigration. It is likewise powerless to enact its own legislative scheme to regulate alien access to public benefits.

Naturally, this decision sent the message nationwide that states should not bother to limit access to taxpayer-funded amenities (with public education being a central issue) because the federal government will simply declare such efforts illegal.

Thus, through these cases, federal courts have made it clear that no state (or anyone other than the feds) can meaningfully prevent participation by non-citizens in political activities such as elections, nor can the states limit the ways in which immigrants can access government benefits, even when those benefits are locally-funded.

The net effect is an imposition of a migrant subsidy scheme across all states regardless of the local economic and demographic realities, while ignoring the fact that residents of certain states bear a greater tax burden in subsidizing migrants.

The Answer Is Not More Government InterventionAt this point, it is important to note that the antidote to government subsidies (i.e., government intervention) is not more intervention. If the federal government insists that the taxpayers subsidize the immigrant population, then the proper response is to simply eliminate the subsidy. This is exactly what voters had attempted to do with Proposition 187 (and Arizona Proposition 200).

This correct approach is to be contrasted with the draconian methods employed by other states which have centered on punishing employers and landlords (and the immigrants themselves, of course) for engaging in private contracts and non-violent market transactions.

Such efforts only expand the size and scope of government, and they ultimately involve federal agents raiding private establishments and combing through lease agreements and payroll documentation to make sure that workers and renters bear an arbitrarily-assigned status as “legal” immigrants.

When states turn to these methods, we end up with the worst of both worlds, since not surprisingly, federal courts have been relatively tolerant of state and local efforts to punish local businesses and employers while at the same time remaining steadfast in opposition to efforts to limit the scope of government programs.

The Answer Is Decentralization and Smaller GovernmentThus, while states and local government are given a small space to act around the edges of immigration policy, all regions and states are tethered to a single national policy on citizenship and immigration. However, we can guess that, if they were given greater leeway to do so, states would offer a very diverse array of immigration-related policies.

In research conducted by Huyen Pham and Pham Hoang Van, the authors attempt to measure the legal “climate” for immigrants for all fifty states by evaluating state and local legislative and legal efforts to limit (or encourage) immigrant activity in each state. The authors unfortunately do not distinguish between efforts that restrict private property (i.e., employment restrictions) and efforts that restrict government growth (i.e., limiting health care benefits). In the following chart, we find Pham’s and Van’s rankings:

Source: Immigrant Climate Index from “Measuring the Climate for Immigrants: A State by State Analysis,” by Huyen Pham and Pham Hoang Van The legislative and legal climates differ broadly, and this suggests that ideology, economics, and demographics produce some areas (i.e., California and Illinois) that tend to favor and subsidize immigration while other areas (i.e., Arizona and Virginia) would thoroughly limit subsidies.

If we took this a step further and gave states and localities the power to determine all eligibility to both state and federal benefits, such measures by themselves (assuming benefits were not transferrable across state lines) would serve to place the burdens of subsidized immigration onto the states that mandate it.

And, of course, there’s nothing to say that the state level is the optimal level of decentralization. As with any truly laissez-faire proposal, the ultimate goal is complete privatization of immigration policy. That is, the ability of immigrants to relocate to a community would be dependent on the dispersed and individual decisions of employers and other property owners who can decide on their own to employ or house migrants in the community. This is, of course, the democracy of the marketplace described by Mises in which individual persons — by making decisions about whom to employ or sell property to — collectively determine who is a member of each community. Any employer who wished to fully staff his operation with so-called illegal immigrants would be legally free to do so, and his decision would be subject to approval or veto by his customers, not by arbitrary government fiat.

But even in the absence of this ideal, movement toward more locally-focused immigration policy gives existing residents greater choice in where to reside and place their property. Without decentralization, the taxpayers (many of whom will want to live in jurisdictions with laissez-faire attitudes toward conducting business with migrants) are powerless to make meaningful choices in this matter without completely uprooting his life and leaving the country.

The Problem with Imposing Top-Down PolicyThe goal of laissez-faire immigration policy is to both diminish the availability to taxpayer-funded programs for immigrants (on the way to eliminating these programs overall) while also avoiding anti-private-property regulations that prohibit owners from freely contracting with immigrants in general.

As we have seen, there is no technological or practical barrier to decentralizing this effort immediately. As is so often the case, however, there is significant ideological and legal opposition.

Among those who insist on a single nationwide policy are those who assert that the best way to ensure the protection of property rights (for both property owners and migrants) is to impose it from above.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen this movie before on other issues ranging from eminent domain to drug policy. In each case, however, the more practical, enduring, and least-risky solutions come from decentralization.

Following the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision in 2005, for example, many advocates for free markets condemned the court for not issuing a top-down prohibition on certain types of eminent domain. As Lew Rockwell pointed out, however, Kelo was one of the few cases in which the court was actually correct in deferring to local control. Even when the central government agrees with us, political decentralization remains the prudent choice:

We are … opposed to top-down political control over wide geographic regions, even when they are instituted in the name of liberty.

Hence it would be no victory for your liberty if, for example, the Chinese government assumed jurisdiction over your downtown streets in order to liberate them from zoning ordinances. Zoning violates property rights, but imperialism violates the right of a people to govern themselves. The Chinese government lacks both jurisdiction and moral standing to intervene. What goes for the Chinese government goes for any distant government that presumes control over government closer to home ...

There are several reasons for [this position].

First, under decentralization, jurisdictions must compete for residents and capital, which provides some incentive for greater degrees of freedom, if only because local despotism is neither popular nor productive. If despots insist on ruling anyway, people and capital will find a way to leave. If there is only one will and one actor, you cannot escape ...

This is certainly true in the case of immigration policy. Those states that turn to raiding employers and fining landlords as “solutions” to perceived problems with immigrants will lose their most productive citizens and property owners to states that shy away from such interventionism. Moreover, those states that choose to heavily subsidize immigration will also suffer the loss of many of their taxpayers.

In such a system, would some states still indulge in massive redistribution schemes and other unsustainable public policies? There is no doubt that would occur, but it’s best to limit the damage to a handful of states than to impose the same fate on everyone nationwide.

View Details

The secessionist impulse doesn’t seem to be going away in Europe. This month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the latest drive for secession comes from Sardinia. The leaders of the movement propose that the island, only part of Italy since the 1860s, be joined to Switzerland instead.

The Sardinians have a tough row to hoe in convincing the Swiss to accept them as the newest Swiss canton (Sardinians do have a coastline to offer, however), but the whole episode illustrates yet again that the national borders drawn on the map over the past two centuries are beginning to outlive their usefulness.

What Is Self-Determination?As with the Venetians, the Scots, and the Catalonians, the matter of Sardinian secession and/or annexation involves any number of referenda and discussions about “self-determination.” And in this case, as with most similar cases, one is left with the problem of determining how one can morally go about switching state affiliations without precipitating war or accusations of human rights abuses. The Europeans don’t phrase it this way, but when they discuss the need for plebiscites and “democracy,” this is what they mean.

Certainly, this problem was not at all alien to the laissez-faire liberals of the nineteenth century, including Ludwig von Mises, who wrote: “No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.” Mises then went on to defend “the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong.”

Murray Rothbard explained Mises’s position further:

On a purely technical level, it’s easy to imagine this sort of territorial plebiscitary process. The problem one is left with in these cases, however, is what to do with minorities that oppose the secession or annexation by other states. This is the claim made by nationalists who oppose secession by Catalonia, for example. The nationalists assert that even if a majority were to prefer independence, minorities within Catalonia itself would be disenfranchised by secession.

The nationalists’ solution in this scenario, therefore, is to disenfranchise the majority. But this “solution” is nothing more than an appeal to the central government to unilaterally “settle” the problem with force. In contrast, the proper solution lies not in centralization but in further breaking down the size of each territory into smaller pieces to account for demographic realities and minority populations (which are rarely evenly dispersed) within the regions themselves.

Doesn’t This Lead To Anarchism?But if any community, no matter how small, can simply break off and join another state or remain independent, what’s to stop single households from doing this?

Rothbard asked this same question, and it brings us back to Mises’s comments on self-determination. Mises writes:

If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done. This is impracticable only because of compelling technical considerations which make it necessary that the right of self-determination be restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country.

In other words, anarchism is theoretically justifiable, although technically problematic. Mises no doubt has a point here since there are economies of scale in both military and civil defense. It is debatable whether or not the technical consideration — from the state’s perspective — cannot be overcome with technological innovation, however. Bureaucratic administration (whether governmental or private) may have required a certain minimum size of departments and territorial units in Mises’s day, but it’s unclear that such problems are insurmountable today given the decentralization and networking capabilities of modern administrative and communications technology.

Nevertheless, from a sociological and economic standpoint, Mises’s concern about there being a practical “floor” to the extent to which states can be broken up appears to be useful. After all, there is no denying that people like to join together in groups for a variety of purposes not limited to military and economic ends. The mega-states of the modern world are held together by coercion, but cities, towns, and communities are naturally occurring phenomena that pre-date states.

Moreover, just as I give up the freedom to talk loudly or adjust the volume when I watch a movie at a theater instead of my home, virtually everyone — even in a system of theoretically limitless secession — would give up at least some of his own personal prerogatives in the name of joining a municipality, league, or association that could provide legal and defense services. At the same time, individuals would be careful to keep the majority of power at the local level, since individuals can still exercise influence over localized governments. (This is not the case in a huge state like the United States where an individual who is not a billionaire has nearly zero influence over anything the national government does.)

But this raises a new question. If people “choose” to give up certain prerogatives to join with others in cities and towns, isn’t this true of all states? Haven’t people “voluntarily” chosen to be part of Russia, or part of the United States? The answer here is “no” because without a meaningful ability to make choices — or provide a new choice via secession — no truly voluntary choice has been made.

A Sliding Scale From One-World Government To StatelessnessAs I’ve noted here, states erect legal and practical barriers to extend their monopoly powers over a large area, and over many facets of life in order to diminish choices and options. Likewise, states generally prohibit the creation of new states, so as to further strengthen their monopolies.

So, the extent to which one is voluntarily subject to a civil government moves along a sliding scale. At one end of the scale is a one-world mega-state where no choice is possible at all. At the other end of the scale is a totally stateless society. Most — if not all — of human history has been characterized by civil governments that fall somewhere in between. Some civil governments are very large and very coercive. That is, they are quintessential states. Some governments are very small and very decentralized and are much less state-like. These later governments must compete with numerous nearby options for citizens and capital.

Naturally, a world with fewer states and very centralized states offers few options, which in turn means fewer choices for persons, cities, towns, and communities.

In spite of this, we still sometimes encounter the bizarre argument that secession is bad because secession “creates a new state.” But, just as consumers of pizza benefit when a new Pizza Hut opens down the street to compete with Domino’s Pizza, consumers of defense services and legal systems benefit when a new competitor becomes available in their neighborhood of states. If Domino’s Pizza managed to use force to prevent any other Pizza chain from opening up in town, that would clearly be a bad thing. Likewise, when a state uses force to prevent the creation of a new state, or prevent the movement of a region from one state to another, we can see this is undesirable because it limits choice, freedom, innovation, and all the good things we associate with a lack of monopoly power.

So Can Sardinia Morally Secede?In the unlikely event that Switzerland declared it would love to welcome Sardinia into the confederation, Italian unionists would still oppose secession on legal and sentimental grounds. They would also claim that Sardinia cannot secede because some Sardinians wish to remain part of Italy. If a majority of Sardinians actually wished to secede, though, then Italian unionists are making the arbitrary claim that most Sardinians should be forced to remain in Italy because some Sardinians say so. And of course, the power of the Italian state would be hung as a constant threat over the heads of secessionists as well.

The answer to this conundrum is not to simply accept the might-makes-right argument, of course. The answer is to therefore break Sardinia itself into smaller pieces. If the people of North Sardinia want to secede, and the people of South Sardinia, do not, then our problem has been solved. Even after this division is made, there are sure to still be disagreeable minorities, but with each reduction in the size of the territory in question, the amount of choice for those in the unfortunate minority increases. A move to South Sardinia from North Sardinia (to escape the secessionists) is far less disruptive to one’s life than a move from Sardinia to the Italian mainland for the same purposes.

There is no perfect and clean method of breaking down nation-states, but as the Americans, the Irish, the Chechens, and many others could tell us, state intervention to prevent secession is often the bloodiest and messiest option of all.

View Details

[This essay originally appeared as "The Theory of Economic Development and the European Miracle" in The Collapse of Development Planning, edited by Peter J. Boettke.]

Among writers on economic development, P.T. Bauer is noted both for the depth of his historical knowledge, and for his insistence on the indispensability of historical studies in understanding the phenomenon of growth (Walters 1989, 60; see also Dorn 1987). In canvassing the work of other theorists, Bauer has complained of their manifest "amputation of the time dimension":

The historical background is essential for a worthwhile discussion of economic development, which is an integral part of the historical progress of society. But many of the most widely publicized writings on development effectively disregard both the historical background and the nature of development as a process. (Bauer 1972, 324–25)

Too many writers in the field have succumbed to professional overspecialization combined with a positivist obsession with data that happen to be amenable to mathematical techniques. The result has been models of development with little connection to reality:

Abilities and attitudes, mores and institutions, cannot generally be quantified in an illuminating fashion.… Yet they are plainly much more important and relevant to development than such influences as the terms of trade, foreign exchange reserves, capital output ratios, or external economies, topics which fill the pages of the consensus literature. (Ibid., 326)

Even when a writer appears to approach the subject historically, concentration on quantifiable data to the neglect of underlying institutional and social-psychological factors tends to foreshorten the chronological perspective and thus vitiate the result:

It is misleading to refer to the situation in eighteenth -and nineteenth-century Europe as representing initial conditions in development. By then the west was pervaded by the attitudes and institutions appropriate to an exchange economy and a technical age to a far greater extent than south Asia today. These attitudes and institutions had emerged gradually over a period of eight centuries. (Ibid., 219–20)Cf. Roberts (1985, 75), who writes of "the general liberation of the economy," which was well on the way to autonomy everywhere in western Europe by 1500, if autonomy means regulation by prices providing undistorted signals of demand and a substantial degree of security for property against arbitrary confiscation by king, lord, or robber."

At the root of the approach criticized by Bauer there appears to be a methodological holism that prefers to manipulate aggregates while ignoring individual human actors and the institutions their actions generate. Yet, "differences in people's capacities and attitudes and in their institutions are far-reaching and deepseated and largely explain differences in economic performance and in levels and rates of material progress" (Ibid., 313–14; emphasis added).

Bauer's critique thus draws attention to the need to study both the centuries of European history antedating the Industrial Revolution and "the interrelationships between social, political, and legal institutions" in that period (Ibid., 277).Cf. Rosenberg (1976, 286), who raises the question why Western European civilization was able to evolve a uniquely powerful combination of cultural values, incentive systems, and organizational capabilities, and remarks: "Interesting answers to this question are unlikely to come from any single social science discipline." Here his assessment links up with an impressive body of scholarship that has emerged in recent years emphasizing precisely these points.

The "European Miracle" While it would be wrong to suggest the existence of any monolithic analysis, a number of scholars concerned with the history of European growth have tended to converge on an interpretation highlighting certain distinctive factors. For the sake of convenience, we shall, therefore, speak of them, despite their differences, as forming a school of thought. The viewpoint may be referred to as the "institutional" — or, to use the title of one of the best-known works in the field — the "European miracle" approach.Major works in the field include North and Thomas (1973); Baechler (1975); North (1981); Rosenberg and Birdzell (1986); Jones (1987); Baechler, Hall, and Mann (1988), especially the essays by Michael Mann, John A. Hall, Alain Besançon, Karl Ferdinand Werner, and Peter Burke; and Jones (1988). Summaries of some of the scholarship are provided by Anderson (1991); and Weede (1988) and (1990, 40–59). See also Osterfeld (1992, 43–46). The essay by McNeill (1980) makes creative use of the fundamental concepts of the approach.

The "miracle" in question consists in a simple but momentous fact: It was in Europe — and the extensions of Europe, above all, America — that human beings first achieved per capita economic growth over a long period of time. In this way, European society eluded the "Malthusian trap," enabling new tens of millions to survive and the population as a whole to escape the hopeless misery that had been the lot of the great mass of the human race in earlier times. The question is: why Europe?

One possible answer, which has long enjoyed powerful support in intellectual circles in the West and among officials in underdeveloped countries, was heavily influenced by socialist and even Marxist tenets.F.A. Hayek in the 1950s referred to "a socialist interpretation of history which has governed political thinking for the last two or three generations and which consists mainly of a particular view of economic history." See Hayek (1954, 7). It accounted for Europe's extraordinary growth largely by the more or less spontaneous advance of science, combined with a "primitive accumulation" of capital — through imperialism, slavery and the slave trade, the expropriation of small farmers, and the exploitation of the domestic working class. The conclusion was clear. The extraordinary growth of Europe was at the expense of untold millions of the enslaved and downtrodden, and the European experience should serve decision makers in underdeveloped countries more as a cautionary tale than an exemplar.

The contributors to the newer model, however, reject this venerable legend. Concerned as they are with comparative economic history, they have sought for the origins of European development in what has tended to set Europe apart from other great civilizations, particularly those of China, India, and Islam. To one degree or another, their answer to the question, why Europe? has been: Because Europe enjoyed a relative lack of political constraint. As Jean Baechler, in a pioneering work, pointedly expressed it:

The first condition for the maximization of economic efficiency is the liberation of civil society with respect to the state…The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and raison d'être to political anarchy. (Baechler 1975, 77, 113; emphasis in original)

The Uniqueness of Europe John Hicks partially adumbrated this approach in the late 1960s (Hicks 1969).The idea of a strong connection between the relative freedom of European society and its economic success can, of course, be traced back to much earlier authors, including those in the Whig historical tradition. Here it is being considered in the context of recent, mainly economic, historiography. In A Theory of Economic History, Hicks laid out the "chief needs" of the expanding, mercantile phase of economic development — the protection of property and the enforcement of contracts — and stated:

The Mercantile Economy, in its First Phase, was an escape from political authority — except in so far as it made its own political authority. Then, in the Middle Phase, when it came formally back under the traditional political authority, that authority was not strong enough to control it. (Ibid., 33, 100)

Hicks's account, however, proved to be much too schematic, besides limiting itself to economic analysis and deliberately ignoring political, religious, scientific, and other factors (see Bauer 1971). Around the same time as Hicks, David Landes was sketching the essentials of the newer outlook. In seeking to answer the question why the industrial breakthrough occurred first in western Europe, he highlighted two factors "that set Europe apart from the rest of the world … the scope and effectiveness of private enterprise, and the high value placed on the rational manipulation of the human and material environment" (Landes 1970, 14–15). "The role of private enterprise in the West," in Landes's view, "is perhaps unique: more than any other factor, it made the modern world" (Ibid., 15).

But what was it that permitted private enterprise to flourish? Landes pinpointed the circumstance that would be vital to the new interpretation — Europe's radical decentralization:

Because of this crucial role as midwife and instrument of power in a context of multiple, competing polities (the contrast is with the all-encompassing empires of the Orient or the Ancient World), private enterprise in the West possessed a social and political vitality without precedent or counterpart. (Ibid.; emphasis in original)

Damaging incursions by government did occur, and the situation in some parts of Europe conditioned a social preference for military values; "on balance, however, the place of private enterprise was secure and improving with time; and this is apparent in the institutional arrangements that governed the getting and spending of wealth" (Ibid.).

A precondition of economic expansion was the definition and defense of property rights against the political authority. This occurred early on in Europe. Landes contrasts the European method of regular taxation (supervised by assemblies representative of the tax-bearing classes) with the system of "extortion" prevalent in "the great Asian empires and the Muslim states of the Middle East … where fines and extortions were not only a source of quick revenue but a means of social control — a device for curbing the pretensions of nouveaux riches and foreigners and blunting their challenge to the established power structure" (Ibid., 16–17). A secondary theme (Landes 1970, 21–22) is the character of the European Weltanschauung. Landes points to the emphasis on rationality in European culture, relative to others, fostered by elements in Christianity that ultimately may be traced to Judaism's disparagement of magic and superstition.

Landes's insights, briefly sketched in a few pages of introduction to his Prometheus Unbound, have been vastly elaborated upon by the new school. The upshot is an overall interpretation of Western history that may be stated as follows:

Although geographical factors played a role, the key to western development is to be found in the fact that, while Europe constituted a single civilization — Latin Christendom — it was at the same time radically decentralized.Cf. Baechler (1975, 74): Europe was "a society based upon the same moral and material civilization that never ended up in political unity, in short, in an Empire." In contrast to other cultures — especially China, India, and the Islamic world — Europe comprised a system of divided and, hence, competing powers and jurisdictions.

After the fall of Rome, no universal empire was able to arise on the Continent. This was of the greatest significance. Drawing on Montesquieu's dictum, Jean Baechler points out that "every political power tends to reduce everything that is external to it, and powerful objective obstacles are needed to prevent it from succeeding" (Baechler 1975, 79). In Europe, the "objective obstacles" were provided first of all by the competing political authorities. Instead of experiencing the hegemony of a universal empire, Europe developed into a mosaic of kingdoms, principalities, city-states, ecclesiastical domains, and other political entities.

Within this system, it was highly imprudent for any prince to attempt to infringe property rights in the manner customary elsewhere in the world. In constant rivalry with one another, princes found that outright expropriations, confiscatory taxation, and the blocking of trade did not go unpunished. The punishment was to be compelled to witness the relative economic progress of one's rivals, often through the movement of capital, and capitalists, to neighboring realms. The possibility of "exit," facilitated by geographical compactness and, especially, by cultural affinity, acted to transform the state into a "constrained predator" (Anderson 1991, 58).

Decentralization of power also came to mark the domestic arrangements of the various European polities. Here feudalism — which produced a nobility rooted in feudal right rather than in state-service — is thought by a number of scholars to have played an essential role (see, e.g., Baechler 1975, 78). Through the struggle for power within the realms, representative bodies came into being, and princes often found their hands tied by the charters of rights (Magna Carta, for instance) which they were forced to grant their subjects. In the end, even within the relatively small states of Europe, power was dispersed among estates, orders, chartered towns, religious communities, corps, universities, etc., each with its own guaranteed liberties. The rule of law came to be established throughout much of the Continent.

Thus, there is general agreement that crucial to laying the foundations for the European miracle were, in Jones's words, the "curtailment of predatory government tax behavior" and "the limits to arbitrariness set by a competitive political arena" (Jones 1987, xix, xxi). Over time, property rights — including rights in one's own person — came to be more sharply defined, permitting owners to capture more of the benefits of investment and improvement (North 1981). With the freer disposition of private property came the possibility of ongoing innovations, tested in the market. Here, too, the rivalrous state system was highly favorable. The nations of Europe functioned "as a set of joint-stock corporations with implicit prospectuses listing resources and freedoms" in such a way as to insure "against the suppression of novelty and unorthodoxy in the system as a whole" (Jones 1987, 119). A new social class arose, consisting of merchants, capitalists, and manufacturers "with immunity from interference by the formidable social forces opposed to change, growth, and innovation" (Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986, 24).

Eventually, the economy achieved a degree of autonomy unknown elsewhere in the world except for brief periods. As Jones puts it:

Economic development in its European form required above all freedom from arbitrary political acts concerning private property. Goods and factors of production had to be free to be traded. Prices had to be set by unconditional exchange if they were to be undistorted signals of what goods and services really were in demand, where and in what quantities. (Jones 1987, 85)

The system protecting the ownership and deployment of private property evolved in Europe by slow degrees — over at least "the eight centuries" mentioned by Bauer. Quite logically, therefore, the economic historians concerned with "how the West grew rich" have directed a great deal of their attention to the medieval period.

The Importance of the Middle Ages The stereotype of the Middle Ages as "the Dark Ages" fostered by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes has, of course, long since been abandoned by scholars. Still, the "consensus" writers on economic development whom Bauer faults have by and large ignored the importance of the Middle Ages for European growth — something that makes as much sense as beginning the explanation of the economic and cultural successes of European Jewry with the eighteenth century. Economic historians, however, following in the footsteps of the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (Pirenne 1937), have had a quite different estimation of the medieval period. Carlo M. Cipolla asserts that "the origins of the Industrial Revolution go back to that profound change in ideas, social structures, and value systems that accompanied the rise of the urban communes in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries" (Cipolla 1981, 298).

Of Europe from the late tenth to the fourteenth centuries, Robert S. Lopez states:

Here, for the first time in history, an underdeveloped society succeeded in developing itself, mostly by its own efforts … it created the indispensable material and moral conditions for a thousand years of virtually uninterrupted growth; and, in more than one way, it is still with us. (Lopez 1971, vii)

Lopez contrasts the European evolution with that of a neighboring civilization, Islam, where political pressures smothered the potential for an economic upsurge:

The early centuries of Islamic expansion opened large vistas to merchants and tradesmen. But they failed to bring to towns the freedom and power that was indispensable for their progress. Under the tightening grip of military and landed aristocracies the revolution that in the tenth century had been just around the corner lost momentum and failed. (Ibid., 57)

In Europe, as trade and industry expanded, people discovered that "commerce thrives on freedom and runs away from constriction; normally the most prosperous cities were those that adopted the most liberal policies" (Ibid., 90). The "demonstration effect" that has been a constant element in European progress — and which could exist precisely because Europe was a decentralized system of competing jurisdictions — helped spread the liberal policies that brought prosperity to the towns that first ventured to experiment with them.

Scholars like Cipolla and Lopez, attempting to understand European development in the Middle Ages, make constant reference to ideas, value systems, moral conditions, and similar cultural elements.Cf. Douglass C. North, "Ideology and the Free Rider Problem," in North (1981, 45–58). As Bauer has emphasized, this is a part of the distinctive European evolution that cannot be divorced from its institutional history. In regard to the Middle Ages, prime importance, in the view of many writers, attaches to Christianity. Harold J. Berman (Berman 1974)I am grateful to Leonard P. Liggio for calling my attention to this essay. has stressed that with the fall of Rome and the eventual conversion of the Germans, Slavs, Magyars, and so forth, Christian ideas and values suffused the whole blossoming culture of Europe. Christian contributions range from the mitigation of slavery and a greater equality within the family to the concepts of natural law, including the legitimacy of resistance to unjust rulers. The Church's canon law exercised a decisive influence on Western legal systems: "it was the church that first taught Western man what a modern legal system was like" (Ibid., 59).

Berman, moreover, focuses attention on a critical development that began in the eleventh century: the creation by Pope Gregory VII and his successors of a powerful "corporate, hierarchical church … independent of emperors, kings, and feudal lords," and thus capable of foiling the power-seeking of temporal authority (Ibid., 56).Cf. Roberts (1985, 67–9), on the Hildebrandine reform, and his comment, 68–69: "The preservation of an idea of liberty and its transmission to the future thus owes an incalculable amount to the quarrels of church and state." In this way, Berman bolsters Lord Acton's analysis of the central role of the Catholic church in generating Western liberty by forestalling any concentration of power such as marked the other great cultures, and thus creating the Europe of divided and conflicting jurisdictions.See Lord Acton's great essay, "The History of Freedom in Christianity (Acton 1956): To that conflict of four hundred years [between the Church and the temporal rulers] we owe the rise of civil liberty… although liberty was not the end for which they strove, it was the means by which the temporal and the spiritual power called the nations to their aid. The towns of Italy and Germany won their franchises, France got her States-General, and England her Parliament out of the alternate phases of the contest; and as long as it lasted it prevented the rise of divine right" (86–87).

In a major synthesis, Law and Revolution, Berman has highlighted the legal facets of the development whose economic, political, and ideological aspects other scholars have examined (Berman 1983): "Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Western legal tradition is the coexistence and competition within the same community of diverse legal systems. It is this plurality of jurisdictions and legal systems that makes the supremacy of law both necessary and possible" (Ibid., 10)Cf. Chirot (1986, 23): "The main reason for the legal rationalization of the West, then, was the long, indecisive, multisided political struggle between king, nobles, the church, and the towns."

Berman's work is in the tradition of the great English scholar, A.J. Carlyle, who, at the conclusion of his monumental study of political thought in the Middle Ages, summarized the basic principles of medieval politics: that all — including the king — are bound by law; that a lawless ruler is not a legitimate king, but a tyrant; that where there is no justice there is no commonwealth; that a contract exists between the ruler and his subjects (Carlyle and Carlyle 1950, 503–26).

Other recent scholarship has supported these conclusions. In his last, posthumous work, the distinguished historian of economic thought, Jacob Viner, noted that the references to taxation by St. Thomas Aquinas "treat it as a more or less extraordinary act of a ruler which is as likely as not to be morally illicit" (Viner 1978, 68–69). Viner pointed to the medieval papal bull, In Coena Domini — evidently republished each year into the late eighteenth century — which threatened to excommunicate any ruler "who levied new taxes or increased old ones, except for cases supported by law, or by an express permission from the pope" (Ibid., 69). Throughout the Western world, the Middle Ages gave rise to parliaments, diets, estates-generals, Cortes, etc., which served to limit the powers of the monarch. See A.R. Myers (1975, 24), who states of these parliamentary bodies: "they flourished at one time or another in every realm of Latin Christendom. They first emerge clearly towards the end of the twelfth century in the Spanish kingdom of Leon, in the thirteenth century in Castile, Aragon (and also Catalonia and Valencia), Portugal, Sicily, the Empire and some of the constituent states such as Brandenburg and Austria, and in England and Ireland. In the fourteenth century … in France … the Netherlands, Scotland, more of the German and Italian states, and Hungary; in the fifteenth century … in Denmark, Sweden, and Poland." A.R. Myers notes:

Almost everywhere in Latin Christendom the principle was, at one time or another, accepted by the rulers that, apart from the normal revenues of the prince, no taxes could be imposed without the consent of parliament … By using their power of the purse [the parliaments] often influenced the rulers policies, especially restraining him from military adventures. (Myers 1975 29–30)

In a recent synthesis of modern medievalist scholarship, Norman F. Cantor has summarized the heritage of the European Middle Ages in terms strikingly similar to those employed by the current institutional historians:

In the model of civil society, most good and important things take place below the universal level of the state: the family, the arts, learning, and science; business enterprise and technological process. These are the work of individuals and groups, and the involvement of the state is remote and disengaged. It is the rule of law that screens out the state's insatiable aggressiveness and corruption and gives freedom to civil society below the level of the state. It so happens that the medieval world was one in which men and women worked out their destinies with little or no involvement of the state most of the time. (Cantor 1991, 416)

One highly important factor in the advance of the West, possibly linked to Christianity, has not, however, been dealt with by the newer economic historians. It is the relative lack of institutionalized envy in Western culture. In a work endorsed by Bauer, the sociologist Helmut Schoeck has drawn attention to the omnipresence of envy in human societies (Schoeck [1969] 1987). Perceived as a grave threat by those at whom it is directed, it typically results in elaborate envy-avoidance behavior: the attempt to ward off the dangers of malicious envy by denying, disguising, or suppressing whatever traits provoked it. The antieconomic consequences of socially permitted — or even encouraged — envy and reactive envy-avoidance scarcely lend themselves to quantification. Nonetheless, they may clearly be highly damaging. Drawing on anthropological studies, Schoeck stresses the harm that institutionalized envy can inflict on the process of economic and technical growth (Ibid., 73). Western culture, according to Schoeck, has somehow been able to inhibit envy to a remarkable degree. Why this is so is less clear. Schoeck links this fact to the Christian faith: "It must have been one of Christianity's most important, if unintentional, achievements in preparing men for, and rendering them capable of, innovative actions when it provided man for the first time with supernatural beings who, he knew, could neither envy nor ridicule him" (Ibid., 79). Yet the evident variation in socially permitted envy in different Christian societies (e.g., Russia as against western Europe) suggests that the presence of Christian faith alone is not an adequate explanation. Case Studies of Development Obviously, all of Europe did not progress at the same rate. In particular, in the modern period the Netherlands and then England became the pacesetters of economic growth, while other countries declined. These facts can also be accounted for by the model.

The Low Countries had long benefited from the legal system inherited from the dukes of Burgundy. These rulers, who governed in collaboration with an active estates-general,Cf. Chirot (1986, 18): "a Burgundian states-general met 160 times from 1464 to 1567, exercising great fiscal powers and defending the rights of towns and merchants." had promoted an open commercial and industrial system, based on protection of property rights. In the rise of the "northern Netherlands" (the United Provinces, or "Holland") we have a near-perfect example of the European miracle in operation. First, the area had been a major participant in European economic, political, social, and cultural developments for centuries. As Cipolla has observed, "The country that in the second half of the sixteenth century rebelled against Spanish imperialism and then rose to the role of Europe's economically most dynamic nation, was anything but an underdeveloped country from the outset" (Cipolla 1981, 263). Owing its independence to the decentralized state system of Europe, it emerged itself as a decentralized polity, without a king and court — a "headless commonwealth" that combined secure property rights, the rule of law, religious toleration, and intellectual freedom with a degree of prosperity that amounted to an early modern Wirtschaftswunder. It is not surprising that Holland exerted a powerful demonstration effect. As K.W. Swart states:

both foreigners and Dutchmen were apt to believe that the Dutch Republic was unique in permitting an unprecedented degree of freedom in the fields of religion, trade, and politics…. In the eyes of contemporaries it was this combination of freedom and economic predominance that constituted the true miracle of the Dutch Republic. (Swart 1969, 20)

The success of the Dutch experiment was noted with great interest, especially in England, whose soil was already well prepared to accept the idea that prosperity is a reward of freedom. The deep roots of economic individualism, and hence of development, in English medieval history have been emphasized by Alan Macfarlane (Macfarlane 1978 and 1987).Cf. Baechler (1975, 79): "If the general political structure of the West was favorable to economic expansion, it would be the most marked in that country where political power was most limited and tolerated the greatest autonomy of civil society." That country, according to Baechler, was England. In the early modern period, the common law, which had evolved over many centuries, acted as a guarantor of the sanctity of property and free entry to industry and trade against the policies of the early Stuart kings. In the face of authoritarian usurpations, Sir Edward Coke and his fellow jurists acted, in the words of North and Thomas, "to place the creation of property rights beyond the royal whim; to embed existing property rights in a body of impersonal law guarded by the courts" (North and Thomas 1973, 148). Crucial in the case of both the Netherlands and England was the preservation, against attempted royal encroachments, of traditional representative assemblies determined to deny the ruler the right to tax at will. Here the antiauthoritarian side exploited — and further developed — the inherited discourse whose key concepts included "liberties," "rights," "the law of nature," and "constitution."

The decline of Spain, on the other hand, is also taken into account in the model. Confiscation of the property of Jews and Moors by the Spanish crown was, according to North and Thomas:

only symptomatic of the insecurity of all property rights . . seizure, confiscation, or the unilateral alteration of contracts were recurrent phenomena which ultimately affected every group engaged in commerce or industry as well as agriculture…. As no property was secure, economic retardation was the inevitable consequence. (Ibid., 131)

The economic decay of Spain, in turn, provided a negative demonstration effect that played a potent role in the policy choices of other countries.

The theme of the autonomy of the market and the inhibition of the predator-state as major factors in economic growth is pursued in the examination of non-European cultures. Baechler, for instance, states that "each time China was politically divided, capitalism flourished," and maintains that Japanese history manifests conditions approximating those of Europe (Baechler 1975, 82–86). Anderson, after surveying economic growth in the history of Sung China and Tokugawa Japan, as well as the Netherlands and England, concludes that the common element is that "they occurred when governmental constraints on economic activity were relaxed" (Anderson 1991, 73–74)See also the chapters on Sung China and Japan in Jones 1988.

While, needless to say, much more research requires to be done on economic development in the history of non-European civilizations, the evidence so far suggests strong support for the basic thrust of the institutional approach.

Contrast of Europe with Russia The meaning of the European miracle can be better seen if European developments are contrasted with those in Russia. Colin White lists, as the determining factors of Russian backwardness "a poor resource and hostile risk environment … an unpropitious political tradition and institutional inheritance, ethnic diversity, and the weakness of such key groups limiting state power as the church and landed oligarchy." (White 1987, 136) After the destruction of Kievan Rus by the Tatars and the rise of Muscovy, Russia was characterized for centuries by the virtual absence of the rule of law, including security for persons and property.

The lawlessness — as well as the poverty — of Muscovite Russia was notorious. When the emissary of Elizabeth I inquired of Ivan the Great the status of his subjects, he was told: "All are slaves" (Besançon, in Baechler, Hall, and Mann 1988, 161). Ivan IV, the Terrible, annihilated the flourishing commercial republics of Novgorod and Pskov, and loosed his Oprichnina (Ivan's praetorian guard) on the kingdom for a frenzy of butchery that came to stand for what was permissible in the Muscovite state. Alain Besançon remarks dryly, "Of the three legends (Romanian, German, and Russian) that depict, in the guise of Dracula, the reign of Vlad the Impaler, the Russian alone sings the praises of the prince" (Ibid.).

The nobility in Russia was a state-service nobility, lacking any independent base. As White observes: "Russia was never truly feudal in the west European sense of the term" (White 1987, 10). In contrast to Europe and America, the towns, as well, were "simply another arm of the state" (Ibid., 137–38). The differences between Russia and the West can be seen in their respective ideas of "absolutism." Ivan IV's concept is well known. It may be compared with that of a political writer in the West who is famous as a defender of royal absolutism, Jean Bodin. Alexander Yanov has pointed out that, for all his faith in absolutism:

Bodin regarded the property of the citizens as their inalienable possession, in the disposition of which they were no less sovereign than was the monarch in ruling his people. To tax citizens of a part of their inalienable property without their voluntary consent was, from Bodin's point of view, ordinary robbery. (Yanov 1981, 44–45)Compare Carlyle and Carlyle (1950, 512): "And most remarkable is it that Budé, who set out the doctrine of the absolute monarchy in France in the most extravagant terms, should have at the same time felt compelled to draw attention to the fact that the French Kings submitted to the judgment of the Parliament of Paris; and that Bodin should have contended that the judges should be permanent and irremovable, except by process of law, because the kingdom should be governed by laws and not by the mere will of the prince."

In this connection, Yanov reports a telling anecdote. A French diplomat in a conversation with an English colleague affirmed his belief in the principle enunciated by Louis XIV, that the king was ultimate owner of all the property within his kingdom (a principle which even the Sun-King never dared to act upon). The Englishmen retorted: "Did you study public law in Turkey?" (Ibid., 44 n. 17)

The fact that Russia received Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome shaped the entire course of Russia's history (Pipes 1974, 221–43). In the words of Richard Pipes, the Orthodox church in Russia became, like every other institution, "the servant of the state." Pipes concludes, regarding the "relations between state and society in pre-1900 Russia":

None of the economic or social groups of the old regime was either able or willing to stand up to the crown and challenge its monopoly of political power. They were not able to do so because, by enforcing the patrimonial principle, i.e., by effectively asserting its claim to all the territory of the realm as property and all its inhabitants as servants, the crown prevented the formation of pockets of independent wealth or power. (Ibid., 249)

What ideas of liberalism came to Russia came perforce from the West. It was from listening to the lectures on natural law at the University of Leipzig that Alexander Radishchev first learned that limits may be put to the power of the tsar (Clardy 1964, 37–38). The beginnings of the shift to a more market-oriented economic policy before the First World War are traced by Besancon to the fact that the Russian ministers read the liberal economists (Besancon, in Baechler, Hall, and Mann 1988, 166).

The Downfall of Marxist Historiography The Marxist philosophy of history is filled with manifold, often strategic, contradictions and ambiguities. Yet, if "historical materialism" has any significant content at all it is as a technological interpretation of history (Mises 1957, 106–12; Bober 1962, 3 — -). Although Nathan Rosenberg has denied that Marx held that "technological factors are, so to speak, the independent variable in generating social change, which constitutes the dependent variable" (Rosenberg 1982, 36; see also 34–51),Rosenberg states that the technological interpretation of the Marxist philosophy of history relies upon a few "aphoristic assertions, often tossed out in the heat of debate" (1982, 36). Nowhere in his essay, however, does he allude to the locus classicus of the subject, Marx's Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (Marx [1859] 1969b). the weight of evidence is heavily against him (Cohen 1978, 134–0).

According to Marx, Engels, and the theoreticians of the "Golden Age" of the Second International, history proceeds basically via changes in the "material productive forces" (the technological base), which render obsolete the existing "mode of production" (the property system). Because of technological changes, the mode of production is compelled to change; with it, everything else — the whole legal, political, and ideological "superstructure" of society — is transformed, as well (Marx [1859] 1969b, 8-). As Marx put it aphoristically: "The wind mill yields a society with feudal lords, the steam mill a society with industrial capitalists" (Marx [1847] 1969a, 130).

Marxism has, of course, been subjected for generations to withering rebuttal on many different fronts, not least in regard to its philosophy of history. The newer understanding of European history is particularly destructive of its fundamental claims, however, in that it directs attention to the peculiar shallowness of "historical materialism." This newer understanding insists that the colossal growth of technology in the Western world in the past millennium must itself be explained, and the explanation it provides is in terms of the institutional and moral matrix that emerged in Europe over many centuries.Anderson (1991, 41) rejects technical change as an independent variable explaining economic growth: "Technology is more appropriately seen as dependent on the institutional structure and the availability of capital, including 'human capital' expressed as an educated, skilled, and healthy workforce. The availability of capital is in turn dependent on a favorable set of institutions." New and more productive machines did not spring forth mysteriously and spontaneously, nor was the spectacular expansion of technical and scientific knowledge somehow inevitable. As Anderson has summed up the evidence, "the scientific and technical stasis that followed the remarkable achievements of the Song dynasty, or of the flowering of early Islam, indicates that scientific inquiry and technology do not necessarily possess in themselves the dynamism suggested by the European experience" (Anderson 1991, 46). On the contrary, technology and science emerged out of an interrelated set of political, legal, philosophical, religious, and moral elements in what orthodox Marxism has traditionally disparaged as the "superstructure" of society.

Conclusion According to the Indian development economist R.M. Sundrum, if we are to understand how development can be promoted in the poorer countries today, we must understand the historical process which transformed developed countries in the past, and why this process failed to take place elsewhere (cited in Arndt 1987, 177). This is the position that P.T. Bauer, too, has insisted upon. Rejecting the "timeless approach" to economic development, Bauer has accentuated the many centuries required for economic growth in the Western world, and the interplay of various cultural factors that were its precondition. Most important, in Bauer's view, is that in the Western world institutions and values evolved that favored private property and the market, set limits to state arbitrariness and predation, and encouraged innovation and the sense that human beings are capable of improving their lot through their actions on the market.

Recently, W.W. Rostow, in a summary of Bauer's career, chided him for failing "to take adequately into account the extremely large and inescapable role of the state in early phases of development" (Rostow 1990, 386).Rostow's dismissive tone in his treatment of Bauer may well have been affected by Bauer's devastating review of Rostow's magnum opus, The Stages of Economic Growth. See Bauer (1972: 477–89). Such a criticism is not surprising, coming from one of the leaders of what Bauer has for years assailed as the "spurious consensus." Yet it finds little support in the work of the historians dealt with here. (For some reason, Rostow ignores this whole body of scholarship in his very lengthy history of theories of economic growth; Ibid., passim). While some of these authors would stipulate a significant role for the state in certain areas — particularly in defining and enforcing property rights — this is consistent with Bauer's viewpoint. Moreover, the overall thrust of their work — which stresses the importance of limits on state action in the development of the West — tends to corroborate Bauer's position rather than Rostow's. Peter Burke, for instance, writing on one of the earliest examples of European development — the merchant-states of northern Italy and the Netherlands — describes them as "pro-enterprise cultures in which governments did relatively little to frustrate the designs of merchants or hinder economic growth, a negative characteristic which all the same gave those countries an important advantage over their competitors" (Burke in Baechler, Hall, and Mann 1988, 230). William H. McNeill notes that "within Europe itself, those states that gave the most scope to private capital and entrepreneurship prospered the most, whereas better governed societies in which welfare on the one hand or warfare on the other commanded a larger proportion of available resources tended to lag behind." As the growth leaders McNeill cites "such conspicuously undergoverned lands as Holland and England" (McNeill 1980, 65). And F.L. Jones takes as a guiding principle in the explanation of growth a famous passage from Adam Smith: "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things" (Jones 1987, 234–35, cited in Stewart [1793] 1966, 68).

The new paradigm generated by the work of these and other scholars has already helped produce further major works of research and synthesis.See, for instance, Roberts (1985): Chirot (1986); and Kennedy (1987, 19–20), where the author of this celebrated book writes of the "decentralized, largely unsupervised growth of commerce and merchants and ports and markets [in Europe]… there was no way in which such economic developments could be fully suppressed … there existed no uniform authority in Europe which could effectively halt this or that commercial development; no central government whose change in priorities could cause the rise or fall of a particular industry; no systematic and universal plundering of businessmen and entrepreneurs by tax gatherers, which so retarded the economy of Moghul India." It goes without saying that a great deal more study is required. Yet it is likely that further research will provide additional substantiation of the viewpoint steadfastly represented by Professor Bauer. As Anderson observes: "The emphasis on release from constraints points to a fruitful direction of research into why some societies experienced economic development and others didn't" (Anderson 1991, 73–74). In any case, the subject will continue to be of very great theoretical interest to scholars — and to many millions in the underdeveloped world, a matter of life and death.

View Details

The Kelo decision, in which the Supreme Court refused to intervene in the case of a local government taking of private property, touched off a huge debate among libertarians on the question of decentralization. The most common perspective was that the decision was a disaster because it gave permission to local governments to steal land. Libertarians are against stealing land, and so therefore must oppose the court decision.

And yet stealing isn't the only thing libertarians are against. We are also opposed to top-down political control over wide geographic regions, even when they are instituted in the name of liberty.

How is the libertarian to choose when there is a conflict between the demands of liberty and strictures against empire? The answer is not always easy, but experience and the whole intellectual history of liberalism suggest that decentralized government is most compatible with long-run concerns for liberty. This is why all the founders were attached to the idea of federalism: that the states within the union were the primary governing units, and the Bill of Rights was to protect both individuals and the states from impositions by the central government—even when liberty is invoked as a justification.

Just so that we are clear on this last point: the purpose of the Bill of Rights was to state very clearly and plainly what the Federal Government may not do. That's why they were attached to the Constitution. The states, under the influence of skeptics of the Constitution's limits on the central power, insisted that the restrictions on the government be spelled out. The Bill of Rights did not provide a mandate for what the Federal Government may do. You can argue all you want about the 14th amendment and due process. But a reading that says it magically transforms the whole Bill of Rights to mean the exact opposite of its original intent is pure fantasy.

Back to the libertarian presumption in favor of decentralization. There are several reasons for it.

Second, localism internalizes corruption so that it can be more easily spotted and uprooted. Along the same lines, local government corruption can be rather benign by comparison; it is easier, on a middle-class budget, to pay off the zoning board than to bribe the State Department.

Third, tyranny on the local level minimizes damage to the same extent that macro-tyranny maximizes it. If Hitler had ruled only Berlin, Stalin only Moscow, and FDR only Washington, the effects of their demented policies might have been contained. This is not only a utilitarian consideration. It means that evil people are prevented from violating the rights of people outside their jurisdiction.

Fourth, no government can be trusted to use the power to intervene wisely. With such power, central governments will always invoke good motives even when they are a mere mask for power grabs (as when the US invaded Iraq, for example). The typical path goes this way. An intervention takes place that might be celebrated by good liberals, such as the Lochner decision (1905) by the Supreme Court that invalidated New York's labor regulations. But once that power is gained, it is used to put a legal imprimatur on central planning and prevent local governments from finding an escape (the central planning of World War I was Lochner's daughter).

Fifth, a plurality of governmental forms—a "vertical separation of powers," to use Stephan Kinsella's phrase prevents the central government from accumulating power. Lower governments are rightly jealous of their jurisdiction, and resist. This is to the good. In fact, the whole history of liberty is bound up with the glorious results of competing institutional structures, no one of which can be trusted with complete control.

To be sure, this does not mean that libertarians must be agnostic on the question of what government should look like. Law should protect person and property against invasive force. This principle applies in all times and in all places. But that does not mean that there must be a single law giver and enforcer. To maximize the chance that good law will prevail over bad, over the long haul, and prevent power grabs from the top, we need a multiplicity of legal forms.

Murray N. Rothbard had a nice phrase that he used to summarize this position: universal rights, locally enforced. Those two principles are frequently in tension. But if you give up one of the two principles you risk giving up liberty. Both are important. Neither should prevail over the other. A local government that violates rights is intolerable. A central government that rules in the name of universal rights is similarly intolerable. Heaven on earth is universal rights, locally enforced. No, it's not here yet. That's why libertarians exist, to work for the ideal.

Now, there is another form of decentralization you often hear about. It comes from those who regret globalization in all forms, including multinational corporations and the like. They complain about the centralization of life in the modern age and long for simpler times. Here's the problem: the kind of centralization they regret is a result of voluntary decision-making in the marketplace. It is freely chosen centralization. Their plans for scaling back would require massive coercion and bring about an economic calamity.

In matters of private association and market economics, libertarians can make no a priori decision concerning the best means to organize. Rothbard was a defender of multinational corporations and global trade, but he also saw that too much integration in the production structure is bad for business. Firms lose the ability to calculate their profits and losses when they are responsible for too great a degree of internal production for their own capital goods.

How does this impact the organization of other institutions in society, like church, extended family, civic associations, and ideological movements? Is centralization best or is decentralization best? The answer must be left to experience. The Catholic Church is centralized doctrinally but decentralized managerially. The family in the American context is not centralized between generations. Grandparents are there to dote, not rule. Civic associations take many forms, from national organizations to local ones.

Rothbard himself, in the course of experience, changed his view on the best method for organizing ideological movements. Early on, he was attracted to the idea of top-down management, with cadres and followers and cells of every sort. He saw that this worked for the Communists, so why not for the libertarians? He was right to say that nothing in libertarian theory prohibits top-down management insofar as it is voluntary and rooted in private property.

But later on in life, he changed his mind and wrote that he found serious problems with this model, and they are related to the same problems that appear with political centralization. In the Libertarian Forum, August 1981, he writes:

"I would like to take this opportunity to admit my previous error in calling for an ultra-centralist model for the [Libertarian Party]. Several years in the [LP] have soured me on centralism permanently. Putting the rule of the Party, or of the movement as a whole, into the hands of one man or of one tight group is a recipe for disaster. First, it means that if a few people sell out to opportunism, the rest of the movement is dragged along with it. But second, and more generally, even if the Machiners were a bunch of wonderful people, since they are not omniscient they are bound, as are all of us to make mistakes. And just as the mistakes of a government-controlled economy can ruin a nation, so the inevitable mistakes of a tight ruling clique can ruin a party or a movement. I still think it absurd to think of decentralism as 'the libertarian' form of organization. How we organize is not a matter of libertarian principle, so long as we do not violate the non-aggression axiom. But it appears that neither radical decentralism nor ultra-centralism will work in any organization…. [M]oderation and balance should be our organizational mode."

How right he is! Imagine if the only forms of ideology available to us were those offered by Washington, D.C. organizations, with their hyper-policy focus and tendency to kowtow to the state. In intellectual life, we need a vast multiplicity of forms in order to check corruption and compromise. Even in the libertarian movement, we need diversity and experimentation, not centralization, command, and control.

In the organization of business, ideas, and life itself, Rothbard recommends balance and moderation. So we might articulate two Rothbardian principles. In public affairs, we need universal rights, locally enforced. In private and economic affairs, we need neither centralization nor decentralization, but moderation and balance, trial and error. To me, these formulations represent the height of good thinking, good law, and the good society.

View Details

The actual negotiations could easily run right up to the deadline in March 2019, when Britain is due to leave. If no agreement is forthcoming by that date, both sides might agree to extend negotiations, but that only seems likely if there is a good prospect of an agreement. Otherwise, Britain leaves and falls back on WTO trading rules, or does away with tariffs altogether. This is seen by the EU negotiators as a threat to Britain, believing it is Britain which is running out of time. Therefore, if Britain wants a trade deal, she must make it clear that a no-deal option is attractive to her. And, be it clearly understood, the negotiations only cover a minor part of the UK’s overall economy.

It’s Much Ado About Not Much TradeWTO tariffs apply to physical goods, involving only £143bn exported from the UK’s £2,000 billion economy to the EU, and imports from the EU of a larger £235.5bn. Excluding agricultural products of some £5bn (net of spirits), average trade-weighted tariffs on goods imported into the EU from non-member states without a trade agreement is only 2.3%.[i] Therefore, the EU’s external tariffs which will be applied to UK non-agricultural goods exports to the EU involves only 7.5% of the UK’s GDP, and is a tax on EU citizens amounting to roughly £2bn. Is this really worth arguing over, and paying massive divorce fees?

The larger issue is services, and here we must differentiate between services sold to consumers, such as retail investments, and wholesale services, such as capital market operations, commercial lending, legal services, architectural services, etc. The retail services involved are not material, and in any event are easily distributed through locally-incorporated subsidiaries in Dublin and Luxembourg. Wholesale services are generally excluded from trade agreements for practical reasons.

Therefore, if a trade agreement is not forthcoming, the cost to British business as a whole is not as material as the Remainers and lobbying businesses have it, and certainly less than the implied cost of normal currency volatility on cross-border settlements. One should conclude that the absence of a trade agreement costs considerably less than the UK Government paying money to the EU for an implementation period.

The Current State of the Brexit DebateIt is becoming clear that the Remainers are driven by little more than a desire to prevent change while distrusting free markets. Nick Clegg, who was Deputy Prime Minister in the Conservative/Liberal-Democrats coalition, has recently published a book entitled How to stop Brexit (And make Britain great again)[ii]. There are no substantive arguments in favour of Remain, not even a neo-Keynesian discourse. Make Britain great again? The book is miss-sold. There is nothing on the subject of the book’s subtitle at all.

Mr Clegg’s unquestioning assumption, which he appears to share with other leading Remainers, is Brexit is just plain wrong. He makes much of the Brexit campaign’s supposed lies about the extent of the rebate when Britain leaves the EU. There was no lie: it merely failed to differentiate between the funds Britain would save, and the money that is spent by the EU in the UK funded by the UK taxpayer. The latter amount is decided by the EU, not the UK, so all the Brexiteers were quoting was a gross figure sent to Brussels, which on Brexit would become available to the Government to save or spend as it sees fit.

Furthermore, there was no mention of “project fear”, the Remain campaign’s concerted effort to frighten voters into voting Remain. But, as we saw only this week, the pro-Remainers in the establishment are at it again. They prepared and leaked another negative report based on the same economic modelling. A reasonable person would have been so embarrassed by the failure of the first attempt at economic propaganda, as to not repeat it. But we are dealing with ingrained beliefs, not reason.

On the evidence, Remainers cannot argue their case effectively. Furthermore, the cost of backtracking on Brexit, which receives too little attention, is now considerable, and almost certainly unpalatable to the electorate. Unless Britain does achieve a proper Brexit, she becomes, taking the words of Jacob Rees-Mogg,[iii] a vassal state, having lost considerable political credibility and the ability to influence EU policy as she has done before.

Realistically, bridges have been burnt, even though the panjandrums in Brussels want Britain to change her mind. The Thatcher rebate would certainly be lost, and Brussels is preparing more onerous regulations in the knowledge Britain can no longer obstruct the EU executive’s plans. The Tobin tax on financial transactions can now be introduced, which would kill the City, if Britain remained, more certainly than any threat from Paris and Frankfurt as rival financial centres. A Tobin tax introduced in Euroland after Britain leaves would see Eurozone wholesale financial business migrate to London.

If Britain backtracks or compromises on sovereignty, it will be disastrous for her, and little account has been taken of the new opportunities for the City, operating from outside the EU.

Enter the European Research GroupThe ERG, unlike its name might suggest, is the grouping of pro-Brexit backbench Conservative MPs determined to ensure Britain truly leaves the EU. The recent appointment of Jacob Rees-Mogg, as its new high-profile chairman, promises a new dynamism in the battle between the Brexiteers and the Remainers. The ERG has considerable power, being comprised of sixty MPs while Mrs May commands no overall majority.

Further pressure is being applied through the 1922 Committee, which officially represents all backbench Conservative MPs. Amongst them are Remainers and those without well-defined opinions, the latter becoming increasingly alarmed at the lack of a clear government policy. If forty-eight of them formally write to the 1922 Committee expressing no confidence in Mrs May, an election for a new leader (and therefore prime minister) is automatically triggered. It is rumoured that forty such letters have already been received. Between the ERG and the 1922 Committee, the Brexiteers’ ability to pressure the Government into sticking with a firm Brexit policy is increasing.

All this lends support to Mrs May’s original Lancaster House declaration, which is what the ERG is seeking to achieve. In the Commons, opposition to Brexit has been subdued enough to get the required legislation through the House, without major concessions. This is not the case, however, in the Lords, which by sending legislation back to the Commons for reconsideration threatens to delay the whole process at a time of tightening deadlines.

Mrs May’s greatest problems are likely to be in dealing with her own advisors, senior civil servants whose only world is one of bureaucracy, and the Treasury, populated with staunch neo-Keynesians. Bureaucrats resist change, particularly when it involves a whole new paradigm, which is always seen as risky. And the Treasury believes in manipulating the economy to enhance tax income, the antithesis of any free market proposition, with which it has little empathy.

These operators are unhappy at the prospect of past agreements being torn up to be replaced by, in their view, uncertainty. Thus, Oliver Robbins, whose job is to coordinate negotiations with the EU from Downing Street, and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, are seen by the ERG to be pursuing a policy of fudging the changes required for a true Brexit. And Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, is now being downright obstructive.

However, governments have a duty to represent the electorate, not the permanent establishment, which is there to serve ministers in pursuing government policy. Individual ministers are meant to toe the agreed policy line. Mrs May, in trying to accommodate the Remainers, appears to be in danger of siding with the permanent establishment and the Treasury, against her own stated policy, instead of firmly instructing it to do the Cabinet’s bidding. Doubtless, the ERG will ram this point home.

Keeping the Broader Picture in SightIt is always difficult for a prime minister at the coal-face of day-to-day problems to retain a broader vision. The ultimate prize for Mrs May would be to go down in history as having laid the foundations for a prosperous Britain. To achieve this, she must have a proper understanding of free trade, as Robert Peel acquired when he sided with Richard Cobden and abolished the Corn Laws in the 1840s. Unfortunately, Mrs May has little option but to listen to risk-averse advisors and central planners who deny the primacy of free markets, not just for handling day-to-day issues, but also, it appears, to guide her for the broader picture. In short, she has to have an independence and resolve to act despite her advisors’ advice.

Some members of Mrs May’s Cabinet do understand free trade. They include heavyweights such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Davis and Liam Fox. Even though Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, has been persuaded against it by his permanent staff, the ERG does have powerful allies in the Cabinet.[iv]

The European Research Group understands, to a reasonable degree at least, the fallacies of central planning and the faults of the socialism of the European project, while understanding the benefits of free trade. Its leadership should be well placed for the task. This is where the position of Mr Rees-Mogg is important. He personally appears to understand the benefits of free markets, has a good grasp of the individual Brexit issues, and argues his case well. This is in sharp contrast with the Remain camp, and the middle ground of lobby-fodder on both sides of the House.

That middle ground is his to win, but time is severely limited. To do so he must not only argue his case well, but also get the following points across, loud and clear:

The best outcome for the British consumer is no tariffs, and their removal is the responsibility of the UK Government. The best outcome for the economy is not found in protecting business through trade tariffs, because that is to the detriment of the consumer.Current EU trade tariffs disadvantage the poor most. This point will become increasingly relevant when price inflation gathers pace ahead of the final Brexit date (March 2019), as the global credit cycle progresses. An appreciation of this simple fact makes tariffs indefensible, and a clean break Brexit becomes more obviously the best solution.No separation payments should be made to the EU, unless they are specifically itemised and contractually justified. The capital payments demanded by the EU in any political compromise are not only a needless expense, but an imposition on the Treasury’s finances which are already in deficit. Furthermore, the loss of revenue from the removal of all tariffs is a considerably smaller sum than the amounts demanded by the EU negotiators.The Treasury must be persuaded that free trade leads to a stronger economy, which will be reflected in higher tax revenues. Moreover, a botched compromise, effectively being advocated by the Treasury, is a significant threat to the government’s finances.There is no need for an implementation or transition period. These extensions do not encourage businesses to adapt to Brexit so much as they delay the necessary changes. Any such period should be firmly restricted to be as short as possible and involve no payment.In any event, time is short, not only given the Brexit timetable, but ideally it must be concluded, or at least set in stone, before the disruption of the next crisis of the global credit cycle.

View Details

In recent decades, anti-abortion advocates have increasingly claimed that the US Constitution provides protections to babies in utero via the 14th Amendment. That is, the Amendment would guarantee that no state may "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

This argument was used by the state of Texas which claimed in the case of Roe v. Wade that “the fetus is a ‘person’ within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The Supreme Court rejected this claim, but not on the grounds that the 14th Amendment did not potentially apply. The court simply denied that a fetus is a person. Furthermore, the court admitted that if personhood were legally established in this case, then the 14th Amendment indeed would apply.

Consequently, anti-abortion activists have focused on establishing the personhood of humans in utero and of asserting that the 14th Amendment ought to apply even without an explicit declaration of personhood. Both Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz repeated this view during the 2016 presidential primary season.

Some commentators have even gone so far as to suggest that babies in utero enjoyed Constitutional protections at some point in the past, as was the case with Michael New in National Review when he reported on a 2012 presidential primary debate:

During the [Palmetto Freedom Forum on September 5, 2011], Princeton professor Robert P. George asked all five candidates whether they would support legislation, under Section Five of the 14th Amendment, that would restore legal protection for unborn children.

It's unclear as to how closely New is quoting George here. But, the use of the phrase "restore legal protection" is problematic because babies in utero did not enjoy legal protections under the Constitution before Roe v. Wade, and one cannot restore that which never existed. Certainly, one can plausibly claim that these babies have always enjoyed rights in the moral sense. It's also entirely possible that some state constitutions explicitly addressed the matter. And we know many state statutes did. But in the legal sense, it is clear there was no protection under the US Constitution.

This idea of "restoring" lost rights to the unborn via federal law has been further extended into the idea that the US Constitution as originally imagined provided these rights.

This, however, does not reflect the legal or ideological reality before Roe v. Wade when abortion was overwhelmingly considered a state and local matter.

By attempting to apply the 14th Amendment to abortion cases, anti-abortion advocates are essentially agreeing with the Court that federal law ought to apply to abortion matters, in spite of them always having been state and local matters in the past.

Even among jurists who oppose abortion, this federalization of abortion laws has seemed questionable at best.

Most notably among those who hold this decentralist view, perhaps, is the late Antonin Scalia who asserted that on the matter of abortion “the Constitution says absolutely nothing about it."

Scalia’s view was that abortion was clearly the domain of the states and that abortion ought not be considered a federal matter:

I will strike down Roe v. Wade, but I will also strike down a law that is the opposite of Roe v. Wade. You know, both sides in that debate want the Supreme Court to decide the matter for them. One wants no state to be able to prohibit abortion and the other one wants every state to have to prohibit abortion, and they’re both wrong ... that’s how I read the Constitution.Antonin Scalia, Remarks at the Pew Research Center Forum, A Call for Reckoning: Religion and the Death Penalty, Session Three (Jan. 25, 2002).

Abortion Before Roe The actual history of abortion in the United States supports Scalia’s view.

The legality of abortion has often varied, depending on the era and state in which one lived.

Some anti-abortion advocates today imagine that abortion was rare and taboo prior to Roe vs. Wade. The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) says exactly this in its "abortion timeline" where it states "there is evidence of a few rogue doctors and midwives performing abortions in the U.S. as far back as the 1850s." The timeline itself does not begin until 1959, thus implying that no notable legal or legislative battle took place before the mid-twentieth century.

The NRLC’s version of the past, however, is very much at odds with the actual legislative history in which both abortion — and legislation impeding it — were widespread during the nineteenth century. What was different about these battles, however, was that they were waged at the state and local levels.

Going back to the seventeenth century, prohibitions could be found, but as Janet Farrell Brodie writes in Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America: "Convictions for abortion, however, were rare. Middlesex County in Massachusetts had only four convictions for attempted abortion between 1633 and 1699."

Brodie notes that technology and public knowledge related to abortion had changed significantly over time:

How Americans learned about ways to control or prevent pregnancy was radically transformed in the decades after the 1830s by public lectures and new genres of literature giving contraceptive advice.

In consumer-driven America, this led to growing industries making contraceptive and abortion services more widely available. Brodie continues:

Abortion instruments, like drugs, were readily available through the mails or from a variety of retail establishments, particularly drugstores, and wholesale druggists’ catalogues carried a considerable variety of styles and models in uterine sounds and dilators. Newspapers regularly carried advertisements for abortion-inducing drugs.

By mid century there was a growing number of professional abortionists, and not only in large cities, as W.M. Smith, a physician in the small farming town of Atkinson, Illinois (population 300) noted in 1874. ... Smith estimated that his town had one abortion for every ten live births.

Just how widespread was abortion? Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century statistics on the matter are sparse. But, as James Mohr writes in Abortion in America: the Origins and Evolution of National Policy, a number of contemporary researchers concluded that numbers were quite high by historical standards:

Dr. P.S. Haskell, in a report to the Medical Association of Maine ..."suggest[ed] a ratio of one abortion for every six live births at a minimum." ... Horace Knapp wrote in 1873, "There can be no doubt that more children are destroyed annually in their mother's womb than are born alive." ... By the of the decade of the 1870s, medical writers began to suggest earlier estimates had been, if anything, too low. In 1878 physicians testifying in the murder trial of an abortionist in southern Illinois set the ratio at 25 percent of all pregnancies .... [this was followed by] still another upward revision of the Storer and Heard ratio of one abortion in every five pregnancies made by the Michigan State Board of Health two years later.

Physicians in Michigan, according to a special committee of the Board of Health, were directly aware of "seventeen abortions to every hundred pregnancies" and were also convinced that at least "as many more ... never come to the physician's knowledge. ... Occasionally during the 1880s a physician might estimate an abortion rate as low as "ten percent of all pregnancies," but most writers arrived at calculations of at least as high as the Michigan rate of one-third. A doctor who had practiced in Philadelphia for twenty-five years "stated as his firm conviction that more than one-half of the human family dies before it is born."

Some of these figures are comparable to modern-day abortion ratios reported by the Guttmacher Institute. During the 1990s — a high-abortion period — ratios reached 25 abortions per 100 pregnancies. In 2014, after several years of decline, the ratio fell to 18.8 per 100 pregnancies.

Seeking better confirmation of his historical statistics, Mohr looked to the birthrates of the time:

The record of birthrates in the United States during the nineteenth century underlies all the foregoing contemporary evidence and offer a final reason to believe that the United States experienced a great upsurge in the incidence of abortion that began around 1840 and continued roughly through the 1870s. The data are circumstantial to be sure, but striking nonetheless, especially when combined with the conclusion of modern demographers about the population trends in other societies ... the average American women bore 7.04 children in 1800; 3.56 by 1900. The steepest decennial drop in this long decline, which had been a slight trough the first three decades of the century, occurred between 1840 and 1850, exactly when abortion information, abortion services, and abortion itself came out in to the open.

The Legislative Response Faced with what was apparently a period of considerable growth in abortion, many social reformers attempted to implement legislative restrictions.

These legislative changes, however, were done at the state level, and were often accompanied by efforts to regulate medical procedures and facilities overall. It was the newly organized American Medical Association that led the charge in 1857. In When Abortion Was a Crime, Leslie Reagan notes that "Through the 1870s, regular physicians across the country worked for the passage of new criminal abortion laws. In securing criminal abortion laws, the Regulars won recognition of their particular views as well as some state control over the practice of medicine.""Regulars" were physicians that were usually part of the AMA mainstream, as opposed to "irregular" physicians who did not have credentials from the AMA or similar organizations.

In spite of this nationwide drive for abortion restrictions, federal law remained generally untouched. Notable exceptions were the so-called Comstock Laws which prohibited the use of the US Postal Service to send abortifacients through the mail. Note, however, that federal authority ended with the federal government's postal service. Any direct prohibition of abortion was seen as having to originate with state laws.

And, when state laws were passed, enforcement was haphazard, to say the least. Reagan continues:

The underlying structure of medicine and the law at the time of the century fostered the practice of abortion everywhere. When the Chicago Times focused on the business of abortion, it ignored the exception in the state criminal abortion law that allowed physicians to perform therapeutic abortion. The law itself contributed to the medical practice of abortion. The Illinois abortion statute exempted "any person who procured or attempts to produce the miscarriage of any pregnant women for bona fide medical or surgical purposes." What constitutes a bona fide reason, however, was left undefined.

By the 1890s, anti-abortion doctors were again attempting to re-invigorate a movement which some saw as faltering again.

The second wave, as described by Reagan, also focused again on state and local laws:

The new antiabortion crusade pursued a three-pronged strategy. Medical efforts focused, first, on reeducating American women and then public about the immorality and dangers of abortion. This cultural campaign took place in physicians' offices and patients' homes during individual encounters as well and in public group forums. Second, antiabortion physicians worked internally within medical societies to eliminate abortionists from the medical profession. Third, the antiabortion campaign moved its focus from state legislatures to the local level, where the new laws were enforced. The new activists sought an alliance with the state officials in enforcing the law. Antiabortionists identified an entire group of practitioners they believed responsible for illegal abortion: immigrant midwives. The attempt by specialists in obstetrics to restrict their competitors was the most visible and public aspect of the new campaign. The purging of the profession was treated as a private problem...

Abortion was not a political issue in the sense that it has become today; it neither played a role in national presidential elections no reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet during the Progressive Era, abortion became a contested issue of interest to politicians and target of new legislation at both the local and state levels.

Recognizing the limitations of legislation to change what was widely-accepted behavior, the reformers focused often on non-state solutions.

Nor was victory assured. While some doctors stressed the medical risks of abortion, many doctors nevertheless saw opposition to abortion as the "Christian duty" while some admitted that their patients were not necessarily open to what physicians had to say. As one Colorado doctor of the time admitted, "Some people ... will laugh at the doctor for telling them that it is murder to kill an unborn infant."See Reagan, page 84.

The Federalization of Abortion By the mid-twentieth century, the cultural and professional factors that had driven the anti-abortion movement in the nineteenth century began to disappear. The AMA and its physicians no longer pushed for continued restrictions on abortion as they once had. Pro-abortion activists began to successfully push for the repeal of state-level restrictions.

Anti-abortion activists experienced a loss of influence with both cultural and political institutions that had driven the anti-abortion movement two generations earlier.

The Pew Research Center provides a brief history of the turning point:

In 1967, Colorado became the first state to greatly broaden the circumstances under which a woman could legally receive an abortion. By 1970, 11 additional states had made similar changes to their abortion laws and four other states — New York, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska — had completely decriminalized abortion during the early stages of pregnancy.

Even into the early 1970s, abortion continued to be a state-level issue. Roe v. Wade changed all that.

When the Supreme Court handed down the Roe decision in 1973, it took abortion matters out of the states and placed them into the hands of federal law-enforcement agencies, federal courts, and Congress in a way that had never been done before. As is the usual modern practice in American politics, this revolutionary rewriting of the Constitution was done without a Constitutional amendment, and thus cut short any national debate that was taking place in state legislatures and local institutions.

Pro-abortion advocates, of course, are happy with this status quo because they are on the winning side — for now. Unfortunately, by nationalizing abortion politics, the Court also raised the stakes in each presidential election, so that now every national election is seen as a referendum on which groups will control the Supreme Court and whether or not one side will rewrite the federal laws that are then imposed on 320 million people.

An American peering into the future from the year 1910 would likely look upon such a state of affairs with amazement. He or she might think "robbery and murder are matters for state and local law, but abortion laws require the Supreme Court and Congress?" It might appear to this observer that Americans had become totally incapable of self-government by the twenty-first century. This assessment would probably be correct.

View Details

The Miami Herald reports that a local couple is going all the way to the state supreme court to fight a local ordinance banning front-yard vegetable gardens:

Hermine Ricketts and her husband Tom Carroll may grow fruit trees and flowers in the front yard of their Miami Shores house...

Vegetables, however, are not allowed.

Ricketts and Carroll thought they were gardeners when they grew tomatoes, beets, scallions, spinach, kale and multiple varieties of Asian cabbage. But according to a village ordinance that restricts edible plants to backyards only, they were actually criminals.

“That’s what government does – interferes in people’s lives,” Ricketts said. “We had that garden for 17 years. We ate fresh meals every day from that garden. Since the village stepped its big foot in it, they have ruined our garden and my health.”

These sorts of stories pop up several times a year. They are often discussed at free-market oriented and libertarian sites to illustrate just the myriad of ways that the state interferes in our daily lives. Many times, they intervene to prohibit totally innocuous activities like growing a front-yard garden.

What articles like these often fail to point out of course, is that these laws didn't appear out of nowhere. They are often passed because some voters demanded the city council or the county commission pass laws prohibiting front-yard gardens, or backyard chicken coops, or other non-violent activities deemed by some to be a nuisance to the neighborhood. These laws then persist over time because the majority of voters either agree with the laws, or don't feel strongly enough about the matter to demand a change.

In Miami Shores, the law against front-yard gardens was likely passed because at least a few people felt that front yard gardens were not so innocuous after all.

This situation illustrates, yet again, a problem with majoritarian government. If a majority of the citizens of Miami Shores — or whatever jurisdiction — hate front-yard gardens, then they likely to vote for candidates who will vote to ban them. The minority, of course, is simply out of luck.

The implied solution in many of these free-market publications is that government should just get out of the business of regulating front yards. OK. But then people will begin to ask the inevitable questions:

Should people be able to just dump garbage in their front yards then?Can they park a food truck there 24-hours a day and sell hamburgers out of them? Can they put in their front yards a 20-foot sculpture of a jackalope? If the response is "of course not" then the next question is "why not?" or "so what is prohibited in front yards?" If a pile of old appliances is not acceptable in the front yard, why is a vegetable garden acceptable? What if many people think gardens are nearly as unsightly as an old car on blocks?

You can probably figure out where this leads. We're right back at regulating what people can do in their front yards.

Indeed, when Ricketts laments that "government interferes in people's lives" in response to the ban on her garden, one wonders if she'd be equally libertarian if her neighbors had piles of junk cars in their front yards.

So, is there no solution here? Must we choose between bans on gardens on the one side, and piles of garbage on the other?

The solution, of course, lies in decentralization and privatization.

The Role of the Homeowners AssociationWere local governments to totally abandon all regulations on neighborhood aesthetics, it's easy to imagine what would happen next.A similar situation would occur if states were abolished altogether. People would quickly sort themselves into like-minded groups of people governed by private agreements similar to homeowners association covenants. Assuming, of course, that they were unable to convince local governments to ban allegedly "unsightly" features like front-yard gardens, those who hate the veggie gardens would then seek a solution in private homeowners associations.For the record, this author lives in a jurisdiction that allows both front-yard gardens and backyard chicken coops. There is no homeowners association. I don't even particularly care if my neighbor paints his house a color I don't especially like. Not everyone, however, shares my views, and those people would probably be happier moving to a covenant-controlled community. They should be free to do so.

Those who want to be surrounded by neighbors who only plant nicely manicured lawns can have it — provided they find others willing to enter into a private agreement banning front-yard gardens.

And this is exactly what many people do when they choose to move to covenant-controlled communities where they believe their "property values" will be protected by private agreements banning unsightly features to front yards or houses.

People like to complain about their homeowners associations, of course, but there's a reason they aren't going away. The homeowner agreements don't actually deter a large number of people from purchasing homes in those communities. Thus, the developers who sell houses there have little reason to believe consumers want a more laissez-faire neighborhood. Many residents actually like knowing that the local association won't tolerate a weed-filled front yard or an old car up on blocks in the driveway.

This is why the homeowners association became widespread in the first place:

These developments were often more self-contained than the large-scale communities in that they maintained stricter standards regarding the appearance of the homes (both the structures and the landscaping). The general idea was that people who were looking for certain amenities (whether restrictions on pets or rules governing hedge planting) would be drawn to these communities; those who sought other amenities would look at other developments.

Some homeowners association are more strict than others, but most are far more strict than the local municipal governments. Indeed, those who want front-yard gardens will probably find it easier to find a municipal government that tolerates them, than a private homeowners association. Finding a homeowners association that allows chicken coops is probably even harder. Many municipal governments, on the other hand, allow them.

Decentralization Is the KeyA second option — decentralization — can achieve a similar result.

Imagine, for instance, that Ricketts convinced a group of people on her side of town to form a secessionist neighborhood that was able to separate from the city of Miami Shores. It became West Miami Shores.

The Ricketts and their neighbors would then get to have their front-yard gardens. This would also be good for the residents in Old Miami Shores. When potential new residents come looking around to buy a house in Old Miami Shores, the anti-garden people can simply say "you want a front-yard garden? Don't move here, move over there."

Problem solved.

Yes, it's true that some residents in both areas will then have to move if they want to live in a neighborhood that favors their particular views on front-yard gardens. But at least now both groups have the option of getting what they want.

In the absence of either of these options, we're only left with a situation in which the majority can run untrammeled over a minority, and the minority has no escape.

View Details

The tax "reform" currently being discussed in Washington is mostly a political exercise for politicians who can use the process to extract more campaign contributions from supporters, and punish non-supporters. The actual tax burden imposed on Americans overall will change little.

The proposed elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) is an excellent illustration of how the tax reform is really about playing political games. Forever in pursuit of "revenue neutral" tax reform, the GOP is simply turning to the elimination of the SALT deduction so it can raise federal revenues, and this allows for a tax cut for some other well-heeled special interest group. Using bizarre "logic," supporters of the deduction's elimination claim that an increase in the federal tax burden will somehow lower state and local taxes — some day. Why? They imagine that if they raise federal taxes for people in states with high taxes (i.e., California, New York) then the majority of voters in those states will then be clamoring for a cut in state and local taxes. The GOP also relies on the tired claim that that a tax deduction (e.g., the home mortgage interest deduction) "subsidizes" those who claim the exemption. But only in the Orwellian world of Washington doublespeak is a tax break a "subsidy." Moreover, given that states like California and New York are among the least reliant on federal funds, claiming that taxpayers there are "subsidized" by the rest of the country is an odd claim indeed.

RELATED: "Rothbard Explains why Tax Exemptions Aren't Subsidies"

There are several problems with this approach.

First of all, the SALT deduction — like all federal tax increases — will drive ever more tax revenues to the federal government, putting more power, both in relative terms and absolute terms, in the hands of the federal government. This is one reason federal tax increases are even worse than state and local tax increases. They skew political power in the US ever more toward the federal government. By increasing the federal government's share of all tax revenues collected, the federal government will also then be in a better position to manipulate state governments and state policymakers with federal grants. The federal government does this today by using federal highway funds. As the old saying goes, "he who pays the piper calls the tune."

An additional problem is that the elimination of the deduction is specifically aimed at increasing federal power at the expense of state and local power. There is no doubt that some conservatives and libertarians will cheer this. For many of them, the federal government and the county government are pretty much the same thing. In their minds, a Congress of out-of-touch millionaires 2,000 miles away is more or less the same thing as — or maybe even preferable to — a cash-strapped local government headed by middle-income part-time legislators.

This naive attitude is totally understandable for those who have never witnessed the very real differences between Washington politics and the politics of the local city council. But, there is a reason that subsidiarity and decentralization in politics have long been foundational elements of libertarian ideologies. Decentralization weakens political institutions, increases options for taxpayers, and contributes to a more vibrant private sector.

The GOP's efforts at eliminating the state and local tax deduction works in the opposite direction. The reform's likely effect will be to further federalize the tax burden while making states more reliant on federal programs and federal grants.

Americans Pay Most of their Taxes to the Federal Government At the core of the GOP's drive to eliminate the SALT deduction is the assumption that state and local taxes are "too high" while federal taxes are apparently either just right, or even too low.

But, it's hard to see how anyone could come to the conclusion that the federal tax burden is the more harmless piece of the puzzle. The federal government already — by far — receives the largest share of the tax revenue pie.This is based on BEA data that can be found here: National Income and Product Accounts Tables. Tables 3.2, 3.20, and 3.21 are used. I have subtracted federal and state grants from the revenue totals of local government, and I have removed federal grants from the state revenue totals.

If we look at how much Americans pay to each level of government, we find that the federal government receives approximately two-thirds of all tax revenue, while only one third goes to state and local governments — combined.

RELATED: "What If Taxpayers Could Choose if Taxes Went to the State Level or Federal Level?" by Ryan McMaken

In 2016, the federal government collected more than $3.4 trillion dollars in revenue via income taxes, customs duties, fees, and revenues from federally-owned lands.

State governments, on the other hand, collected only $1.1 trillion in revenues. Local governments pulled in even less, with under $800 billion in revenues.

What the GOP is now telling us is that the federal government's huge share of the pie is too small, and federal revenues ought to be increased further via elimination of the deduction. This, we're then told, will lead to declines in state and local taxes.

The GOP doesn't mention, naturally, that state and local governments are already falling in their share of overall tax collections.

During the current economic expansion, the share of local tax collections — as a percentage of all tax collections — dropped from 17 percent to 15 percent. State tax collections meanwhile dropped from 22 percent to 20 percent. The federal government's share of the pie, however, increased from 60 percent to 64 percent.

The federal government now controls nearly two-thirds of all revenues paid into governments in the United States, and if current trends continue, we may soon see the feds in control of 70 percent, or maybe even three-fourths of all tax revenue.

If this is the GOP's plan, this is a rather odd position to take for a political coalition that claims to be in favor of "local control" and decentralization and federalism. In reality, the outcome of this war on the SALT deduction is to make the American political system even more dominated by federal power.

Federal Revenues vs. State Revenues Even in high-tax states, the federal government plays a disproportionately large role in tax collection.See the IRS website for federal tax totals. State revenue information comes from the Census's American Community survey.

If we compare state tax collections to IRS collections in each state, we find that taxpayers pay much more to the federal government than they pay to the state government.

In California, for example, the federal government collects $405 billion from California taxpayers. The state government, meanwhile, collects $155 billion. Federal revenues in California are more than two-and-a-half times as large as state-level revenues.

In many states, of course, the results are even more lopsided.

In Minnesota, for example, federal revenues are more than four times the size of state revenues. In Colorado, federal revenues are more than three times the size of state revenues.

We don't have data on specific local revenues here, but given that local revenues make up only 15 percent of tax collections nationwide, its a safe bet that federal taxes are considerably larger than local revenues in most cases.

And yet, to hear the GOP tell it, its state and local taxes that are imposing the real burden on Americans. Their solution? Pay more taxes to the federal government!

Decentralize the Taxes None of this is to say that state and local taxes are a good thing. There is no shortage of waste, corruption, and cronyism at the state level — but compared to the federal government the dollar amounts are tiny in state-level boondoggles.

Nevertheless, the diversity of tax regimes across states and localities has long been one of the good things about the relatively decentralized political system in the United States.

As we've already been seeing, this reality has allowed countless productive Americans to vote with their feet and to move from high tax jurisdictions to low tax ones. This phenomenon thus imposes pressure on many jurisdiction to keep taxes low compared to other nearby jurisdictions. This is known as "tax competition" and it results only when states and localities have considerable autonomy over their tax rates.Tax competition is especially notable in Switzerland where income taxes are primarily a matter of taxation at the municipal and cantonal level. The effect is more control of taxation at the subnational level. In Switzerland, only 47 percent of tax revenue goes to the federal level of government. (https://www.oecd.org/regional/regional-policy/profile-Switzerland.pdf) See also here. Corporate taxes in Switzerland are higher at the cantonal level than the national level: "Companies must pay taxes on their net taxable income, the federal tax rate being 8.5 percent and the cantonal tax varying between 12 percent and 20 percent." (https://www.newlyswissed.com/switzerlands-tax-system/)

Unfortunately, tax competition is restrained by the fact that tax revenues in the United States are primarily a federal matter. Taxpayers thus have far less power to change their tax fortunes by moving across state lines that would be the case in a truly decentralized system.

The downside to local autonomy, of course, is that some states and localities will have especially high taxes. The solution to this, of course, is to avoid investing in those areas until tax competition is sufficient to force more restraint on tax rates.

Raising federal revenues via eliminating the SALT deduction — as the GOP seeks to do — is hardly any sort of solution at all. Indeed, Congress should be moving in the opposite direction. Instead of eliminating the deduction, Congress should substitute a tax credit instead. Every dollar that state and local taxes increase would lead to an equal drop in federal taxes. Then, we might start to see some real diversity in tax burdens across the United States.

In reality, we're seeing quite the opposite. Our current situation is made worse as federal taxes make up a larger and larger share of the overall American tax burden. This leads to greater homogenization of tax rates across the United States, which makes it even harder to escape from especially bad tax policy. If the tax burden is ever "equalized" across all states, then taxation will all simply be equally bad nationwide, and moving across state lines will bring no relief.

View Details

In the wake of the Aurora Theater shooting, I suggested that private sector establishments ought to be expected to be more concerned about the safety of their customers. In the case of the Aurora Theater, this was magnified by the fact that the theater was a "gun free zone" and did not allow patrons to carry their own firearms as self defense. At the same time, the theater owners themselves couldn't be bothered with taking even the most rudimentary steps against allowing a gunman to casually carry multiple weapons from his car into one of the theater's back doors.

The issue came up again with the Orlando shooting in 2016, when the perpetrator simply walked into a private establishment with a rifle and started shooting. Again, we find ourselves with a situation in which the owners of a private establishment refused to take simple steps such as checking entrances for people with rifles, or employing reasonably well-trained security personnel to be present inside the club.

I wasn't the only one to suggest that maybe, just maybe, private establishments such as the Orlando nightclub and the Aurora Theater may share some responsibility in preventing violence on their own premises.

In response to this position, numerous commentators — mostly conservative and libertarian — took the position that it is outrageous to expect private owners to take steps to prevent events like these. At the time, I noted Reason magazine's response as representative of this type of thinking:

Reason magazine has ... hopped on the bandwagon of pre-emptively and unconditionally absolving the theater owners of any possible responsibility. Reason writer Lenore Skenazy claims that a focus on worst-case scenarios is "worst-first thinking" and that such thinking "promotes constant panic. The word for that isn't prudence. It's paranoia."In other words, Skenazy's position is that private owners should simply assume terrible things won't happen and proceed accordingly. If bad things do happen, then let's all just throw our hands in the air and declare "who woulda thunk?"

This sort of thinking results in what security consultant Bo Dietl calls the "panic, forget, repeat." It's not a serious approach to security.

Unfortunately, this problem has become apparent again with last weekend's shooting in Las Vegas which has so far claimed at least 58 lives, making it the worst mass shooting in modern American history.The qualifier "modern" is necessary in this case since we must necessaily exclude frontier violence (committed by both white militiamen and by Indian tribes) from the 19th century to label recent shootings as being "the worst."

To perpetrate the shooting, the shooter used the Mandalay Bay hotel as a sniper's nest from which to rain down death on a crowd assembled at a nearby music festival. (Both the hotel and the venue are owned by MGM Resorts International.)

At the same time, it appears the organizers of the event did not take steps to prevent a shooting of this nature. The police response to the shooting, not surprisingly, appears to show disorganization and lack of knowledge about the situation.

The State Protects Its OwnSome readers will scoff and say "how could anyone be expected to anticipate a sniper situation like this?" In response, I suggest this thought experiment: imagine that a US president or any important political figure were present at the music festival. What do you think security would have looked like? There would have been well-trained security personnel stationed to keep an eye out for snipers, with spotters and "good guy" snipers all around.

Obviously, we would have found out that looking for the worst-case scenario would suddenly have mattered when "important" people are involved. But protecting ordinary members of the public? Well, that's just "paranoia," we're told. The state, of course, is highly invested in protecting its own personnel and its own interests. The organizers of the music festival, however, appear to have relied on blind faith as their primary defense.

The importance of competent professional private security in this case is also illustrated by the fact that a large number of private individuals armed with side arms would have done little to prevent the situation. Even if festival-goers on the ground had been able to quickly spot the source of the gunfire — which itself seems unlikely — a handgun would have been of little use. The often-repeated claim by gun-rights activists that conceal-carry is the answer to all shootings falls flat in this case.

Inaction from Public and Private Police Forces Private security weren't the only ones who appear to have taken a rather lackadaisical view of the situation.

Interviewed in the wake of the Las Vegas shootings, The Boston Herald interviewed former Boston Police Commissioner — and current security consultant — Edward Davis about the situation. Davis notes:

There's always been a fear — not so much among the security chiefs, but by the police out here — that there would be an attack. It is their worst fear coming true.

There are two things we can take away from this claim. First of all, assuming Davis is right, we learn that the private sector security chiefs weren't terribly concerned about this situation arising. Second, we learn that the public-sector police were concerned about it. Yet, it appears that nothing was done to address the fear by either group.

Moreover, Las Vegas has long been recognized as a target for terrorism, given its iconic status. "This is, just on its face, a big glaring target for Islamic terrorists," Davis added. (Davis is right that it's a target. But he's wrong that only "Islamic" murderers are interested.)

Davis also confirms our suspicion that the safety of government personnel in the area have been a subject of worry, in regards to security. The general public? Not so much:

Working on presidential visits and with the Secret Service, snipers are a concern for them, but you don't think about it around a concert.

And why not consider security around a concert? Are we already incapable of remembering the Paris theater shooting of 2015? This sort of amnesia-based thinking is apparently the best that our security personnel have to offer. Had security personnel and their employers been taking the situation seriously, they might have concluded that the chosen locale for the event could not be conducted while offering sufficient security. Certainly, were the Secret Service to conclude that a location can't offer sufficient safety for a political figure, they would recommend against that political figure accepting the risk at all. Perhaps concert organizers in Vegas should bring the same level of scrutiny to their own events.

The Imagined Cure-All: Gun Control Predictably, in the wake of the shooting, gun control advocates have already seized on the tragedy to push for preferred legislation. They like to portray the US as an exceptionally violent place, and claim the reason is too little gun control.

Forgotten, of course, is the French Bataclan Theater shooting, which resulted in 130 deaths. Forgetten, of course, is the 2016 Brussels airport bombing which took 35 lives. Forgotten is the spate of car-rammings, including the Nice, France, massacre which alone took the lives of 86 innocent people.

Indeed, if we look at mass-murder events such as these public rammings and shootings in 2016 and 2017 — and thus excluding the 2015 Bataclan Theater shooting — we end up with a total of approximately 140 victims in Western Europe, and around 120 victims in the US (this includes the Orlando shooting.) This alleged juxtaposition between chaotic America and serene Europe appears to be rather misplaced.Includes Nice attack, Munich shooting, and several London truck rammings, and the Brussels airport bombing. The US case includes both the Las Vegas and Orlando shootings, and several other smaller public shootings. One truck ramming in the US resulted in one death during the time period.

Moreover, as total gun sales in the US climbed repeatedly in the 1990s and the 2000s, homicide rates fell. Stringent gun control laws are common in Latin America, yet homicide rates are much higher in that region than in the more laissez-faire United States. Clearly, gun control does not explain away differing levels of violence absent consideration of other factors.

Government Won't Protect Us Shootings in night clubs and theaters simply are not matters requiring national policy. Nor is the challenge of stopping terrorists from driving trucks through crowds of revelers, as has happened repeatedly in Europe in recent years. Prevention in these cases require that security personnel on the scene employ competent security to control what goes on inside their own buildings and venues.

The knee-jerk appeal to national policy such as nationwide gun control, however, highlights what happens when the private sector blithely relies on a disinterested government to provide security instead. In the US, the Supreme Court has ruled (in Castle Rock vs. Gonzalez) that police are not obligated to provide protection to citizens. As a result, de facto policy is that the lives of police officers receive priority over that of members of the public. It also means that government police are protected from any liability should they be AWOL or incompetent when homicidal maniacs unleash themselves on the public. Thus, there is absolutely no reason to expect public-sector police agencies to provide security at night clubs, movie theaters, or large public events.

Nor is there any reason to simply sit back and assume that gun control will protect us. Experience in high-gun-control zones like Latin America, Russia, and Europe suggests otherwise.

Should Private Owners Be Expected to Provide Security? But, as soon as someone suggests that private owners of public-access venues be expected to take security seriously, then the very idea is denounced by many as simply a bridge too far. For these critics, apparently, it's much better to just trust in government, and hope for the best.

It's easy to see why the private sector and its defenders might vehemently oppose the idea that private owners need to do more. Private security is costly and could drive up prices of goods and services. If the legal system simultaneously protects these owners from any responsibility in allegedly "unforeseeable" events, then we have no reason to expect them to do anything differently. The Aurora-Shooting lawsuits against the theater's owners was significant because it called into question whether or not a private owner should be held legally liable for allowing a nut with multiple guns to so easily plan and set-up a mass-shooting scenario under their noses.

In the end, the theater was found not liable, and the theater owners's attorney claimed the event was "unpredictable, unforeseeable, unpreventable and unstoppable." This claim is obviously nonsense. Of course the shooting was preventable. It simply wasn't preventable using the minimal amount of time and effort the theater owners were willing to devote to customer safety.

In the future, will we continue to label shootings of this nature as "unforeseeable"? It's true that, given the size of the population, events of this magnitude remain exceedingly rare. Yet, how many times must an event of this nature take place before it does become foreseeable? How long will it be before customers should enjoy a reasonable expectation that private owners will plan ahead to prevent these sorts of threats?

The response of some people to this revelation will be to indulge in maudlin declarations of "it's a crying shame." "It's a crying shame we have to live in a world where we have to worry about gunmen!" Perhaps. It's also a crying a shame we live in a world where not everyone drives the posted speed limit in residential areas. If they did, we wouldn't have to worry about our children as much when they play outside. It's a crying shame we live in a world where the plane you're flying in might malfunction and fall out of the sky. Thanks to human error, malice, and stupidity, many bad things happen every day.

Many other bad things happen thanks to an unwillingness to plan ahead. And so as long as we continue to declare things like mass shootings on private property to be "unforeseeable" and "unstoppable" and generally not worth the effort needed to prevent them, we'll just be left relying on the same government agencies who are under no obligation to protect citizens from anything.

View Details

In recent years, Judge Andrew Napolitano has annoyed some anti-immigration activists by pointing out what the text of the US Constitution seemingly makes clear: "[T]he Constitution itself — from which all federal powers derive — does not delegate to the federal government power over immigration, only over naturalization."

Napolitano isn't the first one to point this out, though, and those who have been observing this debate for a long time, will remember that this has been a simmering debate among conservatives and libertarians for many years. Making the case that the text does support federal intervention in immigration is especially important to conservatives who support an "originalist" view of the Constitution. After all, if it really is the case that the original intent of the Constitution was not to empower the federal government to regulate immigration, then it would be impossible for these originalists to support ongoing federal immigration interventions without being accused of hypocrisy or inconsistency.

In response, originalists have suggested a number of theories, including the assertion that the Migration or Importation Clause grants this power. Ilya Somin has effectively dismantled this claim in his 2016 article on the topic.

Other far-less-sophisticated claims have been made as well, such as the claim that immigration is the equivalent of a military invasion, or that naturalization pretty much means the same thing as immigration. Rarely are these claims convincing to observers who are not already vehemently anti-immigration.

With this essay, however, I want to largely ignore modern legal debates and instead approach the originalists' claim by looking at how nineteenth-century American policymakers themselves viewed the proper role of the federal government in restricting immigration.

At this point, you can probably already guess where I'm going with this: it turns out that if we look at immigration regulation and legislation in the first century of the United States, we find that federal involvement in regulating immigration was very rare, and that attempts to federalize the matter repeatedly failed in Congress, where federalization was often regarded as being of dubious Constitutionality.

During this period, it was the states that dominated in terms of regulation of immigrants, and state governments were considered to be well within their rights when it came to the regulation — and even deportation — of immigrants.

State and Local Regulation of Immigrants It is not until the 1880s that we see the national government displace the states as the primary enforcer of immigration law. And even then, states continued to work in cooperation with the federal government. It was not until the twentieth century that the federal government began to insist that it had a monopoly on immigration law, and that the states were excluded from exercising their own powers in the matter.

In his lengthy article on "The Lost Century of American Immigration Law" in the Columbia Law Review, Gerald Neuman notes that state and local law had been used to restrict migration in the North American colonies — and later the United States.

The legal framework employed had its origins in English poor laws that restricted the movements of paupers, vagabonds, and other alleged undesirables. Neuman notes that after independence, local governments in many places retained control over settlement:

After 1794 [in Massachusetts], persons newly arriving in a town became settled inhabitants if they met certain statutory criteria, such as property ownership, or if they received express permission of the town government.

The idea was to prevent the permanent settlement of any persons who were likely to become reliant on local charity efforts, or who might be criminals.

These restrictions, in fact, were acknowledged and written into the Articles of Confederation in which Article IV states that states retained the powers to limit the movements of "paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice." Neuman further contends that "Although the Constitution omits this qualification from its Privileges and Immunities Clause, the courts continued to assume that paupers had no right to travel."

Historical experience in the states confirms that restrictions on free travel did not go away with the new Constitution, and indeed new restrictions on incoming migrants from outside the US were introduced.

In his study on state-level immigration laws, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy, Hidetaka Hirota focuses especially on state laws in Massachusetts and New York where the matter of expelling and limiting new migrants was a matter of perennial concern:

To reduce Irish pauperism, New York and Massachusetts built upon colonial poor laws for regulating the local movement of the poor to check the landing into the state of destitute foreigners. In Massachusetts, an exceptionally strong anti-Catholic and anti-Irish tradition inspired the state legislature to go beyond merely setting entry regulations or excluding the unacceptable. Rather, Massachusetts developed laws for deporting foreign paupers already resident in the state back to Ireland or to Britain, Canada, or other American states. Between the 1830s and the early 1880s, at least 50,000 persons were removed from Massachusetts under this policy. State policies applied to all destitute foreigners, and German immigrants attracted their fair share of nativism. Those expelled from Massachusetts also included American paupers who originally came from other states. Yet it was Irish poverty that generated the principal momentum for the growth of state immigration policy.

Given the fact that Boston and New York were such popular destinations for the Irish during this period, these two states were the most active in instituting immigration controls. Other states engaged in some efforts, although as Hirota notes:

...Maryland and Louisiana had little interest in restricting European immigration throughout the nineteenth century, while Pennsylvania and California failed to establish sustainable systems of immigration regulation.

It was these laws that led to some of the earliest legal decisions in the US as to the role of the federal government in immigration law.

Early Supreme Court Cases Early legal cases illustrated a reluctance on the part of the court to assert federal control of migrants.

In New York v Miln (1837) for example, the Court took up the matter of whether a state could require a docking ship to "to provide a list of passengers and to post security against the passengers from becoming public charges." The strategy of bonding was often used in which ship owners were forced to post a bond under which the state could be compensated in case the new migrants arriving in said ship turned out to be criminals or paupers dependent on the state.

The court sided with the state, concluding the state was entitled "to provide precautionary measures against the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possible convicts, as it is to guard against the physical pestilence, which may arise from unsound and infectious articles imported."

However, regulation of immigrants was acceptable to the court so long as the regulation was "not a regulation of commerce, but of police." That is, the court ruled to overturn the state's ability to impose what were essentially taxes on shipping, while concluding that the state and local governments nevertheless retained to right to regulate the immigrants themselves. This included the right to refuse entry to new migrants perceived to be paupers, criminals, mentally ill, or carrying communicable diseases. As Hirota recounts, these "police powers" resulted in many deportations conducted by state officials.

Moreover, in the "Passenger Cases" of 1849, a fractious court again declined to limit state police powers in regulating immigrants. The majority "consensus" which consisted of several different concurring opinions, struck down state efforts to collect taxes and fees designed to fund state efforts at monitoring and controlling migrants. These taxes were ruled to be against the federal powers of regulating maritime law and international shipping. The court failed to establish overall federal supremacy on the matter of immigration, however, and Justice Levi Woodbury emphasized the point in his dissenting opinion:

[I]t is for the State where the power resides to decide on what is sufficient cause for it,whether municipal or economical, sickness or crime; as, for example, danger of pauperism, danger to health, danger to morals, danger to property, danger to public principles by revolutions and change of government, or danger to religion.

Similarly, according to Neuman, Justice "Peter Daniel invoked at length the Jeffersonian polemics against the Alien Act of 1798 to demonstrate that power over the entry of aliens was vested exclusively in the states."Some originalists have claimed that the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts proves that the federal government has Constitutional authority over immigration. The Jeffersonians, of course, disagreed vehemently. The loss of the Federalists to the Republicans in 1800 essentially destroyed the pro-federal, anti-immigration position for decades, during which time federal immigration control was associated with the overreach of the Federalist Party, and contrary to the more strict Constitutional views of the Jeffersonians.

These cases came in the wake of more notorious episodes during the 1820s and 1830s in southern states in which some states prohibited free black sailors from coming ashore in port cities. Fearing the presence of free blacks would incite slave uprisings, some southern states — but most vigorously South Carolina — essentially adopted "quarantine" laws in which free black sailors were required to stay on their ships or be held in the local jail until they departed again out of port. Captains of British ships, which sometimes employed free blacks from British colonies, complained to federal authorities. Ultimately, however, the federal government was unwilling or unable to take steps that ended these policies.

Restricting State-to-State Migrants The issue of race colored other restrictions on migration as well. Some states, both north and south, adopted laws designed to restrict the movement of free blacks from states to state. Michells Slack points out

the Oregon Constitution of 1857, although prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude, 35 also prohibited the entry or presence of any "negro or mulatto" not already residing in the State at the time of its adoption. Moreover, most free black residents were required to register and prove both their free status and their right to residence within the state. In turn, such documentation was regularly demanded of free blacks under threat of expulsion.

The State of Illinois also imposed penalties for facilitating "entry by a mulatto."

In southern states, the situation was more focused on re-entry. Neuman writes:

In slave states, the mere visibility of black people living in freedom was regarded as a grave threat to the operation of the system of slavery. Moreover, slaveholders feared that free blacks would foment or facilitate escape, or conspire to bring about slave revolts.

Slave state legislation usually barred the entry of free blacks who were not already residents of the state. Penalties were often imposed on persons bringing in free blacks. Over time, some states extended these prohibitions to their own free black residents who sought to return after traveling outside the state, either to a disapproved location or to any destination at all. Slave states often required that emancipated slaves leave the state forever, on pain of reenslavement.

Although these laws were bound up with slavery and race, they nevertheless established both in the courts and in legislatures that states had the prerogative to prevent entry of certain persons into the states. Political realities, of course, meant there was mostly free movement between states.Although claiming to favor "states rights" slave masters demanded greater federal action on the matter of fugutive slaves. Significantly, when South Carolina seceded form the Union, it cited insufficient federal action on the matter of returning fugitive slaves to bondage.

Congress Shows Little Interest in Regulating Immigrants Meanwhile, Congress largely ignored the immigration issue beyond regulating naturalization, as mandated in the Constitution.

The 1911 report from Congress's Dillingham Commission on immigration recounts that legislation addressing immigration during the mid-nineteenth century was minimalist, to say the least. The commission notes that most agitation for new immigration legislation stemmed from the Native American Party, also known as the "Know-Nothings." These efforts failed due to a lack of interest by federal lawmakers in regulating immigration, and also due to doubts about whether or not such efforts were even constitutional. A lengthy quotation from the Commission's report helps illustrate the Congress's inaction on the matter:

On January 2, 1855, Representative Wentworth, of Massachusetts, introduced a bill to prevent the introduction of foreign paupers, criminals, idiots, lunatics, and insane and blind persons, but it was laid on the table by a vote of 68 to 83...

February 17, 1855, Senator Jones, of Tennessee, evidently believing it useless to try to pass an act excluding undesirables, sought to have Congress agree to give the matter entirely over to the States, and presented the following resolution, which was quickly tabled:

Whereas the Constitution of the United States confers on Congress the power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization and is silent as to the exercises of any power over the subject of immigration; and Whereas it is declared in the Constitution that all power not delegated to the constitution nor prohibited to the states by it are reserved to the States respectively or to the people:

Therefore Resolved, that Congress has no power to pass any law regulating or controlling immigration into any of the States of Territories of the Union; but that the power to prescribe such rules and regulations touching this subject as may be deemed necessary to the safety and happiness of the people belongs to the States respectively or to the people, and that each State may determine for itself the evils resulting from the great influx of criminals and paupers and apply such remedy as their wisdom may suggest for their safety demand.

Again on March 4, 1856, Mr. Smith, of Alabama, introduced a bill to exclude foreign paupers and criminals. This bill required United States consuls to issue certificates to all persons intending to come to the United States, stating that they were not paupers, nor convicts, and that they were coming of their own accord and were not sent out of their own country by any society or authority whatsoever...

The law failed. Meanwhile, the Committee on Foreign Affairs issued a report on Congressional concerns about European nations dumping undesirables in the United States. But, the committee "seemed to doubt the power of Congress to regulate the matter, so almost all their recommendations were to the States..."

The lack of federal action on immigration matters led the Commission to conclude that it was until the 1860s that "the change of control of immigration from the various States to the National Government" began to take place.

The Federalization of Immigration Policy: the 1870s and After As with so much else following the Civil War, what had been long accepted to be state policy began to be federalized, and in 1872, President Grant sent a message to Congress claiming that when it came to immigration, "I see no subject more national in its character..."

Hirota concurs with this assessment of latter-day federalization, noting that:

The federalization of immigration control was therefore a gradual process at best, and the actions of officials in the northeastern states set the conditions for the introduction of general deportation by the federal government in 1891.

The nationalization of immigration regulation technically reached completion in 1891. Responding to the inefficiency of state-federal joint administration at Castle Garden revealed in legislative investigations, Congress passed a new immigration act in March 1891. The act placed issues of immigration under the control of the federal superintendent of immigration in the Treasury Department and appointed federal commissioners of immigration at major ports, replacing state enforcers with federal employees. ... The 1891 law also expanded the excludable category to cover people with mental defects and insanity, paupers and people "likely to become a public charge," people with contagious diseases, people convicted of a felony of other crime involving "moral turpitude, polygamists, and assisted emigrants" — making all of them deportable.

The 1891 act came at the end of decade of growing federal action on immigration which included the Chinese Exclusion Act and more general legislation soon afterward. By the time this was taking place, however, many state governments, especially those in Massachusetts and New York were inviting more federal involvement in immigration control. Hirota continues:

Officials in both New York and Massachusetts fundamentally influenced the development of national immigration policy in the late nineteenth century by playing a central role in the making of the federal Immigration Act of 1882. Passed three months after the enactment of the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers, the Immigration Act was the first general legislation that applied to all foreigners at a national level and set the groundwork for subsequent federal immigration laws. ... Modeled on existing immigration policies in New York and Massachusets, these provisions came form a draft bill that the two states' officials created. In addition, the act left the enforcement of its provisions in the hands of the state officials.

Here we see that even in the 1880s, federal immigration laws continued to rely on local enforcement, and state and federal officials were seen as partners in regulation of migrants.

It would not be until the twentieth century that the federal government would begin to claim sole legal authority over matters of immigration.

That most of this legislative history is today forgotten would be an understatement. This led Neuman in 1993 to refer to a "myth of open borders" in which it has been long assumed, even by the very learned, that borders in the United States were essentially open with few to no attempts by governments at any level to control the flow of migrants either into the United States, or across state borders.

Michelle Slack notes that even among those who are aware of this legislative history, there have still been attempts to claim that no deportations of any consequence took place. As the work of Hirota has shown, this was not the case.

This is not to say that there were not also attempts to increase immigration to the US in numerous cases. As I have shown in the past, many frontier states adopted policies designed to attract migrants by offering an easy road to citizenship, and by adopting multiple "official" languages designed to accommodate a non-english-speaking population.See: "In the 19th Century, Non-Citizens in the US Could Vote in 22 States and Territories" (https://mises.org/wire/19th-century-non-citizens-us-could-vote-22-states-and-territories) Indeed, pro-immigrant sentiment mid-century was sufficient enough for President John Tyler to publicly declare in 1841: "We hold out to the people of other countries an invitation to come and settle among us as members of our rapidly growing family, and for the blessings which we offer them we require of them to look upon our country as their country and unite with us in the great task of preserving our institutions and thereby perpetuating our liberties."

It must be understood, though, that by "people of other countries," Tyler did not mean all those categories of paupers and other undesirables outlined in state statutes. He meant people other than the disabled, ill, impoverished, and criminally inclined. Indeed, while Emma Lazarus was penning her famous poem "The New Colossus" in 1883 — which claimed the US welcomed the world's "wretched refuse" — both the federal government and the states were at work enforcing legislation specifically designed to reject this alleged "refuse."

This effort to exclude undesirables, however, illustrates a fundamental difference between nineteenth-century immigration legislation and modern legislation. As Neuman observed "[n]either Congress nor the states attempted to impose quantitative limits on immigration" [emphasis in the original].

Legislation focused instead on refusing entry to those who were seen as likely to increase the government-assistance rolls or who might commit criminal acts. Creating arbitrary quotas for the total number of legal immigrants was a later innovation.

No Evidence of Early-American Federalization of Immigration Policy None of the information in this essay, of course, has much to say in regards to those who employ non-originalist arguments in favor of federal control over immigration. Those who believe that the Constitution is a "living document," or that expansive federal powers are a good thing in most every circumstance, would not be stymied in their claims by the fact that nineteenth century Americans rejected federal primacy in the matter of immigration. For many non-originalists, immigration is just another case where the evolution of the federal courts is to be welcomed.

Considering the legislative history on the matter, though, it's difficult to see much to support originalist claims that immigration has always been the proper domain of the federal government, or that this position has long been accepted even by staunch defenders of constitutional federalism in the United States. To come to this conclusion, one must ignore repeated refusals by both Congress and the Federal Courts to assume control of the immigration situation during the first century of the United States. Even less believable is the claim that immigration is exclusively a matter for the federal government, and that states are necessarily out of bounds when adopting immigration regulations in conflict with current federal law.

To be sure, the political realities of the nineteenth century don't "prove" that the original intent of the Constitution was to greatly limit federal involvement in immigration regulation. It could simply be that nearly everyone was misinterpreting the text during most of the nineteenth century, and that now proponents of greater federal control have it right. Nevertheless, outside of the Federalists who supported the hated Alien and Sedition Acts, there's little evidence of policymakers from the "founding" generation calling for more federal control in the matter. This general neglect of the issue continued into the late nineteenth century. Contrary to some claims that immigration simply wasn't an issue in the nineteenth century, the existence of numerous state laws on the matter show that it was an important issue. And yet few sought federal control. One would think that if the Constitution were clear about federal control of immigration, this would not have been the case.

View Details

In recent years, left-wing groups have often been the driving force behind secession movements. This has been the case in Scotland, in Catalonia, and in California.

In each case, the secession movements have been initiated in part to forward left-wing goals, such as the creation of a larger welfare state or to escape limitations imposed by political interest groups and institutions deemed to be too right-wing.

Within the American context, the loudest calls for secession right now are coming from California where leftists are eager to assert their independence from the Trump administration in Washington.

Generally speaking, these California secessionists want single-payer health care, an even larger welfare state, confiscation of private firearms, and an ever larger environmental "protection" bureaucracy. That is, they want a European-style welfare state.

California as Case Study This case presents Americans — and especially libertarian-minded Americans — with a question that continues to come up in recent years on secession matters: should they support a left-wing secession movement?

Is it right or moral to support a secession movement that, in the short- and medium- terms is almost guaranteed to adopt policies that are counter to the cause of freedom and free markets?

The answer must first and foremost be compared against the reality of forcing political union on a separatist region. That is, the cost of allowing a region to separate must be compared to the cost of keeping it in — i.e., military invasion, occupation, mass arrests, government surveillance, martial law, and worse.

Not surprisingly, we're forced to conclude the answer is the same whether we're talking about secession in Scotland, in California, or in Catalonia: the answer is yes.

What About the Minority Interests? Often, the immediate retort to this position is to point to those groups in the minority who are left stuck in the seceding territories.

The argument goes something like this: "Now that you've cut California loose, what about those poor conservatives, gun owners, and business owners who will now be negatively impacted by a newly empowered California government? Before, California was at least somewhat restrained by its membership in the United States. Now the California government is even more free to inflict misery on the hapless taxpayers and productive people who are stuck there."

To this criticism, there are at least two responses.

One: California Independence Means More Freedom for the Rest of the Country Those who wish to focus on merely what happens to those who are in California take a parochial and far-too-limited view. Yes, it's true that business owners, religious Christians, and gun owners in California (to name just three groups) would likely be negatively impacted by California independence. The California government has long illustrated an open hostility to these minority groups.

The other side of the coin, however, is that California secession would lead to a significant expansion of freedom for the "rump" United States left behind. Freed of the influence of California on American politics, the remainder of the United States would likely move significantly in the direction of more freedom in markets. Federal regulations would likely be scaled back, and presidential candidates would no longer need to cater to interest groups with sizable memberships in California.

California's 53-member delegation in Congress (39 of them Democrats) would be gone, and voting patterns in Congress would likely shift in a direction more hospitable to freedom and free markets.

In other words, the nation would be freed from a great weight tied around its neck. One might even say the situation is analagous to the removal of an infected appendage. It wouldn't be the first time such a thing had happened. In 1861, when Southern States began seceding from the Union, New Yorker George Templeton Strong welcomed the prospect of being freed from the political influence of the slave drivers down south. He concluded "the self-amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure, and their virus will infect our system no longer."

But, unlike Strong who might have been induced by conscience to think of the slaves left behind in the seceding territories, we face no similar scruples. Obviously, comparing modern California to a slave state of old is laughably inappropriate, and unlike the slaves, Californians are free to move away. Nor is it the moral obligation of Texans, or Floridians, or Coloradans to protect the Californians from the excesses of their own government.

Thus, when we think of post-secession California subject to the whims of a hard-left government there, we must also think of the 285 million remaining Americans who would benefit from the separation.

Note also that this situation even has advantages for the taxpayers and business owners in California who wish to escape the California regime.

Now that the rump United States has been improved by California's absence, those in California who seek a more business-friendly legal environment can dramatically change their fortunes for the better by moving across the new national boundary to Arizona or Nevada. For these migrants, the net gain achieved by leaving California has grown larger thanks to California's departure.

Two: More States are Preferable to Fewer States The second response to the objection lies in the fact that secession already brings with it a solution to the problem. That is, the problems caused by one secession are solved by more secession.

As I've explained here, here, and here, a larger number of states is preferable to a smaller number. A larger number of small states provides more practical choices to taxpayers and citizens in choosing a place to live under a governments that more closely match their personal values.

Thus, in considering the problems of an independent California, we find that the primary problem faced by taxpayers and productive residents in California is that the state is simply too large and contains too diverse a population within its boundaries.

As noted by numerous commentators over the years — including supporters of the Six Californias initiative — California's population is quite politically and culturally diverse, although it has been dominated for decades by a hard-left coalition of voters based around the Bay Area. Compared to these voters, Southern California residents appear downright centrist, but one would not know this by looking at statewide politics because Northern California is so adept at throwing its weight around.

The solution to this, problem lies in breaking up California into still smaller pieces. We can see many of these political lines ripe for decentralization in the voting patterns revealed by statewide votes such as those for Propsition 187 and Proposition 8. We can see it in the map of legislative districts. Nor is this just a matter of metropolitan areas versus rural areas. Many suburban areas within the metroplexes of California are quite right-of-center in their own rights, and would surely benefit from further political decentralization.

Urban core cities ought to be their own self-governing territories, with suburan and rural areas kept separate and self-governing in their own ways.

The net result of all of this would be to offer a multitude of choices among taxpayers, entrepreneurs, gun owners, and moral traditionalists as to where they might live and enjoy the benefits of self-determination within their own communities.

But before any of this can happen, we must first establish and extend the moral and legal legitimacy of self-determination through secession and decentralization. Clinging to the status quo of existing regional and national boundaries is reactionary in the extreme. Insisting that no community ought to be allowed self government unless its leaders are hard-core libertarians is impractical, irresponsible, and doomed to failure.

Nevertheless, when confronted with new attempts at decentralization and secession, even some of those who claim to be for freedom and self-determination cling to ideas of imposing nationalistic control over others. They invent emotion-laden fictional slogans claiming "we are one nation" or "secession is treason" or other sayings designed to justify using the power of the state to impose political unity. Ultimately, this is an ideology of monopoly and coercion, and tramples the very ideals of freedom that the nationalists claim they hold dear.

View Details

This week, the governor of Iowa signed into law new restrictions on abortions in the state, prohibiting abortions in cases where a fetal heartbeat can be detected. This would make Iowa one of the most restrictive states in the Union in terms of abortions, prohibiting most abortions after six weeks into pregnancy.

Opponents of the law have already vowed to sue in federal court, claiming that the new law cannot be constitutional in light of Roe vs. Wade. They contend that the federal courts have guaranteed the legality of abortion (well beyond six weeks gestation) in every US state, and thus state-level efforts to restrict the practice must be invalidated by federal officials.

Prior to the Roe v Wade ruling in 1973, though, abortion was routinely regarded as a state and local issue in which there was no precedent for federal involvement.

Consequently, the availability of abortion varied from state to state, but given that US citizens could always travel and migrate freely from state to state, it was legally possible for any American to obtain an abortion in the United States.

This was especially beneficial to those who wanted abortions in an age when the federal government leaned in favor of restriction. Even when restrictionist views began to become more common at the federal level in the late 19th century, a decentralist bias against federal action prevailed at the time, and what federal legislation did exist on abortion matters — such as the Comstock laws — did little to actually limit access in the states.

RELATED: "Before Roe v. Wade, Abortion Had Always Been a State and Local Matter"

This, of course, did not prevent state governments from legalizing abortion, or ignoring the issue altogether. As the Pew research center recounts:

Given that a right of free travel from state to state was guaranteed to all legal US residents at this time, abortion thus became legally accessible to all Americans. Practical limitations remained, however, in the form of travel costs for those who lived in restrictionist states.

Although the decentralist position limited the power of anti-abortion advocates in Congress, this situation brought benefits for those who opposed abortion, as well. It allowed for anti-abortion residents to live in states where the local legal system did not — as they saw it — protect or foster abortion. Overall, the situation allowed Americans to "vote with their feet" and live somewhere that residents felt best reflected their values.

After all, on fundamental moral issues like abortion (as with issues like circumcision, animal rights, etc.) there is little room for the sort of "compromise" that is usually invoked to defend centralized one-size-fits-all democratic regimes. Abortion is either legal or its not, with advocates on both sides often finding any compromise to be morally objectionable.

RELATED: "From Abortion to Circumcision, Democracy Won't Save Minorities from the Majority"

In situations like these, the best form of compromise if often to allow differences between jurisdictions so voters, taxpayers, and citizens can at least have choice among where to live and pay their tax dollars. The smaller the jurisdictions in question, the better.

Since Roe, though, it is assumed by many — on both sides of the issue — that federal action ought to be taken to mandate either access or prohibition on a uniform, nationwide scale.

For those on the winning end, of course, a single, mandated "solution" to a problem is a great thing. For those on the losing side, the option of free choice among political jurisdictions is obliterated.

In terms of federal law at the present time, the pro-abortion side is the winning side. And even though the Iowa law does not actually prohibit abortion — we should nevertheless expect protests from pro-abortion activists in Iowa who will demand guarantees of greater access to abortion from federal officials.

Decentralization Leads to Real "Choice" One of the more popular strategies employed nowadays to advocate for greater access nationwide is to concentrate on the costs associated with traveling from one place to another in order to obtain an abortion. The Guttmacher Institute, for example, has published a report on how many miles must be traveled in order to obtain an abortion:

In the states with the longest average distance to travel — Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota — at least half of women of reproductive age lived more than 90 miles from the nearest clinic providing abortion services. Women in Alaska lived an average of nine miles from the nearest clinic, but 20 percent of women in that state would have to travel more than 150 miles.

Some advocates for great accessibility have even taken to talking about an "abortion desert" — likely a play on the notion of "food deserts" — where abortions are more difficult to obtain — as noted in the LA Times:

As more states adopt more restrictive laws and the number of clinics dwindles in the so-called "abortion desert" – an area that stretches from Florida to New Mexico and north into the Midwest – women are increasingly traveling across state lines to avoid long waits for appointments and escape the legal barriers in their home states.

These facts are presented, of course, with the intention of making the case that variations in accessibility from place to place are a violation of rights of some sort, and act as de facto prohibitions that ought to be considered legally intolerable under Roe v. Wade. For example, although Iowa is a relatively small state, traveling to Minnesota or Illinois — where abortion is likely to be easily accessible indefinitely — is nevertheless more costly than driving down the street.

The implied conclusion is that restrictions such as these diminish "choice" and that everyone is every location ought to have "equal access" and "equal choice" in obtaining abortions regardless of location.

What is forgotten, however, is that by guaranteeing this kind of "choice" other types of choice must be eliminated: the choice of living in a jurisdiction where abortion is limited, for example.

It is with this latter sort of "choice" in mind, of course, that political decentralization was created to foster. As was once long assumed in the US in regards to issues like abortion, tax laws, business regulations, and alcoholic beverages, a respect for local autonomy provided greater choice and greater compromise in which differences in morality and ideology were respected from place to place.

This sort of choice reduces the stakes in national elections, fosters greater respect for local democracy, reduces cross-regional conflict, and allows for Americans to more easily relocate to legal jurisdictions that better suit their political values.

Without decentralization, every national election becomes a national referendum on which factions will control every aspect of American life, and dictate conditions from a centralized national seat of government.

Moreover, advantages of this approach work in both directions, and decentralization can hardly be shown to be just a right-wing plot. After all, the presence of some political decentralization has been key in drug legalization efforts and the "sanctuary city" movement favored by pro-immigration activists. Historically, decentralization fostered the growth the anti-slavery movement and nullification of the federal fugitive slave laws.

Decentralization Is Not Perfect None of this is to say that the decentralization approach is perfect. It is true that decentralizing abortion policy would indeed lead to more costly travel requirements for those seeking abortions. But this is also true for sundry other issues. Residents of New York seeking to legally consume recreational marijuana must travel out of state — often at a high price. Entrepreneurs seeking lower barriers to opening a business may often find the local regulatory environment too inhospitable.

Nor is it the case that any law or policy is fine and acceptable so long as its done at the state and local level. Marijuana criminalization, for example, is objectionable at every level of government. High taxes are impoverishing whether imposed by the city council or by Congress. But it is better that there be variety and competition among jurisdictions, rather than a situation in which policies are all decided in one place for 320 million Americans and imposed uniformly across the land.

Yes, the cost of moving or traveling to another jurisdiction can be costly. Recognizing the realities such as these, Felix Frankfurter once concluded (when he opposed a federal law on child labor) "we must pay a price for federalism" by which he meant that decentralization may force us to accept that not every law in every place will suit our personal preferences. But, as Frankfurter also noted, there are often advantages to paying that price.

View Details

If it seems like secession is become a more frequent topic in the global media, it's not just your imagination.

In recent years, talk of political separatist movements have become not only more commonplace, but are increasingly discussed as reasonable alternatives to the status quo.

Historically, of course, established states have long sought to portray secession movements as unsavory forms of agitation pushed only by extremists.

In the US, of course, secession has long been portrayed as strictly the realm of right-wing zealots motivated by racism, or even something worse.

In 2014, however, it became increasingly clear that this strategy's days were numbered. 2014, of course, was the year that 45 percent of Scottish voters voted to secede from the United Kingdom. Less than two years later, a majority of British voters voted for secession from the European Union — in spite of a hysterical scare campaign waged by pro-EU activists.

These British secession movements were immune from the usual "arguments" against secession made in the United States. After all, were we to believe that British secessionists were pushing secession so they could impose slavery within their borders?

Had it been used, such a charge would have been laughed at, so this new type of secession was generally ignored, or described as something other than secession.

Moreover, the Scottish secession was problematic for the global left in general. Secession movements had often been portrayed by global elites as reactionary or at least the sort of thing that conservative malcontents would indulge in. But in Scotland, the secession movement was largely a product of the mainstream leftist parties. In the wake of the Scottish referendum, we were to believe that 45 percent of Scottish voters were extremist malcontents? Again, such a charge would have rightly been viewed as ludicrous.

Since Brexit, two of the most notable secession movements — California and Catalonia — have also been products of the left. Given the mainstream media's fondness for the left, the effect of this has been to push secession out of the "extremist" shadows and into the realm of allowable — if eccentric — political discourse.

Thus, it's not shocking that The Washington Post has now featured a study of secession movements which shows that they are proliferating. There really are more of them now than in the past:

The new in vogue term, apparently, is "sovereignty referendums":

Since Massachusetts kicked off the trend in 1776, more than 630 sovereignty referendums have been held. There has been a surge in recent years, as you can see in the figure below. The 1990s alone saw a record 110 sovereignty referendums, largely because of the numerous autonomy and independence referendums triggered as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia broke up. The 2000s saw 88 more sovereignty referendums, many related to whether the European Union should continue expanding eastward...

Why the surge? Although each referendum has its own history, we can find some general reasons. Perhaps most important, conflicts over sovereignty have proliferated. According to a recent study, since 1945 the number of ethnic movements demanding greater self-determination has increased more than tenfold. Many former colonies voted on their independence...

What’s more, when international actors intervene in nationalist conflicts they increasingly promote sovereignty referendums. For instance, in 1999 Portugal brokered a referendum in East Timor, which was administered by the United Nations. Some observers have even suggested that there is a new international norm emerging requiring referendums to legitimate territorial realignments.

This isn't to say that secession is now an easy thing. Status-quo states almost uniformly oppose secession movements within their own borders. This is because states naturally seek to enlarge themselves and increase their monopoly power over larger and larger territories. When geographic territories secede, they can no longer be directly taxed — and states don't like to give up their taxing powers. In many cases, seceding territories offer geopolitical advantages that the status-quo states are unlikely to relinquish.

In some cases, if the status-quo states are convinced that the seceding territory will continue to be friendly toward them, secession may be tolerated. This was the case when Australia and Canada were granted independence from the United Kingdom, and when the Philippines was granted independence from the United States. In all cases, it is assumed that the former territories will be reliable military allies in case of global war.

In more conflict-prone parts of the globe, however, matters are less clear cut. As The Post notes:

Unilateral secession referendums, in particular, are rarely implemented. Neither Catalonia nor Iraqi Kurdistan has a clear path to independent statehood. Nor do Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region, Bosnia’s Srpska region, or Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia, all of which voted for independence during the 1990s.

In all of these cases, the status-quo states fear that secession may lead to advantages for competing states.

But, it is increasingly accepted that secession and "sovereignty referendums" are multi-faceted in their motivating factors.

Moreover, research suggests that secession movements can also help to promote peace. In his dissertation, Micha Germann concluded that "self-determination referendums are likely to create a positive dynamic and increase chances for peace ... they are likely to foster perceptions of fair decision-making ... they may contribute to a reversal of hostile images ... they may lead to referendum-related coalitions that are willing to support their outcome."

And perhaps most importantly these movements may "increase the durability of settlements."

However, to gain these benefits — according to Germann — secession movements must come at the end of a negotiation period in which the status quo state is convinced to allow for the referendum and abide by its results.

Of course, states aren't likely to sign off on these referenda unless pressure is applied, whether via international pressure, domestic protest movements, or even through violence. Secessionists have to find some way to make secession the least bad option for a state.

At the core of all of this, however, is the realization that it is morally objectionable and absurd to insist that current borders of a state are forever sacrosanct that everyone currently within a certain state must remain forever so.

Given the perpetual lip service paid by modern states toward "democracy," it's becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss sovereignty referenda without looking hypocritical.

The realization that secession can alleviate intrastate conflicts would not come as news to Ludwig von Mises who advocated for referenda as a tool in secession and the readjustment of national borders to align with nationalist, linguistic, and cultural trends.

Sometimes, Mises noted, the only way to protect the rights of minority groups is for them to secede from one state, and perhaps join another.

For Mises, who was an expert on the nationalist movements of nineteenth century Europe, and who supported the Catalonian secessionist movement in his own day, "sovereignty referenda" were a natural and reasonable way to adjust political realities to cultural and ideological realities.

Allowing majority-controlled governments to impose their values and agenda on minority population was akin to military occupation in Mises's mind, and required secession as a solution.

Mises, however, was writing on these matters in the 1920s, when nationalist, totalitarian, and fascist movements took a dim view of secession, to say the least.

Today, however, it looks like Mises's pragmatic and savvy views on secession were a glimpse into what many researchers are now coming to realize about secession and its benefits.

View Details

Listen to Ryan McMaken's commentary on the Radio Rothbard podcast.

According to the usual news sources, Donald Trump's new budget proposal "envisions steep cuts to America’s social safety net" and will "gut social programs." Most of the cuts were proposed to pave the way for more Pentagon spending.

In truth, Trump's proposal doesn't matter, and Congress will set to work piling on more deficit spending for both social programs and for the Pentagon.

But, the debate of "gutting" social programs will no doubt be used to perpetuate, yet again, the myth that the United States is ruled by libertarian social Darwinists who ensure that no more than a few pennies are spent via social programs for the poor.

Now setting aside the question of whether or not social programs are the best way to address poverty, the fact is that the United States spending on social programs is on a par with Australia and Switzerland, and can hardly be described as "laissez-faire."

Moreover, government spending on healthcare per capita in the United States is the fourth largest in the world.See the World Health Organization's 2015 "World Health Statistics" report.

Governments in the United States pour money into social-benefits programs at rates typical to a Western welfare state. We can debate whether or not the way this is done is sub-optimal or not, but the fact remains, that if we're going to talk about social programs, the amount of spending in the US is not low in a global context.

According to the 2016 social expenditure database at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), public social spending as a percentage of GDP in the US was 19.4 percent:

While it is true the US is hardly the highest on this list, its social spending is higher than that of Canada, Australia, Ireland, and Iceland, all of which we are often told are far more "generous" countries in terms of their welfare states. Indeed, if the typical American leftist were asked if the US should spend as much as Canada or Australia on social benefits, the response is very likely to be an emphatic "yes."

And yet, the US outpaces all of these, and has spending levels comparable to that of Switzerland. Indeed, the difference between Switzerland and the US in this measure is four-tenths of one percent. The OECD average is 21.4 percent, a matter of 2.1 percentage points difference from the US.

When we turn to the matter of healthcare, we find that the US is a world leader in terms of governmental healthcare spending.

According to the World Health Organization, only Luxembourg, Norway, and the Netherlands spend more government money on healthcare per capita.

In the US, the sum is $4,153 per capita, and in Norway it is $5,154. In the United Kingdom, the total is $2,716.

This presents a problem for advocates for more government control of the healthcare system, of course. Often, their line of argument is that Americans are too "stingy" with social health benefits. When confronted with the fact that government spending is quite high, however, they switch tactics, and then declare that if the US adopted a more government-regimented system, then spending would actually be lower. This was a tactic employed by Bernie Sanders.

This latter claim may or may not be so, but the one thing we do know is that the US already spends more taxpayer money on healthcare than most everyone else. So, it seems hard to fathom that the "problem" — whatever that may be — is a product of too little government spending on health care.

If advocates for reform want to argue over how the money is spent, let them do so, but the debate should hardly include any proposals to increase government spending.

In the US, government spending on healthcare as a percentage of total government spending, is one of the highest among wealthy nations. Although, by this measure the US is equal with Japan and the Netherlands.

I am not a defender of the US government's gargantuan military budget, but even considering that huge expense, government healthcare spending still takes up an unusually large amount of government spending in the US.

There is no shortage of articles in publications like Slate and The Nation stating that "the American social safety net does not exist" and that the US has a "stingy social safety net."

Now, if by "stingy" one means, "poorly administered," "ineffective," or "counterproductive," then one would be on to something. But if by "stingy," one means "underfunded," well, there's little evidence of that.

Even many advocates for a reduced federal budget are likely willing to consider ideas that would spend taxpayer dollars more effectively. After all, if it's a given that one is going to pay a large federal tax bill, one usually would rather see that money go to something like housing for a single mother and her children who are living in a car.

But are federal dollars actually doing this well?

Critics of American "stinginess" are themselves quick to point out that all that American spending on social benefits isn't pushing down poverty rates as in other countries. Even if one believes that governments are generally poor at accomplishing the goals they set out to accomplish, it seems that in this regard, the US government is especially bad.

A Modest Proposal — Dismember America's Huge Welfare State There may be many reasons for this. But it is also worth noting that among the Western welfare states, the United States is by far the largest with 320 million people. The next largest country isn't even half that size, and is Japan with 125 million people. And, of course, Japan's geography, culture, and demographics are completely different from the same attributes of the US. Once we get to governments of the size and physical scope of the US government, we're looking at something on a scale that can't possibly be considered "responsive" or "accountable" by any measure. It becomes nearly impossible to make changes in such an enormous apparatus which itself cannot possibly take into account the vast number of different populations and conditions that exist across a place as huge as the United States.

One immediate solution is to decentralize the welfare state immediately, and take it out of the hands of the federal government. But that by itself isn't a magic bullet, since we know that in California, which has its own supplemental welfare state on top of the federal one, poverty is higher than in any other state.

Nevertheless, if we're going to hear constantly about what successes the Scandinavian welfare states are, for example, we might use this as an excuse to create welfare states on a more Scandinavian scale. Given that the largest Scandinavian nation-state (Sweden) has 10.1 million people, this means breaking up the American welfare state into at least 30 totally independent smaller pieces and going from there. These programs would then be under the control of local residents — as they are in, say, Denmark — and not something controlled by distant, untouchable Washington bureaucrats and politicians. An even better size for each piece would be something on the scale of Norway, which has five million people, and is thus the size of Minnesota or Colorado. At the very least, no government larger than a US state ought to be in the business of social benefits.

When it comes to government, bigger has never been better.

View Details

With a Republican in the White House, the anti-gun-control lobby smells a bit of blood in the water. Now is the time, they suggest, to pass national gun-licensing reciprocity laws forcing gun-restrictive states to recognize permits issued by gun-permissive states.

Writing in The Hill, Tim Schmidt sums it up:

It is time for there to be national reciprocity for concealed carry permits, instead of the patchwork of laws governing reciprocity that vary by state. Virginia, where the [recent shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise] happened, has reciprocity for some states’ concealed carry permits, but if members would have brought their guns back and forth from D.C., they would have been breaking the law. It should never be a crime to be responsibly prepared to defend yourself in any possible situation.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) have introduced the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017, which would allow legal gun owners and concealed carry permit holders nationwide to responsibly arm themselves no matter where they are.

The way this is phrased sounds nice and totally unobjectionable: this bill sounds like it's just saying people should be left alone.

The problem, however, is that the drive for mandated reciprocity is essentially a drive to increase federal involvement and federal control in the realm of gun policy.

Schmidt is right in the sense that, of course it should never be a crime to defend one's self. The question remains however: should the federal government be the agency that guarantees that right? Should the feds have the power to overturn state and local laws that limit gun ownership?

This issue can be addressed from both a legal and Constitutional standpoint, and from a general philosophical decentralist view.

The Constitutionalist ViewSuzanne Sherman at the Tenth Amendment Center has already weighed in against the idea on Constitutional grounds, based on two main arguments:

Reciprocity laws are compacts made among the states, and are not imposed by the federal government.
The Bill of Rights Doesn't apply to the states.

On the first matter, Sherman notes that the proposed legislation would impose reciprocity on the states. This, Sherman notes, is a departure from what we usually mean by reciprocity, which denotes compacts that two or more states have voluntarily entered into.

RELATED: "Should Libertarians Care about the Constitution?" by Allen Mendenhall and Brion McClanahan

Sherman writes:

Many advocates of forced National Reciprocity point to the “Full Faith and Credit Clause” found in Article IV, Section 1 of the Constitution. Such application is likewise problematic because it deviates from the original intent of the clause, lifted directly from the Articles of Confederation without any change to its meaning. This clause, as ratified, simply ensured citizens in one state could own land or property in another with the full rights of a citizen of that state. It in no way implied that one state had to recognize the institutions or licensing of another state. Driver’s licenses are acceptable for passing through various states, but it is, like CCW licensing, by mutual assent of the states. In other words, there is no federal statute mandating that one state must honor another state’s driver’s licenses.

In other words, the sort of "reciprocity" imagined by the backers of nationwide forced reciprocity is a new kind ofreciprocity that substitutes federal policy for decentralized state-level policy.

The enormous downside to this is that it federalizes what has long been recognized as largely the domain of state and local governments. Further federalizing gun policy may look like a fine idea right now, but as Sherman notes, it only takes a couple of new anti-gun appointments to the Supreme Court for the whole idea to blow up in the faces of pro-gun advocates. It's far more prudent, Sherman contends, to work against any increase in federal involvement in gun policy.

The Bill of Rights Was Never Meant to Apply to the States Sherman's second point is one that Constitutionalists and decentralists have made for years. Namely, that the Bill of Rights is properly understood as a document that limits the federal government, not state governments.

Sherman writes:

When he introduced the proposal for a Bill of Rights to Congress, Madison wanted some of the provisions to be made applicable against the states. He argued that was where liberty would be most likely threatened. Again, he was defeated unanimously. The Bill of Rights was never understood to be applicable against the states. There is absolutely no historical evidence of the Bill of Rights being made enforceable against the states. Even nationalist John Marshall, in the 1833 case Barron v. Baltimore, was forced to admit this when he said that the first ten “amendments contain no expression indicating an intention to apply them to the state governments. This court cannot so apply them."

...It was not until 1925, in the case of Gitlow vs New York, that the Supreme Court magically “found” the authority to apply the Bill of Rights against the states supposedly hidden away in the 14th Amendment..."

Sensing that things are going their way, it has become fashionable for some gun-freedom advocates to push for more federal control over state and local gun laws. One example is the recent case of Mcdonald vs. the City of Chicago which finally declared that the Second Amendment — like other portions of the Bill of Rights — applies to the states. Nevertheless, by pushing for more federal control in this case, gun-rights advocates are only pushing for more federal control over the states.

Even those who have no particular affinity for the current American Constitution have noted this as well.

Lew Rockwell writes:

[T]he purpose of the Bill of Rights was to state very clearly and plainly what the Federal Government may not do. That's why they were attached to the Constitution. The states, under the influence of skeptics of the Constitution's limits on the central power, insisted that the restrictions on the government be spelled out. The Bill of Rights did not provide a mandate for what the Federal Government may do. You can argue all you want about the 14th amendment and due process. But a reading that says it magically transforms the whole Bill of Rights to mean the exact opposite of its original intent is pure fantasy.

In other words, appealing to the 2nd Amendment as a means of limiting state and local gun laws is based on newly invented federal powers that have no basis in legal or historical facts around the Constitution as written. Thus, it is ironic that many conservatives — who often fancy themselves to be "strict constructionists" and "local control" people — have suddenly made peace with the idea of using the Bill of Rights to boss state governments around.

The Decentralist ViewThe Constitutional arguments are all well and good, but the US Constitution should never be viewed as the final word on any matter. The current constitution has always gone much too far in terms of centralizing political power in the United States, and the United States should never have been anything more than a loose military alliance and customs union. It's no more necessary that the federal government regulate gun laws than it is necessary to define marriage or prohibit prayer at school sporting events.

In fact, gun policy, like abortion policy, wage policy, land-use policy, and everything else, should be relentlessly decentralized.

RELATED: "Anarchism and Radical Decentralization Are the Same Thing" by Ryan McMaken

In his article "What We Mean by Decentralization," Lew Rockwell explains the various reasons why decentralization is a mroe effective check on power than handing everything over to a Supreme Court or other federal "protectors" or rights.

Rockwell lists five reasons for this:

First, under decentralization, jurisdictions must compete for residents and capital, which provides some incentive for greater degrees of freedom...

Second, localism internalizes corruption so that it can be more easily spotted and uprooted....

Third, tyranny on the local level minimizes damage to the same extent that macro-tyranny maximizes it....

Fourth, no government can be trusted to use the power to intervene wisely...

Fifth, a plurality of governmental forms—a "vertical separation of powers," ... prevents the central government from accumulating power. Lower governments are rightly jealous of their jurisdiction, and resist...

Also key to this equation is the fact that decentralization offers a multitude of choices between different regimes in the face of government restrictions and persecution. If only one huge government has been granted the power to protect rights, to where will one go when the government fails to do its prescribed task? On the other hand, when a wide variety of smaller governments are charged with protecting rights, the failure by one regime is not nearly as catastrophic since the offending regime can be far more easily avoided through emigration and boycott than can a large centralized regime.

Thus, it might sound nice to put the federal government in charge of protecting gun rights, but the potential downside is immense given that federal policy can change easily, and then be imposed nationwide.

This isn't to say that small, decentralized government are a cure-all either. Ideology always plays an important role, and in a world where the majority wants all private citizens disarmed — well, that will happen regardless of what level of decentralization exists.

However, if what we desire is a governmental landscape that offers more choices for residents and more limitations on state power, decentralization is the proper path, and handing over gun policy to federal "protectors" is a terrible idea.

View Details

Although Donald Trump portrayed himself as an anti-gun control candidate on the campaign trail, the president apparently has no problem with sending federal agents into Chicago to more fiercely enforce gun laws.

The New York Times reported late last month that the Trump administration has sent in federal agencies to partner with local law enforcement in Chicago, in order to confiscate more guns:

Anthony Riccio, the chief of the Police Department’s Bureau of Organized Crime, said the new team would “significantly help our efforts to trace and stop the flow of illegal guns.”

The phrase "illegal guns" makes it sound like we're only dealing with very sinister elements within society. But in Chicago, where gun control laws are among the most stringent in the country, the phrase "illegal guns" might as well be interpreted as "most guns, whether owned by peaceful people or not."

Thus, it appears that the Trump administration is using federal agents to assist local politics in what is one of the most anti-gun jurisdictions in the nation. And, not coincidentally, it's one of the most violent jurisdictions.

At the same time, as pointed out by Anti-Media, "There has yet to be any outcry from conservative or gun rights groups over Trump’s federalized gun grab in Chicago. Can you imagine what would have happened if Obama had done this?"

Trump's contradictory stance on gun control is a time-honored tactic of Republican presidents. When George W. Bush was running for president, he announced "This nation must enforce the gun laws which exist on the books." and pledged more aggressive enforcement.

As President, Bush did indeed pursue more prosecutions which led to the pro-gun control organization Americans for Gun Safety approvingly concluding that "the Bush Administration has made progress" on enforcing federal gun laws, including those against mere possession of a gun while violating federal drug laws. This, of course, could bring draconian prison sentences for anyone in possession of a gun while engaged in the heinous crime of growing marijuana plants.

With his current pledge to help the City of Chicago confiscate more guns, Trump appears to be pursuing a similarly bad policy.

An Agency for Taxation and ProhibitionAt the center of these policies is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), which is essentially a regulatory bureaucracy that oversees federal regulations on firearms, and also on the illegal trafficking of alcohol and tobacco.

The agency's attention is mostly directed toward prohibitionism, taxation, and regulation. Little of the agency's attention goes toward investigation and prosecution of actual violent crimes.

The agency began as a revenue-collection agency in the late 19th century. Like many other federal agencies, the introduction of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s greatly expanded the agency's role. After prohibition failed, the agency became the "Alcohol Tax Unit," and in the 1950s also gained powers over tobacco regulation and taxation. It wasn't until the late 1960s that the federal government began to greatly expand its role in regulation of firearms regulation. Later, the federal government invented new federal laws against certain types of explosives, further expanding the powers and roles of what by then was called the ATF.

During all of this time, real violent crimes such as homicide and arson were always illegal at the state and local, and so the addition of the ATF did little more than add an additional layer of law enforcement and an expansion of the numbers and types of federal crimes that were to be prosecuted in federal courts.

Naturally, this also meant ongoing growth in federal spending for the agency, which now totals more than a billion dollars per year.

Noting that the ATF fills no unique role or area of competence among federal agencies, Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner introduced legislation in Congress in January to abolish the ATF, explaining:

Despite our country being trillions of dollars in debt, government spending continues to rise. Common sense budgeting solutions are necessary, and the ATF Elimination Act is one measure we can take to reduce spending, redundancy, and practice responsible governance. The ATF is a scandal-ridden, largely duplicative agency that has been branded by failure and lacks a clear mission.

Sensenbrenner could have also mentioned that the ATF is the organization responsible for the Fast and Furious debacle in which ATF agents engaged in gun trafficking for Mexican cartels. If that weren't enough to illustrate the abuse and incompetence endemic to the organization, we can also recall that the ATF was the central agency in the Waco massacre of 1993, during which, James Bovard concludes,

there is ample evidence the ATF started the gun battle. ATF agent Roland Ballesteros, one of the first agents out of the cattle trailer during the raid, later told the Texas Rangers that he believed federal agents fired the first shots–perhaps to kill five dogs that could have bitten the agents. As early as 36 hours after the initial raid, the feds abandoned routine law enforcement procedure to avoid gathering potentially embarrassing evidence of their conduct early in the raid. According to a confidential September 17, 1993 Treasury Department memo, the ATF had initiated a shooting review on March 1 and “immediately determined that these stories [of agents involved] did not add up.”

The botched raid would eventually lead to the deaths of 76 people, including numerous women and children.

Sensenbrenner's legislation, unfortunately, is far too tame. It calls for the FBI and the DEA to take over the ATF's activities and to continue with prosecutions of alcohol and gun-related activities prohibited by federal law.

RELATED: "Abolish the FBI" by Ryan McMaken

A far better solution would be to abolish the ATF's activities along with the ATF itself. After all, many of the federal crimes the fall under the ATF's purview only became federal matters at all in the past 50 years. Prior to that time, ATF matters were either state-level matters, or were not crimes at all.

Somehow, the United States survived the first half of the 20th century without the ATF to regulate everyone's gun and alcohol purchases.

First Steps in Ending the ATF The Trump administration's apparent enthusiasm for sending the ATF into Chicago to "assist" local law enforcement is most unfortunate precisely because it is an affirmative step in exactly the wrong direction.

The Trump administration and Congress should be taking immediate steps to reduce the agency's role.

As a first step, the administration should announce that the agency will focus only on actual violent crimes, and will be ignoring all non-violent activities such as illegal alcohol sales or illegal gun sales. Most of these activities amount to little more than a revenue collection scheme. States would still be free to engage in these law-enforcement activities, of course. This would simply be the end of federal involvement.

Supporters of the agency will naturally complain that the agency must enforce "all laws." But, this has always been a nonsense claim since resources are always limited and every agency must prioritize. Thus, since some money has already been budgeted to the agency for the current budget year, let the agency focus exclusively on real crime.

The second step comes during the next budget process: de-fund the agency.

This doesn't even require legislation formally abolishing the agency. Simply stop giving the agency money. Few agents will show up to work without the hefty paychecks they're used to. If Congress wants to do some real good, they can put the ATF's budget toward reducing the huge annual budget deficit.

And finally, the agency should be formally abolished, although so long as it's not funded, its existence on the books doesn't really matter.

In response to any concerted effort to abolish the agency, of course, we'll hear all the usual arguments in favor of federal law enforcement agencies. But, as I noted in a recent article calling for the abolition of the FBI, federal law-enforcement agencies have always been both redundant and unnecessary:

The advocates for national police also often claim that without a national police force, the individual states of the US would be overrun by criminals. The US states are too small and weak, we are told, to mount any effective opposition to sophisticated crime operations.

So, by this reasoning, small countries should have more criminal activity than larger, more powerful countries.

But where's the evidence for this? Is Switzerland crime infested while much-larger Mexico is crime free? Nope. Does Poland have sky-high homicide rates while much-more-powerful Russia is serenely peaceful? Wrong again. Indeed, no relationship whatsoever has been demonstrated between the size and scope of a country's regime, and the amount of crime it has. Brazil, after all, is an immense state both in geography and in regulatory vigor. Yet crime there is a major problem.

Moreover, even if there were some optimum minimum size for countries (which there is not) many US states have more than enough wealth, population, and power to fund immense police operations.

Texas, for instance, has approximately the same GDP and population size as Australia. If Australia is not ruled by drug runners and terrorists — as we're supposed to believe would happen to Texas without the FBI — why is Texas too small to obtain the same level and quality of law enforcement? With more than 20 million inhabitants, Florida and New York have GDPs similar to those of a mid-sized European country. Pennsylvania has a GDP equal to that of Switzerland. California has both a population and a GDP larger than that of Canada.

Moreover, without the FBI not even very small US states would be on their own since no FBI is necessary to coordinate information-sharing between states. INTERPOL, of course, has been around for decades as a body that helps police organizations share information and apprehend suspects. INTERPOL itself, however, has no agents who make arrests, and INTERPOL's budget is much, much smaller than that of the FBI.

Not even the European Union has gone so far as to create a police force that resembles the FBI in its vast power. Europol, like INTERPOL, assists in coordination among police agencies, but Europol officers do not conduct independent investigations in member countries as the FBI does in American states. Europol's budget is only a small fraction of the FBI's.

The same principles apply at least as much to the ATF as to the FBI. At least the FBI sometimes investigates and prosecutes real crimes such as kidnapping and human trafficking. The ATF is most notable for regulating peaceful activities, collecting tax revenue, burning women and children alive, and selling guns to Mexican drug cartels. The agency's disappearance would hardly be a blow to American peace and freedom.

View Details

Many people in Catalonia wish to secede from Spain and form their own country, but the Spanish government has used force to block them from doing so. What should libertarians think of this conflict? In trying to answer this question, it is useful to seek guidance from Mises and Rothbard. Not that these two thinkers are always right, but it is a safe bet that these two giants of twentieth-century social science will have something illuminating to say.

Mises addresses the issue directly. In Omnipotent Government, he criticizes the eminent Spanish liberal Salvador de Madariaga for his opposition to Catalonian independence. “If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace. It is unbelievable how deep-rooted these vicious ideas of hegemony, domination, and oppression are even among the most distinguished contemporaries. Señor Salvador de Madariaga condemns the demands of the Catalans and the Basques for independence, and advocates Castilian hegemony for racial, historical, geographical, linguistic, religious, and economic considerations.” (pp. 15–16) (Madariaga served variously as Professor of Spanish at Oxford and Spanish Ambassador to the League of Nations. He and Mises were friends, until this dispute drove them apart.)

Attempts to suppress the autonomy of a distinct linguistic group, Mises thought, would tend to lead to war. Peace requires that groups be allowed to choose their own destiny. “It is futile to advance historical or geographical reasons in support of political ambitions which cannot stand the criticism of democratic principles. Democratic government can safeguard peace and international cooperation because it does not aim at the oppression of other peoples.” (p. 15)

Mises extended the right of secession very far: any group wishing to fend for itself should be free to do so. “The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. ... If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done.” (Liberalism, pp. 109–10)

For Mises, then, preserving peace holds primary importance. Groups should not be forced to remain in a country against their will. Mises does not make it a requirement for secession that the seceding group accept libertarian, or as he would say liberal, principles. It is not even a requirement that the seceding group favor institutions more libertarian than those of the country they wish to escape. Mises would have little sympathy for the view, held by some libertarians today, that Catalonian independence should be opposed because the Spanish government is at present less socialist than the Catalonian provincial authorities.

Rothbard held very similar views, although for him individual rights rather than avoiding conflict lay at the heart of the secession issue. “National boundaries are only just insofar as they are based on voluntary consent and the property rights of their members or citizens. Just national boundaries are, then, at best derivative and not primary. How much more is this true of existing state boundaries which are, in greater or lesser degree, based on coercive expropriation of private property, or on a mixture of that with voluntary consent! In practice, the way to have such national boundaries as just as possible is to preserve and cherish the right of secession, the right of different regions, groups, or ethnic nationalities to get the blazes out of the larger entity, to set up their own independent nation. Only by boldly asserting the right of secession can the concept of national self-determination be anything more than a sham and a hoax.” (“The Nationalities Question”)

Rothbard had little use for the notion, held by some libertarians, that because only individuals exist, nations have no significance. “We must not fall into a nihilist trap. While only individuals exist individuals do not exist as isolated and hermetically sealed atoms. Statists traditionally charge libertarians and individualists with being 'atomistic individualists,' and the charge, one hopes, has always been incorrect and misconceived. Individuals may be the only reality, but they influence each other, past and present, and all individuals grow up in a common culture and language.” Like Mises, Rothbard does not require a seceding group to be classical liberal in orientation in order to secede. If it is not, that is unfortunate; but the members of the group do not lose their right to form a new political association.

One might object to Mises and Rothbard along these lines: Can we not imagine situations where secession would have very bad consequences? Must we support secession, come what may? The views of neither thinker require this. Too often libertarians seek a geometric politics, in which absolute principles follow rigidly from the non-aggression principle. Such deductions are not to be had, and Mises and Rothbard both deemed it essential to apply libertarian principles to particular circumstances with the requisite practical judgment. In doing so, they argued, support for secession is almost always the preferred course.

View Details

The United States was originally constructed in such a way that the states themselves would dominate the electoral process. Historically, states have determined who can vote, when they vote, and how they vote. Through this power states have also be given limited de facto power of determining citizenship.

RELATED: "In the 19th Century, Non-Citizens Could Vote in 22 States and Territories"

Over time, the federal courts have increasingly seized local prerogatives in t his matter, but even today, states and counties are the primary government organizations that conduct elections, collect the votes, print the ballots, and determine the winners.

This is appropriate, of course, since the United States was intended to function on a confederation model in which it would be up to the states to decide for themselves how they would send representatives to Congress. There is no such thing as a "national election" in the United States because there wasn't supposed to be a single nation.

RELATED: "Decentralize the Elections"

Unfortunately, in the wake of the 2016 election, opponents of the election's outcome have been petitioning the Supreme Court to step in and take even more power away from the states in deciding how presidents are selected through the Electoral College. Specifically, two electors in Colorado are suing in federal court to overturn a state law that requires members of the electoral college to support the winner of the statewide vote:

The two electors, Polly Baca and Robert Nemanich, are suing to overturn a Colorado law that requires them to support the winner of their statewide popular vote -- Hillary Clinton -- during the general election last month.

In this case, the two electors who are suing are pro-Clinton, and Clinton won the statewide vote in Colorado. So, as electors, they'll be voting for the candidate they supported in the general election anyway. But, they're hoping their lawsuit will lead to the nullification of state laws over the electoral college, which could free up electors in other states. Currently, in addition to Colorado, 28 states and the District of Columbia have adopted laws mandating the electors vote for the winner of the statewide vote. Failure to comply with these mandates, however, generally bring only a fine.

This follows a mandate from the current US Constitution which states in Article II, Section 1 that: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress."

In other words, the text is explicit that the state legislature has nearly untrammeled control over how electors are appointed.

Thus, by extension, the state legislature could also be entitled to force electors to legally pledge to support the winner of the statewide vote.

This method would also be reminiscent of methods used prior to the 17th Amendment when members of the legislature were pledged to appoint to the US Senate the winners of statewide votes.

RELATED: "Repealing the 17th Amendment Won't Fix the Senate"

Of course, the method that states use to appoint or bind electors is beside the point. States ought to be free to appoint, manage, remove, or regulate electors totally outside any interference from federal courts, federal regulators, or federal policymakers of any kind. If fifty states employ fifty different methods of assigning electoral votes, this would merely reflect the diversity of the American states.

Were the federal courts to step in and begin regulating states on how they manage their electoral college votes, it would be a significant swing in favor of federal centralization and greater federal power.

The Current System Favors the Democrats As a final note, we might also look at how the current system of binding electors to the statewide vote in each state actually favors the Democrats. The fact that the state legislatures so often defer to the winner of the statewide vote limits legislative power, and puts electoral votes beyond the reach of the legislature once the votes are counted. This helps the Democrats in a period where the Republicans have an overwhelming advantage at the state-government level.

For example, given current party control of state government, were legislatures to reserve to themselves more active control over the electoral college, Republicans would be guaranteed victory in at least 23 states where the GOP has a so-called trifecta — control over all houses of the legislature and the governor's office. This means the GOP would get 248 out of the necessary 270 electoral votes right off the bat. The Democrats by this measure would win 7 states for a total of 86 electoral votes. Once we add in other states where the GOP controls the legislature but not the governor's office, the GOP easily wins the necessary electoral votes.

This advantage will be even greater once the GOP's additional state-level gains in the 2016 election take effect next year. Post-2016, the GOP will have a trifecta in 24 states with 255 electoral votes. The Democrats will have a trifecta in 6 states with 83 electoral votes.

View Details

A Mises podcast.

View Details

A Mises podcast.

View Details

In his article today, Christopher Westley noted that Texas's economy — when measured by GDP — is larger than Canada's. In other words: If Texas were an independent country, it would be the world's 10th largest economy (totaling $1.6 trillion), and its citizens would be more than capable of addressing natural disasters of the magnitude of a major flood. Texas's economy is also larger than those of Russia and Australia.

By why stop our analysis at the state of Texas? Indeed, if we look at the GDP of the Houston metropolitan area, we find it comes in at $503 billion. This total is similar to the GDPs of Poland, Belgium, and Austria. It's significantly larger than the GDPs of Norway and Denmark.Source for metro area GDP comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. National GDP totals and state GDP comparisons can be found here and here and here. In most cases, the data is from 2015 and 2016.

Nor is Texas's GDP largely driven by federal spending — so we can't say that Texas's economy depends on federal spending to stay afloat. When we look at federal spending in Texas compared to the federal taxes paid by Texans, we find it's nearly a one-for-one relationship. So, if the Federal government stopped spending in Texas — but allowed Texans to keep their money, Texas would be fine.

Indeed, as Westley notes, the Houston area has benefitted from its relatively laissez-faire politicies in recent decades, and this will enable the region to more easily confront its troubles: "What makes Houston different has to do with property rights institutions taking root and developing there over decades, making it a center for capital investment, because capital always flows to those areas where it is most secure."

Nevertheless, because there's money there for the taking, the Texas state government and countless local governments in Texas will be more than happy to take the federal aid that Donald Trump was recently promising as he posed for photo ops near the flood zone. After all, if taxpayers from the other 49 states are being forced to hand over money to Texans, why refuse "free" money?

This free cash promised for Texas has already lit up the usual leftwing outlets with charges of hypocrisy and foolishness on the part of GOP politicians who have in the past allegedly been stingy with federal disaster-relief funds. One New Orleans columnist opines that "Texas Republicans will have some explaining to do" since nearly the entire GOP Texas delegation in Congress " voted against a $50.5 billion relief package for victims after 2012 superstorm Sandy slammed into New York and other parts of the Northeast."

Now that Texas "needs" Federal funds, the shoe is on the other foot! Or so we're told.

It's true enough that GOP Texas politicians have themselves in a political bind here. If they refuse the funds, local voters who think the federal funds are essentially without cost to them will largely be angry their Congressmen and Senators didn't grab the cash.

But, of course, the politicians themselves — and the voters who supported their reluctance to shell out more federal spending on disaster funds — will look like hypocrites.

Now, in a properly-functioning confederation of states, the Texas delegation could simply say this: "Hey Congress and Trump, we don't actually need your money. Instead of giving us money from the taxpayers in other states, how about you just give us back a big chunk of all the federal taxes you drained from our economy this year? Thanks in advance."

Unfortunately, direct federal taxation of Texans makes this a logistical impossibility, so all the tax funds must be trafficked through Washington, the bureaucrats will take their cut, and then some dollars will filter back to Texas in the form of disaster-relief funds.

It likely that many Texas taxpayers see the situation as a matter of getting back funds already paid. They're thinking "I pay federal taxes constantly, so I might as well get some of it back to rebuild the infrastructure the floods washed away. With my taxes, I already paid to rebuild New Orleans and the Hurricane Sandy victims, anyway."

There is a certain soundness to this logic, in spite of its lack of precision. In any case, the whole situation reminds us it would be best to simply do away with all the constant robbing of Peter in State X to pay Paul in State Y.

Of course, we'll be told that federal disaster relief programs are all about "sharing" and "cooperation" and "kindness." In reality, it's all just about forcing one group of people to hand over money to another group of people. There is no doubt that Texas and Houston now face significant challenges in rebuilding after the flood. But, when we demand that other regions and states pay for the rebuilding of Texas, we're acting as if those other states and communities don't have problems of their own. Needs related to poverty, infrastructure, and education in, say, Michigan did not magically disappear because Texas experienced a flood. The only reason it now seems right to take money from people in Michigan, and hand it over to Houstonians, is because Houston's problems are in the headlines, and Michigans mundane daily problems are not. The central planners have decided that Houstonians deserve Michigan's money. But the rationale for this decision is purely political, and thus arbitrary.

This isn't to say real sharing and kindness are a bad thing. It's excellent that private charities have already been hard at work helping with the cleanup in Houston. If one wants to insist that governments be involved, there's nothing stopping other states from handing over funds to Texas directly. The federal government need not be involved at all.

View Details

In recent years, numerous states have been passing new reforms of the long-abused civil asset forfeiture in which police agencies seize private property without any due process. At least 11 states, plus the District of Columbia, have passed new reforms. Some reforms, such as those in New Mexico and Nebraska, prohibit asset forfeiture altogether in the absence of a criminal conviction. Other states have opted for a more incremental approach, and have settled for new mandates in which law enforcement agencies must publicly report what has been seized — with the intent of identifying abuse for possible additional future reforms.

The Heritage Foundation has noted the significance of these reforms:

The fact that these reforms have been adopted within the past three years is remarkable. Only a few short years ago America’s civil forfeiture system was skewed at both the state and federal levels, seemingly invulnerable to public criticism and legal attack. Yet, with widespread support in their legislatures, states continue to enact significant forfeiture reform measures, often over the alarmist and overblown objections of police, sheriffs, and prosecutors. The message is clear: Outside the law enforcement community, support for the forfeiture status quo is remarkably thin.

From Washington, DC, you might not know there's any perceived problem at all with asset forfeiture — a key tactic in the War on Drugs. This seems to be the case for US Attorney General Jeff Sessions who in a recent speech to the National District Attorneys Association doubled down on the practice and called for more asset forfeiture.

"[W]e plan to develop policies to increase forfeitures," Sessions declared this month, claiming that " No criminal should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime." Of course, given that asset forfeiture is by definition a seizure of property from a person without any criminal conviction, what Sessions really means is this: "no person we suspect of being a criminal should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime." In other words, in the mind of Jeff Sessions, due process means nothing.

RELATED: "Make Every State a Sanctuary State" by Ryan McMaken

State legislatures, fortunately, have concluded otherwise, and this should perhaps be not surprising since state legislatures are far more responsive to the voters than is Congress. The US attorney General, who is a political appointee, is even more distant from any oversight by the voters or the public. State legislators tend to live among their constituents. Many of them are only part timers. A voter can arrange to have coffee with a state legislator without being wealthy or especially powerful. Members of Congress, on the other hand, are mostly millionaires who spend most of their time hundreds — if not thousands — of miles from their constituents. To get a meeting of any consequence with a member of Congress, one must usually be either a wealthy donor or represent a powerful interest group. The federal AG, is totally out of reach of the average voter.

Thus it should surprise no one that Jeff Sessions, a wealthy out-of-touch former Senator himself, is moving in exactly the opposite direction as the state governments who are attempting to bring police powers under control.

Sessions himself has admitted he's clueless as to what's going on in the real world, and back in April he revealed he was "surprised [the public] didn’t like" his fanatical anti-marijuana policies.

Sessions won't let his obvious disconnect from state government and the public affect his obsession with the drug war, however. He wants more asset forfeiture, and he wants more drug prosecutions.

Perhaps because of the initial reaction to his tone-deaf proclamations on marijuana, Sessions was careful to not mention marijuana in his remarks. Instead, he announced he wants law enforcement to "make visits to physician and pharmacies and do checks on those who prescribe or sell" prescription drugs because "[t]his nation is prescribing and consuming far too many painkillers." Sessions apparently knows exactly the correct number of prescriptions that ought to be issued.

Of course, if Sessions has decided to abandon his drive to crack down on marijuana — at least as far as his public remarks are concerned — we shouldn't be thanking anyone in Washington, DC.

Indeed, if DC's hands are increasingly tied on this matter it's because the states have simply become increasingly hostile to federal policy.

Since 2012, eight US states — with a total population of over 60 million — have legalized recreational marijuana. More than a dozen other states have decriminalized marijuana. More than half of the states have legalized medicinal marijuana. Congress has done precious little to meet the states halfway on this, and legal marijuana businesses continue to be crippled by federal banking regulations, while the threat of federal prosecution still hangs over the heads of many. The federal government has not formally admitted defeat on this matter in any way and continues to reserve for itself the right to raid private homes and businesses to enforce federal law.

In the matter of both asset forfeiture and marijuana's legality, we see a growing gap between the states and the immovable monolith that is the US federal government. As many state governments are increasingly forced to economize, reform, and engage in self-criticism over sacred cows like asset forfeiture, it's all just business as usual in Washington where federal budgets grow ever larger, where salaries get ever bigger, and where no regulation — no matter how onerous — seems to ever be repealed.

And state hostility to federal edicts doesn't end with just drug war matters. In recent years, at least eight states have passed laws attempting to nullify federal efforts to restrict gun ownership. As with marijuana laws, many of these provisions are facing attacks in federal court. Sessions, of course, has declared "I want to see a substantial increase in gun crime prosecutions." He means federal prosecutions.

Meanwhile, California keeps talking about secession. Cities threaten to become "sanctuary" cities for immigrants contrary to federal law, and Utah is trying to regain control of federal lands.

Jeff Sessions, however, continues to whistle past the graveyard on these matters. In this, he's probably a fairly typical Washington politician. From their luxury condos on the shores of the Potomac, everything probably looks fine.

View Details

A Mises podcast.

View Details

Janet Yellen made headlines this week, assuring the global economy that there's no reason to fear a super bubble, she doesn't expect to see another financial crisis "within our lifetimes." Of course, Ms. Yellen is not the first Federal Reserve chairman to express such confidence about the future — unfortunately, however, such boasts rarely age well. As she and her colleagues continue to ignore the consequences of their own actions, it becomes more important for people to reject policies designed to give them ever more control and demand a return to money beyond the influence of delusional central planners.

Freeing Americans from the control of the Fed was a passion for Dr. Ron Paul while in Congress, and he joins Jeff this week on Mises Weekends. The two talk about his efforts to legalize the use of gold and silver as untaxed currency, and his involvement with sound money initiatives in states like Arizona and Wyoming. Plus he shares some great anecdotes about Reagan's Gold Commission, Alan Greenspan, and Paul Volcker.

And in case you missed them, here are this weeks Mises Wire articles, covering a wide array of topics including: gold standard, interest rates, healthcare, the problems with law schools, public education, and government unhealthcare.

Did Obamacare Really Save Lives? by Robert MurphyWhere Ignorance Is Bliss by David GordonPeace Is Popular by Jeff DeistThe Existence of Evil by Claude Frédéric BastiatGovernment Medicine: Court Declares Child Should Die Rather Than Receive Privately-Funded Health Care by Ryan McMakenNo, Mark Carney, Brexit Didn't Cause Inflation — You Did by George PickeringTrump's Pricey Love Affair With Saudi Arabia by William D. HartungMyths Behind the War on Cash by Ronald-Peter StöferleA Look at Uncertainty in the UK, Post-Election by Daniel LacalleCanadian Interest Rates Set to Rise? by Caleb McMillanIs America Really Coming Apart, As Charles Murray Suggests? by Jeff DeistTime to Cash Out of the Banking System? by Joseph T. SalernoJim Grant Explains the Gold Standard by Ryan McMakenThe Super Bubble Is in Trouble by Thorsten PolleitRepublican Healthcare Plan Fails the "Jimmy Kimmel Test" by Ron PaulThe Money-Velocity Myth by Frank ShostakThe Danger of "Public" Education by Murray RothbardYes, the Fed Really Is Holding Down Interest Rates by Joseph T. SalernoWill the Work Day Shrink to Four Hours? by Randall G. HolcombeThe American Bar Association Stifles Legal Education by Allen Mendenhall

View Details

The UK Independent reported last week that legislators in Iceland have proposed a ban on circumcision of boys. In practice of course, a ban on male circumcisions essentially outlaws Judaism. Anticipating opposition from advocates for religious freedom, the legislation "insists the 'rights of the child' always exceed the 'right of the parents to give their children guidance when it comes to religion'."Chinese communist officials have taken this a step further by banning children from churches and taking other measures to "restric[t] children from joining Christian groups and attending religious activities." (http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2018/02/09/chinese-priests-ordered-to-put-up-signs-banning-children-from-churches/)

Iceland is not alone in considering laws that pit the majority against the allegedly barbaric practices of a minority group.

In the Netherlands, for example, animal rights activists are hard at work trying to outlaw kosher and halal meats.

Meanwhile, in Quebec, lawmakers have recently prohibited the use of head coverings by — presumably Muslim — women in certain public places.

Nor is the circumcision debate limited to Iceland. Male circumcision has been on shaky legal ground in Germany in recent years where a court banned the practice in 2012. Perhaps recognizing that banning Judaism could look bad for German "tolerance," lawmakers intervened to allow the practice again.

For the subjects of this regulation, the activities being targeted are no mere preferences. They touch on fundamental values, and they present a clear conflict with other value systems. In cases such as these, where there is no apparent room for compromise, whose values ought to prevail?

Democracy Doesn't Always WorkThroughout most of the West, of course, we're all taught from an early age that "democracy" will allow everything to work itself out. The parties in conflict will enter into "dialogue," will arrive at a "compromise" and then everyone will be happy and at peace in the end.

But, that's not how it works in real life. While there some areas for compromise that can be found around the edges of issues such as moral values and ethnic identity, the fact is that in the end, kosher meats are either legal or they're not. Circumcision is either legal or it's not. Abortion is either legal or it's not. Muslim head coverings are either legal or they're not.

After all, if one group of people believe that a 3-month-old fetus is a parasite that has trespassed against the mother, those people are going to find little room for compromise with a group of people who think the same fetus is a person deserving legal protection.

Indeed, we see the shortcomings of democracy at work every time this latter issue comes up. One side calls the other killers who are complicit in the killing of babies. The other side calls their opponents rubes and barbarians, probably motivated by little more than crazed misogyny. Similar dynamics, of course, are present in cases involving animal rights, circumcision, and headscarves. One side thinks that their side is the only acceptable option for virtuous people. "Virtue," of course, can be defined any number of ways. Some are so blinded by their cultural biases, in fact, that they even conclude that no "civilized" person could possibly believe that, say, circumcision is anything other than a barbaric practice.Those who continue to believe in such things must therefore be forced "into the 21st century" by the coercive power of the state. Their religious beliefs, as Hillary Clinton demanded in 2015, "have to be changed."

These problems also exist under authoritarian, non-democratic regimes. But anti-democrats usually admit that the state is using force to support one side over the other. Democrats, on the other hand, often prefer to indulge in comforting fictions. What many supporters of democracy refuse to admit is that there is no peaceful debate that will solve this conflict. The conflict is philosophical and moral in nature. And, so long as both sides are forced to live under a single legal system, any "compromise" will take the shape of one side imposing its position on the other by force. In the end, the losing side will be taxed to support the regime that disregards its views and forces compliance with laws made by the winning side.

Majority Rule: Conquest and Colonialism by Other MeansIn his work on nationalism, Ludwig on Mises examined the fundamental problem that comes from various groups with different value systems living under a single unitary state. Even when there are certain theoretical guarantees for minority groups, the political reality is that groups with minority beliefs are at the mercy of the majority. This is true in matters of conflicting ethnic groups and religions, but is also applicable to any number of groups with conflicting values.

Joseph Salerno ably sums up Mises's thought:

Mises maintains that two or more “nations” cannot peacefully coexist under a unitary democratic government. National minorities in a democracy are “completely politically powerless” because they have no chance of peacefully influencing the majority linguistic group. The latter represents “a cultural circle that is closed” to minority nationalities and whose political ideas are “thought, spoken, and written in a language that they do not understand.” Even where proportional representation prevails, the national minority “still remains excluded from collaboration in political life.” According to Mises, because the minority has no prospect of one day attaining power, the activity of its representatives “remains limited from the beginning to fruitless criticism . . . that . . . can lead to no political goal.” Thus, concludes Mises, even if the member of the minority nation, “according to the letter of the law, be a citizen with full rights . . . in truth he is politically without rights, a second class citizen, a pariah.”

Mises characterizes majority rule as a form of colonialism from the point of view of the minority nation in a polyglot territory: “[It] signifies something quite different here than in nationally uniform territories; here, for a part of the people, it is not popular rule but foreign rule.” Peaceful liberal nationalism therefore is inevitably stifled in polyglot territories governed by a unitary state, because, Mises argues, “democracy seems like oppression to the minority. Where only the choice is open oneself to suppress or be suppressed, one easily decides for the former.” Thus, for Mises, democracy means the same thing for the minority as “subjugation under the rule of others,” and this “holds true everywhere and, so far, for all times.” Mises dismisses “the often cited” counter-example of Switzerland as irrelevant because local self-rule was not disturbed by “internal migrations” between the different nationalities. Had significant migration established the presence of substantial national minorities in some of the cantons, “the national peace of Switzerland would already have vanished long ago.”

Those on the winning side, of course, don't see any problem here. What the minority thinks of as "oppression" is really — according to the winners — just "modernization," "progress," "decency," "common sense," or simply "the will of the majoirity." The fact that the enforcement of that will of the majority is founded on state violence is of little concern.

The Solution: Secession and DecentralizationMises, who was himself a democrat, offered a solution to the problem of democratic majorities: self-determination through secession and decentralization.

For Mises, populations must not be forced perpetually into states where they will never be able to exercise self-determination due to the presence of a more powerful majority. On a practical level then, populations in regions, cities, and villages within existing states must be free to form their own states, join other states with friendlier majorities, or at least exercise greater self-government via decentralization.

Moreover, in order to accommodate the realities of constantly-changing populations, demographics, and cultures, borders and boundaries must change over time in order to minimize the number of people as members of minority populations with little to no say in national governments controlled by hostile majorities.

In Mises vision, there is no perfect solution. There will always be some minority groups that at odds with the ruling majority. But, by making states smaller, more numerous, and more diverse, communities and individuals stand a better change of finding a state in which their values match up with the majority. Large unitary states, however, offer exactly the oppose: less choice, less diversity, and fewer changes to exercise self-determination.

The Option of Decentralized ConfederationsNor do all political jurisdictions need to be totally independent states. Mises himself advocated for the use of confederation as a solution to problems of cultural and linguistic minorities.For more on this, see Mises's 1941 essay "An Eastern Democratic Union: A Proposal for the Establishment of Durable Peace in Eastern Europe." Mises discusses the issue of handling linguistic and ethnic conflicts within a larger confederation. Found in Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Volume 3, edited by Richard Ebeling. Confederations might be formed for purposes of national defense and diplomacy, Mises noted. But in any country with a diverse population, in order to maintain internal peace, self-government of domestic affairs must be kept localized and so as to minimize the ability of a majority group to dominate a minority group.

Mises didn't invent this idea, of course. This sort of confederation was justified on similar grounds by the founders of the Swiss Confederation and the United States. Moreover, while not planned out ahead of time, the government of Austria-Hungary was by necessity decentralized to minimize internal conflict. In cases such as these, matters of language, religion, education, and even economic policy must be handled by the local majority, independent of any nationwide majorities. Or else democracy becomes little more than a tool for the winning coalition to bludgeon the losing coalition.

For decades, this worked at various times in the United States. On the matter of abortion, for instance, Americans agreed prior to Roe v Wade to allow abortion laws to be determined at a local level and be kept out of the hands of the national government. Public schools — and what was taught in them — were governed almost exclusively by local school boards and state governments. Even immigration policies and linguistic issues were decided by local majorities, and not by national ones. So long as these matter remained local matters they were irrelevant to national politics. Under these conditions, a victory for one party or another at the national level has little impact on the daily practice of one's religion, moral values, or schooling.

As localized democracy turns into mass democracy, however, majorities exercise increasing power over minority groups. Each election becomes a nationwide referendum on how the majority shall use its power to crush those who pose a threat to the prevailing value system. Even worse, when there is one nationwide "law of the land" there is no escape from its effects, save to relocate hundreds of miles away to a foreign land where the emigrant must learn a new language and a new way of life far from friends and family.

Needless to say, as this sort of democratic centralization increases, the stakes become higher and higher. The potential for violence becomes greater, and the disenfranchisement of minority groups becomes ever more palpable.

Mises understood well what the end game to this process is. It's political and social unrest — followed by political repression to "restore" order. War may even follow. For Mises, the need to guarantee localized self-determination was no mere intellectual exercise for political scientists. It was a matter essential to the preservation of peace and freedom. We would do well to take the matter as seriously as he did.

View Details

There's an old saying that "he who distinguishes well teaches well." In other words, if one's going to talk about an important subject, one should be able to define his terms and tell the difference between two things that are not the same.

This wisdom, unfortunately, is rarely embraced by modern pundits arguing about the causes of the American Civil War. A typical example can be found in this article at the Huffington Post in which the author opines: "This discussion [over the causes of the war] has led some people to question if the Confederacy, and therefore the Civil War, was truly motivated by slavery."

Did you notice the huge logical mistake the author makes? It's right here: "...the Confederacy, and therefore the Civil War...."

The author acts as if the mere existence of the Confederacy inexorably caused the war that the North initiated in response to it. That is, the author merely assumes that if a state secedes from the United States, then war is an inevitable result. Moreover, she also wrongly assumes that the motivations behind secession were necessarily the same as the motivations behind the war.

But this does not follow logically at all. If California, for example, were to secede, is war therefore a certainty? Obviously not. The US government could elect to simply not invade California in response.

Moreover, were war to break out, the motivations behind a Californian secession are likely to be quite different from the motivations of the US government in launching a war. For the sake of argument, let's say the Californians secede because they couldn't stand the idea of being in the same country with a bunch of people they perceive to be intolerant rubes. But, what is a likely reason for the US to respond to secession with invasion? A US invasion of California is likely to be motivated by a desire to extract tax revenue from Californians, and to maintain control of military bases along the coast.

Thus it would be absurd to equate the motivations of the California secessionists with those of the advocates for the invasion of California.

To put it simply: an act of secession, and a war that may follow it, are not the same thing.

And yet we find that commentary on the Civil War repeatedly conflates secession with the Civil War itself as if they were the same thing.

Yes, Southern Secession was Motivated by SlaveryBut before we go any further let's get this out of the way: the secession movement itself was obviously motivated by a desire to maintain slavery. This is easy enough to show because many Southern secessionists explicitly said so in their declarations of secession. In the South Carolina declaration of independence, the entire second half of the document explains that the state is seceding because it fears the North wil force emancipation on the country as a whole. The authors of the document denounce Northerners for electing a president who is "hostile to slavery" and for a "current of anti-slavery feeling" that allegedly pervaded the North at the time. What especially annoyed the secessionists was the North's refusal to enforce the federal fugitive slave laws against abolitionists who "encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves" in escaping slavery.

The Mississippi declaration went even further, equating slavery with civilization itself, and claiming "a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization," and plainly states that "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world."

In both of these documents, taxes and free trade are barely mentioned. Slavery was clearly at the heart of the matter, which is in part why British free-trade crusader Richard Cobden rejected claims that the South had seceded primarily over tax and trade concerns.

The War, However, Was Motivated by Other Factors None of this means the war was motivated by slavery — or opposition to it. After the fact, opponents of slavery claimed the war was about emancipation, which it clearly was not, except in the minds of a small minority of radical Republicans. It was not until military victory was apparent that the Republican leadership began to press for nationwide emancipation in negotiations with the South.

Almost until the end, the war was motivated by a concern for preserving tax revenues, and by nationalism. In a North where few people were full-on abolitionists, very few were willing to run off and stop a bullet to end the institution of slavery. Even those who disliked slavery were not exactly rushing off to shoot people over the matter. New York attorney George Templeton Strong's attitude in 1861 toward Southern secession was one of "good riddance." Referring to slavery as the "national ulcer," Strong concluded: "the self-amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure, and their virus will infect our system no longer." Strong noted that his impression of Northerners was that they were granting "cordial consent" to Southern secession.It was Southerners themselves who eventually made it much easier for Northern politicians to call for war. In a show of totally unnecessary bravado, Southern artillery fired on Ft. Sumter in 1861, allowing Lincoln to claim that the South had started a war on the North. Obviously even this move by the Confederacy did not justify the wholesale invasion and occupation of the South. Given Sumter's location, the attack on the fort shouldn't even have counted as an act of war. Nevertheless, in terms of public perception, the South blundered badly and played into the hands of pro-war politicians.

Those who were ready to call for war were more often animated by ideological views tied to defending "the Union," which many regarded as sacred, while the Northern policymakers themselves were concerned with the retention of military installations and with revenue concerns. The South provided a lot of revenue for the North, and the North wanted to keep it that way.

Years into the war, many Americans were still perfectly happy to come to a negotiated settlement with the South that allowed for the continuation of slavery. Indeed, in the 1864 election, the Democratic nominee, who promised to end the war without abolishing slavery, won 45 percent of the popular vote. (Voters in Confederate states were excluded, of course.)

Should the North have invaded the South to end slavery? That's a separate question, and one that is also totally distinct from the question of secession. Northern armies could have invaded the South at any time to force emancipation on the South. No secession was ever necessary or key to the equation.

Equating Secession with SlaveryThe lack of precision used in equating the war, slavery, and secession, serves an important purpose for modern anti-secessionists. Their knee-jerk opposition to any form of decentralization or locally-based democracy impels them to equate secession itself with slavery, even though secession can be motivated by any number of reasons. After all, secession was the preferred strategy of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who as early as 1844 began preaching the slogan "No union with slaveholders!" In Garrison's mind, the North ought to secede in order to free northerners from the burdens of the fugitive slave acts, and to offer safe haven to escaping slaves.

Had such a scheme played out, and the South had taken military action to force the North back into the union, would we be hearing today about how the only appropriate response to secession is open warfare? One would certainly hope not.

View Details

Following the US Senate's failure to pass a bill repealing Obamacare, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee decided that the Senate would do a better job if the 17th Amendment were repealed. Huckabee took to twitter and said:

Time to repeal 17th Amendment. Founders had it right-Senators chosen by state legislatures. Will work for their states and respect 10th am[endment.]

Huckabee, of course, is referring the Constitutional amendment that altered the method by which US Senators are elected. Prior to the Amendment's passage in 1913, Senators were — at least in theory and on paper — selected by the state legislature in each state. Since the amendment was adopted, Senators are selected via popular vote in each state.

The response to Huckabee's very brief missive was fairly predictable. Reactions ranged from pearl-clutching horror at Gizmodo to Allen West's declaration that repealing the Amendment would force Senators to take marching orders from state legislators.

History suggests, however, that a repeal of the 17th Amendment would not lead to nearly as big a change as these commentators seem to think.

Indeed, the rather stark juxtapositions of the pre-amendment Senate with the post-Amendment Senate rather over-simplify things. In practice, the selection of Senators was varied and included a mixture of practices, some of which gave more power to the legislature than others.

While it is true that repealing the amendment would grant greater freedom to states in their selecting of US Senators, repealing the amendment won't necessarily revolutionize the Senate.

First of all, it's important to note that under the pre-amendment Constitution, many states had already worked out de facto popular election of US Senators even before the Amendment had been adopted. As noted at mises.org in an article titled "Decentralize the Elections":

While the [original text of the] US Constitution says the state legislatures shall elect the US senators, it does not say how that should be done. For example, must candidates for US Senate receive a majority of legislative votes or will a plurality do? Can those senators be recalled by the legislature? The US Constitution is silent on this. Moreover, in practice, states were free to pass their own state laws creating popular elections for senators that were then binding on members of the state legislature. By 1912, the last election before the adoption of the 17th Amendment, a majority of states employed de facto popular election of US senators.

Ralph Rossum at the Heritage foundation has explained the process in a little more detail:

What happened is that the people in most of the states gradually turned to nonbinding primary elections to select their Senator; state legislators promised to vote for the Senator that the people had selected in this "advisory" election. This "advisory" election had real teeth because many state laws provided that candidates for state legislator had to sign pledges (which were placed on the ballot) that they would promise (or refuse to promise) to vote for the U.S. Senate candidate that the people had selected in their nonbinding election. If the state legislative candidate refused to sign the pledge, the people would vote against him, and so the Senate gradually became populated with people who were, in effect, selected by popular, direct election.

Thus, Allen West's idea that state legislators would be running around recalling "misbehaving" Senators is only supported by some historical experience. Moreover, there's no reason to believe that a Senator would be recalled based on a single vote on a single issue. Personal loyalties, party politics, and local political considerations have always gotten in the way of the idea that state legislators would dictate to US Senators as to how to vote.

States Should Have Total Freedom to Appoint Senators as they See Fit The fact that repeal of the Amendment would give greater discretion to the states themselves has always been the strongest aspect of the repeal movement. In this, however, straight repeal is too weak and ambiguous when it comes to empowering the states in relation to federal power. The US Constitution has always placed far too many restrictions on how states govern themselves, and this includes the mandate that state legislators appoint US Senators. In fact, states should have the prerogative to appoint Senators in any way they see fit, whether that be popular vote, appointment by the governor, appointment by the state's supreme court, or some other system entirely. Senators could be chosen by lottery. Certainly, random selection is unlikely to produce Senators who are any less craven and unethical than the current bunch.

Those same Senators should also be subject — contra the US Constitution which forbids this — to recall elections at any time.

There Should Only Be One Senator per State Simple repeal fails in another way as well. A fundamental problem of the Senate has long been the fact that Senators do not vote as representatives of a state delegation, but as independent legislators. This reality has long obscured the fact that the Senate was intended to be a council of the states and not simply an "upper house" of a national legislature. There is, after all, already a legislative body at the federal level where legislators from a single state can vote against each other and act independently. It's called the House of Representatives.

RELATED: "The US Should Have 10,000 Members of Congress" by Ryan McMaken

The fact that each state has two independent legislators in the Senate, however, sends the message that Senators are really just older, richer versions of members of the House of Representatives. Thus, under the current system, when Senator A from State X votes yea or nea on a measure, it is seen simply as the preference of Senator A. Senator A's vote may in fact be canceled out by Senator B's vote from the same state. This is one of the many ways that the current US Constitution is inferior to the older constitution now known as the "Articles of Confederation." The older version granted votes only to delegations and not to individual members of Congress. Thus, the status of the United States as a collection of member states was reinforced.

The status quo should be abandoned in favor of allowing each state delegation only a single vote in the Senate, and that vote should be interpreted as the member state's position.

Now, I'm not naive enough to think that Senators will actually vote with the ordinary people of their states in mind. Nor do I think it would be remotely possible for a Senator to truly "represent" the interests of millions of diverse human being from that state. All the fundamental problems behind representative legislative bodies would still remain in our new reformed Senate.

What this change would do, however, is emphasize the fact that the United States government is a collection of member states where it is recognized that each member state has a distinct set of preferences and interests.

The Real Problem Is Ideology It should always be remembered, though, that structural reforms such as these are really only small potatoes when compared to the dominating problem of ideology. No constitutional reform by itself will be sufficient so long as a majority of voters and politicians believe that government institutions should be centralized and powerful.

Indeed, those in favor of repealing the 17th Amendment often engage in a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy when they assume that the 17th Amendment is what caused the centralization of greater power in Washington. The success of the 17th Amendment was a symptom of the then-popular desire to take more power away from state governments. (These ideas remain popular today.) The Amendment didn't cause the ideological shift. It was a result of it. The fact of the matter is that for the past century, many voters and most political elites have truly believed that a strong centralized government is superior to a weaker decentralized one. Reformers at the time really did believe that shifting greater power to Congress would magically eliminate state-level corruption. It's not a coincidence that these reforms were occurring at the same time that reformers were also calling for a national police force —that eventually became the FBI — to supersede local police forces.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the state legislators — the people who would presumably be selecting the Senators in a post-17th-Amendment future — would suddenly become ardent localists and advocates for greater state autonomy. It's very likely most state legislators value decentralized state autonomy in about the same proportion as the ordinary voters who elect US Senators today.

The government we have today reflects these ideological realities, and to undo the problems that many modern opponents of the 17th Amendment see, the task is far greater than they think. The answer lies in truly changing the minds of the majority of Americans, including the elites. Once that change occurs, it won't really matter how many Senators there are, or how how they get elected.

Ryan McMaken is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Contact: email, twitter.

View Details

A few months before the 2016 election, the Obama administration was claiming that the federal government needed to seize control of the election process because, according to CNN "Vladimir Putin's hackers could wreak havoc" on the electoral process.

Attempts at federalizing elections have long been a dream of the left, and the claim of Russian "hacking" of elections offered a convenient excuse for saying that states could no longer be allowed independence in the matter.

Not to be outdone by the left's imagined Russians behind every tree and farm wall, the Trump administration is now trying to come up with reasons of its own to justify federal meddling in elections.

Sure that states everywhere are being overrun by voting illegal aliens (including, apparently, Republican-controlled states), Donald Trump has convened a new "election integrity commission" which is seeking to uncover voter fraud.

This should not surprise us, of course. Thanks to the presence of Drug Warrior Jeff Sessions within the administration, it's long been clear that Donald Trump is perfectly at ease with the idea of the federal government bossing around state governments.

Last week, the vice chairman of the commission sent a letter to all 50 states requesting a wide array of materials about voters.

The requested data includes:

registrants' full names, addresses, dates of birth, political parties, the last four digits of their social security numbers, a list of the elections they voted in since 2006, information on any felony convictions, information on whether they were registered to vote in other states, their military status, and whether they lived overseas.

Much of this information is already publicly available in many states, and the collection of the data itself doesn't represent an especially onerous move.

What the commission plans to do with the information is another matter, however, and many states have declined to assist a federal task force in coming up with yet more ways to federalize everything.

Not surprisingly, then, the response of many Secretaries of State (the state-level office that usually administers elections) was to refuse portions of the request or the request in its entirety. Officials from at least 44 states have told the federal group "thanks but no thanks."

Nor has the response been partisan in nature. In Mississippi, for example, a state hardly known for its leftwing politics, the Republican Secreatary of State Delbert Hosemann offered a colorful reply to the commission:

"My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from," he said. "Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state's right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes."

Given the fact that much of this info is already public, some Trump supporters are acting dismayed at the state-level resistance. Conservative Byron York, for instance, sympathetically reports sources who describe the unfriendly responses to the commission as "absurd" and "silly."

Why, the Trump administration is just trying to get to the bottom of voter fraud! is York's perplexed response. Who could possibly be against that? York concludes:

Now the Trump commission is seeking answers. To do so, it needs the information that, until now, many states routinely gave out to interested parties. Now, however, the states appear to be spoiling for a fight. Given the amount of public posturing involved so far, it's not at all clear the commission can succeed.

Whether or not there's voter fraud is a question that should be asked. But it's a question that states and counties can ask just fine, without any help from Donald Trump. If the states conduct elections in a way the federal government doesn't like, then the only response from the states should be "tough luck." York is right that a lot of the data the commission wants is already publicly available. But this shouldn't be seen as a principled opposition to federal use of private data. That's pretty clearly not the issue. It's more likely that state officials simply have no interest in helping a federal commission come up with new directives and "suggestions" for state governments to follow. They've all seen plenty of that over the past century.

The historical and legal roots of this relationship were outlined last year at mises.org:

Most Americans probably assume that elections are now and always have been, constitutionally, the domain of the federal government. But, this has never been the case. The Federal Election Commission wasn't even created until 1975, and even now, the FEC's power is limited primarily to regulating campaign finance, and not elections.

The federal takeover of elections, to the extent that it has been successful, has primarily been carried out by the courts, with the Supreme Court and other federal courts handing down decisions to states in regards to how elections must be conducted.

The courts have, for example, long intervened to prevent state governments from requiring that voters provide proof of citizenship or even proof of identity in order to vote. It is, apparently, a human rights violation to require that voters are who they say they are.

The American left has long hated any state-level attempts to regulate voting since it has long been assumed that limitations on voter turnout works to the favor of Republicans. (This claim about turnout is highly debatable.) Thus, it is not surprising to see articles like this one from The Daily Kos which advocates for a total federal takeover of elections.

This thinking is based on the long-worn claim that state governments are reactionary and retrograde — always seeking to disenfranchise populations — while the federal government is magnanimous and open to expanding the franchise.

Historically, this is easily disproved. State governments have long displayed extremely diverse agendas on voting. Indeed, during the 19th century, many Western and Midwestern states had very liberal laws when it came to what is called "declarant alien voting" in which 22 states and territories extended the vote to non-citizens. By doing so, the states also — in effect — lowered the bar for citizenship while encouraging immigration into those states. Western states also were among the first to extend the franchise to women with Wyoming granting women the vote in 1869, a full 50 years before the federal government followed suit.

Montana was the first state to elect a woman to Congress — Jeanette Rankin — before the adoption of the 19th Amendment federalizing policy on women's suffrage. Today, women comprise a higher percentage of representatives in state legislatures than in the US Congress. (Colorado has the highest percentage with 42 percent of General Assembly members being women.)

The original philosophy behind state control of elections is easy to understand, given the intended — and now ignored —decentralized structure of the United States.

This was explicit in the first Constitution of 1776 (i.e., the so-called Articles of Confederation) but continued in a watered-down form with the new Constitution in 1788. In terms of Congressional representation, states were to elect their representatives in a manner chosen by the state, with state control over who could vote.

If the Trump administration wants to do some good, it could direct its efforts toward getting federal courts out of state election, and let states investigate for themselves whether or not there's voter fraud. If the feds want to investigate something, let them investigate the feds. And leave everyone else alone.

View Details

Last week, a gunman opened fire on a group of Republican members of Congress. Letters sent by the gunman to his local newspaper suggest he was obsessed with Republican policies, and concluded that Donald Trump "Has Destroyed Our Democracy" [sic] and that "It's Time to Destroy Trump and Co."

In the wake of the attack, there have been the usual predictable calls for "unity." These calls, of course, fail to address a central reason why unity appears to be a problem, and why many feel the need to manufacture it where it does not exist.

Fear of a "Foreign" MajorityIn the wake of the 2016 election, it was not uncommon to read in both the mainstream media, and in social media, predictions that with a Republican victory, a fascist police state would soon be bringing the hammer down on all the enemies of the regime. In this case, "enemy of the regime" was anyone other than the alleged troglodytes who had voted Trump into office.

Nine months later, we're still waiting on that border wall and on that Obamacare repeal, and on that tax cut. In fact, all we're likely to get is more government spending, more deficits, and more war. In short, the new administration will look a lot like the old one.

Nevertheless, there are some significant changes that are likely to take place. The administration may refrain from forcing nuns to pay for someone else's birth control, and environmental regulations are likely to be loosened. The general tenor of the federal government will shift slightly more toward favoring members of a center-right coalition of interest groups. The change, however, is anything but radical.

Nevertheless, any change that disfavors one's own preferred interest groups and ideological groups is a real problem for those who find themselves on the outside of the winning coalitions.

Many voters and activists who now feel powerless saw themselves as being in the majority ruling coalition while Obama was in power. Now that he's been replaced by Trump, the fear of abuse at the hands of the new ruling majority shifts to others.

While the consequences are probably less significant than many imagine, there will be real winners and losers over the next four years compared to what was the case under the previous administration.

Calling for unity and asking people to play nice will do nothing to eliminate this reality. Those groups that saw themselves as being on the outside during the Obama years are all to familiar with what many Obama supporters are now feeling.

Indeed, living among the minority that finds itself out of power is an unpleasant experience in any context.

Ludwig von Mises wrote on this phenomenon. He couched it within the context of immigration, but the lesson learned here applies to any situation in which one group manages to wrest control of government power away from another group:

As long as the state is granted the vast powers which it has today and which public opinion considers to be its right, the thought of having to live in a state whose government is in the hands of members of a foreign nationality is positively terrifying. It is frightful to live in a state in which at every turn one is exposed to persecution—masquerading under the guise of justice—by a ruling majority. It is dreadful to be handicapped even as a child in school on account of one’s nationality and to be in the wrong before every judicial and administrative authority because one belongs to a national minority.

Mises speaks of nationality in this example, but with some modest changes to the text, we could apply this illustration to any number of other examples. It is not necessary for a potentially dangerous majority to be composed of foreigners. Mises might just as easily have said that "the thought of having to live in a state whose government is in the hands of members of a competing ideology is positively terrifying."

For many, the fear is real, and is indeed analogous to those who fear changes in government control fostered by migrations. Consider another passage by Mises:

The entire nation, however, is unanimous in fearing inundation by foreigners. The present inhabitants of these favored lands fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country and that they would then have to suffer all the horrors of national persecution...

In this case, Mises might have said that "Californians are unanimous in fearing a takeover by Southerners and Christians ... and they fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country."

The analogy is a bit clunky here, but it's not difficult to see the similarity. For most California voters (59 percent of whom voted for Clinton), there is a real fear that the levers of power in Washington really will be "inundated" by members of the so-called "basket of deplorables" that Hillary Clinton spoke of. In the minds of West Coast leftists, the thought of government under the control of evangelical Christians from Texas really is something to fear.

This same leftist might then imagine himself personally subject to the whims of his rightwing enemies in this manner as described my Mises:

And when he appears before a magistrate or any administrative official as a party to a suit or petition, he stands before men whose political thought is foreign to him because it developed under different ideological influences. ... At every turn the member of a national minority is made to feel that he lives among strangers and that he is, even if the letter of the law denies it, a second-class citizen.

Again, Mises is speaking of ethnic and linguistic differences, but the observation applies to any sort of minority subject to a majority group with differing values.

Now, we can debate as to how much a leftist from Silicon Valley might "suffer" under the alleged yoke of a rightwing regime that might cut taxes.

The perception of the danger posed by "the other" is very real, however. Nor is this limited to leftists, of course. Sarah Palin's declaration that there are "real Americans" (i.e., conservatives) who are to be contrasted with presumably fake Americans highlights the tendency to simply declare other ideological groups to be essentially "foreign" to one's own interests. The fact that these "others" happen to speak the same language or be born in the same legal jurisdiction does little to erase the perception of a rift between different groups.

It's not surprising then, that the issue of "unity" appears to be a growing problem.

If the members of competing political groups aren't "real Americans" or are "deplorables," then one should hardly be motivated to pursue unity with such people. Many may even conclude that violence is necessary.

How to Address the Problem For Mises, one of the primary answers to the problem of oppressing minorities was to make governments smaller and less powerful — and thus less able to oppress minorities. Again, in the context of immigration, Mises concludes:

It is clear that no solution of the problem of immigration is possible if one adheres to the ideal of the interventionist state, which meddles in every field of human activity, or to that of the socialist state. Only the adoption of the liberal program could make the problem of immigration, which today seems insoluble, completely disappear. In an Australia governed according to liberal principles, what difficulties could arise from the fact that in some parts of the continent Japanese and in other parts Englishmen were in the majority?

In other words, even if ethnic Japanese groups took control of the Australian state, it would not matter if the state were conducted along liberal [i.e., libertarian] lines. But the same might be said of feminists, or Christians, university professors or working class white people. If all were "governed according to liberal principles," there isn't a problem. If the state lacks the power to regulate, oppress, and impoverish one group for the benefit of another, then what group is in the majority is irrelevant.

But, if a state "is not conducted along completely liberal lines," Mises concludes,

there can be no question of even an approach to equal rights in the treatment of the members of the various national groups. There can then be only rulers and those ruled. The only choice is whether one will be hammer or anvil.

Put simply: the bigger the government, the greater the threat when the other guys manage to get political power.

The Other Option: Secession Should efforts to restrain the state's overall power fail, another answer is decentralization. And this was Mises's other solution to the problem of minorities subject to majorities. For Mises, the problem of "self-determination" could be addressed through decentralization, secession, and an acceptance that minority groups must have the option of breaking free from political bonds with majority groups of divergent interests:

The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars. ... To call this right of self-determination the "right of self-determination of nations" is to misunderstand it. It is not the right of self-determination of a delimited national unit, but the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong...In his essay on Mises's views on self-determination and nationalism, Joseph Salerno notes that for Mises the answer lies in "providing for the continual redrawing of state boundaries in accordance with the right of self-determination." In other words, in order to prevent the oppression of minorities by majorities, it may be necessary to allow the minority group to separate from the majority.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the United States is becoming a country in which every election brings a perceived mandate to forcefully — and even vengefully — impose the winning coalition's agenda on the losers. In a country where political power is relatively weak, decentralization is effective, and taxes are low, then the effects of a political loss can be relatively minor. But that's not the situation we now face.

View Details

Conservatives and progressives alike spent the 20th century arguing for universal political principles. But the world is not so malleable; even in a hyper-connected digital age elites struggle to maintain support for globalism against a tide of nationalist, populist, and breakaway movements. Libertarians should embrace this reality and reject universalism for the morally and tactically superior vision of radical self-determination.

For decades we’ve been conditioned to believe the world is getting smaller, and thus that globalism in all its forms is inevitable. Instant communication, inexpensive access to digital information, global trade, and cheap fast travel will combine to demonstrate once and for all that nationality, geography, culture, language, ethnicity—and even history— matter far less than a shared humanity.

Given this inevitable reality, old modes of living will be tossed aside by a world hungry for modernity. Universal suffrage, an article of faith in a post-monarchical world, will yield social democracies with robust safety nets, regulated capitalism, legal protections for women and minorities, and widely agreed-upon norms regarding social issues. Western conceptions of civil rights will spread far and wide, with technology bridging the old boundaries of nation states. Both progressives and conservatives share this vision, although the former emphasize a supra-national administrative state (“one world government”) while the latter focus on globally managed trade schemes under the auspices of international law.

Universalism provides the philosophical underpinnings for globalism. But it does not provide a roadmap for freedom. Libertarians, who want a non-political world organized around civil society and markets rather than the state, have a responsibility to call foul on this inescapably statist narrative. Globalism is not liberty; instead it threatens to create an entirely new level of government. And universalism is not natural law; in fact it is often directly at odds with human nature and (true) human diversity.

Yet many libertarians have taken up the universalism mantra. Calls for the global recognition of rights based on liberal individualism and the promotion of an ill-defined “libertarian cosmopolitanism” suggest the same kind of universalist hubris that imagines an inescapable arc to human history. A form of libertarian universalism is behind the creation of international organizations like the Atlas Network, just as it is behind the impulse to argue for western “tolerance” and constitutionalism before the nascent Iraqi National Assembly. It’s behind the charge that Ron Paul’s support for secession and states’ rights is illibertarian.

Certainly there are universal normative principles found in libertarianism, especially natural law libertarianism. All humans have a right to sovereignty over their physical bodies and minds, a right to own justly-acquired property, and to freely associate (or disassociate) with others. Self-ownership and property rights are central tenets of libertarianism.

But many parts of the world disagree with those tenets, whether we admit this or not. Universal social norms, cultural attitudes, or policy prescriptions are a very tough sell beyond the West. While libertarians can universally condemn slavery, or authoritarian collectivism, it’s quite another thing to suggest how other societies ought to organize themselves politically. Yet consistent universalism requires this. Gay rights in America means gay rights for Saudi Arabia, open borders for Germany means Monaco also must open its doors to refugees, and Texas-style open carry is the prescription France needs to prevent another Bataclan. If US military intervention is justified in Rwanda, it must be justified in Syria. How can a universalist libertarian argue otherwise?

The fundamental problem with universalism is that so few things really are widely agreed upon. Universalists exhibit a special kind of hubris, one that smacks of neo-colonialism: the insistence that others must believe as we do, if only we show them the obvious superiority of our thinking.

But humans not only often fail to believe as we want them to, they also fail to act as hoped. Actions, in fact, tend to be reliably singular. Thus universalism, whether political, economic, or cultural, poses a problem Ludwig von Mises identified decades ago— it is collectivist and unworkable within a praxeological framework:

The philosophy of universalism has from time immemorial blocked access to a satisfactory grasp of praxeological problems, and contemporary universalists are utterly incapable of finding an approach to them. Universalism, collectivism, and conceptual realism see only wholes and universals. They speculate about mankind, nations, states, classes, about virtue and vice, right and wrong, about entire classes of wants and of commodities.

Not only does universalism fail to fully account for individual human action, it also presupposes some form of overarching arbiter, whether deity or state:

The essential problem of all varieties of universalistic, collectivistic, and holistic social philosophy is: By what mark do I recognize the true law, the authentic apostle of God's word, and the legitimate authority. For many claim that Providence has sent them, and each of these prophets preaches another gospel. For the faithful believer there cannot be any doubt; he is fully confident that he has espoused the only true doctrine. But it is precisely the firmness of such beliefs that renders the antagonisms irreconcilable.

As Joe Salerno recently discussed, in rejecting universalism Mises instead saw self-determination as the highest political end. The smaller and more localized the political unit, the more apt the individual was to live under political terms acceptable to him. For Mises, this was not only a matter of civic comity but necessary to avoid outright civil war and bloodshed:

The right of self-determination of which we speak is not the right of self-determination of nations, but rather the right of self-determination of the inhabitants of every territory large enough to form an independent administrative unit. If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done. This is impracticable only because of compelling technical considerations, which make it necessary that a region be governed as a single administrative unit and that the right of self-determination be restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country.

In other words, self-determination is the ultimate political goal. It is the path to liberty, however imperfect. A world of seven billion self-governing individuals is the ideal, but short of that we should prefer the Liechtensteins to the Germanys and the Luxembourgs to the Englands. We should prefer states’ rights to federalization in the US, and cheer for the breakup of EU. We should support breakaway movements in places like Catalonia and Scotland (provided they are organic and not engineered by states and their spy agencies). We should admire the Swiss federalist system, where localism is a governing principle. We should favor local control over faraway legislatures and administrative bodies, and thus reject multilateral trade deals. We should, in sum, prefer small to large when it comes to government.

Can a small local state be equally or more illiberal than a large distant one? Of course, although history often demonstrates otherwise. But the Misesian principle remains: the best chance for liberty occurs under rules made by the smallest and closest possible administrative unit to the individual. Each higher level of government attenuates the individual’s ability to effect (or affect) such rules.

Decentralization, secession, subsidiarity, localism, and nullification are the tools for greater self-determination, and thus greater liberty. These tools, not universalist platitudes, should be the stock in trade of libertarians trying to make the case for a freer world.

Libertarians aside, there are hopeful signs that both the political Left and Right see the decentralized writing on the wall.

Progressives saw their world profoundly shaken with the successful Brexit campaign and the election of Trump over uber-globalist Hillary Clinton. They reacted predictably: centralized power in DC suddenly was something to be feared and resisted at all costs. Silicon Valley scions began seriously talking about Calexit, mayors from New York to San Francisco called for sanctuary cities and flouting of federal edicts, and the Chairman of the Democratic Party declared 2017 the Summer of Resistance. These do not sound like people who believe in the sanctity of elections, or who accept the powers of the unitary executive when the wrong guy wins.

But as libertarians we should applaud this. We can call progressive hypocrites, and they are, but they are correct that voting confers no legitimacy on government. If it takes Trump to make the Left realize there is more opposition among the rubes to social democracy and identity politics than they imagined, so be it. For the first time since the Progressive Era, liberals are contemplating the diminution of federal power. This is a happy turn of events, and one we should encourage. Political decentralization, something the Left resisted mightily throughout the 20th century, offers them an opportunity to enjoy progressive policies here and now:

Libertarianism has nothing to say about private communities except this: force and fraud are not permitted. So thousands or even millions of people could come together in areas like San Francisco and voluntarily create single-payer health schemes, gun control zones, income and wealth redistribution, radically progressive taxation, enforced diversity, limits on carbon emissions, free schools, collective child-raising, etc. — the whole panoply of progressive programs.

Conservatives too are starting to recognize that any sense of national identity or unity has been lost. Angelo Codevilla, a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, recently wrote a remarkable essay titled The Cold Civil War that is very much worth reading. Codevilla, a serious scholar not prone to hyperbole, sees Trumpist America as nothing short of “in the throes of revolution”:

American society has divided along unreconcilable visions of the good, held by countrymen who increasingly regard each other as enemies. Any attempt by either side to coerce the other into submission augurs only the fate that has befallen other peoples who let themselves slide into revolution. It follows that the path to peace must lie in each side’s contentment to have its own way—but only among those who consent to it. This implies limiting the U.S. government’s reach to what it can grasp without wrecking what remains of our national cohesion.

Codevilla continues to use familiar conservative language like “statecraft” and “federalism,” but the message of the article clearly shows him in the unfamiliar territory of proposing a radically decentralized America. He is a conservative who finally understands that conservatives simply cannot win under the current political arrangement. They’ve lost the culture wars, lost the budget wars, lost the mantle of limited government, and lost the Constitution. They exist only to slightly impede the progressive agenda, but even that slight opposition has earned them nothing but hatred and scorn. For a red-blooded, America-loving immigrant like Codevilla, this is unacceptable.

So like progressives he calls for some good old-fashioned Irish Democracy— widespread but passive resistance to central government edicts that impose progressive policies on red states that do not want such policies. Since administrative force can never overcome “waning consensus,” what if Texas shut down abortion clinics or North Dakota instituted prayer in schools? What would, or could, the federal government do if dozens of states simply shrugged and decided to reject certain federal regulations or court decisions in matters of “health, education, welfare, and police”?

The answer, as libertarians have long argued, is not much. Three or four million federal employees are in no position to carry out federal rules once any national consensus has fallen apart. In fact, what Codevilla proposes sounds an awful lot like a… loose confederation of states. This is a refreshing development from the Claremont Institute, which has a history of lionizing the Great Centralizer Abraham Lincoln.

Claremont may not be the Heritage Foundation or National Review, but it is squarely within the boundaries of Conservatism, Inc. So when a publication like the Claremont Review of Books features an article calling for radical decentralization to avoid a hot civil war, we should take notice.

Political subsidiarity offers conservatives and progressives a way to coexist, maybe the only way. Hyperbole aside, is a shooting war really unthinkable at this point in America?

Now is the time for libertarians to seize the day and make the case for decentralization. There’s never been a better time to sell it. It is time to rebrand libertarianism as a robust, pragmatic, and workable alternative to the phony universalism currently being peddled. Trump showed us the cracks in the globalist narrative. So rather than doubling down on that narrative, we should promote a libertarian vision that actually comports with human nature and reality.

The overarching libertarian political value is self-determination. Decentralization, secession, subsidiarity, and nullification are the mechanisms that move us closer to that value. Insisting on universal values, political or otherwise, is both a strategic and ethical mistake. The future is decentralized; why are so many libertarians arguing for the opposite?

Unless you’re a Saudi or a Frenchman, the status of gay marriage or gun rights or any number of things in those countries ultimately is none of your business. This may seem unsatisfactory to libertarians, but only if we imagine that universalism trumps self-determination.

Jeff Deist is president of the Mises Institute. He previously worked as chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul and as an attorney. Contact: email; twitter.

View Details

In the current discussion about immigration, Ludwig von Mises is often invoked by libertarians as a staunch proponent of free trade in the broad sense that pertains to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. Mises has even been proclaimed by some libertarians as an advocate of open borders. However, Mises’s views on the free migration of labor across existing political borders were carefully nuanced and informed by political considerations based on his first-hand knowledge of the deep and abiding conflicts between nationalities in the polyglot states of Central and Eastern Europe leading up to World War One and during the subsequent interwar period. Thus Mises did not evaluate immigration in terms of purely economic optima such as maximizing the productivity of human labor, irrespective of the political context. Rather, he assessed the effects of immigration from the viewpoint of the classical liberal regime of private property. My purpose in this short essay is to set forth Mises’s views on immigration as he developed them as an integral part of the classical liberal program he elaborated. I shall not attempt to criticize or evaluate his views.

Liberal Nationalism For Mises, liberalism first emerged and expressed itself in the nineteenth century as a political movement in the form of “peaceful nationalism.” Its two fundamental principles were freedom or, more concretely, “the right of self-determination of peoples” and national unity or the “nationality principle.” The two principles were indissolubly linked. The primary goal of the liberal nationalist movements (Italian, Polish, Greek, German, Serbian, etc.) was the liberation of their peoples from the despotic rule of kings and princes. Liberal revolution against despotism necessarily took on a nationalist character for two reasons. First, many of the royal despots were foreign, for example, the Austrian Hapsburgs and French Bourbons who ruled the Italians, and the Prussian king and Russian Czar who subjugated the Poles. Second, and more important, political realism dictated “the necessity of setting the alliance of the oppressed against the alliance of the oppressors in order to achieve freedom at all, but also the necessity of holding together in order to find in unity the strength to preserve freedom”. This alliance of the oppressed was founded on national unity based on a common language, culture, and modes of thinking and acting.

Even though forged in wars of liberation, liberal nationalism was for Mises both peaceful and cosmopolitan. Not only did the separate national liberation movements view each other as brothers in their common struggle against royal despotism, but they embraced the principles of economic liberalism, “which proclaims the solidarity of interests among all peoples.” Mises stresses the compatibility of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and peace:

[T]he nationality principle includes only the rejection of every overlordship; it demands self-determination, autonomy. Then, however, its content expands; not only freedom but also unity is the watchword. But the desire for national unity, too, is above all thoroughly peaceful. . . . [N]ationalism does not clash with cosmopolitanism, for the unified nation does not want discord with neighboring peoples, but peace and friendship.Mises (1983, p. 34) gives the charming example of the Italian nationalists who shouted to the imperial Austrian soldiers: “Go back across the Alps and we will become brothers again.”

As a classical liberal, Mises is careful to specify that the right of self-determination is not a collective right but an individual right: “It is not the right of self determination of a delimited national unit, but rather the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong.” Mises makes it crystal clear that self-determination is an individual right that would have to be granted to “every individual person . . . if it were in any way possible.” It should also be noted in this respect that Mises rarely speaks of the “right of secession,” perhaps because of its historical connotation of the right of a government of a subordinate political unit to withdraw from a superior one.

While championing of self-determination as an individual right, Mises argues that the nation has a fundamental and relatively permanent being independent of the transient state (or states) which may govern it at any given time. Thus he refers to the nation as “an organic entity [which] can be neither increased nor reduced by changes in states.” Accordingly, Mises characterizes a man’s “compatriots” as “those of his fellow men with whom he shares a common land and language and with whom he often forms an ethnic and spiritual community as well.” In the same vein, Mises cites the German author J. Grimm, who refers to the “natural law . . . that not rivers and not mountains form the boundary lines of peoples and that for a people that has moved over mountains and rivers, its own language alone can set the boundary.” The nationality principle therefore implies that liberal nation-states may comprise a monoglot people inhabiting geographically non-contiguous regions, provinces and even villages. Mises contends that nationalism is thus a natural outcome of and in complete harmony with individual rights: “The formation of [liberal democratic] states comprising all the members of a national group was the result of the exercise of the right of self determination, not its purpose.”However, Mises (1983, p. 37) concedes that in rare cases, “where freedom and self government already prevail and seem assured without it,” such as Switzerland, the right of self determination may not result in a nationally unified state.

It should be noted here that, in contrast to many modern libertarians who view individuals as atomistic beings who lack emotional affinities and spiritual bonds with selected fellow humans, Mises affirms the reality of the nation as “an organic entity.” For Mises the nation comprises humans who perceive and act toward one another in a way that separates them from other groups of people based on the meaning and significance the compatriots attach to objective factors such as shared language, traditions, ancestry and so on. Membership in a nation, no less than in a family, involves concrete acts of volition based on subjective perceptions and preferences with respect to a complex of objective historical circumstances. According to Murray Rothbard, who shares Mises’s view of the reality of the nation separate from the state apparatus:

Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one of several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. . . . The ‘nation’ cannot be precisely defined; it is a complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups or religions. . . . The question of nationality is made more complex by the interplay of objectively existing reality and subjective perceptions.

Colonialism as the Denial of the Right of Self-Determination Unlike many late 19th- and early 20th-century liberals, Mises was a passionate anti-colonialist. As a radical liberal, he recognized the universality of the right of self determination and the nationality principle for all peoples and races. He wrote powerful and scathing indictments against the European subjugation and mistreatment of African and Asian peoples and demanded a quick and complete dismantling of colonial regimes. It is worthwhile quoting Mises on this at length:

The basic idea of colonial policy was to take advantage of the military superiority of the white race over the members of other races. The Europeans set out, equipped with all the weapons and contrivances that their civilization placed at their disposal, to subjugate weaker peoples, to rob them of their property, and to enslave them. Attempts have been made to extenuate and gloss over the true motive of colonial policy with the excuse that its sole object was to make it possible for primitive peoples to share in the blessings of European civilization. . . . Could there be a more doleful proof of the sterility of European civilization than that it can be spread by no other means than fire and sword?

No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified. The dominion of Europeans in Africa and in important parts of Asia is absolute. It stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy, and there can be no doubt that we must strive for its abolition. . . . European conquerors . . . have brought arms and engines of destruction of all kinds to the colonies; they have sent out their worst and most brutal individuals as officials and officers; at the point of the sword they have set up a colonial rule that in its sanguinary cruelty rivals the despotic system of the Bolsheviks. Europeans must not be surprised if the bad example that they themselves have set in their colonies now bears evil fruit. In any case, they have no right to complain pharisaically about the low state of public morals among the natives. Nor would they be justified in maintaining that the natives are not yet mature enough for freedom and that they still need at least several years of further education under the lash of foreign rulers before they are capable of being, left on their own.

In those areas where native peoples were strong enough to mount armed resistance to colonial despotism, Mises enthusiastically supported and cheered on these national liberation movements: “In Abyssinia, in Mexico, in the Caucasus, in Persia, in China—everywhere we see the imperialist aggressors in retreat, or at least already in great difficulties.”

To completely phase out colonialism, Mises proposed the establishment of a temporary protectorate under the aegis of the League of Nations. But he made it clear that such an arrangement was “to be viewed only as a transitional stage” and that the ultimate goal must be “the complete liberation of the colonies from the despotic rule under which they live.” Mises based his demand for the recognition of the right of self-determination and respect for the nationality principle among colonized peoples on the bedrock of individual rights:

No one has a right to thrust himself into the affairs of others in order to further their interest, and no one ought, when he has his own interests in view, to pretend that he is acting selflessly only in the interest of others.

The Breakdown of Liberal Nationalism: Majority Rule and Nationality Conflicts This bring us to Mises’s key insight into the irreconcilable “conflict of nationalities” bred by majority rule—even under liberal democratic constitutions. As a keen observer of the pre- and post Great War polyglot states of Central and Eastern Europe, Mises noted that “national struggles can only arise on the soil of freedom.” Thus as prewar Austria approached freedom, “the violence of the struggle between the nationalities grew.” With the collapse of the old royalist state, these struggles were “carried on only more bitterly in the new states, where ruling majorities confront national minorities without the mediation of the authoritarian state, which softens much harshness.” Mises attributes such a counterintuitive outcome to the fact that the nationality principle was not respected in the creation of the new states. Mises’s point is illustrated in the modern ethnic conflicts that erupted in the wake of the collapse of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia.On the ethnic-religious conflicts in the former Yugoslavia see Rothbard (1993; 1994).

With respect to regions inhabited by different nationalities, Mises therefore concludes, “the right of self-determination works to the advantage only of those who comprise the majority.” This is especially true, for example, in interventionist states where education is compulsory and “peoples speaking different languages live together side by side and intermingled in polyglot confusion.” Under these conditions, formal schooling is a source of “spiritual coercion” and “one means of oppressing nationalities.” The very choice of the language of instruction can “alienate children from the nationality to which their parents belong” and “over the years, determine the nationality of a whole area.” The school thus becomes the source of irreconcilable national conflict and “a political prize of highest importance.” With respect to the debate over compulsory education, Mises emphasizes, the only effective solution is to depoliticize schooling by abolishing both compulsory education laws and political involvement with schools, leaving the education of children “entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.”

Compulsory education is only an extreme example of how interventionism exacerbates the inevitable conflict between different nationalities that are living together under the jurisdiction of a single state. In such a situation, Mises argues: “Every interference on the part of government in economic life can become a means of persecuting the members of nationalities speaking a language different from that of the ruling group.” Perhaps Mises’s most important insight, however, is that even under a laissez-faire system, where government is rigorously restricted to “protecting and preserving the life, liberty, property and health of the individual citizen,” the political arena will still degenerate into a battleground between disparate nationalities residing within its geographical jurisdiction. Even the routine activities of the police and judicial system in this ideal liberal regime “can become dangerous in areas where any basis at all can be found for discriminating between one group and another in the conduct of official business.”Rothbard (1994, pp. 5-6) makes a similar point about the unavoidable political conflicts that arise in a situation where different nationalities are bound together under the jurisdiction of a single, laissez-faire liberal government: “But even under the minimal state, national boundaries would still make a difference, often a big one, to the inhabitants of the area. For in what language . . . will be the street signs, telephone books, court proceedings, or school classes of the area? This is especially true in states where “differences of religion, nationality, or the like have divided the population into groups separated by a gulf so deep as to exclude every impulse of fairness or humanity and to leave room for nothing but hate.” Mises gives the example of a judge “who acts consciously, or still more often unconsciously, in a biased manner” because he believes “he is fulfilling a higher duty when he makes use of the powers and prerogatives of his office in the service of his own group.”

Not only is the member of a national minority subjected to ingrained and routine bias in the political sphere, he is unable to grasp the thought and ideology that shape political affairs. His social and political worldview as well as his cultural and religious attitudes reflect ideas formulated and discussed in the national literature of a foreign language, and these ideas diverge, possibly radically, from those of the majority linguistic group. According to Mises even though political and cultural ideas are transmitted and shared among all nations, “every nation develops currents of ideas in its own special way and assimilates them differently. In every people they encounter another national character and another constellation of conditions.” Mises gives the example of how the political ideal of socialism differed between Germany and France, and between the latter two and Russia.

The result of this natural “nationalizing” and differentiating of even similar ideas and intellectual trends is that the member of the minority nation confronts a linguistic and intellectual barrier that prevents him from meaningfully participating in the political discussion that shapes the laws under which he lives. Explains Mises:

Cast into the form of statute law, the outcome of [the majority’s] political discussions acquires direct significance for the citizen who speaks a foreign tongue, since he must obey the law; yet he has the feeling that he is excluded from effective participation in shaping the will of the legislative authority or at least that he is not allowed to cooperate in shaping it to the same extent as those whose native tongue is that of the ruling majority. And when he appears before a magistrate or any administrative official as a party to a suit or petition, he stands before men whose political thought is foreign to him because it developed under different ideological influences. . . . At every turn the member of a national minority is made to feel that he lives among strangers and that he is, even if the letter of the law denies it, a second-class citizen.

The result of the political impotence of the national minority in a majoritarian democracy is that it perceives itself to be a conquered or colonized people. For as Mises points out: “The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest. . . .” In the 1920s Mises had already identified the phenomenon of what today is misleadingly called “institutional racism”— because the problem lies not with all institutions, only political ones — but is better described as “democratic subjugation.” In the1960s, Malcolm X (1963) gave poignant expression to the yearning for self-determination on the part of minority African nationalities in the U.S., saddled with an interventionist state controlled by peoples of European extraction:

This new type of black man, he doesn't want integration; he wants separation. Not segregation, separation. To him, segregation . . . means that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. . . . In the white community, the white man controls the economy, his own economy, his own politics, his own everything. That's his community. But at the same time while the Negro lives in a separate community, it's a segregated community. Which means it's regulated from the outside by outsiders. The white man has all of the businesses in the Negro community. He runs the politics of the Negro community. He controls all the civic organizations in the Negro community. This is a segregated community. . . . We don't go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything. You have yours and you control yours; we have ours and we control ours.

In analyzing the causes and solution of nationality conflicts, Mises coined the terms “militant” or “aggressive” nationalism, which he contrasted with “liberal” or “peaceful” nationalism. Thus for Mises, the choice was never between nationalism and a bland, atomistic “globalism”; the real choice was either nationalism that was cosmopolitan and embraced universal individual rights and free trade or militant nationalism intent on subjugating and oppressing other nations. He attributed the rise of anti-liberal nationalism to the failure to apply the right of self-determination and the nationality principle consistently and to the utmost degree possible in the formation of new political entities in the wake of the overthrow of royal despotism by war or revolution. The consequence was peoples differentiated by language, heritage, religion, etc. artificially and involuntarily bound together by arbitrary political ties. The inevitable outcome of these polyglot, mixed-nation-states was the suppression of minorities by the majority nationality, a bitter struggle for control of the state apparatus, and the creation of mutual and deep-seated distrust and hatred.A more euphonious term than “mixed-nation-states” for these political entities would be “multinational states” but given its current connotation, the latter term is likely to be misleading. This state of affairs often culminated in state-sanctioned physical violence, including the expropriation and expulsion and even the murder of minority populations.

Freedom of Movement Versus the Right of Self-Determination of Peoples Mises argues that all of this could have been avoided if only the full liberal agenda which includes, in addition to an economic policy of domestic laissez-faire and international free trade in goods, the crucial right of self-determination and the nationality principle to which it gives rise. Mises does not mince words in describing the plight of minorities in an illiberal, interventionist system:

If the government of these territories [inhabited by members of several nationalities] is not conducted along completely liberal lines, there can be no question of even an approach to equal rights in the treatment of the members of the various national groups. There can then be only rulers and those ruled. The only choice is whether one will be hammer or anvil.

Mises goes further, however, and argues that even an end to interventionism will not resolve the conflict of nationalities. Almost alone among classical liberals of his era and modern libertarians, Mises clearly recognizes that laissez-faire capitalism and free trade are necessary but not sufficient to ensure peace among different groups of individuals forced to live under a unified political system who voluntarily and naturally self-identify as different peoples or nations on the basis of language, shared customs and traditions, religion, heritage or any other objective factor that is subjectively meaningful for them. As Mises states

All these disadvantages [experienced by minorities] are felt to be very oppressive even in a state with a liberal constitution in which the activity of the government is restricted to the protection of the life and property of the citizens. But they become quite intolerable in an interventionist or socialist state.

For Mises the best that can be said of a government whose functions are strictly limited to protection of person and property and enforcement of contract is that it does not “aggravate artificially the friction that must arise from this living together of different groups.”

Mises defends the complete liberal agenda—the laissez-faire and the nationality principles—against those who vacuously attribute the “violent antagonisms” between nations inhabiting a single political jurisdiction to an “innate antipathy” between different peoples. To the contrary, argues Mises, despite the hatreds that may naturally exist between various groups of people of the same nationality, they are able to get along peacefully when living under the jurisdiction of the same state, while different nationalities that are forcibly bound together under common political arrangements are in constant conflict:

The Bavarian hates the Prussian; the Prussian, the Bavarian. No less fierce is the hatred existing among individual groups within both France and Poland. Nevertheless, Germans, Poles, and Frenchmen manage to live peacefully within their own countries. What gives the antipathy of the Pole for the German and of the German for the Pole a special political significance is the aspiration of each of the two peoples to seize for itself political control of the border areas in which Germans and Poles live side by side and to use it to oppress the members of the other nationality. What has kindled the hatred between nations to a consuming fire is the fact that people want to use the schools to estrange children from the language of their fathers and to make use of the courts and administrative offices, political and economic measures, and outright expropriation to persecute those speaking a foreign tongue.

So it is not natural antipathies between peoples—which may or may not exist—but the political denial of the right of self-determination that is the underlying cause of national conflicts. In this vein, Mises issues a dire and, in hindsight, prescient warning: “As long as the liberal program is not completely carried out in the territories of mixed nationality, hatred between members of different nations must become ever fiercer and continue to ignite new wars and rebellions.” This is certainly true of today’s world, particularly in Asia and Africa, where European imperialists and colonialists dragooned different “nations” (tribes, chiefdoms, linguistic groups, ethnicities, religions) into deeply dysfunctional political unions. Most of the forty wars currently being waged on these continents are “intrastate” or civil wars and, of these, most are “fueled as much by racial, ethnic, or religious animosities as by ideological fervor.” At their root lie the attempts of minority groups to resist or end oppression by the majority by either seizing the existing state apparatus, seceding from the state, or creating an entirely new state, e.g., ISIL.

This brings us to the vexed question of immigration. Mises summarily dismisses the purely economic arguments against free immigration as fallacious. He points out that, from the global point of view, migration raises the productivity of human labor, the supply of goods, and standards of living because it facilitates the reallocation of labor (and capital) from regions with less advantageous natural conditions of production to those with more advantageous natural conditions. Barriers to labor migration therefore cause a misallocation of labor and its geographic mal-distribution, with a relative oversupply in some areas and undersupply in other areas. The effects of migration barriers are thus exactly the same as the effects of tariffs and other barriers to the international trade of goods: the reduction of productive efficiency and income because comparatively unfavorable opportunities for production are exploited in some regions while comparatively favorable opportunities remain unutilized in others.

Although Mises argues that free movement of goods, capital and labor tends to maximize the productivity of labor and the total output of goods and services, he does not envision this as the ultimate goal of liberalism. As Mises argues in another connection, it was a mistake to believe “that the essence of liberal programs was not private property but ‘free competition’ [i.e., free of the ‘economic power’ of large business enterprises].” The same also applies when evaluating the social desirability of labor migration: the welfare standard for Mises and classical liberals is not the “economistic,” Chicago-school goals of production efficiency or maximum labor productivity measured in pecuniary terms but the securing of a full private property regime. For it is the operation of the unhampered market based on private property that best satisfies consumer preferences for exchangeable and non-exchangeable goods, which is the ultimate goal of all economic activity. In his brilliant but neglected analysis of the labor market in his economic treatise, Human Action, Mises points out that even the completely unhampered migration of labor across political boundaries does not lead to maximum labor productivity and a distribution of labor that equalizes wage rates for the same kind and quality of labor services throughout the global economy. The reason?

The worker and the consumer are the same person. . . . Men cannot sever their decisions concerning the utilization of their working power from those concerning the enjoyment of their earnings. Descent, language, education, religion, mentality, family bonds, and social environment tie the worker in such a way that he does not choose the place and the branch of his work merely with regard to the height of wage rates. [Paragraph break suppressed.]

In discussing labor migration Mises therefore shifts the focus from the analytical abstraction of the “laborer” seeking the highest wages consonant with his leisure preferences to the real human actor who demonstrates preferences across a broad range of goals that include non-exchangeable goods like close proximity and association with members of the same family, religious affiliation, ethnicity or language group. Consequently, Mises explicitly recognizes that once the outdated assumptions underlying the free-trade doctrine advanced by Ricardo and the classical economists are dropped, and the international mobility of capital and labor as well as goods is considered, the case for free trade, while it remains valid “from the purely economic point of view . . presents a quite changed point of departure for testing the extraeconomic reasons for and against the protective system.” Mises thus takes the analysis of migration beyond the realm of narrowly economic considerations and brings it into contact with the concrete political reality of the democratic mixed-nation-state and its characteristic suppression and violation of the property rights of national minorities by the majority nation.

This analysis leads Mises to view mass “immigration,” that is, labor migration across state borders, even when it occurs for purely economic reasons, as posing an inherent problem. Mises maintains that the creation of mixed-nation-states resulting from the immigration of workers of a foreign nationality, “gives rise once again to all those conflicts that generally develop in polyglot territories” and “to particularly characteristic conflicts between peoples.” Mises does recognize that peaceful cultural and political assimilation can take place “if the immigrants come not all at once but little by little, so that the assimilation process among the early immigrants is already completed or at least already under way when the newcomers arrive.” He cites the example of Chinese immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century, which did occur in a manner amenable to assimilation. Mises remarks, however, that “perhaps” the Chinese would have “achieve[d] domination in their new home . . . in the western states of the Union if legislation had not restricted their immigration in time.” But this is strictly a positive statement and Mises draws no policy implications from it.

Indeed, Mises exposes the economic arguments to restrict immigration put forward by protectionist trade unions in relatively high-wage countries like the U.S and Australia as transparently self-serving and injurious to the economic interests of their fellow nationals as well as contrary to the teachings of sound economic theory. Mises takes a more measured tone when considering the extra-economic argument in favor of immigration restriction that is disingenuously resorted to by the protectionists as a fallback position. According to the latter argument, in the absence of immigration barriers “hordes of immigrants” of non-English-speaking European and Asian nationalities would “inundate Australia and America.” Because these immigrants would arrive rapidly and in great numbers, the argument asserts, they could not be assimilated and Anglo-Saxons in the host countries would find themselves in a minority and their “exclusive dominion . . . would be destroyed.”

In evaluating this argument, Mises emphasizes the political problems that would arise in a mixed-nation-state created overnight by mass immigration:

These fears may perhaps be exaggerated with regard to the United States. As regards Australia, they certainly are not. . . . If Australia is thrown open to immigration, it can be assumed with great probability that its population would in a few years consist of Japanese, Chinese and Malayans. . . . The entire nation [not just workers] is unanimous, however, in fearing inundation by foreigners. The present inhabitants of those favored lands [the U.S. and Australia] fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country and that they would then have to suffer all horrors of national persecution to which, for instance, the Germans today [1927] are exposed in Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland. While Mises does not take an explicit position on the desirability of a policy curbing massive immigration flows that are induced by economic opportunity, he acknowledges that “these fears” of the nationality inhabiting the receiving country “are justified,” especially in a world of interventionist states. Mises, who for many years observed first-hand the egregious maltreatment of national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, vividly expresses the basis of the majority nation’s fear of being transformed into a national minority:

Thus, Mises views immigration as always and everywhere a “problem” to which there is “no solution,” as long as interventionist political regimes are the norm. Only when the crossing of state borders by members of a different nation portend no political dangers for the indigenous nationality will the “problem of immigration” disappear and be replaced by the benign migration of labor that creates unalloyed and mutual economic advantages for all individuals and peoples. From the Mises’s perspective, then, the solution to the immigration problem is not to legislate some vague, ad hoc right to the “freedom of movement” between existing fixed-boundary states. Rather, it is to complete the laissez-faire liberal revolution and secure private property rights by providing for the continual redrawing of state boundaries in accordance with the right of self-determination and the nationality principle. Then — and only then — can the continual and wealth-creating reallocation of labor throughout the world required by a dynamic capitalist economy be peacefully accommodated without precipitating political conflict.

Conclusion Mises was a radical liberal nationalist and cosmopolitan whose overarching goal was to promote policies that facilitated the peaceful extension of the social division of labor founded on private property to all individuals and nations. He acknowledged the reality of separate nations and its meaningfulness for political and economic policy analysis. He recognized that political borders that were not formed according to the nationality principle were an insurmountable impediment to the fullest realization of the concept of free trade and an important source of national conflicts and protectionism that destroyed wealth. In particular, Mises realized that “immigration” was not the solution to the problem of the uneconomic spatial distribution of labor, but the very cause of the problem. The problem of immigration would be solved only with the consummation of the classical liberal revolution in the universal recognition of the right of self-determination. Then the problem—and the very phenomenon—of immigration would disappear, as the borders of states would move with the migration of peoples and nations.

Further Reading Mises, Ludwig von. 1983. Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of Our Time. Trans. Leland B. Yeager. New York: New York University Press.

_____. 1985. Liberalism in the Classical Tradition. Trans. Ralph Raico. 3rd ed. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY and San Fancisco: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. and Cobden Press (co-publishers)

_____. 1996. Critique of Interventionism. Trans. Hans F. Sennholz. 2nd ed. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.

_____. 1998. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Scholar’s Edition. Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Rothbard, Murray N. 1993. “Hands Off the Serbs.” RRR: Rothbard-Rockwell Report. Pp. 1-5.

_____. 1994. “Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 11:1 (Fall): 1-10.

View Details

A Mises podcast.

View Details

When Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe made his famous argument against democracy back in 2001, the notion that voting was a lousy way to organize society was still radical even among many libertarians. Virtually everyone raised in a western country over the past century grew up hearing “democracy” used as a synonym for wonderful, good, just, and valid. It takes a great deal of unlearning to overcome this as an adult, and to question the wisdom of representative government installed via democratic mechanisms.

Fast forward to 2017, however, and the case against democracy is being made right in front of our eyes. Witness Hillary Clinton, who not long ago gushed about our “sacred” right to vote — that is until her stupendous loss to Trump. Today she clings to the specious nonsense that the Russians somehow influenced our election by planting stories and using social media, which if true would be an excellent argument against voting rights. If the natives are so easily duped by a few silly posts in their Facebook feeds, why on earth is their vote meaningful or sacred?

Other progressives like Michael Moore demand that Trump be arrested, presumably for treason. Left-leaning cable news pundits openly call for Trump to resign or be impeached. Mainstream newspapers wonder whether he’ll even finish his four-year term. The overwhelming message from the media is that Trump is a disaster, an existential threat that must be stopped.

But it’s not just progressives questioning democratic outcomes. Neoconservative Bill Kristol tweets that he’d rather be governed by an unaccountable deep state than Trump. Mild-mannered conservative moralist Dennis Prager, a reasonable and likeable right winger in my view, argues quite seriously that we are in the midst of a second civil war with those who simply reject their electoral defeat. And the libertarianish jurist Richard Epstein, writing for the somnambulant Hoover Institution, unloads a litany of grievances against Trump that would make Bill Maher blush.

We should recall that as democratic elections go, Trump’s victory was perfectly legitimate. Nobody seriously challenges his margins in the key states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida. Lamentations about Clinton winning the so-called popular vote are irrelevant and blatantly partisan — the Electoral College is as much a part of the “rules” as having two senators per state.

Meanwhile in the UK, former Prime Minister Tony Blair employs the language of revolution in urging Remain forces to “rise up” against Brexit and overturn the referendum in Parliament. Never mind that Blair is no longer an elected official and holds no government office, never mind that both the referendum process and the Brexit vote were perfectly valid: he just doesn’t like the results. His argument that Leave voters had “imperfect knowledge” is both hilarious and disingenuous: voters always have imperfect knowledge about candidates and policies prior to elections; pertinent new information always comes to light after elections. If Blair thinks we can start overturning elections based on any degree of voter ignorance, then I must suggest he begin with the vote in the House of Commons that made him PM. And why does he, a democrat, imagine some right to overturn election results at all?

It’s time to call a spade a spade. All of this angst hardly comports with our supposed reverence for democracy. Again, Trump handily and fairly won a democratic election just three months ago. If he’s the devil, a wrecking ball that cannot be stopped by the other branches of government, then our entire constitutional system and its democratic mechanisms are defective. Why doesn’t the #neverTrump movement take its arguments to their logical conclusion, and insist an electorate that would install Donald Trump never be allowed to vote again or have any say in organizing society?

The reality is becoming clear, even as it remains uncomfortable for many: democracy is a sham that should be opposed by all liberty-loving people. Voting and elections confer no legitimacy whatsoever on any government, and to the extent a democratic political process replaces outright war it should be seen as only slightly less horrific.

As I stated before the election last year:

… no matter who wins, millions of people — maybe 40 percent of the country — are going to view the winner as illegitimate and irredeemable.

In fact a recent Gallup poll cites that fully one-third of Americans won’t trust the election results anyway — which is to say they don’t trust government to hold an honest election.

Trump vs. Hillary represents something much bigger: what we might call the end of politics, or at least the limits of politics. Americans, and Europeans too, are witnessing the end of the myth of democratic consensus. Democratic voting, so called, doesn’t yield some noble compromise between Left and Right, but only an entrenched political class and its system of patronage.

Great libertarians like Thomas Jefferson have long warned against democracy, even as they uneasily accepted it as a necessary evil. Both Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were democrats, men who championed both the virtues of an intellectual elite and the necessity of having that elite gain legitimacy for its ideas through public acceptance. Mises termed democracy a “method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority.” Hayek viewed democracy as potentially wise if tempered by built-in safeguards to protect individual liberty.

But these men lived in very different times, coming as they did from pre-war Old Europe. We can’t know what they would think of modern social democratic welfare states, or Trump, or Brexit. I suspect they would find democracy quite wanting, in terms of producing what either would consider a liberal society. Both were utilitarians (of a sort) in their economic thinking, and it’s not hard to imagine they would take a consequentialist view of a society gone awry via democracy.

Things are getting strange in America when Michael Moore and Dennis Prager start to sound the same, and that’s arguably a very good development. We are close to a time when the democracy illusion will be shattered, for good and all. Democracy was always a bad idea, one that encourages mindless majoritarianism, political pandering, theft, redistribution, war, and an entitlement mentality among supposedly noble voters. It’s an idea whose time has passed, both on a national and international scale. The future of liberty is decentralized, and will be led by smaller breakaway nations and regions where real self-determination and real consensus is not an illusion. Jefferson and Hoppe were right about democracy, but it took Trump and Brexit to show the world how quickly elites abandon it when they don’t prevail.

Jeff Deist is president of the Mises Institute. He previously worked as a longtime advisor and chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul. Contact: email; twitter.

View Details

Leftwing Vox.com recently published a welcome and thoughtful piece on the virtues of devolving political and legal power away from the federal government toward states and localities. This is exactly the kind of conversation honest Americans need to have if we are serious about preventing the kind of political violence witnessed recently in Charlottesville and Berkeley. One overriding feature of the culture wars is that each sides justifiably fears the other will impose its way of living through a winner takes all political system.Violence is a natural and predictable response to this, a means of circumventing the ballot box.

The political class makes its living from centralized power and the attendant division it causes. But why should ordinary Americans accept the false choice between one brand of centralized government and another, when the obvious solution is staring us in the face? Breaking up politically is far more practical, and far more humane.

Written by a conservative who apparently supported Evan McMullin in the 2016 election, the Vox article raises two pressing questions: whether centralized governance is desirable in a vast country of 320 million people, and more importantly whether it’s even possible. Are overarching political solutions workable, or does politics simply enrich Washington DC while feeding the rapidly deteriorating culture war?

The author makes his central argument for subsidiarity as a peaceful approach for a large, diverse country:

...decentralization of power requires more than just devolution of a few powers here or there, but a society-wide commitment to transferring power, authority, and responsibility back down the totem pole. A diverse society can sustain itself peacefully when its members are committed to solving problems as locally as possible, involving higher levels of government only when absolutely necessary.

He also uses the seemingly intractable issue of abortion to make his point:

Where things get much trickier is where a more fundamental issue like abortion is concerned. On this issue in particular, many progressives and conservatives alike hope to achieve a victory that is far more total — more sweeping and national — than I think likely or desirable. That is, conservatives and progressives both seem to think that we need a federal rule about abortion. But we don’t, and indeed such a rule poisons the well of national politics. The reason is blindingly obvious: There is no federal agreement about abortion.

Ideologues on both sides will assert that, where highly charged moral issues are concerned, federalism is terrible: If abortion is wrong, it’s wrong everywhere. If same-sex marriage is right, it’s right everywhere. This is true in abstract moral terms, but it is not true in political terms, and the two are not the same, because it is immoral to compel a people to accept a set of laws with which they do not agree and which they cannot readily change.

Devolving political power is the first step toward making government smaller and less powerful in our lives. National and even supra-national governments are the biggest threats to human liberty and flourishing because they control the weapons of mass destruction: armies, nuclear missiles, central banks, economic sanctions, and trade tariffs. These are the elements of systemic contagion that should terrify us.

Your local city council may be dumb as a box of rocks or even evil, but at the very least it is far more accessible to you. Its damage is likely to be contained, and your ability to flee its jurisdiction may require nothing more than a cross-town U-Haul rental.

Subsidiarity is the most realistic and pragmatic approach to creating more freedom in our lifetimes. Winning 51% support for supposedly universalist political principles is a daunting challenge, especially for minority libertarians. We would do well instead to consider the Swiss federal model, which champions the subsidiarity principle:

Powers are allocated to the Confederation, the cantons and the communes in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity.

The Confederation only undertakes tasks that the cantons are unable to perform or which require uniform regulation by the Confederation.

Under the principle of subsidiarity, nothing that can be done at a lower political level should be done at a higher level.

Imagine Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump campaigning on this idea in 2016: “I can’t claim to know what’s best for Des Moines or Bangor or Anchorage or Phoenix in every situation. I'm not omnipotent, and neither are 500-odd members of Congress. We should leave most things up to the people who actually live in those towns. Vote for me if you agree.”

Subsidiarity is not perfect, just better. Freedom, in the political sense of the word, means the ability to live without government coercion (anarchists and minarchists debate whether all government is inherently coercive). It does not mean the ability to live under broadly agreed-upon liberal norms, simply because truly universalist political norms are so elusive. Free societies don’t attempt to impose themselves politically on electoral minorities any more than they attempt to impose themselves militarily on neighboring countries. Politically unyoking different constituencies in America makes far more sense than attempting to contain the hatred and division created by mass majority outcomes.

The world is moving toward decentralization, flattening itself and replacing hierarchies with networks. Libertarians should work to move politics and government in the same direction. Subsidiary is real diversity in practice.

View Details

From the perspective of the state, one of the benefits of growing larger geographically is that bigness makes it more difficult for residents to emigrate or cross over borders to escape taxes.

In his writings on the origins of the "European miracle" that led to the continent's economic success, Ralph Raico has noted the importance of small states in Europe and the ability to easily emigrate from one political jurisdiction to another. This free movement has been essential in forming a free and open economy and society. Raico contrasts Europe with Imperial China where the state was more easily able to monopolize both natural and human resources through its large size.

In an earlier article at mises.org, we also explored how the creation of a larger number of (necessarily smaller) states creates more options for residents of the existing states, and thus increases the potential for fruitful migration and escape from overweening state power.

Larger states, geographically speaking, work in the opposite direction of this, limiting options for relocation, and placing greater barriers in the way of residents who might be looking to change the the conditions under which they live.

In the case of the United States, for example, the sheer size of the United States requires a potential emigrant to move hundreds of miles from friends and family simply to live under a different national government. Even worse for the potential immigrant is that, in the case of the US, there are only two bordering states. This means, unless the emigrant can gain entry into one of those two neighboring states, he may potentially need to move thousands of miles from friends and family.

The magnitude of such a move means that an emigrant, in order to visit family members, or conduct business in his or her community of origin, must endure great expense in terms of travel costs and time.

On top of this, given that 70 percent of the world's native English-speakers live in the United States, any potential emigrant is also likely to need to learn a new language, which is no small affair.An earlier version of this article stated this as 80 percent. I revised down to 70 percent based on native speaking populations. The US is by far the largest Anglophone country with the UK coming in second place at approx 65 million compared to the US's 320 million.

This, of course, helps illustrate the absurdity of claims by nationalists that any critic of the local state should simply "love it or leave it" and move somewhere else. Even if that person can gain entry into another state — something that is by no means guaranteed — he would then need to separate himself from friends and family by hundreds or thousands of miles, learn a new language, and be prepared to potentially spend thousands of dollars and take time off from work simply to visit a sick relative.

Not surprisingly, then, virtually no one emigrates based on political views alone because the quality of daily human life depends largely on a countless number of connections to family, social networks, and business associations that tend to depend on physical proximity to others. Leaving these social and economic networks can come at a great personal cost, and the further one must move from them, the greater the cost may be.

Thus, the more a state can make cross-border travel expensive, tedious, or time consuming, the more that state can easily impose a wide variety of disincentives to emigration.

For these reasons, among others, advocates for greater freedom in the movement of goods, persons, and capital, should seek to limit and shrink the size of states. Given that states, by their very nature, rely on extending a monopoly on coercion over a specific area, one can say that smaller states are less state-like. Larger states, by contrast, act more like the quintessential state since they are able to effect greater consolidation of monopoly power.

Mises's View of State and SocietyLudwig von Mises believed that states, in theory, could be reduced in size to a single household. That is, he was theoretically an anarchist. However, Mises also recognized that, for practical reasons, individual political jurisdictions were likely to be larger than a single person or household. Writing in liberalism, Mises concludes:

If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination [via secession] to every individual person, it would have to be done. This is impracticable only because of compelling technical considerations, which make it necessary that a region be governed as a single administrative unit and that the right of self-determination be restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country.

But what does Mises mean by "compelling technical considerations?"

To get insight into what Mises may mean here, we can extrapolate from Mises's view of how and why human civic institutions are formed in the first place.

For Mises, individuals associate with each other voluntarily in order to take advantage of the division of labor. Writing in Human Action, Mises notes:

Every step by which an individual substitutes concerted action for isolated action results in an immediate and recognizable improvement in his conditions. The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation and division of labor are universal. They immediately benefit every generation, and not only Iater descendants. For what the individual must sacrifice for the sake of society he is amply compensated by greater advantages. His sacrifice is only apparent and temporary; he foregoes a smaller gain in order to reap a greater one later.

Mises continues:

[H]uman action itself tends toward cooperation and association; man becomes a social being not in sacrificing his own concerns for the sake of a mythical Moloch, society, but in aiming at an improvement in his own welfare.

In Mises's view, these efforts to enhance trade and cooperation among human beings lead to the creation of cities and other population centers.

Moreover, for Mises, the state — properly limited to the function of protecting private property — can potentially assist in creating conditions that facilitate the cooperative behavior he envisioned. Thus, it is the cost of acting as an administrator of law that leads Mises to conclude that certain "compelling technical considerations" are are likely to keep states above a certain minimum size.

A problem arises, however, when we recognize that this vision of the state exists in tension with the fact that — as illustrated by Raico — the physical and geographical growth of states tends to facilitate the expansion of state power well beyond the role imagined by Mises.

When contained at a municipal or metropolitan level, state power is one thing. Relocation to a neighboring metropolitan area remains relatively easy. Once states begin to take control of sizable frontiers and multiple municipal areas, however, the situation becomes far different, and states begin to limit and regulate trade and free movement, rather than facilitate it.

Thus, even if we accept Mises's idea that there is some level at which economies of scale for state administration may be beneficial, those assumed benefits are increasingly threatened the larger a state becomes.

A Modest Proposal for States on a More-Human ScaleThe answer lies in limiting state size to a human scale in which human beings can still associate, travel, and trade across jurisdictional boundaries without incurring a great cost. The standard for "great cost" is subjective, of course, and over time has changed substantially. The cost of traveling 50 miles in the 16th century, for example, is significantly different form the cost of traveling the same distance today.

There are ongoing attempts by geographers, however, to determine the "natural" size of a region that encompasses a population's economic, political, and social institutions. In a recent study, for example, Garret Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae attempted to identify regions that "have been substantively tied together by the forces of urban development, telecommunications, the frictionless circulation of capital, and the consolidation of both public and private institutions."

Basing their standard of scale on tolerance for commute times, the geographers selected 50-mile commutes as an indicator of how closely tied together is a specific region. The end result was this:

Full methodology and explanation available here.

The authors then create a suggested map of political units based on the scale of megaregions:

What are the implications of this analysis?

Analysis of regions such as these are significant because, even if we accept many of the arguments claiming that states are necessary to facilitate basic infrastructure and services, this analysis suggests there is no need to have states any larger than the so-called megaregion. After all, if one takes the view that states are necessary to streamline legal relations within certain economic regions — as Mises suggested — then this can easily be accomplished at the level of the megaregion. There is no reason, for example, why a single megaregion could not fund its own infrastructure and welfare state through the usual redistributive means. I do not advocate for this sort of redistribution, but am merely recognizing that geographically expansive states are simply not necessary to provide the sorts of state interventions put forward by modern-date social democrats.

Indeed, many welfare states we find around the world to this day are scarcely more than singular megaregions themselves, as in the case of Finland or Norway. Both states are little more than small handfuls of metropolitan areas surrounded by sparsely populated frontiers.

Moreover, even military needs, as dictated by geopolitical realities need not require a geographically large state. Historically, these issues have been successfully addressed by membership-based confederations such as the Hanseatic League and the early United States (especially during the 1770s and 80s). In both cases, these groups composed of independent city states or small states successfully addressed outside military threats. In the case of the Hanseatic League, which had no central government at all, this continued for nearly two centuries.

To this day, of course, small independent states continue to enter into agreements for the purposes of defense and do not require consolidation of domestic power into a central state.

These realities, however, are unlikely to lead to any re-arrangement of the United States — or any other state — along the lines of smaller megaregions. Even if advocates for interventionism recognized that the "services" for which they advocate could be provided at a much smaller scale, they would be likely to recognize that state power would tend to be more limited by a large number of smaller states than in a world of fewer large states.

After all, when kept to a size such as that of the megaregions listed here (to use just one example), the persons who live within them could for more easily leave one jurisdiction to do business in another, even on a daily basis. Political jurisdictions seeking to raise taxes and regulatory burdens would be limited by the relative ease of moving one's business or family to a neighboring jurisdiction. Even worse — from the state's perspective — those expatriates would still be able to visit friends and family "back home" with relative ease. And, those jurisdictions that sought to engage in various types of prohibition such as those on marijuana, would find it far more difficult to prevent their citizens from easily traveling over jurisdictional lines to spend their money in neighboring areas — thus robbing the prohibitionist states of further tax revenue.

With States, Size MattersMany advocates for limited government or even laissez-faire government continue to debate the proper extent of state power, or whether states should exist at all. What should be apparent, however, is that even for those who want states to provide certain amenities, many modern states are far, far greater in size and scope that what is even necessary to provide those amenities in the first place. Unfortunately, the primary effect of bigness in these states is to enhance the power of the state and limit the ability of citizens to escape the state's taxes and impoverishing regulations.

View Details

Dear Clinton Voters:

I know this election has been painful for you. Many feel betrayed and even believe yourselves no longer living in the country you thought you were. Reflect on that pain and frustration for a moment. Now recognize how you feel now is how an equally large, possibly larger, number felt for the past eight years. Those who are of a liberty bent feel it all the time, no matter who ends up in office. Reflect on it, feel it, understand it, own it.

Before you get the wrong idea, this is not my attempt at rubbing in your face the loss of your candidate or an endorsement of President-elect Donald Trump. If anything, I share your pain and frustration, just for an entirely different reason. What you’re feeling, this hopelessness, this feeling that you’re no longer represented, this feeling that people other than you are now able to dictate your way of life, this is all a result of the massive expansion of the Federal government. Elections have long ceased being voting for someone you think represents the lifestyle you want to live and are, in practice, an exercise on determining whether or not you get to impose your preferred lifestyle on someone else.

This is the nature of elections, especially the “first past the post” method utilized in the United States. This system is, by its nature, one where one group of people enjoys the ability to effectively dictate to those who did not win how they will be living their lives over the next term period. The effect of this on voter frustration, which manifests as cultural divisiveness, only gets magnified the more powerful that government becomes. A weak federal government would produce little divisiveness because there is little to be divided over. A strong Federal government would produce significant divisiveness since there is much to be divided over. It also goes to say that an absolute government would create absolute division while the absence of government would not produce a division because there isn’t any risk of having your life dictated by distant populations. When we add in factors of geographic distance and cultural diversity, we end up with a horrible mud-slinging process where people actively dislike both candidates and the electorate openly attacks one another over the political process, completing the division process. These issues won’t go away with vague calls of being civil, coming together or getting along. One group or another will always feel put out and ignored since those in office only truly represent those that got them elected.

However, you need not despair. The liberty movement has the answers you seek to not only distance yourself from future risk of being dictated to by distant populations and political heartache but also be able to more quickly and nimbly get policies and lifestyles you prefer without having to fight someone else for it.

Option 1: Demand Your Representatives Shut Down DCNothing Obama signed into law or created through regulatory diktat had to be done at the national level. Not the Affordable Care Act. Not raising minimum wages. Not identifying tax rates. Not regulatory agencies. Not even food stamps and various other welfare programs. None of it has to be done in Washington DC. All of it can be done at your State level and even locally. To prove a point, Colorado had an opportunity to form the nation’s first European-style single payer health care system. Had that referendum passed, residents of Colorado could have been able to copy the Canadian model of medical care delivery. And it would have been entirely legal and done so without having to collect the opinions of 320 million people or impose it on residents of other States that would not have wanted it.

However, as noted in the linked article, the referendum was opposed on grounds that it could not be sufficiently paid for. This is not because of the common argument that the entire nation needs to be tapped to afford it. Colorado is wealthier than the national average, so Colorado would realistically end up having to pay residents of other States if such a scheme went national. So why is this law fiscally impossible in today’s environment? It is mainly because the Federal government is already taking all those resources for itself.

On average, the Federal government consumes 50 percent of all the taxes paid in this country. This means that, if the average holds for Colorado, and the State is likely further disadvantaged because of the higher income bracket, residents are sending $1 in taxes to the federal government for every $1 in taxes that are collected from them that go to the State or Local governments. In other words, Colorado residents have no say in how half their tax resources are used. Worse, Colorado residents would likely do a better job administering the exact same programs and do so for less because most Federal programs do little more than return the money back to equivalent State agencies. This means your State is having to cover the overhead of 2.7 million Federal employees whose sole purpose is to take money from your State then give it back again with orders on how to spend it.

By eliminating these programs wholesale on a national level and utilizing your existing State systems, you can avoid any disruptions in the programs and also enjoy a less expensive process. Instead of the Federal government collecting its pound of flesh, you will send it to your State capital. This not only allows you to continue the policies and even amend and adjust them more readily without having to convince up to 59 other Senators, hundreds of House representatives and a sitting president, along with an unknown and distant bureaucracy. All you need to do is ask your State representative, who is probably far more available to talk to than the senator you send to DC. With an added bonus, the people living the next State over aren’t going to feel threatened by your political philosophy because they are safe knowing that whatever system you decide to live under does not apply to them if they so choose not to.

Option 2: SecessionThis is a more extreme process, but it is also just as valid and allows for more culturally compatible people to have a stronger option at self-determination. This strategy further removes the chances of having a central power structure usurping the wishes and desires of your more culturally compatible group by incompatible groups elsewhere. If one looks at the 2016 election map:

We can find that, at minimum, save for a couple of orphans in the form of New Mexico, Denver, Minneapolis, and Chicago, the United States as it stands is perfectly set up for a secession movement to split the nation into at least three separate entities.

This would allow a greater level of freedom for residents of these three newly formed entities. Further, this split is more than possible from economic size. For the purposes of this exercise, I’ll name the three new nations Cascadia (Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada and let’s throw Hawaii in there), New England (all the blue colored States from Virginia through Maine), and the United States (everyone else). If the USA split into these three entities, here is how the top 20 nations by GDP would look:

These new nations would rank second, fourth and sixth in world GDP and two of them, USA and Cascadia, are one decent year of growth away from jumping up a rank.

An additional benefit of secession is the ability to further harmonize the new nation with more desirable trade practices, immigration policy, foreign policy, military spending, court systems, and monetary policy. These decentralized entities even have the option of altering how the government itself works, such as dispensing with individual State identities, removing the Electoral College and applying a direct vote system or even converting into a European-style Parliamentary system. Secession allows for even greater self-determination missing in today’s system.

Or you could continue operating as-is and hope enough swing voters decide they want to go back to your philosophy so you can take your turn again imposing your lifestyle on someone else and taking the risk of playing backseat where you truly have no representation or real say in how you live.

In any case, the liberty movement can be a strong ally to allow you to avoid having to live through another Donald Trump term and forge your own destiny without all the strife and divisiveness that goes with a modern American election cycle.

Justin Murray received his MBA in 2014 from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

View Details

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.~ Joseph Stalin

The federal government is making a move to move in the direction of further centralizing the administration of elections nationwide. The justification this time around is stated to be danger of Russian hackers who, we are told, will compromise election results. As if so often the case in debates about federal control, it is assumed that the federal government can do things with greater competence and more professionalism than any state government. The refrain is likely to soon be: "Hey states, running elections is so hard. Why not let us do it all for you?" At the moment, the feds are only offering "help" with voter registration systems. Even the feds admit hacking state-level election systems is very difficult. But, none of us should be surprised when the feds in the future start talking about the need to "modernize" election systems by centralizing them.

The Member States Have Historically Controlled Elections Most Americans probably assume that elections are now and always have been, constitutionally, the domain of the federal government. But, this has never been the case. The Federal Election Commission wasn't even created until 1975, and even now, the FEC's power is limited primarily to regulating campaign finance, and not elections.

The original philosophy behind state control of elections is easy to understand, given the intended — and now ignored —decentralized structure of the United States.

State Control of Congressional Elections, in PracticeThis even extended to the election of US Senators, although many think that the Constitution mandates that state legislatures appointed US senators prior to the 17th Amendment. While the US Constitution says the state legislatures shall elect the US senators, it does not say how that should be done. For example, must candidates for US Senate receive a majority of legislative votes or will a plurality do? Can those senators be recalled by the legislature? The US Constitution is silent on this. Moreover, in practice, states were free to pass their own state laws creating popular elections for senators that were then binding on members of the state legislature. By 1912, the last election before the adoption of the 17th Amendment, a majority of states employed de facto popular election of US senators. (Indeed, were the 17th Amendment to be repealed today, it is a safe bet that approximately 50 of the states would continue to use popular election to determine the appointment of US Senators.)

States also employed various means of determining who could vote in elections overall. As the 19th century entered the Jacksonian era, the states led the way with significantly liberalizing who could vote. By 1845, nearly all states had removed the land-ownership requirement for voting, resulting in near-universal suffrage for non-slave males. Western states would then expand this with their own extensions to women and foreign nationals.

All the while, the federal government had little-to-no role in dictating to states how elections should be conducted or whom should be granted the right to vote.

Later on, the federal courts would employ the 14th Amendment to begin regulating elections. The racial-politics tail would come to wag the national dog with the federal courts intervening to micro-manage elections even in states with no legacy of slavery and where the racial issues of the Old South were non-existent.

Thus, today, a state like Arizona is prohibited by the courts from requiring that voters be US citizens.

In spite of numerous court diktats, however, elections are still largely controlled by states. State-level Secretaries of State remain the primary election officers. How these elections are conducted essentially determines how federal elections are handled.

One need not employ an immense amount of imagination, however, to guess what would happen were control of elections moved to the national level. Instead of being controlled by elected state officials who must run for re-election, elections would be controlled by a commission with members appointed by the US President. Like the head of the FBI who selectively enforces laws according to his political whims, the elections commissioners would be accountable to no one but the president and insulated from any public outrage. Many of the commissioners might serve for decades in their positions, depending on how the governing federal statutes were written. Large national interest groups would expand their influence at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.

Gone would be the days when states could, on their own initiative, reform voting law as they did during the 19th century.

Practical Benefits of Decentralization Centralization would eliminate practical benefits of state-level election administration as well.

A single nerve center for election administration would make elections more susceptible to outside hacking, not less. State governments have already been repulsing hacking attempts for years. The alleged threats from Russian hackers — assuming they even exist — would be nothing new.

Moreover, even if one state were compromised, there is practical advantage to limiting the damage to a single-state. That is, if Iowa's election software were compromised, a recount could be necessary only in Iowa, as opposed to conducting an immense nationwide recount. Indeed, were the results of a national election lopsided enough, the corruption of one state's election system may not even be enough to sway the election, and would simply be irrelevant to the outcome.

Of course, the practical considerations are of far lesser importance compared to the importance of continuing to maintain decentralized control over elections.

As a remnant of the days when the US was seen as a conglomeration of independent states, decentralized elections are important in heading off even more movement toward converting the US into a unitary state controlled from Washington. As a general principle of decentralization — which should also lend itself toward nullification and secession — keeping control of elections out of the hands of a single centralized government remains of significant importance.

Naturally, the states should be given total control over who can vote, when they vote, and whether or not states could base election outcomes on pluralities, majorities, or supermajorities. States should also be free — contra the US constitution — to set the qualifications for federal representatives. If a majority of California voters elect to send a 12-year-old Iraqi refugee to the US Senate, They should be free to do so. If voters in states wish to vote to recall their US Representatives, they should be free to do that as well. If states want to hold elections every year instead of every two years or every six years, it should not be the business of any federal judge or commission or politician. Every state already has a huge incentive to send representatives to Washington. We don't need Washington to know or care how that's done.

Ryan McMaken is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Contact: email, twitter.

View Details

More than 150 years after the Civil War, the nation is engulfed in controversy over statues of people who fought for the Confederacy. Many people want the statues taken down. The statues, they say, depict men who were slaveowners, slavery proponents, and traitors. Those who want the statues to stay in place are said to be racists. The feelings run so deep on both sides of the controversy that one would think that the Civil War ended just yesterday.

As a libertarian, I question why government should erect statues in the first place, to anyone. That’s simply not a legitimate role of government. Moreover, why should people be taxed to fund a statue of someone whose beliefs or behavior they dislike or oppose?

Private entities, of course, should be free to erect any statues they want, so long as they aren’t subsidized by the state and the statues are on privately owned property. In fact, in 2003 a group spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to establish the Confederate Memorial Park in Point Lookout, Maryland, which features a statue and battle flags that celebrate the Confederacy. It is privately funded and people are free to boycott it or even protest it. It is an example of how things operate in a private-property system.

The statue controversy exposes lies and hypocrisy that characterize the popular depiction of the Civil War.

The most popular lie is the one that says that Abraham Lincoln waged the war to free the slaves. That’s just a plain lie. Ending slavery was the result at the end of the war but it was clearly not Lincoln’s goal at the beginning of the war.

Lincoln had one reason and one reason alone for initiating war against the Confederacy: to keep the nation intact by suppressing the South’s secession. That was it. That was Lincoln’s sole aim. Prior to the war, he had made it clear that slavery was legal under the U.S. Constitution. Thus, he believed, the only way to end it legally would have been by constitutional amendment.

Indeed, further proof of Lincoln’s aim is seen in his Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves only in certain areas. If he were waging the war to end slavery, wouldn’t he have proclaimed the freedom of all slaves, not just some of them?

Let’s assume that there was no slavery in the South and that the South had seceded for some other reason, say, tariffs, or simply because Southerners had decided that they no longer wanted to associate with the North. Even without slavery, there is no doubt that Lincoln would have initiated the war to prevent the South from seceding.

What if the Confederate States seceded today and declared their independence? Does anyone doubt that federal forces would be sent into the South again to suppress the secession? Obviously, their aim would not be to end slavery but to keep the nation intact, the same aim that Lincoln had when he ordered federal forces to invade the South.

So why the lie? Why not teach American children the truth — that the Civil War was waged to prevent secession and that ending slavery was simply a byproduct of the war?

I suggest that the reason for the lie is that proponents of the Civil War know that suppressing secession might not be considered by many to be a noble cause for a war that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed half the country, not to mention that it damaged the freedom and democratic processes of the country.

Not so with ending slavery. That’s something noble. That’s something that many people would say was worth the tremendous sacrifices in life, limb, freedom, and prosperity.

Thus, the lie comes into existence: The Civil War was waged to end slavery, it is said, which is a noble cause, one worth sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction of half the country.

Treason?Why do some proponents of the Civil War consider the suppression of secession to be less than a noble cause?

With secession, people are simply saying, “We don’t want to be associated with you anymore. We wish to separate our states from this country and establish our own country.”

With the suppression of secession, people are essentially responding, “Tough luck. We don’t care whether you want to continue associating with us or not. We are going to initiate force against you to prevent you from going your way. We will force you to remain associated with us. We will kill and destroy you until you change your mind.”

It is fairly obvious that that position doesn’t have the nobility that ending slavery does. That’s undoubtedly why the lie began.

In fact, I believe that Lincoln himself began realizing that as the war progressed and the death and destruction mounted exponentially. When he provoked the incident at Fort Sumter, I think he figured that the war would be quickly brought to a conclusion and that the seceding states would be quickly defeated.

Lincoln’s mindset was much like the Washington, D.C., crowd of socialites and sightseers that gathered in Virginia to watch the first Battle of Bull Run at the inception of the war. They viewed the battle as sort of a big sports event, one that would be over rather quickly, with the federal team winning. Once it was clear that the Confederate forces were prevailing in the battle, the D.C. socialites and sightseers ran for their lives back to D.C. in fear that they would be captured or killed.

That’s essentially what many supporters of the Civil War have done. They have fled from the truth and convinced themselves that the Civil War was initiated principally to end slavery and only secondarily to suppress secession.

During the statue controversy, people have accused the secessionists of being traitors. They say that it was treason for Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, and others to secede from the Union.

But isn’t treason a legal concept? If the Constitution permitted secession, which many people believed, then how could it be treasonous to secede? Indeed, at the end of the war, federal officials took Davis into custody and threatened to prosecute him for treason. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, however, they dropped their prosecution. One reason might have been that they didn’t want to risk a Supreme Court ruling on the matter.

There is an important point about secession that needs to be made, one that exposes the hypocrisy of those who condemn the South for seceding. That point is: The United States itself was founded on secession. And most of the people who condemn the South for seceding nonetheless celebrate America’s secession from Great Britain in 1776.

We call it the American Revolution, but that’s really a misnomer. It wasn’t a revolution at all. A revolution is an attempt by rebels to oust the existing regime and take control of the central government. That’s not what the American colonists in 1776 were doing. They had no interest in taking control over the British government. They simply wanted to secede from it.

Keep in mind that the people who signed the Declaration of Independence were not Americans. They were British subjects, just as people in the Confederacy were American citizens. The British colonies were part of Great Britain, much as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands are part of the United States today.

So the men who signed the Declaration were simply saying, “We don’t want to be part of your country anymore. We don’t want to associate with you. We wish to establish our own country.” They didn’t want to take over the British government. They simply wanted to secede from Great Britain and establish their own country, just as Southerners wanted to do nearly 90 years later.

Today, some Americans celebrate George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Patrick Henry as patriots for seceding from their country while, at the same time, condemning Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson as traitors for seceding from theirs.

Of course, often it’s a question of who wins and who loses that determines whether a secessionist is a patriot or a traitor. Great Britain certainly did not consider its rebelling British colonists to be patriots. On the contrary, it considered them to be traitors and criminals, the same way that many Americans today view Davis, Lee, Jackson, and other Southerners who lost their war for secession.

Sovereign StatesPeople claim that Southerners were fighting to preserve slavery and, therefore, cannot under any circumstances be considered patriots.

They miss two important points, however. One is that the secessionists in 1776 intended to preserve slavery in their new country and, nonetheless, they are still considered to be patriots.

The other point is related: It’s possible to fight for two principles, one noble and the other ignoble. Lee provides a good example. When the war broke out, Lincoln offered him command over all Union forces. Lee turned down the offer and returned to Virginia, where he assumed command over the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia. At the time, his wife was also a slaveowner.

Critics today call Lee a traitor. They say that he betrayed his country by taking up arms against it (just as some people considered George Washington, who was also a slave-owner, to be a traitor for taking up arms against his country).

The problem is that such critics are looking at the situation from the standpoint of a 21st-century American, one who has been indoctrinated into viewing the federal government and the nation in a way that is entirely different from how 18th-century and 19th-century Americans viewed them.

Today’s Americans are taught to view the United States as one nation, consisting of states that are inferior and subordinate to the federal government.

That was not the mindset of our ancestors. They viewed the nation as a collection of sovereign and independent entities (i.e., states) that had simply confederated together to facilitate matters of common interest.

In the process, however, the states understood that they were not surrendering their separate, independent, and sovereign status. That was manifested in the type of political structure that they established. The charter by which they came together was called, appropriately, the Articles of Confederation. That’s because they came together simply as a confederation and without losing the independence and sovereignty of each state. Under the Articles the federal government was given very few powers. It wasn’t even given the power to tax.

Most people considered their home state to be their real country. That’s where their loyalties lay. That’s where their allegiance was — not to the United States but rather to Virginia or South Carolina. People didn’t see themselves as citizens of the United States. They saw themselves as citizens of their respective states.

That mindset was reflected by the way Americans prior to the Civil War referred grammatically to the United States. When doing so, they would use the plural form: “The United States are moving in a different direction.” Sometime after the Civil War and continuing through today, the country is referred to in the singular: “The United States is moving in a different direction.”

It was with that mindset that Lee turned down Lincoln’s request to command the Union forces. In his mind, to do so would constitute treason because it would entail waging war against his own country, which was Virginia. And that was the mindset of most Southerners. In their minds, they were fighting for their country against an illegal invader, notwithstanding the fact that their system was based on slavery. That is, they would have had the mindset with respect to patriotism even if there had been no slavery in the South.

Proponents of the Civil War ignore some other important points.

If the war was actually about slavery rather than secession, U.S. forces could have invaded the Confederacy, freed the slaves, and returned home, leaving the Confederacy as an independent nation. After all, doesn’t the U.S. government justify some of its foreign interventions in that way today? After the infamous WMDs failed to be immediately found in Iraq, U.S. officials said that they were actually invading and occupying Iraq to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. In the process, they didn’t absorb Iraq into the United States.

They could have done the same thing to the Confederacy — invade, free the slaves, and return home without forcibly re-absorbing the Confederacy. The reason they didn’t is clear: the war was about secession, not slavery.

Moreover, there was another way to bring an end to slavery without all the massive death and destruction that Lincoln’s war entailed. The North could have acceded to the secession and then declared itself to be a sanctuary for runaway slaves.

What about the Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northern states to return slaves to their owners? It would have been gone. Remember: with secession, there would now be two separate and independent countries — the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. There would be nothing the Confederacy could do to force the North to return runaway slaves.

That would have undoubtedly broken the back of the slave system in the South. After all, slavery was a dying institution anyway, not only in a moral sense but also in an efficiency sense. Operations based on slavery could not compete against enterprises based on consensual, paid employees. It was just a matter of time before the entire system collapsed. A sanctuary system in the North would have accelerated its demise.

War CrimesFinally, in the matter of statues and the honoring and glorification of Union leaders, it’s important to keep in mind the grave war crimes ordered by Lincoln, and committed by Philip Sheridan and William T. Sherman, especially in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and in Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Traditional rules of warfare precluded the waging of war against civilians, a principle that had been taught to Sheridan and Sherman at West Point. Yet, that is precisely what those two men and the troops under their command did. They intentionally targeted women, children, seniors, and other noncombatants by burning their homes, their crops, and their towns and villages, with the intent of killing them by starvation or exposure to the elements. The idea was that it would bring the war to an earlier conclusion, especially by demoralizing Confederate soldiers who would be losing their wives, children, siblings, and parents.

It’s a rather straight line from what was done in the South to the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. carpet bombing of North Korean towns and villages, the bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam, the killing of civilians at My Lai and countless other villages in South Vietnam, and the several missile and drone attacks on wedding parties in Afghanistan. Every one of those war crimes is based on the notion that it’s okay as long as it saves American lives by ending the war sooner, especially by demoralizing the enemy. They all stretch back to the war crimes that Sheridan and Sherman committed in the South.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the extreme dictatorial actions committed by Lincoln. His arrest of the Maryland legislature. His jailing of critical journalists. His suspension of habeas corpus. His embrace of conscription. His enactment of the Legal Tender Laws. They were all illegal under our form of constitutional government. They are also characteristic of some of the most brutal dictatorships in history.

Indeed, let’s not forget that while Lincoln opposed slavery prior to being elected president, he was also a white separatist, believing at best that blacks and whites should be kept separate and that blacks should be forcibly deported to Africa.

Lincoln ended up winning and slavery was ended, which was the one good thing that came out of the war. But it’s not necessary to honor war criminals and white separatists simply because they won, especially when ending slavery wasn’t the reason they initiated the Civil War. Indeed, does winning mean that lies and hypocrisy have to be a major legacy of the Civil War?

View Details

Military spending by the United States is higher now than it was during the Cold War. That means the US taxpayer is now on the hook to pay for more military personnel, bases, and weaponry than was the case when the Soviet Union controlled an area three times the size of the United States, and was an avowed ideological foe of the West.

Today, the US must spend even more, we are told, to fight an enemy like the Islamic State which has no navy, no air force, and certainly no intercontinental ballistic missiles.

To further buttress these claims that ever more spending is needed, America’s foreign policy establishment continues to insist that the United States — and thus, the American taxpayer — continue to provide the military defense for much of the planet, including countries such as South Korea, Japan, Germany, the Baltic States, Turkey, and many others.

Reflecting his populist and nationalist base, Donald Trump has wondered aloud as to why the United States should keep footing the bill for the defense of other large, wealthy, and technologically advanced countries — or for countries that offer no geopolitical advantages for defense of United States territory.

Specifically, Trump has also suggested that, rather than provide defense for Japan and South Korea, those two countries beef up their own military and nuclear capability. Trump has also expressed doubts about the need for the US, through NATO, to commit itself to World War III in case countries like Latvia and Turkey are attacked by an outside state (presumably Russia).

What Trump doesn’t mention is the larger problem with the status quo: it carries with it the potential of making regional conflicts into global ones. For example, if Japan and China go to war in North Asia, the US government has committed itself to devoting American lives and potentially trillions in taxpayer dollars for the benefit of the Japanese state. The same is true of South Korea.

Trump is right that the current policy is very costly in terms of dollars, but the cost in terms of human lives and treasure could be far greater if regional conflicts turn into world wars.

The Media Reaction: Pretend There Is No Debate

The collective reaction from the mainstream media and the political establishment has been to clutch their pearls and be aghast at the idea that anyone would ever suggest that the status quo of endless global military subsidies for foreign regimes should not continue indefinitely.

Perhaps the most hysterical reaction comes from Zack Beauchamp at Vox who has said that Trump’s position is essentially the equivalent to inviting nuclear war with Russia.

No deterrence against Russian nuclear capability is possible, Beauchamp claims, without the US as the guarantor of security in Eastern Europe. Beauchamp cites this study, quoting: “‘formal alliances with nuclear states appear to carry significant deterrence benefits.’ The US’s formal agreements, then, deter aggression against its non-nuclear partners (like Germany and the Baltics).”

What Beauchamp doesn’t mention is that NATO already includes nuclear states other than the United States (namely, the United Kingdom and France.) Both the United Kingdom and France possess advanced missile technology for delivering nuclear warheads, and it is widely accepted that Germany could convert to being a nuclear power in a short time frame. Perhaps even in a period of months.

So, even if we accepted Beauchamp’s claim as true (which I’m not doing), the situation doesn’t require the participation of the United States.

Secondly, if formal alliances with nuclear states create a deterrent effect, the same can be said of proliferation. That is, logic dictates if states can create deterrence by joining with nuclear states, they also create deterrence by becoming nuclear states themselves.

Proliferation Brings Security

The possibility that nuclear proliferation would increase deterrence and peace has long been forwarded by prominent scholars within the realist camp of the international relations world. Among the most influential of these is Kenneth Waltz whose 1981 paper “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better,” concludes “the slow spread of nuclear weapons will promote peace and reinforce international stability.” Waltz’s paper is still the subject of debate among students and scholars today.

Waltz’s paper became a matter of real-world application in the 1990s when Ukraine abandoned its nuclear arsenal (left over from Soviet days) and fellow realist scholar John Mearsheimer concluded it would be a mistake for Ukraine to give up what constituted a solid deterrent to potential Russian aggression. A nuclear-armed Ukraine, Mearsheimer noted, would offer stability in the region and reduce the risk of conflicts in which other great powers were pulled into Ukraine-Russia conflicts to counter Russian expansion.

Unfortunately, the anti-proliferationists succeeded, and their success has ensured that NATO and the US continue to insert themselves into the region, allegedly as a necessary balance against Russian weaponry. The risk for global conflict in this situation is significant.

Decentralize and Regionalize Nuclear Power

Thus, instead of decentralizing nuclear capability in that case, and keeping regional conflicts limited, the insistence on non-proliferation has instead ensured that virtually any nuclear conflict in that part of the world will carry a strong potential for becoming a much larger global conflict.

Meanwhile, Germany, the wealthiest state in the region — with an economy more than double the size of Russia’s — continues to pass the buck to the American taxpayer. (“Buck passing” refers to a specific type of behavior in international relations.)

This cannot continue indefinitely. In fact, writing in his 2001 book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer predicted that the established order in Europe would collapse by 2020, and Germany would then create its own nuclear arsenal. Mearsheimer’s prediction may have to wait longer than 2020 to come true, but his own analysis led him to believe, quite plausibly, that the status quo, in which Europe is expected to rely on American military spending and the American nuclear arsenal, has limited endurance. Whether we like it or not, it’s only a matter of time before a deeply-indebted American state begins to recede from its countless international guarantees, at which point proliferation of nuclear weaponry is inevitable — at least among wealthier states.

In other words, at some point the realities of geography and economics give way to the fact that — among other things — the US has limited resources, and nuclear deterrence works just as well with smaller states as it does with larger states. An enormous arsenal is unnecessary. All that is necessary is that potential adversaries are aware of the arsenal, and that it may be used. As Waltz noted, even small arsenals function as a deterrent thanks to the ever-present factor of uncertainty:

States are not deterred because they expect to suffer a certain amount of damage but because they cannot know how much damage they will suffer.

Moreover, the use of nuclear weapons is relatively less expensive than maintaining a large conventional force. Waltz continues:

Some countries may find nuclear weapons a cheaper and safer alternative to running economically ruinous and militarily dangerous conventional arms races. Nuclear weapons may promise increased security and independence at an affordable price.

(Indeed, this is precisely what President Eisenhower concluded when he chose to counter the Soviet Union’s Red Army not with with a comparable conventional military, but with a large American nuclear arsenal.)

Similar realities exist in East Asia where the American taxpayer is also expected to cover the cost of local deterrence against both Chinese and Russian expansion.

This demand that regional conflicts be made into a potential World War III has long been the modus operandi of the anti-proliferation movement and those who support the global status quo. For them, it is American citizens that are to foot the bill and up the ante to global war should any problems arise on the eastern frontier of NATO or in North Asia.

That trump has questioned this situation should be regarded simply as an outburst of common sense. Given the immense cost of maintaining the status quo, and the wealth enjoyed by states such as South Korea, Germany, and Japan, it continues to become less and less convincing that the United States is the only state that can provide stability in the region.

This fact doesn’t stop The Atlantic’s Sam Kleiner, who relies entirely on the opinions of American politicians who have opposed proliferation, in asserting: ”American presidents of both parties have understood the simple arithmetic involved — that the more countries have nuclear weapons, the more opportunities there are for nuclear war to break out, whether by design or by accident.”

Waltz specifically addressed Kleiner’s overall approach long ago when he noted: “Much of the writing about the spread of nuclear weapons has this unusual trait: It tells us that what did not happen in the past is likely to happen in the future, that tomorrow’s nuclear states are likely to do to one another what today’s nuclear states have not done.” For his part, Kleiner presents no evidence as to why a world primed for global nuclear war — which is what you get when you centralize nuclear power among a few megastates with global aspirations — is better than a world with more small and regional nuclear states.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to see why American politicians would agree on non-proliferation. Non-proliferation is good for the American state because it assists the American state (at a high cost to the taxpayers) in its effort to attain the position of global hegemon. (Mearsheimer defines a global hegemon as a country with “a capability to devastate its rivals without fear of retaliation.”) Although greater proliferation is likely to increase overall stability, it decreases the odds of the the US being able to obtain global hegemony. Of course, this same calculus applies to all large nuclear states. Naturally, the Russian state benefits from Ukraine giving up its nuclear power, just as the US state benefits from preventing the spread of nuclear power to other rival states.

So, we should not at all be surprised that the US government agrees proliferation is bad. Those who foot the bill, however, should take a more skeptical view.

It’s Too Late to Rely on Non-Proliferation

In any case, talk of US global hegemony is idle talk since the US has never achieved global hegemony, and is unlikely to ever do so. The US cannot attack Russia, for example, without fear of retaliation, and if trends continue as they do, China will continue to develop greater delivery capability both in terms of ground-based missiles and in terms of nuclear submarines. Once developed, nuclear armed subs can patrol the waters of the US coast to obtain short delivery time for nuclear missiles. Moreover, nuclear-armed India is developing missiles that can deliver payloads up to 10,000 kilometers. Thus, the US will soon be facing multiple large rivals with significant delivery capability, not counting the nuclear arsenals of “friendly” states such as France and the UK.

The American dream of containment of all other nuclear powers has long since become unrealistic.

Not surprisingly, more adroit observers of the situation have taken a more sanguine view toward proliferation. Eric Margolis, for example, suggests the more reasonable option is to let South Korea and Japan “go nuclear”:

Ending the pretense of nuclear virginity would make North Asia safer. China and North Korea would be much less likely to threaten Japan and South Korea if these latter nations had nuclear retaliatory forces and anti-missile systems.

Anyway, why can’t these grown-up democracies in Japan and South Korea have nuclear weapons when Washington has secretly allowed India and Israel to build powerful nuclear arsenals?

And yet, old habits die hard. The American military establishment is built on doctrines, ideas, and notions that come out of a world that existed in the 1950s and 60s when countries like China and India were dirt poor, and central Europe was still reeling from the Second World War. That world is gone. Nevertheless, modern American foreign-policy ideology continues to assume that the United States can hope to attain a lopsided superiority in weaponry that will allow it to manage regional conflicts across the globe with minimal risk of retaliation.

It remains to be seen if Trump has any awareness of these realities himself, or if his comments are simply campaign rhetoric. At the very least, Trump has accidentally stumbled upon a very real problem for the American state: it can no longer afford to manage the entire international order, especially in an age when numerous other states continue to expand their own ability to respond forcefully to American meddling.

View Details

Yesterday, we looked at how the European Union functions on a model of "democracy" that is based on very large constituency sizes, thus reducing access to policymakers, and reducing the ability of ordinary taxpayers to influence the lawmaking process. (The more residents there are for each elected official, the larger the constituency size.)

An analysis of constituency size showed that there are far, far more constituents per elected official in the EU Parliament than is typically the case for national legislatures in Western Europe.

Constituency size has been shown to correlate to government spending in many cases, as shown in research by Mark Thornton, George S. Ford, and Marc Ulrich. See here and here.

As Thornton et al. conclude:

[T]he evidence is very suggestive that constituency size provides an explanation for much of the trend, or upward drift in government spending, because of the fixed-sized nature of most legislatures. Potentially, constituency size could be adjusted to control the growth of government.

They note the reason for this appears to be diminished engagement between elected officials and constituents when constituency sizes are very large.

Also key in this analysis is the problem of "asymmetry" of interests between ordinary voters and minority interest groups. For example, a group of farmers interested in maintaining a subsidy will go to a lot of effort in order to lobby elected officials. This will be true even if the opportunity cost of access to elected officials is very high — the potential gains for lobbying success are very high. For voters who don't want to pay for the farmers' subsidies, however, the calculus is very different. Each farmer might receive thousands of dollars in subsidies. But each taxpayer only pays a small fraction of that to keep the subsidies flowing. A taxpayer may wish to lobby his elected official against the subsidy, but if meeting with an elected official is costly in terms of time and money, the taxpayer will quickly find it's not worth the trouble. Thus, lowered access to elected officials is more likely to prevent lobbying from individual voters than from established and well-funded interests.

Other factors mentioned by Thornton, et al. and others include:

Large constituencies increase the cost of running campaigns, and thus require greater reliance on large wealth interests for media buys and access to mass media. The cost of running a statewide campaign in California, for example, is considerably larger than the cost of running a statewide campaign in Vermont. Constituencies spread across several media markets are especially costly. Elected officials, unable to engage a sizable portion of their constituencies rely on large interest groups claiming to be representative of constituents. Voters disengage because they realize their vote is worth less in larger constituent groups. Voters disengage because they are not able to meet the candidate personally. Voters disengage because elections in larger constituencies are less likely to focus on issues that are of personal, local interest to many of the voters. The ability to schedule a personal meeting with an elected official is far more difficult in a large constituency than a small one. Elected officials recognize that a single voter is of minimal importance in a large constituency, so candidates prefer to rely on mass media rather than personal interaction with voters. Larger constituent groups are more religiously, ethnically, culturally, ideologically, and economically diverse. This means elected officials from that constituent group are less likely to share social class, ethnic group, and other characteristics with a sizable number of their constituents. Larger constituencies often mean the candidate is more physically remote, even when the candidate is at "home" and not at a distant parliament or congress. This further reduces access. On other words, there is compelling reason to believe that smaller is better.

The Case of the United States

In response to yesterday's article looking at EU representation, some astute readers noted that the US suffers from a similar problem.

This is true. In fact, among countries with elected national legislatures, the United States has one of the largest constituency sizes of all. As the first graph shows, the US is similar to Russia, Brazil, and Pakistan, but is far outside the trend even for those countries. Only India, with constituency sizes of more than a million people, has larger constituency sizes than the US in our sample.

Our second graph shows constituency sizes calculated using the total number of representatives in the national legislature. These include only elected representatives, and thus excludes the UK House of Lords, for example. In bicameral legislatures, totals from each house are added together. Thus, the US is 535 (100 Senators + 435 Representatives):

The United States is very unlike Western European national legislatures in this regard, and is even an outlier by Latin American standards. Overall, legislatures outside of Western Europe tend to have larger constituency sizes in general.

As we can see, in the United States, the average constituency size (or "district" size in the case of the US) is nearly 600,000. This is comparable to representation for member states of the EU in many cases. This total can also vary considerable from state to state, with the largest states having the largest district sizes. This is based on the population of each state divided by the number of members of Congress in each state (using current Census data):

In California, a district size, on average includes 677,000 people, which means each constituent must compete with 677,000 other people — not to mention large interest groups — for access to elected officials.

The picture is less stark at the state level. While Congress today manages the minutiae of daily life from wages to home loans, state governments also produce significant amounts of regulation and legislation.

In most cases, however, it is easier for constituents to gain access to state legislators. California remains, by far, the state with the largest constituency sizes, while smaller states, such as New Hampshire, Wyoming, Maine, and Alaska, have far smaller constituency sizes:

Changes Over Time

In most modern democracies, legislative size tends to increase at a much slower pace than population growth in general. In the United States, the size of the House of Representatives has been locked at 435 since 1929 with the Permanent Reapportionment Act of 1929. Ever since then, Congressional representation has been reapportioned based on relative population growth across the states, and not on growth in population.

When fixed at 435 Representatives (plus 96 Senators from 48 states), the population in the United States was 123,000,000. So, at the time, the average number of constituents per member of Congress was 231,000. That's a constituency size smaller than all but three states today. The size has grown about 156 percent from 1930 to 2010.

When looking at Congressional delegations at the state level, we find the largest constituency size in 1930 was in New York with 267,000, and the smallest was found in Nevada with a constituency size of only 30,000.

Constituency sizes have more than doubled over this time in most states, and in some states, the size has more than tripled. For the sake of a better scale, I have left Nevada off this list, since the increase in Nevada over this period was more than 1,200%:

Constituency sizes at the state level have been smaller. The Massachusetts House, for example, reached a total size of 635 in 1837. Given the population at the time, that works out to an average constituency size of a tiny 1,160 (excluding the state Senate). Even as recently at 1978, the Massachusetts House had 80 more members than it has today — with about 800,000 fewer people.

Out west, Colorado's General Assembly, for example, has always had 100 members. It had 100 members in 1876 when Colorado became a state, meaning that the average constituency size was about 1,900 people in 1880. Today, that has increased to around 53,000.

The Anti-Federalists Wanted Smaller Constituent Sizes

For a look at what was originally envisioned for constituency size in the United States, we can consult the Constitution itself, which mandates "the number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand." Noticing that the Constitution did not actually mandate increases in the size of the congress to match population increases, the anti-federalists had attempted to amend the constitution to ensure the legislature grew with population (see "article the first"). The anti-federalist Cato, in his Letter No. 5 noted "that the number of representatives are two few" among several "evils that will attend the adoption" of the new constitution. As usual, the opponents of the 1787 Constitution have been proven correct.

Nevertheless, in 1790, members of congress represented on average 37,000 people. In Massachusetts in 1800, for example, there were 422,000 people sharing 16 members of Congress. Senators were not directly elected at the time, however, so if we include only members of the House, the average constituency size in Massachusetts in 1800 was 30,142. To reach a constituent size like this today, the US Congress would require 10,000 members. If this strikes us as "impractical" then it's likely that the United States is far too large to offer anything that we might seriously call "representative government." It is far more likely that the notion of a single nation-state with 318,000,000 people is what is impractical.

Many Argue for Making Constituent Size Even Larger

In recent decades, elected officials have pressed to increase the size of constituencies, even as population growth makes them bigger every year. As we have noted, Massachusetts significantly reduced the number of representatives in its state house in 1978, and politicians in Pennsylvania are currently attempting to reduce the size of the state legislature. Advocates of such measures usually claim that reductions in representative totals will save money, but the dollar amounts saved are minute compared to the size of the state budget. It is claimed that six million dollars will be saved if Pennsylvania reduces the size of its legislature. But, the chances that the state budget will be reduced by six million is approximately zero, and the prospect of reducing member salaries or the immense staffs maintained by members does not appear to be on the table. In practice, reductions in legislator totals merely impose greater costs on private taxpayers and voters who will pay more dearly in terms of opportunity cost and cash in efforts to communicate with and influence policymakers. Meanwhile, reductions in legislative size reduces costs for lobbying groups which benefit from having fewer legislators to keep track of.

Advocates also claim that "technology" now makes large legislatures obsolete since constituents can send emails and make phone calls. In practice, personal relationships are an enormous factor in influencing votes, and larger constituencies make these relationships more inaccessible for ordinary people.

Technological advances argue more in favor of making legislatures larger. It is now easier than ever for larger numbers of people to interact in a large legislature. Gone are the days when it was necessary for everyone to gather in one room for a single vote, or for physically counting hands or yeas and nays. Members of Congress need not even be in Washington, DC to vote. State legislatures could be composed of hundreds of people who exchange bills, bill amendments, and count votes instantaneously thanks to technological advances. In the days of yore, large legislatures quickly became unruly thanks to cumbersome record-keeping and the length of time needed to draft bills and amendments. Those days are gone.

Constituent Size Is Just One Strategy

As noted by Thornton, et al., reducing constituent size could be a helpful strategy in reducing government spending, but my purposes here are not to suggest that democracies composed of small constituencies are some type of ideal form of government. Nor do I claim that the US Constitution should be regarded as an unassailable authority on these matters. Constituent size by itself cannot be used to ensure that human rights are protected or that peaceful people be left alone. Certainly, ideology is a major independent factor in limiting state power: if people want a large intrusive government, they're going to get it regardless of constituent size. And, as Nathan Benefield of the Commonwealth Institute has noted, other important factors include the size of legislative staffs, the degree to which legislators are "professional legislators" rather than "citizen legislators," and the size of legislative salaries.

The change over time in constituent sizes does call into question how modern defenders of the US political system can so blithely insist that it is illegitimate to oppose the federal government in the form of nullification or secession. "You have representatives in Congress!" is the common refrain that is supposed to silence dissent. But, as we have seen, "representation" today looks nothing at all like it did even in the early 20th century. Legislators are increasingly inaccessible, physically distant, wealthy, and expensive to influence. In many cases, they spend virtually the entire year thousands of miles from the people they are supposedly representing.

If this is "representation," our definition of the word has become thoroughly flawed.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article mistakenly included the unelected upper house of the Canadian parliament in the article's calculations. The article has been adjusted to include only the elected lower house.

View Details

When Sweden abandoned its open border with the rest of the Schengen Area, and started checking passports, that created a bottleneck in Denmark. Migrants and refugees were traveling through Denmark in large numbers, but when Sweden closed its border, many of those migrants stopped and stayed in Denmark.

Consequently, Denmark has now ended its open border policy as well, and is now turning people away at the Danish-German border. In response, the Swedes, Germans, and Danes have entered into "emergency talks" in Brussels in an attempt to save the open-border zone known as the Schengen Area from becoming a thing of the past.

The Schengen Area first splintered following the terrorist attacks in Paris late last year, and the French border controls remain in place to this day. Nicolas Sarkozy has declared "Schengen is dead."

De Facto Decentralization at Work

The result has been a de facto decentralization of border control in Europe — and thus greater overall decentralization in practice. Predictably, to counter this threat, the EU has attempted to impose more centralized government control on Europe in the form of a centralized bureaucracy and police force that will oversee border control.

This means politicians in Brussels will regulate how the border is administered in faraway Hungary and Poland. Naturally, member states have expressed concerns. "Don't worry," the head of the new border force has assured them. “[local] sovereignty is not at stake.” By which they mean, "local control."

But the attempt to "Euro-ize" the border merely illustrates the fact that the EU project is greatly concerned with further centralizing political power in Europe.

Freedom Doesn't Need a Centralized State

The EU's latest moves belie the EU's oft-repeated claim that it is about open borders, free trade, and other principles behind genuinely liberal government.

And yet, a central European state has never been necessary to achieve this goal, and the states that control the EU — namely Germany and France — have always been free to enact unilateral open borders, just as they are free to enact unilateral free trade.

However, the welfare state, government centralization, and bureaucratic control are so ingrained in the DNA of modern European elites that it would never occur to them to do much of anything nowadays without imposing a central bureaucratic state on the affairs of member states in the name of "freedom," "unity," or "human rights."

Nevertheless, if one really is in favor of greater freedom for people and trade, attempts at entering into international agreements to regulate the flow of people, capital, or goods is counterproductive to the stated goals. This is why most early liberals, including Vilfredo Pareto, J.B. Say, and early Richard Cobden all opposed international agreements.

But, never content with genuine laissez faire treatment of their neighbors, the architects of the EU instead created a means of imposing the will of the dominant states within the EU on the other member states.

For decades, they have managed to buy the support of the less powerful regimes with cash extracted from the hapless taxpayers of the more powerful EU nations. The result has been a large government-forced transfer of wealth from taxpayers in Germany, France, and the UK, to poorer states like Poland, Greece, Portugal, and Ireland.

The poorer states were happy for the "free" money, but some have remained protective of local control. Just as with the US, once the less powerful member states become dependent on money from the central government, they're much more easily convinced when it comes to surrendering local control to the central state.

In recent years, though, even this method of control has started to come up short.

Brussels Gets Aggressive

The reaction to the failure of the Schengen Area offers one example of the centralist impulse within the EU, but for another illustration of of how the EU works, we need look no further than the EU's reaction to Poland's recent elections.

In response to Poland's election of an allegedly "far right" party, German politicians, among others, have responded by calling for sanctions against Poland's government for supposed violations of the EU's requirements for freedom of speech.

Soon after, "Brussels...launched an unprecedented probe ... into whether Poland was breaching the EU’s democratic principles."

So, we get down to what the EU is really about. It's not about free trade or free movement. It's about controlling member states and dictating how member states will hold elections or conduct internal affairs.

This latest controversy comes on the heels of resistance from Hungary over border controls, and it was unsurprising when Hungary came to Poland's defense against what Hungarian PM Viktor Orban called "groundless measures from the rather pompous older democracies."

Moreover, Poland's latest conflict with the Germans comes after long-simmering annoyance with the fact that the Western Europeans control the European Pariament thanks to their larger populations.

In fact, back in 2007, Polish PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski violated one of the great taboos of European politics when he mentioned World War II and the fact that Poland too would have a very large population had the Germans not killed so many of them. Specifically, Kaczynski noted: "We are merely demanding what was taken from us ... If Poland had not had to live through the years of 1939-45, Poland would be today looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million [a population roughly equal to France today]."

This earned much condemnation from other states that are influential in Brussels (states mostly of Teutonic extraction) who said Poland was being unfair to Germany, although the Czech PM (perhaps unsurprisingly) was rather more understanding of Poland's position.

Poland has been repeatedly told to just "get over it" by EU politicians, but Poland (and the Eastern Europeans) are not simply reacting to some one-time calamity of the past, but a pattern of behavior in which large economic and political interests (including those of Western Europe) enthusiastically take advantage of their size and political influence to get what they want from less powerful states.

Universal Rights, Locally Enforced

The whole situation illustrates that in the EU, the endgame is political unity in which officials of the central government will be able to bring everyone in Europe under the rule of Brussels and its elites.

Free movement of workers, free trade, and free speech are all good things, but "freedom" imposed by far off politicians — who are ultimately unaccountable to the people who will be ruled by them — is hardly the way to ensure actual freedom in practice.

If the Poles make the mistake of limiting freedom of the press (for example), having a "remedy" imposed by EU agents would be a cure worse than the disease, and would invite far greater violations of civil liberties from a far more empowered EU state in the future. This is the perennial irony behind imposing a respect for universal rights from above, and was the reason that Murray Rothbard's position was that "rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local,"

Some will dispute the wisdom of this position and claim that a common government will prevent violence, and allow for a working out of conflicts in a parliamentary forum instead of on the battlefield.

If that were true, civil wars, rebellions, police states, massacres, and the whole gamut of violent conflicts that occur within the borders of a nation-state would not exist. Replacing interstate wars with intrastate wars is hardly "progress," and the answer lies not in centralization but in further decentralization and in regimes staying out of the internal affairs of its neighbors, especially in cases so minor and utterly irrelevant to the affairs of neighbors as in the case of Poland's recent elections.

Indeed, if common government is necessary for peace, why have Canada and the US been at peace with each other since 1815? Why have Mexico and the US been at peace since 1916? Why has there been no interstate wars beyond small border disputes between South American states for more than a century? (There have, of course, been multiple civil wars in South America during that time.)

As Ludwig von Mises pointed out many times, the reason for peace in these cases is not because of some government imposed from far-off elites, but because a widely-held desire for peaceful commerce has overcome the desire for military conquest. Only an ideological change can overcome the problems of military conflict.

Those who control the EU, however, want to take the shortcut in which "peace" is imposed by force from Brussels. But, if the regimes of Western Europe are so concerned about freedom of speech, or open borders, or free trade, let them set the example by embracing such things.

We shouldn't hold our breath. To do this would require these states to scale back their welfare states (as open borders are incompatible with welfare states), to embrace free speech which France and Germany reject, and to allow true free trade, which of course is a non-starter among the European elites of today.

But, this doesn't stop the EU from lecturing its less powerful member states about what freedom means. It's doubtful they see the irony, though.

View Details

[This article contains excerpts from a presentation given at the 70th anniversary of the publication of Human Action, in Vienna, at the Palais Coburg, November 23, 2019.

Mises surely would be pleased by the thought of this gathering today, to know that his Vienna still has a heartbeat in Europe, even as its politicians and bankers and academics all go in the wrong direction. He certainly would be pleased and amazed to know his work would become available across the world, in many languages, free and instantly online. Most of all he would be thrilled to know his name is better known today, and his work more widely read, than during his lifetime. What more could any intellectual or writer want? This alone is a huge achievement.

Yet while even Mises's harshest critics now acknowledge his influence, they do not read him much or understand him at all. A cursory search of the name "Mises" in the New York Times or Washington Post produces dozens of mentions in recent years, nearly always in the context of some nefarious takeover of government by free market radicals. Who knew Mises was an avatar of neoliberalism, something nobody quite defines but everybody knows is bad? The leftwing New Republic even asserts neoliberalism "emerged from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early twentieth century." And The Marginal Revolutionaries, a new book by Professor Janek Wasserman from the University of Alabama, just a few hours from Auburn, claims Mises and his movement "not only transformed economics and social theory, but changed our world."

When the Left creates a caricature of you, you know you have arrived.

For most of the last 70 years, Austrian economics, or at least Austrian economists, always looked West. This is why, since about the middle of the twentieth century, Austrian economics grew and flourished in the US, while it slowly atrophied in Vienna. It is why Janek Wasserman and others use the term "American Austrians," with some derision. The Viennese Austrians all seemed to go West.

Consider young Carl Menger, born in what is now the Polish city of Nowy Sącz. His schooling, in Krakow, Prague, and Vienna, took him westward both geographically and intellectually. His position at the University of Vienna must have felt like a cosmopolitan western outpost to a Galician, and his travels as tutor to Archduke Rudolph von Habsburg took him West, through continental Europe and the British Isles.

Mises of course moved westward throughout his life, from Lemberg to Vienna, then Geneva, and finally New York. Hayek too, from Vienna to the London School of Economics, then to the University of Chicago, and even a stint at the University of Arkansas(!) before retiring to the University of Freiberg in West Germany. Murray Rothbard moved from his beloved New York City (where he had been a protégé at Mises's seminar) to Las Vegas and the University of Nevada somewhat late in life. Even our special guest today, Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, seems to have had a westward orientation. From his birthplace in Peine, Lower Saxony, he headed at least a little West to university in Saarbruken, detoured slightly back to the East for graduate studies in Frankfurt, but then moved decisively West to New York, and then to Las Vegas to join Rothbard. Maybe Las Vegas in the 1980s and 90s was the high water mark, the westernmost reach of Mises's Vienna.

Now Dr. Hoppe has moved East, even beyond his native Germany to Istanbul. Maybe this is a metaphor for all of us who consider ourselves "Western." Have we become so accustomed to our conception of the West we fail to fully accept how truly illiberal and intellectually decadent it has become? After all, West always meant "new" and East always meant "old." West meant capitalism and East meant collectivism or mysticism.

But is that still true today? And is the Austrian school of economics ultimately geographic, theoretical, or sociological? In fact it is all three. We should consider whether, at least metaphorically, Austrian economics now finds itself looking back toward the East.

From an American perspective, rooted in our history as Anglo colonies, Vienna is the East. Even Germany is "Eastern" in a very important sense, because most Americans think "Western Civilization" is synonymous with Western Europe — which downplays Germany's influence and virtually ignores the Eastern Bloc and its geographic overlap with the former Habsburg Empire. Our great friend and philosopher David Gordon points out historian Jonathan Clark's book titled Our Shadowed Present, which examines the relationship between Britain and Europe. Clark contends, and David agrees, that Cold War intellectuals purposely used "the West" to shift focus away from the central role of Germany in European history.

But today the concept of East and West are metaphoric as much as geographic.

Maybe we need to turn back toward Vienna, toward the Balkans, the Baltics, the former Eastern Bloc, and even toward Asia to find people interested in what makes a free and prosperous society. We cannot ignore how sad, tired, and addled the West has become. We cannot ignore how many in the West simply no longer care about what makes us rich, or even worse imagine wealth will continue to manifest itself all around us regardless of incentives or state depredations. This is why we see the rise of candidates like Elizabeth Warren and growing support for socialism among the young across America and Europe.

Many in the West simply have given up.

The great investor and fan of Austrian economics Jimmy Rogers says that young people seeking their fortune in 1900 moved West to America, while young people seeking their fortune in 2000 moved East to Asia — which is why he raises his children in Singapore. Of course recent events in Hong Kong show the terrible reality of Chinese state authoritarianism, but the people of the East in the twenty-first century want to get rich, to build wealth, to enjoy all the material comforts of the West — while the West is reduced to socialist schemes for redistribution of already existing wealth. The West consumes capital created by our grandparents, the East builds capital for their grandchildren.

As an aside, China is perhaps the fastest growing market for interest in Austrian economics. We constantly receive requests for materials from Chinese professors who teach at universities we have never heard of, in cities of five or ten million people which are scarcely known in the West.

Consider these questions about people in the East and people in the West: who saves and invests more of their income? Who buys more gold? (in fact the Chinese, Turks, Russians, Indians). Who seeks meaningful and rigorous education for their children, not hyphenated-studies? Who is clear-eyed about human nature, and who is starry-eyed? Who puts more emphasis on family, or even wants children? Who is building, with long time horizons, and who is merely consuming?

Where does Mises's vision resonate most strongly today?

It has been 70 years since Human Action, but 100 years since Nation, State, and Economy and nearly that long since Liberalism. In those two relatively short texts Mises almost literally laid out a blueprint for Western governments to enjoy prosperity and peace in the aftermath of the Great War.

Dr. Joe Salerno describes Mises's program as "liberal nationalism," a recognition of nation states but rooted in property and rigorous self-determination at home — even to the point of allowing secession for political, linguistic, or ethnic minorities. Misesian liberal nationalism requires laissez-faire at home, robust free trade with neighbors to avoid the tendency toward autarky, and non-interventionist foreign policy to avoid the tendency toward war and empire.

We can only imagine what the West might look like today if those books had been read and absorbed at the time. If western governments had been even somewhat reasonable over the past century: consuming, say, only 10 or 15 percent of private wealth in taxes; maintaining reasonable currencies backed by gold; mostly staying out of education, banking, and medicine; and most of all avoiding supra-national wars and military entanglements, we might still live in a gilded age like pre-war Vienna — but with the unimaginable benefits of today's technology and material advances.

But liberalism didn't hold. It didn't hold in the West, or anywhere else. It never took root in the full Misesian sense anywhere, and never took root anywhere for long. That's why all of us are here today. If the world had listened to Mises, even somewhat — if western states had committed to his prescription of sound money, markets, and peace, libertarian and anarcho-capitalist theory might have been unnecessary. We might merely grumble about the state, instead of seeing it as an existential threat to civilization.

The flaw in the Misesian liberal program was democratic voting, something obvious to us in hindsight but hardly obvious a century ago in a Europe just emerging from monarchy. From Mises's perspective, democracy held the promise of liberation from aristocracy. He saw democracy as the mechanism for peaceful transfers of political power, and while this has proven somewhat true, it certainly has not been uniformly true since the interwar years in which he wrote. Democracy did not prevent Franco or Hitler or Tito, and we need only look at Brexit and Trump to see the limits of democratic consensus when the wrong guy or wrong cause wins. Turns out "we" don't really believe in democracy after all.

But more importantly, we now understand how democratic voting necessarily and inexorably erodes property rights. Politicians and their electorates benefit from high time preference, from living today at the expense of tomorrow — not only through government spending, debt, and borrowing, but also through artificially low interest rates, all courtesy of central bank policies so crazed not even the prescient Mises would recognize them as banking practices today. Voters and the political class in a liberal democracy have all the wrong incentives, and thus any liberal program conducted through mass democratic voting contains the seeds of its own destruction. Property and laissez-faire cannot survive democracy for long.

So while Mises's liberalism provided a profound and underappreciated blueprint for the West, it didn't hold. We have to accept this and grapple with this. Western governments could have chosen to leave people alone, they did not. They could have chosen sound money, they chose political fiat. They could have chosen peace, they chose entanglements. The next time a supposed "classical liberal" — an artificial term, as our friend David Gordon explains — criticizes the excesses of Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist theory, or bemoans breakaway movements like Brexit, or attacks AFD in Germany or Orban in Hungary, or is appalled by Trump and anti-globalist populism — remind them that these developments happened as reactions to the failures of bastardized Western liberalism. Elites in the twentieth century failed us, on every front: war and peace, money and banking, medicine, education. And they have the temerity to wonder why populists gain support?

The West didn't listen to Mises, so it got Rothbard and Hoppe!

If liberal democracy has failed to defend property, liberty, and peace in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, it is entirely justified to consider what should replace it. Of course the Left offers nothing but its program of statism, egalitarianism, positive rights, and identity politics-- all totally illiberal in design and practice. Meanwhile the Right offers only a jumbled mix of constitutionalism, "limited government," and "rule of law," while largely sharing progressive ends but advocating slightly different means. Both share the neoconservative foreign policy of US hegemony and occupation — also known as democratic nation-building.

Therefore it is up to us to create a vision for the present age. It is up to us to reconsider Misesian liberal nationalism for the twenty-first century. Not an easy task, but we have the benefit of hindsight. We know what civilization and society require, and must avoid, because we have the twentieth century to learn from. We also have the work of Rothbard and Hoppe, post-Mises, to guide us and correct us.

What does a twenty-first century Misesian program look like, as supplemented by Rothbard and Hoppe?

First, it recognizes nation is not necessarily state; the former can coalesce organically while the latter is always artificial;It is rooted in property and markets, rejecting the utopian virus of egalitarianism that animates the Left;It advocates for smaller, decentralized entities — entities more like Liechtenstein or Switzerland and less like Germany or the US, with democratic mechanisms strictly limited to local councils and local matters;It permits breakaway entities for any group or minority;Beyond this, it advocates fully private communities along Hoppean lines;In particular, it demands private provision of education, medicine, and retirement pensions;It rejects central banking in favor of private, competitive money and banking — so no monetary hedonism is possible;It is strictly non-interventionist and rejects any standing military; andfinally, for its own self-preservation, the twenty-first century Misesian model encourages and nurtures the vital intermediary institutions of society, including faith and family, and rejects libertine culture. It thus recognizes human nature, and acknowledges the need for internal governance to reduce the need for external governance. It encourages real culture over pop culture, intellectualism over anti-intellectualism, truth and beauty over mindless pursuits, and real liberal arts education, including history and classical languages, over modern curricula and dumbed-down hyphenated studies. In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, our revolution is paleo, not neo. It takes its cues from Vienna, and finds its origins in a better, older, Misesian worldview. It increasingly looks East, not West to the failing and sclerotic thinking of Frankfurt or Brussels or London or New York or Washington DC. It is localist and decentralist, not globalist. And it places property front and center in the liberal program, as Mises did 100 years ago.

View Details

The Americas are unusual because citizenship is often granted based on birthplace, rather than on the citizenship or place of origin of one's parents. Countries in North and South America have historically tended to more freely grant citizenship due to their relatively low populations, abundant land, and a historical dependence on migrant labor to take advantage of the region's vast natural resources.

Thus the United States, as with other states in the Americas, has tended to grant citizenship to newcomers both in large numbers and from a large variety of backgrounds.

But there are some groups in the United States who have made sure place of birth won't get you very far in terms of integrating into the local community. And if one's parents have the wrong ancestry, you can usually forget about ever gaining full "citizenship."

I speak, of course, about Indian tribes in the United States where eligibility for membership often depends very much on who your grandparents were.

A History of Limiting Tribal Membership The term "citizenship" isn't generally used to refer to membership in a tribe, but it is analogous in many ways. After all, being enrolled in a tribe gives one access to the tribe's political system, and to the economic benefits that come with membership. This includes access to some federal programs such as Indian Health Care. But membership can also bring benefits specific to each tribe, such as access to tribal lands and even cash benefits.

Tribal membership can come with both material and psychic benefits. For those who have grown up on a reservation or married a member of a certain tribe, the terms of tribal membership are obviously very important. But there are material advantages as well. It is not the case that all Indian reservations are impoverished with no resources. Median incomes for tribal residents of reservations can range from poverty-level — as in the case of the Fort Peck reservation — to well above the US median income, as with the Agua Caliente reservation.

[RELATED: "Why Indian-Tribe Sovereignty Is Important" by Ryan McMaken]

This the case for members of tribes that disburse dividends from tribal business dealings. Revenues from these enterprises can be substantial in tribes that own oil wells and casinos.

The Southern Ute Indian tribe of Colorado, for example, owns stakes in a wide variety of natural resource extraction operations. It has a casino. In 2017, it won a major lawsuit with the federal government which resulted in a $126 million settlement.

And that's a big deal because the Southern Ute tribe has only about 1,500 members. In the case of tribes like the Tulalip tribes of Washington State, membership brings a stake in tribal ownership of casinos, shopping centers, and other investments.

So, it's easy to see why limiting membership has its advantages. But if membership is increased, the per capita benefits of membership diminish (all else being equal.)

So how to limit membership? Among US tribes, the issue often comes down to blood quantum.

"Blood Quantum" The blood quantum standard didn't start with limiting access to earning from oil wells. The "benefits" of membership in the late nineteenth century mostly consisted of stingy consolation prizes for tribes evicted from their lands. According to Russell Thornton:

The process of enrollment in a Native American tribe has historical roots that extend back to the early nineteenth century. As the U.S. government dispossessed native peoples, treaties established specific rights, privileges, goods, and money to which those party to a treaty—both tribes as entities and individual tribal members—were entitled. The practices of creating formal censuses and keeping lists of names of tribal members evolved to ensure an accurate and equitable distribution of benefits.

At first, this was all determined by the federal government, but over time, the tribes themselves began to determine who could be considered a member of each tribe. Thornton continues:

...American Indian tribal governments have won the right to determine their own membership: "The courts have consistently recognized that in the absence of express legislation by Congress to the contrary, an Indian tribe has complete authority to determine all questions of its own membership."

These requirements can vary considerably by tribe. The most restrictive tribes require "one-half degree blood quantum" which means one full-blood parent, or two parents who themselves are each "one-half" of the ancestry in question. (Only the Northern Ute tribe of Utah has a higher requirement at five-eighths.)

Some of the least restrictive tribes require only "one-sixteenth degree blood quantum," or proof that one is descended from an ancestor who was a tribal member.

And it's tribe-specific. While many white people think all Indians are pretty much the same, the tribes certainly don't see it that way. Being "one-half" Cheyenne won't get you very far if you're looking to enroll in the Navajo tribe.

Sometimes, tribal members vote on changing blood quantum requirements. In 2013, for example, the Northern Utes voted on whether or not the blood quantum requirement should be lowered. The measure apparently failed, since as of 2015, the Southern Ute Drum reported the blood quantum requirement was still five-eighths.

More recently, however, the Red Lake Nation's tribal council voted to expand membership. The approved measure declared that all currently-enrolled members of the tribe will be henceforth considered to have four-fourths blood quantum. This means the descendants of current members will have less trouble meeting the tribe's one-fourth blood quantum requirement in the future.

The Red Lake Council shifted its policy because it realizes if tribes rigorously enforce blood quantum standards without exception, and don't adjust over time, membership is likely to dwindle until the tribe goes extinct. Given the way the math works, when blood-quantum requirements are high, any intermarriage outside the tribe — even to a member of another tribe — can lead to the children of that union becoming ineligible for membership.

When the Northern Ute were considering changing their own requirements, one former Ute official noted:

"We have children who are all ‘Indian’ but [do] not have the required blood quantum of 5/8 Ute blood and cannot be enrolled in any tribe right now,” he said. “In some instances, the child has both parents enrolled but still can’t make the blood quantum!”

Not surprisingly, the issue remains controversial among Indians. Many note that it is all quite convenient for the whites that blood-quantum can result in many tribal members being stripped of their tribal identities over time.The origins of blood quantum are fundamentally anti-Indian in nature. Once tribes gained control over setting their own standards, however, tribes were able to use the policy to reinforce tribal sovereignty. Moreover, the current theory underlying the blood-quantum policy appears to reject the idea that there are physiological differences between races. It simply serves as a convenient -albeit highly imperfect - standard for measuring a person's familial connection to the tribe. Besides, tribal membership was originally determined arbitrarily by whites based on an individual's appearance, dress, or language, and not according to any sort of serious attempt at genetics or racialist theories about physiology. See Schmidt, Ryan W. "American Indian Identity and Blood Quantum in the 21st Century: A Critical Review" Journal of Anthropology, Volume 2011 (https://www.hindawi.com/journals/janthro/2011/549521/) The hope among white policymakers was, according to historian Elizabeth Rule, "Indians would literally breed themselves out and rid the federal government of their legal duties to uphold treaty obligations."

Tribal Sovereignty Although accidental, blood-quantum also has its upside for tribes. Tribal populations can use it to assert control over their own lands and to determine membership in their own communities. As Rule notes: "it's all part of tribes deciding on their own terms, in their own ways, utilizing their own sovereignty [to decide] what approach is best for them."

Given that tribal membership can bring very real benefits to individual members — both material and immaterial — self-preservation suggests that the tribes can't simply let anybody join. After all, tribal populations are small, and are surrounded by far larger alien populations. To open up tribal membership — and its benefits — to anyone and everyone would likely lead to the tribe being quickly overwhelmed by outsiders.

Not surprisingly, then, there is an enduring tension between the need to limit tribal membership while also not allowing blood-quantum requirements to destroy tribal populations. Tribal members don't want their communities to disappear through intermarriage. But they also don't want to be displaced by outsiders who have no stake in maintaining the tribe's culture. This control over membership is especially important for tribes given there are open borders between tribal lands and non-tribal lands in the US. Although, tribes vary in how much say individual members have in selling property to non-tribal members, many non-Indians live on reservations. In many cases, Indians make up less than one-third of all residents within reservation boundaries.

Can Communities Decide? This brings us back to the immigration issue.

For most of us, the idea of applying notions of "blood quantum" to membership in our own communities is a non-starter. But broadly speaking, if members of Indian tribes can "decid[e] on their own terms ... what approach is best for them," on what principle ought this be denied to other groups?

Perhaps the biggest practical problem that confronts us is the problem of scale. The tribes with the largest enrollment — the Cherokee and Navajo — number around 300,000 members each. Many tribes' enrollment total around just a few thousand. The interests of tribal members are far more specific, limited, and identifiable, than would be the case in a country like the US where a very diverse population of hundreds of millions is spread across most of a continent.

Of course, even at the level of a small tribe, the so-called "will of the community" is always problematic. It always involves some groups — the winning side — determining policy for the losing side.

It is arguably possible to claim that most members of a small tribe share many common interests. But such claims become more absurd the larger the scale becomes. While many Americans continue to indulge in the fantasy that all Americans share "a common culture," this was never true, and certainly not true now. 100 years ago, a native-born Catholic Hispanic in Southern Colorado did not exactly share a common culture with a native-born WASP in Cleveland. Once we're beyond ultra-basic policies such as prohibitions on murder, we can hardly say it's easy to determine what policies are in the interests of the nation overall.

This is certainly the case for immigration policy. As Zachary Yost has noted, it strains the boundaries of common sense to put policies governing citizenship and immigration into the hands of any group that thinks itself qualified to pick the "right" policy for a nation of 320 million people.

[RELATED: "Immigration Policy Must Be Decentralized" by Ryan McMaken]

On top of tribal membership, there is also the issue of residency. Should tribal populations or their governments determine who can legally live within the boundaries of tribal lands? It's a difficult issue at any scale and one that reminds us of the important distinction between immigration and naturalization. Barring tribal members from selling or leasing land to non-tribal members is migration issue separate from whether newcomers ought to be granted membership in the tribe.

Ultimately, the question of limiting tribal membership raises important questions of whether or not any community of individuals should collectively assert control over citizenship. For other communities considering their own responses to issues of migration and naturalization, the challenges of maintaining tribal sovereignty may suggest that a policy of decentralization and restrictive naturalization — coupled with tolerance for porous borders — can offer some answers.

View Details

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled the legal rights of members of the Crow tribe are not void simply because a US state tries to legislate them away.

In the case of Herrera v. Wyoming, the US Supreme court overturned the lower courts' findings that tribal rights (established in an 1868 treaty with the United States government) in Wyoming had ceased when Wyoming became a state in 1890.

According to the case summary:

In 2014, Wyoming charged petitioner Clayvin Herrera with off-season hunting in Bighorn National Forest and being an accessory to the same. The state trial court rejected Herrera’s argument that he had a protected right to hunt in the forest pursuant to the 1868 Treaty, and a jury convicted him.

The right to hunt was limited to "unoccupied" lands, and Herrera contended both that the National Forest lands in which he was hunting was unoccupied, and that he had a right to hunt there due to treaty stipulations.

The court did not rule on whether or not the specific place Herrera was hunting was "occupied," but focused instead on whether or not tribal-members' rights continued to exist in accordance with an extant treaty. The court found these rights do still exist, but Herrera may still be found guilty if it is established the land on which he was hunting is not unoccupied.

Whether or not Herrera is ultimately found guilty, the court's findings are important because they potentially establish a higher standard of sovereignty for tribal governments than had been previously admitted by the courts.

After all, the basic premise of treaties between the tribes and US government — at least as communicated to the tribes themselves — was that the tribes were sovereign entities entering intro treaties with another sovereign entity (i.e., the US government.) Over time, the US government took advantage of the tribes' lack of de facto independence to reinterpret treaties as documents subject to unilateral amendment and abrogation by the US Congress.

Even worse, state governments began to assert their own authority over tribes, even though the tribes were not parties to any sort of agreement with the state governments.

In recent decades, courts have slowly begun to limit state jurisdiction over tribes with the effect of providing more autonomy to tribes. Perhaps most famous among these decisions is the 1987 case California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians in which the court determined state governments could not prevent tribes from offering legal gambling within their own borders (in most cases). The result was political decentralization and greater access to legal gambling for non-tribal members. The subsequent rise the Indian gaming industry has greatly improved the standard of living for many Indians.

In Herrera vs. Wyoming, the court has now further established that state governments cannot simply override treaty-established tribal law whenever it suits state legislatures.

But this isn't the only case this year which has strengthened tribal independence.

In March, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Yakama tribe in Washington State Dept. of Licensing v. Cougar Den, Inc. The Court held that the Yakama Nation Treaty of 1855 preempts state attempts to tax fuel purchased by a tribal corporation for sale to tribal members. The State of Washington insisted it could tax tribal fuel transported on state highways. The Supreme Court disagreed and took a relatively broad interpretation of the treaty's provisions guaranteeing free use of the state's highways.

In both cases, the cases were decided by a 5-4 vote with Neil Gorsuch siding with the so-called liberal wing of the Court in upholding tribal rights.

In his concurring opinion on the Yakama case, Gorsuch wrote:

Really, this case just tells an old and familiar story. The State of Washington includes millions of acres that the Yakamas ceded to the United States under significant pressure. In return, the government supplied a handful of modest promises. The state is now dissatisfied with the consequences of one of those promises. It is a new day, and now it wants more. But today and to its credit, the court holds the parties to the terms of their deal. It is the least we can do.

Many left-wing publications have expressed surprise that the Gorsuch sided with the "liberals" in these two cases, although more astute observers should not be confused. After all, Gorsuch, unlike the conservative wing of the court, has tended to side frequently with arguments in favor of decentralization and limitations on both state and federal power. His position in these two cases appears consistent with these general leanings.

Moreover, it is likely not a coincidence that Gorsuch is the only Supreme Court justice with extensive legal experience outside of the eastern United States. Gorsuch served as an appellate judge for the Tenth Circuit, which means he heard cases for states significantly impacted by conflicts between states and tribes, including New Mexico, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Utah. Meanwhile, nearly all other members of the court spent their appellate careers along the East Coast of the United States. For these members, as for most Americans outside a few Western states, experience with the realities of tribes and tribal lands is extremely limited.

Decentralization and Local Sovereignty Matters These two cases, of course, are just very small steps in the right direction. For the most part, Congress can still abrogate and amend treaties on its own with precious little input from the tribes themselves. These recent cases help to establish greater tribal sovereignty in the face of state law, but do little — on their own — to enhance tribal sovereignty when it comes to federal legislation.

Some conservatives, of course, might wrongly interpret these decisions as attacks on state-level sovereignty by lessening state control over its own territory. This, however, misses the point.

Correctly imagined, both state governments and tribal governments ought to have far greater independence both from federal control, and from each other. In practice, for example, the entire northeast corner of Arizona, which is mostly Navajo tribal land, ought to not be considered Arizona territory at all. Nor should it be considered US territory. As Kevin Bourgault, a member of the Skokomish tribe, has (correctly) noted:

Tribes are the sole entities in our society with established treaty rights... As sovereign nations, tribes are equivalent political entities to the states in which they are located.

This is not the de facto reality today, but it should be. And it ought to be recognized as the legal standard in conflicts between tribes and government bodies in the United States. Moreover, as I have noted here, tribal sovereiegnty is an important limiting factor on federal power. If we are to take decentralization seriously, the sovereignty of locally-controlled tribal lands should be a priority, and be seen as one key factor in developing meaningful checks on federal power through local sovereignty, nullification, and secession.

View Details

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported on a remarkable development in Mexico. In an article titled "Losing Faith in the State, Some Mexican Towns Quietly Break Away" we discover that some municipalities in Mexico are turning to de facto secession in order to put a stop to the rampant drug-cartel violence that has become so problematic:

Tancítaro represents a quiet but telling trend in Mexico, where a handful of towns and cities are effectively seceding, partly or in whole. These are acts of desperation, revealing the degree to which Mexico’s police and politicians are seen as part of the threat.

Visit three such enclaves — Tancítaro; Monterrey, a rich commercial city; and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, just outside the capital — and you will find a pattern. Each is a haven of relative safety amid violence, suggesting that their diagnosis of the problem was correct.

But why have these areas become safer?

All three of these areas are dealing with the problem of organized crime and corruption in slightly different ways. But all of the solutions involve working around the established political systems.

In the cases of Tancítaro and Monterrey, private owners stepped in to provide security in places where crime had run out of control:

[In Tancítaro it] began with an uprising. Townspeople formed militias to eject both the cartel, which effectively controlled much of Michoacán, and the local police, who were seen as complicit. Orchard owners, whose families and businesses faced growing extortion threats, bankrolled the revolt.

This left Tancítaro without police or a government, whose officials had fled. Power accumulated to the militias that controlled the streets and to their backers, an organization of wealthy avocado growers known as the Junta de Sanidad Vegetal, or Plant Health Council. Citizens sometimes call it the Junta.

Nearly four years in, long after other militia-run towns in Michoacán collapsed into violence, the streets remain safe and tidy.

The reform has also been largely a byproduct of private interests in Monterrey as well:

If Tancítaro seceded with a gun, then the city of Monterrey, home to many top Mexican corporations, did it with a Rolodex and a handshake.

Rather than ejecting institutions, Monterrey’s business elite quietly took them over — all with the blessing of their friends and golf partners in public office.

[Local business owners] hired a consultant, who advised top-to-bottom changes and replaced nearly half the officers. They hired lawyers to rewrite kidnapping laws and began to coordinate between the police and the families of victims.

When the governor later announced an ambitious plan for a new police force, intended to restore order, he again invited business leaders in. C.E.O.s would now oversee one of the most central functions of government. They hired more consultants to put into effect the best and latest thinking in policing, community outreach, anything that could stop the violence tearing through their city. They bankrolled special housing and high salaries for officers.

Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, however, took a different approach:

Neza inverted Monterrey’s model: Rather than establishing an independent police force and co-opting the political system, Neza established an independent political system and co-opted the police.

Mexico’s establishment parties are more than parties. They are the state. Loyalists, not civil servants, run institutions. Officials have little freedom to stretch and little incentive to investigate corruption that might implicate fellow party members. Most are shuffled between offices every few years, cutting any successes short.

Neza, run by a third party, the left-wing P.R.D., exists outside of this system. Its leaders are free to gut local institutions and cut out the state authorities.

But merely cutting out cartels and local corrupt government employees isn't enough.

The leaders of these administrative secession movements must also deal with state-level and federal government institutions in Mexico — and that's no easy task.

The locals in these communities, however, are well aware of the threat that higher-up government officials pose, and, in Neza local officials have only managed to carry out reforms because they have held both drug gangs "and the Mexican state at bay." In fact, "[t]he state police are treated like foreign invaders."

But, given the way that the United Mexican States — to use Mexico's formal name — functions as a republic, the deck is stacked against local reform movements.

Mexico: a Top-down Political System When confronted with the issue of Mexico's ongoing crime problem, many observers have been tempted to simply declare that it's unnecessary to look beyond "culture" to find the essential variable that makes the difference.

Indeed, many Mexicans themselves might agree with that assessment. In his book Mañana Forever?, Former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda points to numerous aspects of Mexican culture as being an impediment to economic progress.

On the other hand, an overemphasis on culture fails to account for the characteristics of a society's government institutions, which may clearly be problematic in themselves.

A nation's political culture does not exist independent of its political institutions, and its political institutions reinforce the political culture.

For example, had the United State's colonial period been characterized by an activist and overbearing regime — instead of by "benign neglect" from imperial officials who tolerated a great deal of local control for many decades — American political institutions today would be quite different.

Similarly, the way that political institutions are constructed in Mexico, both now and historically, have greatly influenced the ability of local governments to seek out meaningful solutions to problems like crime.

When we look more closely at Mexico's political institutions we quickly find that, compared to its American neighbor, Mexico leans much more toward centralization of political power. The tendency toward centralization dates back to the days of Spanish colonial law, and the Spanish footprint has never quite gone away.

The Mexican system is not a unitary system, however. The Mexican constitution is clear that the federal government, the states, and even municipal units are all units that share power and enjoy certain protections under the Constitution. The Mexican Constitution even has something equivalent to the American Tenth Amendment, Article 124, which states that "powers not expressly granted by this Constitution to federal officials are understood to be reserved to the States."

Nevertheless, while Mexico is technically a federal republic, the federal government exercises far more power — relative to the 31 constituent states — than the US federal government does relative to the 50 US states.

Nor is this a static situation. As with the United States of America, "during the nineteenth century, the [Mexican] states enjoyed considerably more autonomy," and things have changed over time:

the Constitution was amended 415 times between 1917 and August 2004. "Almost half of these reforms were aimed at "strengthening" the federal government and thus, given the nature of Mexico's presidential system, also at increasing the federal executive power. Although the municipalities have experienced an evolution toward decentralization during the past 20 years, the states, in contrast, have suffered a deep reduction of their autonomy.Juan Marcos Gutierrez Gonzalez, "United Mexican States" in Constitutional Origins, Structure and Change in Federal Countries, edited by John Kincaid and G. Alan Tarr. p 233.

Calls for decentralization have increased somewhat since 2000 when the system of one-party rule that had dominated Mexico for decades finally ended. Until the late 1990s, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) essentially had a lock on the federal government, and on most state governments as well.

By 2000, though, other parties had gained enough of a foothold at the state level to finally win a national election for another party — specifically, the National Action Party (PAN). This allowed some decentralization efforts to move forward, but the changes have hardly been revolutionary.

Even under the PRI before 2000, there was enough dissatisfaction with the central government to act as an impetus for some decentralization measures.

The 1990s produced reforms such as handing education policy over to the states. Municipalities in recent decades have also solidified their status as entities with "exclusive jurisdiction in matters respecting basic public functions and services, such as potable water, sewerage and drainage ... construction of urban infrastructure, public safety, and transit."Juan Marcos Gutierrez Gonzalez, "United Mexican States" in Constitutional Origins, Structure and Change in Federal Countries, edited by John Kincaid and G. Alan Tarr. p 215

But in all these cases, the federal government has maintained the lion's share of control of government funding. As The Economist noted in 2003, most government revenue, including all levels of government, flows to the federal level alone:

Power may be dispersed, but money is not. About 80% of federal revenues are appropriated by the centre; most of the rest falls to the states, though 5% is spent by the municipalities. In Brazil, by contrast, the federal government controls only around half of total government revenues.

Under Mexico's law of “fiscal co-ordination”, the states' powers to raise local revenues are restricted. They consist chiefly of fairly small taxes on payrolls and on cars; municipalities must rely on symbolic property taxes. At one extreme, the Federal District, the quasi-state which includes much of Mexico City, raises about 45% of its $8 billion budget itself. Most states are at the other extreme—lucky if they gather 10% of their spending.

For the other 90%, they must rely on federal transfers, divided up under a notoriously complicated formula dating from 1980.

The situation had not changed markedly by 2018 with Robert Velasco-Alvarez noting:

According to Moody’s, the average Mexican state collects only 10 percent of its income. The other 90 percent of the states’ budgets comes in the form of federal government transfers.When Mexican taxpayers pay their taxes to Mexico city, their communities do get much of the money back as federal transfers. The problem is that the money first goes through Mexico City — where Party officials and other federal agents take their cut — and then is paid out to states based on formulas decided by federal officials. A former head of our secretary of the Treasury’s Unit for Coordination with the States claims that municipalities account for only 1.1 percent of Mexico’s tax revenues.

By contrast, in the United States, state and local tax collection — while certainly less than that of federal receipts — amounts to over forty percent the size of federal revenues. In numerous states, state revenues alone — not counting local revenues — reach thirty percent the size of federal revenues. When we look at federal aid to states as a percentage of state revenues, we find that rarely does federal spending amount to more than 35 percent of state revenues.

In other words, states in Mexico are considerably more reliant on federal spending than is the case in the US.For more details on revenue formulas, collections, and spending in relation to Mexican federalism, see Emily Edmonds Elías's 1997 paper "Fiscal Decentralization and Municipal Governance in Mexico The Case of Chihuahua." (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.487.7286&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

There had been attempts to further reform this situation in 2007 with a new "fiscal federalism" effort, but funding nonetheless remained lopsidedly under the control of the federal government. Fiscal federalism had partly been pushed with the goal of increasing the fiscal independence of state and local governments, but the reality has not measured up.

Mexican Crime and Centralized Political ControlOver time, the effect has been one in which state and municipal governments rely on the federal government to fund local operations like roads and public safety. This then distorts the local political reality by making state and municipal local politicians turn toward the federal government for money, and not toward the resident taxpayers who actually pay the bills in their states and cities.

Velasco-Alvarez blames this disconnect for much of the state and municipal governments' apparent unwillingness to crack down on crime:

As organized criminal activity has spiraled out of control in Mexico, two federal administrations have been unable to regain control entirely. At least, there is increasing awareness that Mexico’s national institutions cannot solve the problem. However, there is little discussion as to why our organizations at the state and local levels are ineffective at enforcing the rule of law. The importance of Mexican fiscal federalism in this explosion of criminal behavior is notably underemphasized. It is critical for the national security of both Mexico and the United States to understand this relationship...

This fiscal arrangement is the basis of Mexico's current political equilibrium. Governors operate detached from the people who elect them. And, despite its leverage over states’ finances, the federal government is unable to keep the corruption in check. Although citizens benefit from the decreased tax burden, they end up saddled with terrible governance and increasing graft at the state level.

For Velsaco-Alvarez, and for many others who advocate for a more locally-controlled political system, major reforms are necessary that will remove federal restriction on the ability of states and municipalities to raise revenue independent of the federal government.

According to Gutierrez Gonzalez, over the past decade, the "Reforma del Estado" effort has continued to advocate for reforms such as these, including efforts to lessen the powers of the national presidency and "Allowing the states and municipalities to recover major and minor taxation powers as sources of revenue."

According to Tim Campbell in The Quiet Revolution: Decentralization and the Rise of Political Participation in Latin American Cities, decentralization efforts have been an issue throughout Latin America, and is part of a region-wide effort to assert local control in the wake of decades of domination from central governments. As an example, Campbell relates how some local governments have attempted to do this without changes to federal law.

Large cities and small have found many ways to gather more income on their own. Most mayors, if they take the trouble to review property tax systems, as many did upon reaching office, recognized that simply by increasing coverage and updating property values, their represent system of tax administration would yield substantial returns.Campbell, The Quiet Revolution, p 124.

Campbell notes that with similar strategies in Tijuana, local revenue "increased 58 percent from 1989 to 1994." A major downside to this is that local governments have no ability to reduce federal taxes while increasing local revenues. Thus, the overall tax burden only increases. The upside is that federal power is somewhat reduced in relation to local power.

While taxpayers — especially Mexican ones — are not known to cheer efforts to increase their taxes, resentment over taxes is mitigated if the taxpayers feel they have something to show for it. As one mayor in Campbell's study remarked: "when taxpayers see they are getting new services, they are willing to pay."

In Mexico, though, all too many residents aren't seeing "services" of any kind, and most notably absent are basic public safety services. Taxpayers continue to pay their taxes, primarily to Mexico City, but the promised services aren't materializing.

Consequently, many townspeople have taken matters into their own hands, as they have done in Nezahualcóyotl, Monterrey, and Tancítaro. Realizing they're powerless to force any improvements from Mexico City, they've turned instead to throwing out local officials, partnering with local private businesses, and divorcing themselves from the national power structure.

Needless to say, the Mexican government and Mexican nationalists have not often looked kindly on these efforts, and efforts to breakaway from the federal government's control have been met with knee-jerk opposition to federalism efforts. As David Merchant and Paul Rich note, these fears of nationalists aren't totally unfounded:David Merchant and Paul Rich, "Prospects for Mexican Federalism: Roots of the Policy Issues" in The Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2003.

Concern about disintegration is not totally farfetched. One of Mexico’s leading intellectuals, Carlos Fuentes, frankly concedes that “... the pro-Americans in Mexican society do not disguise their hope that Mexico can become a sort of undeclared fifty-first state of the Union.” Business leaders in northern Mexico frankly admit that when stressed out they have discussed breaking away from the rest of the country: “We’ve got to do something extreme, and it would be worthwhile to make a big effort to make (the state of) Nuevo León independent from the rest of the country,” Luis Enrique Grajeda Alvarado, head of the Nuevo León Employers Center, told a news conference. The government is “punishing productive states like Nuevo León . . . we have liquidity problems,” said Gerardo Gámez Valdez, director of the Monterrey branch of the National Chamber of Commerce. “The idea of breaking out of federal coordination is one of the ways out for us.”... “It’s not fair that the federal government takes away funds from Nuevo León to grant them to states like Chiapas,” Grajeda Alvarado said.

These comments out of Nuevo Leon, which the Los Angeles Times later described as part of a "separatist campaign," were motivated by a familiar gripe. Monterrey is a highly productive center for international business which produces a sizable amount of tax revenue for Mexico City. Chiapas, on the other hand, produces far less revenue, but benefits handsomely from the tax revenue produced by Monterrey workers. Thus, according to the Times: "leading business executives in Monterrey even threatened to launch a separatist campaign last fall after learning that federal tax outlays to their state, Nuevo Leon, had dropped."

Realizing they're producing sizable tax revenues for the federal government, while getting less back in return, who could blame the business leaders of Monterrey for thinking they might be more than capable of providing services like roads and government safety on their own without the need of "help" from Mexico City?

Indeed, had they managed to pull away, they might have been spared many of the worst excesses of political corruption and organized crime that have spread even to Monterrey over the past two decades.

Nevertheless, in spite of a lack of any de jure secession, some local communities continue to show a drive to creating institutions that are more responsive to taxpayers and residents, without the corruption and bureaucracy so endemic to the government institutions run from Mexico City. They've managed to do this in spite of a federal system and political apparatus designed to stifle and limit local action. It's clear that for many Mexicans, the desire for peace and reform is already there. It's too bad the federal government won't simply get out of the way.

View Details

Once upon a time there was a northern, medieval phenomenon as much the subject of universal myth and curiosity as that of the enchantress city-republics flourishing down south: the Hanseatic League of the mid-13th to 16th centuries. “The Hansa“ (old German for “associations“) or “The League,“ as it was known, began as a treaty between Lübeck and Hamburg “to clear the road of pirates and robbers between the Elbe and the Trave“ [a river in northern Germany with its delta at the Baltic sea]. It gradually increased to add Cologne and Bremen, later expanding to Gdansk, Riga and Novgorod, finally incorporating Bruges, Brunswick, and many satellite-cities throughout Scandinavia. The main goal of this expansion was to keep the herring fisheries of the Baltic in the hands of the merchant-princes of Lübeck and decidedly out of the hands of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, stupor mundi extraordinaire, who, in 1226, decreed that lovely, gothic-gabled town an Imperial City. Then, too, routes to capture the salt trade to Cyprus were critical. Soon, The League was dominating commercial relations with the Levant, Venice, Spain, France and England in timber, fur, grain, honey, Scandinavian copper and iron, in return for spices, medicine, fruit and wine and cotton. Such is how this loose coalition of Flying Dutchman--capitalists emerged as an empire without a State.

Navigare necesse est, viviere non est necesse is inscribed over the door to the old shipping house in Bremen: “It is necessary to carry on navigation, it is not necessary to live.” This old Hanseatic wisdom truly captured the spirit of this great port-civilization. Ruled by a code of honor as a de-centralized alliance, trade was everything and “The State” was looked upon as a land-locked, bureaucratic annoyance. The League came together and stayed together to share the risks of trading, seafaring and—where necessary—to deal with pestering overlords who knew nothing of commerce on the high seas but could smell a fresh source of taxation from a thousand Baltic tributaries away. They were “men who would not fight or steal; who would not live by plunder for pay,” as a 19th century British magazine, The Illustrated Magazine of Art, once swooned in nostalgia. “As those who wished to sell honestly, they were compelled to unite together for their own protection in order that they not be deprived of the rich goods they brought back with them from Italy for the north of Europe. They formed an association—one which ultimately became the proud and powerful rival of Kings and Emperors.”

In no time those kings and emperors “begged their loans and pawned their crowns” to do business with the Hansa and their fleet of 248 merchant ships — the pride and power of the seas. Lübeck, at one point the richest city in Europe and referred to as the “Carthage of the North”, became the unofficial capital of the League, one that maintained its own mercenary-army of 50,000. But that was about it. The League had no coherent political organization. To join or to leave was determined by trading interests of the merchants—there was never a clearly defined administrative center or even a system for raising taxes. Admission was strict: no cities would be allowed in unless situated on the sea or some navigable river adjoining. Cities “which did not keep the key to their own gates” were not even considered. They had no parliament, no president; no consistent civil jurisdiction outside formal oaths and pledges. As a protector they chose the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights—and even he had to take an oath to preserve the mercantile freedom of this merry posse of salty dogs. The League’s on-again, off-again Diet met whenever and wherever it was convenient to discuss things; there was no army or navy, and in the event of some outside threat, the cities most at stake would come together to decide a common plan of action such as higher tariffs, and only rarely the waging of war. As The League’s founding charter proclaimed: “If the conflict is against a prince who is lord of one of the cities, this city shall not furnish men but only give money.”

The condition of affairs in Germany at this time was favorable to the development of these feisty free towns, for Emperor Frederick was always engaged in vain wars in Italy, while leaving imperial matters at home to take their own course.

Thus, the Hansa, one might say, was the medieval, northern, sea-faring equivalent of the exalted mode of the great poles — Athens, Corinth, Thebes—themselves centers of industry, generating economic-civic relationships and an explosion in inter-regional trade between other city-states. The League remained as such only a few decades after that fateful day in 1598 when Elizabeth I closed a key Hansa trading association on the Thames in London, primed as she was to create an imperial power of England.

When The League first started to take shape, it spread with astonishing rapidity, reaching the extreme eastern point of the Baltic a few decades after the founding of Lübeck. The establishment of so many successful colonies stimulated a heady commercial spirit, and the race to search out the remotest markets became a kind of sport of wayfarers. That the League originated along the Baltic was due to the fact that the entire region was far behind the other great commercial districts of Europe in terms of civilized development, and presented greater risks and dangers to traders than did the Mediterranean or the North Sea. The Italian cities, for instance, never combined into an organized system for commercial ends. The Dutch towns would never have been under the necessity of uniting, as far as their trade with England and Norway was concerned; they were drawn into the Hanseatic League because of their interests in the Baltic.

As one historian, Ellen Semple of the American Geographical Society of New York, wrote of The League: “For the towns scattered along the German and Russian coast from the Trave to the Neva, union was a matter of life and death. Moreover, they were full of the spirit of enterprise and self-reliance engendered by their mode of life. Their inhabitants, lured as colonists to these inhospitable shores by partial exemption from taxation and by certain unusual rights and privileges as citizens, had tasted of the sweets of independence.”

These commercial cities were located between the advanced industrial centers of Flanders, the Netherlands, and western Germany on the one hand, and the undeveloped lands to the southeast, east and north on the other. To the south of them was a great passage from the Mediterranean, and also from the Black and Caspian Seas. They formed the northern termini of the trading routes “and they thrived or declined according to the commercial activity along these great continental highways”. They entered into close relations with the inland cities which grew up along these routes to complement the work of the coast towns, and formed with them their own city-systems, in which each sustained a defined relation to the others. For this reason, the Hanseatic League, mysterious as its origin is, was formed first by a federation of maritime cities “simply for the purposes of protection to their common trade”.

The Hansa was also one of two great powers that used gold-as-money systems that worked in their day — some would say all of history — the other being Venice. This gold as money was in constant circulation; there was no credit-as-money in The League.

It was Socrates who spoke of the concept of a “city-soul.” The natural justice, as he called it, of city life was that men made products for the men who need them, with each individual endowed with some mental talent or physical capacity to equip the community. It is a justice, as one scholar of the philosopher has written, drawn from nature and “applied to the man-made organization of his order and rule.” For the Hansa, the City was an expression of civic greatness — and not “The State”. The Hanseatic League remains a wonderful, romantic, practical tale of the power of pure commerce to organize and civilize human relationships, and its unfailing genius in advancing the progress of human society.

View Details

Is there any hope in the Western World that individual citizens can win some release from the relentless and imprisoning growth of government? In the US, government spending, a reasonable proxy for their power over us, increases every year, except for a few minor blips. The citizens’ situation becomes more and more dire. We have precious little say and little influence over our taxes, our health care, our energy and water supplies and costs, not to mention the social rules with which the government constrains us. The number of rules and regulations, using the proxy of pages in the Federal Register, also increases every year, and very few rules are removed. The government closes in on us more and more every day.

There is one western country that we might look at to see a glimpse of hope. That country is Switzerland. In a small landlocked country with precious little in the way of natural resources except water, the people have created a high level of prosperity based on innovation and creative capitalism.

100% Economics, Zero % Politics Prior to its 1848 constitution, Switzerland was a confederation of states, each of which was sovereign and independent, bound together by a treaty of mutual defense from external aggression. As a country, it was the most economically developed in Europe. It was religiously and ethnically diverse, highly innovative and highly productive. Huguenots expelled from France in religious wars started the Swiss watch industry, and German protestants escaping Catholic oppression founded major industrial companies. There was a focus on knowledge and education to compensate for the lack of natural resources, and the Swiss were globally networked and energetic traders.

“Economics was everywhere and politics nowhere” was a phrase used to describe this productive, energetic, innovative, decentralized trading nation in the mid-nineteenth century. What a wonderful picture of economic freedom unencumbered by political extraction is conjured up by that description.

Switzerland has been able to retain some of these characteristics despite the predations of the twentieth century. It stayed on a gold standard until 1999, and resisted internationalization until it joined the UN in 2002. In fact, internationalization is what has eroded Switzerland’s uniqueness as a nation. The influx of internationally-oriented MBA’s and the McKinsey mafia is dragging Switzerland down toward the lowest common denominator of statism and interventionism. The EU aims to get Switzerland to sign a bilateral agreement which will inevitably lead to Brussels gradually imposing its multicultural socialism, just as it did on the UK.

Nevertheless, Switzerland has at least six structural advantages which will keep it ahead of its mediocre peers for a while longer.

1) Decentralization Switzerland remains a confederation of 26 cantons. Its more centralized than prior to 1848, but the functions of the central government are limited. There’s a national constitution, a national military and security force, a single currency and a central bank, and a national foreign policy. But the people have been able to keep the powers of the central government enchained to a greater extent than in the US. James Madison promised, but his Constitution was unable to deliver. The Swiss have done better.

2) Subsidiarity Subsidiarity is the principle of resolving all problems and issues at the lowest level. Most taxes are imposed at the municipal and canton level. The federal take is limited to about 20% of total tax payments. This starves the central government beast. Citizens are more engaged around their local governments and their taxing and spending decisions. And they can vote with their feet, moving to another town or canton if they feel it will improve their circumstances.

3) Direct Democracy In Switzerland, the people are sovereign. One way their sovereignty is maintained is through regular referenda, in which the people vote on matters of national policy, laws, and proposed constitutional changes. There is typically a high voter turnout for these referenda, and the people take direct democratic control of their government seriously.

4) Free Trade There is little debate about free trade in Switzerland. It’s an imperative. It’s a country heavily dependent on imports of basics — energy, food, commodities. It therefore developed a strategic exporting industry strategy: unique high value products and services meeting global demand. Watches are the famous example. Today, it’s biotech and other technologies. Always, free trade has been the binding condition to Switzerland’s prosperity.

5) Neutrality In foreign policy and diplomacy, Switzerland is famously neutral and non-aggressive. It goes with global free trade — creating enemies would be counterproductive. Switzerland has a military, and compulsory military service, but for defense against external invaders only. War is the number one barrier to economic progress, and political reconstruction after war is often a worse disaster than the physical destruction of war itself. Switzerland has avoided all this.

6) Entrepreneurial innovation Switzerland ranks fairly high in the list of countries for ease of doing business, although its ranking has deteriorated in the 21st century. It’s easy to start a company, taxation is relatively low and laws are transparent. Numerous international companies choose Switzerland for their headquarters. Innovation is embedded in education and in a network of research centers, representing investments in people and knowledge. It’s in the individual psyche and the nation’s institutions.

Not perfect, but better Switzerland is by no means perfect as a nation-state. The whole concept of nation-states is detrimental to the individual lives of the people who live in them and form them, and the concept calls for a lot of disruptive innovation. Maybe it’s the Swiss, with their tradition of decentralization, subsidiarity, individual initiative and a free trade in ideas who will be the ones to implement the innovation. That is, if they’re not overwhelmed by the internationalists at the EU, UN, IMF and McKinsey before they can break out. It’s economics versus politics. We hope for economics everywhere and politics nowhere, but it’s proven impossible to maintain. The fact that economics once prevailed in Switzerland gives us hope to believe they could re-establish its primacy.

Originally published by the Center for Individualism.

View Details

In recent decades, a number of states enacted statewide law preempting local ordinances enacting rent control. Now, some state governments are beginning to move in the opposite direction. State-level policymakers are attempting to repeal these bans in some states with the hope that local governments will then enact rent-control measures of their own.

Two recent examples are California and Colorado. In California, for example, the measure was submitted to the voters in a statewide referendum in 2018. The measure was defeated.

This year, the Colorado state legislature is attempting the same thing. A new bill in the Senate has been proposed which would allow local governments to enact their own rent control measures.

The measure does not mandate that any county or city or local government of any kind enact rent control. It simply decentralizes the legal authority as to which legislative body decides whether or not rent control ought to be implemented.

If the bill passes, then it will be up to county commissioners and city councils to adopt or enact rent control.

Of course, those who support the measure almost certainly support the implementation of rent control in general. If they thought they could get away with it, they might also support a statewide mandate of rent control. The political realities of the present, however, do not allow this.

Regardless of what supporters might hypothetically do, the fact remains that the bill only hands over prerogatives to local governments.

This puts the bill's supporters in a good place politically. In a state like Colorado, which has long tended to sympathize with the idea of "local control" and "home rule," the bill's supporters need only say "we're letting the local voters decide."

Opponents of the bill, meanwhile, find themselves in an awkward position. Their position ends up being a call for state politicians to boss local politicians around.

Anti-rent control advocates can argue until they're blue in the face as to the damaging effects of rent control — which are real. Rent control is overwhelmingly negative for low-income people, and it only benefits the minority of renters who are able to obtain the few rent-controlled units that become available. The majority of renters will face greater hardship. Since rent control will cause housing developers to produce fewer housing units, the long term effects of rentcontrol will be a smaller supply of housing units overall within the rent-controlled jurisdiction. Most renters are likely to end up with longer commutes, or will be living in more crowded conditions in aging units. They'll have fewer housing choices, and lower-quality housing.

But all of this fails to address the issue of local control, and advocates for the bill need only reiterate they're not necessarily pushing rent control. They're simply putting it in the hands of locals.

To a great many people, this approach may strike them as quite reasonable. After all, it's unclear why the state government should have a role in local housing regulations at all. While statewide laws such as the rent-control ban have long been justified as a matter of "statewide interest," the concept is among one of the most arcane and vague in legislation. What constitutes a statewide interest has long been little more than a matter of opinion. Moreover, the claim doesn't appear to apply much in the matter of rent control. Housing markets, home prices, and housing regulations have always been eminently local matters.

Meanwhile, the anti-rent-control advocates — many of whom tend to be Republicans and conservatives — end up arguing against decentralization and local control, even though these same groups profess to support these two ideals in other contexts.

Local Control Is Best But even if one agrees that rent control is disastrous for most low-income renters, that doesn't justify statewide legislation on the matter.

The benefits of decentralization have always been apparent. It creates more choices for voters and taxpayers in finding jurisdictions that reflect their values. Smaller jurisdictions make it easier to escape onerous laws and regulations. Decentralized laws allow for diverse populations to more easily live in peace rather than be constantly at war to control a single centralized lawmaking body. Moreover, lawmaking at the local level is more responsive to local citizens, and lawmakers are more accessible.

Many Americans tend to see these arguments strictly in terms of state-federal realtions. But the same arguments for favoring states in the state-federal balance apply equally in the state-local balance as well. After all, there's nothing magical about state-level government, and there's no non-arbitrary reason being given as to why voters and policymakers at the local level ought not be allowed to decide for themselves. Are we really to believe that state-level politicians are more educated, more reasonable, or more insightful than local politicians? In many cases, the these two groups include the same people, as many politicians move up and down between local government and state government positions.

Moreover, some US states are larger than many nation-states, thus making a mockery of the idea that there's anything local about statewide government. States like California, Texas, Florida, and New York are all as large as medium-sized European countries.

Some will still claim "but it's all just a Democrat scheme to spread rent control!" Yes, I get it. But I also get that if people regard local policy as a matter for far-off state politicians, then it's much easier to impose statewide rent control, as has happened in Oregon.

[RELATED: "Oregon Defies Logic with Statewide Rent Control" by Andrew Moran]

Moreover, experience shows decentralization works in a whole variety of directions. For example, as federal courts have tolerated more local autonomy on the abortion issue, we've seen state governments use this de facto decentralization to legislate against abortion. Local governments have been more successful than federal reformers at scaling back police abuse of asset forfeiture laws. State governments have increased the freedoms of gun owners in many states. Thus, we see that decentralization in a federal context has been used to increase property rights in a number of cases. There's no reason to assume further decentralization to locals necessarily works in the opposite direction.

The problem we now see in the rent-control drive isn't that advocates want de-centralization, per se. The problem is that their proposal is limited to a single issue. If local governments ought to have control in matters of rent control, they should gave control in a variety of other matters too.

For instance, there should be no statewide minimum wage. If communities want something above the federal minimum wage, leave it up to cities and counties. Indeed, there should be no statewide business licensing or labor regulations at all. Statewide blue laws should all be out the window as well, with no state regulations on who can sell alcohol — or recreational drugs — when or where. Gun laws, too, ought to be for county sheriffs to decide.

In typical fashion, many conservatives will scoff at this, and say "that seems unlikely to happen!" But for this, we mostly have so-called advocates for "local control" to blame. Rarely do these supposed local-control advocates ever actually push for any meaningful decentralization down to the local level. Most have always been content to lazily accept the status quo in which state-level politics dictates to local governments on an endless number of issues. Even when these groups are in power, they rarely push for locally-focused reforms.

Now that some rent-control advocates are using the strategy to benefit themselves, we're now all supposed to buy the idea that state-level policy is necessarily better than local policy. It's an unconvincing claim.

View Details

Because of their physical size, large states are able to exercise more state-like power than geographically smaller states — and thus exercise a greater deal of control over residents. This is because larger states benefit from higher barriers to emigration than smaller states, thus allowing them to avoid one of the most significant barriers to expanding state power: the ability of residents to move away. Moreover, by virtue of the fact that the land area of the earth is more or less fixed, a small number of large states prevents the formation of a large number of small states.

The economic and political implications of this are explained by Ralph Raico in his seminal work "The European Miracle." Raico explains how a large number of small states — and thus the relative ease of emigration — in pre-modern Europe laid the foundation for the relatively restrained state power that led to the rise of Europe as an economic powerhouse.

But, once states can extend their monopolies over vast expanses of land, linguistic areas, and cultural areas, emigration becomes difficult, and states are more easily able to increase their taxation and regulatory power over a population without danger of losing their tax base due to migration.

For example, a potential Russian immigrant must face the prospect of moving hundreds of miles from friends and family — and also learning a new language and a new culture — in order to emigrate. To a lesser extent, the same is true of the United States in which most potential destinations for an American emigrant would involve learning a new language and being distant from one's family.

In the case of a small state, however, many of these cultural, linguistic, and distance-based barriers are greatly lessened. Were the United States actually composed of 50 truly independent political jurisdictions, residents would be able to move from region to region with less trouble in terms of adapting to local languages and culture. In the case of a move from Virginia to North Carolina, it would still be practical in many cases for emigrants to regularly return to visit friends and family with relative ease.

This would become all the more true were these jurisdictions reduced in size even more — as in this thought experiment — thus facilitating even greater ease of emigration from place to place.

RELATED: "If American Federalism Were like Swiss Federalism, There Would be 1,300 States" by Ryan McMaken

And, as states become even smaller than this, free movement between a large number of potential choices becomes easier and easier.

In a world of thousands of small states — at the size of ,say, a Swiss canton, residents would have multiple options for relocation within a small distance, thus reducing the monopoly power of each state.

In fact, we often seen this at work even in moderately decentralized states. In the US, Americans often move across city and county lines to avoid certain regulations, to lower their taxes, or to take advantage of better amenities. For example, when the city of Chicago imposed a number of high regulatory hurdles against Wal-Mart, the retail giant elected to simply move one block away from the Chicago city limits, thus depriving the city of tax revenues, but allowing Wal-Mart access to Chicago's consumer population. If states in a confederation are appropriately small, "emigration" might be a matter of moving a few miles down the road, thus making the practical cost of emigration very low indeed.

A "State" of 50,000 PeopleNow imagine a world composed of tiny states the size of small cities. The smaller the better. But for the sake of providing concrete examples, let's use the city of Arcadia, California.

The city is 11 square miles with 56,000 people. It borders at least five other cities. In other words, were the city an independent entity — we'll call it the Republic of Arcadia — any resident need only move a few miles to change the government under which he or she lives.

Were the Republic of Arcadia (ROA) to impose a large tax increase, or a series of new onerous regulations, many residents would elect to move away. This situation would still impose costs on the new emigrants. They would perhaps need to sell their houses or businesses, which is costly in terms of time and money. By moving, they're leaving their preferred place of residence — which they had demonstrated was in Arcadia. And, now they must live in a place that they would have rather not lived, all else being equal.

But, in many cases, the emigrants also might also be able to move without even needing new employment, and without being distant from friends and relative. They would have multiple choices of other jurisdictions with a nearly identical climate, language, and culture. Moreover, neighboring jurisdictions would likely be more than happy to accept the very people that ROA's big tax hike is most likely to drive to emigrate: the most productive residents.

In this scenario, the Republic of Arcadia is still technically a state. It has a monopoly on the means of coercion within its territory. But when a state is as small as the Republic of Arcadia, how much power does it really wield? The answer is "not much."

How Small States Are Similar to a Totally Privatized SocietyNow, let's add another element to this scenario. Let's say that when emigrants from the Republic of Arcadia move to the Republic of Pasadena (ROP), they find that all residents are required to enter into a contractual relationship with the ROP government. The ROP will provide certain amenities while residents agree to pay "dues." Residents agree to other restrictions as well, such as a 10-storey limit on all new construction. Should a resident conclude he no longer wishes to abide by these regulations, he must move out of the community.

Is the Republic of Pasadena a state? The answer is no since at this point the Republic of Pasadena is really just a private covenant community. In his book Democracy: The God that Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe describes a totally privatized community in these terms:

All land is privately owned, including all streets, rivers, airports, and harbors. With respect to some pieces of land, the property title may be unrestricted; that is, the owner is permitted to do whatever he pleases with his property as long as he does not physically damage the property of others. With respect to other territories, the property title may be more or less restricted. As is currently the case in some housing developments, the owner may be bound by contractual limitations on what he can do with his property (restrictive covenants, voluntary zoning), which might include residential rather than commercial use, no buildings more than four stories high, no sale or rent to unmarried couples, smokers, or Germans, for instance.

In other words, it functions like any association of private owners — such as those in a condominium community — which include common ownership of sidewalks, hallways, parking lots, the grounds around the buildings, and walls surrounding the complex. All members are required to pay fees to support the maintenance of these facilities. Those who refuse to pay the fees must move away.

Moreover, in this scenario, the Republic of Pasadena is not the result of a state imposing a monopoly on residents, but is a result of private owners voluntarily entering into agreements for specific purposes. Hoppe continues:

You and I, private property owners, may enter and put our property into a restrictive (or protective) covenant. We and others may, if we both deem it beneficial, impose limitations on the future use that each of us is permitted to make with our property.

In our hypothetical scenario, upon attempting to move to the Republic of Pasadena, the potential residents learn that 50 years earlier, a group of 100 property owners had all entered into contract with each other that governed the behavior of all residents in terms of land use and other uses of property. The contracts even forbids smoking in common areas. The original owners were also religiously minded people, and all residents are required to pay into a "Widows and Orphans Fund" that provides temporary relief to residents who fall victim to unfortunate accidents and health problems. While these rules can be changed be means of a city wide vote by all adult residents, all residents must agree to the community's rules in order to live there. Those who elect to live in the ROP, must comply with these rules.

After agreeing to these rules, residents who complain about the Widows and Orphans fund as "welfare for lazy bums" — and refuse to pay into it — must move away. Those who want to build a 50-story highrise on their property must also leave. In no way are the residents being "coerced" into paying for widows and orphans, nor are their private property rights being infringed upon when their ability to build a skyscraper is limited. These are merely contractual obligations.

"But wait!" some reader may say. "It's not fair that someone has to move just because they don't like the rules." Indeed, it's not uncommon to hear complains and protests of injustice of this sort from residents who live in communities with homeowners associations.

Here's a typical scenario:

A homeowners association stipulates no flagpoles in the front yard. An Old Veteran moves into the community and decides he wants a flagpole to fly the American flag. The homeowners association says no, and the veteran angrily claims he's being "censored." In truth, the old veteran is only being held to the rules he voluntarily signed off on before moving in. Thus, he has a few options. He can convince the management to change the rules. He can convince the other owners to vote to change the rules, or he can move away.

At this point, some may further object: "But all communities like this have rules I don't like! All the houses I like are in homeowners-association controlled communities, and it's not fair to make me live somewhere that is not to my liking in every conceivable way!"

At this point, of course, we're living in a pure fantasy land. Even in a thoroughly competitive and unhampered market, it's extremely rare that we should ever have access to products and services that are to our liking in every way. Virtually no automobile has every feature we want — and certainly not at the price we want. No retail store carries every product we desire. In our covenant community scenario, we can always attempt to convince the other residents to help us in changing the rules, but others residents are sure to have their own preferences as well.

Even in a highly competitive industry, customized products that meet our every need tend to be very expensive. Yes, billionaires will be able to build every product as a customized personalized product, from vehicles, to private security, to infrastructure. Those people can afford to be "one-man states." But, security, infrastructure, vehicles and housing are all costly to create and maintain, so most normal people will have to use the affordable mass produced versions of those products instead — and mass produced products won't conform to our every whim. We'll need to choose a preferred option among many options that may nevertheless not fit with our perfect imagined ideal.

This reality applies to communities as well, including our hypothetical Republic of Pasadena. Even in a world with thousands — or even millions — of small independent states, we aren't going to find one that's exactly what we want. Some communities will have poor weather. Some will have too many residents who have political views we don't like. Some will have too many women, or too many men, or not enough bike lanes, or too many zoning restrictions. Some will be dirtier than others, and some will have fees that are too high for our liking.

With States, Size MattersThere is no denying, though, that it is inconvenient when one needs to relocate to a community that better suits our politics, our lifestyle, or our fondness for the American flag.

The answer to this problem is to encourage decentralization, but even in a world where one could choose from 100,000 states worldwide, communities and firms that will be able to exercise some degree of monopoly power. After all, Ford motor company has a monopoly on the very specific product known as Ford trucks. Your dentist has a monopoly on the services provided by that specific dentist. And of course, every homeowners association has a monopoly on its specific location and configuration of services.

The same is true even of small states. The benefit of a world composed of small states, however, is that they are subject to far more competition than are large states. Thus, small states must compete to provide better services at lower prices.

By being forced to compete, the monopolistic nature of a small state becomes diminished. And in this way, it may be that in many ways, small states are not really states at all.

View Details

Two years, four months and a few days ago, on 23rd June 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU. The date of the UK leaving is currently set at 29th March 2019 – almost three years after the vote. It could be postponed further. In the case of a transitional arrangement that could last until at least the end of 2020, possibly even beyond the general election in 2022. That would be an enormous six years after the historic vote.

EU mandarins as well as Whitehall mandarins will tell you it must be this way because the relationship the UK has with the EU is too complex to untangle sooner.

However, history offers a different angle. World War I lasted four years, World War II lasted six. Perhaps it’s easier to conquer and then lose an entire continent than to separate two jurisdictions peacefully?

Instead, look at Czechoslovakia, the country where I was born, but a country I never think of as my birthplace. That is because before I even went to school, it had not only transformed from a socialist republic and a Soviet satellite to a liberal democracy, but it also split into two nations. All I have ever known, therefore, has been the Czech Republic. All the turbulent history – Václav Havel elected President, the Velvet Revolution, the first free election, the beginning of economic transformation, Václav Klaus elected Prime Minister, the Velvet Divorce – happened within the first six years of my life.

The curious thing about this is the Velvet Divorce. Let me just briefly remind you of the timeline: the pivotal elections that took place on 5th and 6th June 1992 saw Václav Klaus’s party in the Czech Republic and Vladimír Mečiar’s party in Slovakia both take the lion’s share of the vote in their respective state parliaments and the federal parliament (Czechoslovakia had already been a federation for over 20 years at this point).

Tensions erupted quickly. The Czech PM Václav Klaus met the Slovak PM Vladimír Mečiar in Brno on 8th July and they agreed to split up the federation. The agreement was signed on 26th August and Václav Havel resigned his seat in the meantime (20th July). By 13th November, a law had been enacted as to how the federal assets were going to be divvied up and twelve days later, an act was passed that set the dissolution date at 31st December. Complex matters such as the continuity of the Czech Parliament, continuity of laws, arrangements for courts and so on were all swiftly determined by December. A new Czech Constitution was passed on 16th December.

Czechoslovakia was dissolved at midnight on New Year’s Eve. When the people woke up the next morning, they had new nationalities and the Czech Parliament re-elected Václav Havel as President on 26th January 1993.

Within a mere six months, a comprehensive settlement had been agreed and activated. Immobile assets were distributed to the country where they sat, mobile assets and assets abroad were distributed according to the rough population ratio 2:1. Amendments to international treaties signed by Czechoslovakia were negotiated and signed very quickly by both new republics, confirming the continuation of such treaties. In 1996, the two countries signed a protocol specifying the distribution of duties enshrined by treaties signed as Czechoslovakia. All of this happened whilst Czechoslovakia and its constituent countries were undergoing a massive economic transformation.

Czechoslovakia was privatising on an unprecedented scale and at an unprecedented pace. In a way, it was like Brexit and the UK’s 1980s privatisations combined, only a lot more complicated. Whereas the 1980s UK privatised two companies a year, the early 1990s Czechoslovakia privatised two companies an hour. Taken together, these companies’ accounting value was a big share of GDP. The voucher privatisation alone (there were other methods of privatisation) privatised companies worth one third of Czechoslovak GDP. All of this was taking place at the exact same time the republics were being separated.

Let us not forget the fact that Czechoslovakia was also a currency union. The original idea was that the currency would continue after the separation, but the Czechoslovak koruna outlived Czechoslovakia by a mere six weeks.

Where there is a will, there is a way. Two things made this possible: Klaus’s insistence that it must happen fast, before organised business interests as well as government could mount a successful defence of the status quo. Then the fact that the two newly-created governments, for all the tension between them, worked together to apply current or previous arrangements in good faith. Wherever questions or differences arose, they sought an amicable solution where none of the parties would score a win for their side but rather one where future cooperation could be maintained.

Nobody was proposing divorce bills or ridiculous notions of planes not flying, trucks stuck at the border, licences not being recognised, or one country continuing to have jurisdiction over the other for the next 100 years. Time, and good faith, were of the essence.

If Czechs and Slovaks were able to separate an entire country in six months, surely Whitehall and the Berlaymont can find a way to extract one member state sooner than in six years.

Originally published at BrexitCentral.com

View Details

When used properly, and when restrained by the prevalence of a relatively laissez-faire ideology, democracy can indeed work as a brake on government power. Like Claudio Grass — who believes that Switzerland employs elections relatively well in the service of hobbling government power — I agree this can be done. Indeed, at the state and local level in the US, it has been done to a certain extent, as in the case of the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights in Colorado, which requires voter approval of tax increases.

In a recent article at LewRockwell.com, Grass, examines the historical origins of two highly-decentralized states, Switzerland and (pre-1980s) Lebanon.

The general thrust of the piece is that the power of states can be limited if states are comprised on competing and conflicting jurisdictions, whether they be cantons in the case of Switzerland, or ethno-religious enclaves as in the case of Lebanon. (As with many other political systems, however, outside intervention in Lebanon de-stabilized the system.)

But let's focus on Switzerland since it is the example that has lasted the longest and is still extant. Grass notes that Swiss politics is dominated by a preference for local control and suspicion (relatively speaking) of the central government. This in turn is reinforced by political institutions that provide a fairly large amount of political power at the local level compared to the national level. Specifically, he mentions the traditions of plebiscitary democracy that can provide for a veto on national law.

Grass doesn't mention the concept by name, but he's likely also referring to Switzerland's tradition of "double majorities" which, generally speaking requires that not only a majority of the voting population approve of a government initiative, but also that a majority of member cantons/states/municipalities approve.

Let's imagine a "double majority" case in the context of the American states. Say, for example, that in order to pass a tax increase, it would be necessary to get a majority vote from Congress and also from a majority of voters in a majority of states. Thus, every tax increase would require majority votes from the voters in 26 states.

How easy might it be to pass tax increases if such a situation were mandated? I'd guess it would be rather more difficult. Moreover, such a system is thoroughly anti-majoritarian in that it lessens the power of the more populous regions relative to less populous regions. A straight popular vote greatly favors the large and populous states. On the other hand, in a system of double majorities, New York and California might find themselves begging South Dakota and Montana voters for their support in passing national laws.

Obviously, such a system would look considerably different from the one we have now, and would emphasize the role of more local government institutions in making national policy.

View Details

One of the potential silver linings from the surprising victory for Donald Trump is the hope that a Republican White House will resurrect the left’s distrust of the Federal government. During the Obama administration, progressive activists have been noticeably less vocal on issues such as war, executive overreach, and civil liberty violations than they were when George W. Bush was in office. Encouragingly, we are already seeing signs of this with the idea of California secession buzzing on social media as demonstrators marched in Sacramento yesterday in support of the idea.

As Business Insider reported:

The group leading the charge, Yes California Independence Campaign, assembled long before Trump's surprising victory. Its aim is to put a referendum on the 2019 ballot that, if passed, would make California an independent country.

CalExit has even managed to find financial support from some in Silicon Valley:

The movement has racked up some impressive backers already. Shervin Pishevar, an early investor in Uber and well-known angel investor, claimed on Twitter that he would bankroll a campaign to make California its own nation if Trump won.

In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, he confirmed his mission.

"It's the most patriotic thing I can do," he told CNBC. "The country is at serious crossroads. ... Calling it New California."

He expressed a desire that California, the sixth largest economy in the world, in terms of GDP, might become a catalyst for a "national dialogue" as the country reaches a "tipping point."

While this blossoming interest in California secession is likely more a short-term partisan reaction to the election results than a reflection of a true growing movement — any campaign aimed toward political decentralization should be celebrated. Secession has long been portrayed exclusively as a reactionary, fringe right-wing solution, and too-often absurdly linked with racism. Secession should be seen as non-ideological, and perceived as a practical solution for an increasingly diverse society.

In fact, as Jeff Deist noted last year during a Mises Circle event dedicated to the subject, secession would make it easier for the progressive left to achieve the sort of society they desire:

Now one might think progressives would champion the Tenth Amendment and states’ rights, because it would liberate them from the Neanderthal right wingers who stand in the way of their progressive utopia. Imagine California or Massachusetts having every progressive policy firmly in place, without any preemptive federal legislation or federal courts to get in their way, and without having to share federal tax revenues with the hated red states.

Imagine an experiment where residents of the San Francisco bay area were free to live under a political and social regime of their liking, while residents of Salt Lake City were free to do the same.

Surely both communities would be much happier with this commonsense arrangement than the current one, whereby both have to defer to Washington!

Considering the fundamental economic fallacies he spent most of his campaign advocating, it's unlikely the Trump administration will end up advocating for the sort of policies America actually needs to become great again. But if the election of President Trump leads to more and more people questioning the value of democratic consensus, and causes more Americans to reassess the incredible powers that have been granted to the presidency, libertarians may be able to find a silver lining to this cycles election results.

Tho Bishop directs the Mises Institute's social media marketing (e.g., twitter, facebook, instagram), and can assist with questions from the press. Contact: email; twitter; facebook.

View Details

A few weeks ago, Maine Governor Paul LePage signed a Food Sovereignty Bill into law, guaranteeing the rights of Maine towns to regulate food production locally, rather than submitting to federal regulation. Although the press is avoiding describing the bill as such, this is a nullification of federal food regulations.

The movement for food sovereignty in Maine began in the town of Sedgwick, which passed its own food sovereignty bill, and the idea quickly spread to twenty towns across the state. The Sedwick law explicitly gave citizens of the town the right to “produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing,” such as raw milk and meats slaughtered locally in plants that do not meet the burdensome federal regulations that create barriers of entry for smaller operations.

At first, the state of Maine reacted by suing citizens of the municipalities that passed Food Sovereignty Laws, with the state Supreme Court ruling against farmer Dan Brown for selling raw milk in the town of Blue Hill, which had passed a law mimicking Sedgwick. It was this case that helped the food sovereignty movement gain steam, and in June, the state government capitulated to the farmers by passing the state-wide law protecting the citizens of any municipality that passed such a law. Essentially, the state of Maine is recognizing the right to local regulation of its food industries.

Decentralizing measures regarding food regulation are not isolated to Maine. Two years ago, Wyoming passed a law protecting the right of the citizens to sell unlicensed “homemade” food without fear of prosecution. The Wyoming law is not as sweeping as the Maine Food Sovereignty Laws, but it similarly represents the increased willingness of states to nullify federal regulations regarding food. Maine, however, is the first state to pass a law aimed broadly at all food regulations, rather than a single specific regulation.

The food sovereignty movement is undoubtedly a response to the increasingly burdensome regulations on small food producers. The response from Maine farmers who support the bill indicate that the movement is a reaction to the costs imposed on small producers by federal regulations. Jordan Pike, a farmer from Lebanon, Maine, said of the law:

Providing this service to community members and neighbors can mean the difference between keeping the cow — even keeping the farm — or having to sell out. It means being able to pay the vet bill for an animal instead of putting it down, or pay the roofer to fix the leak in the barn, or the painter and keep our property values up.

In other words, like many – if not most – government bureaus, the US Department of Agriculture effectively regulates to the benefit of large businesses at the expense of smaller competitors. Maine is leading the charge against this kind of protectionism, and it is using the principle of nullification to do so.

The law is set to take effect on November 1, but the governor has called for a special session of the state government before then to address the objections of the federal government. The USDA has threatened to “designate” the Maine Meat and Poultry Inspection if the new law is not amended to exempt the slaughtering of meat and poultry from protection under the new law. To have “designation status” means that any meat or poultry slaughtered in the state would be required by federal law to “be transferred to the Federal meat and poultry inspection program overseen by the USDA-Food Safety and Inspection Service.”

It is no surprise that the federal government is unwilling to relinquish any regulatory power back to the state and local governments of the country, and if Maine chooses to fight back and uphold the nullification of federal regulations, then the Department of Agriculture will be in a position to use the might of the federal government to force the state to submit. As it stands, Governor LePage is encouraging the state government to meet federal demands. Hopefully, the legislature will choose otherwise and the Food Sovereignty movement will spread to the rest of the country.

View Details

Why was James Madison so critical of democracies? Moreover, why was he so concerned about them when, according to the definition he provided, "democracies" basically don't exist anywhere, either in his time or in our own.

Today, many conservatives like to claim that "the Founding Fathers" opposed democracy and supported less majoritarian republics.

However, as is nearly always the case whenever "the Founding Fathers" are involved, a more accurate statement would be "some Founding Fathers" condemned democracy. Indeed, many of the Founding Fathers — especially among the Anti-Federalists, openly described themselves as being in favor of "democracy" and "the democratical spirit."

This is no coincidence.

By attacking democracy, Madison was attempting to discredit the more decentralized and more democratic state governments that were preventing the sort of powerful and centralized government that Madison wanted.

Thus, Madison sought to condemn localized government that was close to the people, and substitute a vast, less-representative "republic" that was the be the playground of a small number of powerful men — all at taxpayer expense, of course.

Thanks to the political realities of the time, Madison couldn't come right out and condemn the state governments, lest he look too radical. So, he employed subterfuge and a definition for democracy that could then be used to insinuate that the state government were too close to "mob rule" and must be reined in.

Specifically, Madison defined a democracy as "a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person." These societies, Madison contended "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention."

Now, obviously, none of the US states at the time fit this description, strictly speaking. There was no "direct democracy," and every state employed elected representatives.

This by itself, according to Madison's definitions, made the states all republics. Madison writes:

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

It is the latter part of this quotation, however, that illustrates what Madison was really driving at. Sure, the states had elected officials and were obviously not true democracies. But, to be a proper republic in Madison's mind, a political jurisdiction must be imposed over "a greater sphere of country."

In other words, Madison wanted a large government that could rule over a vast area. In Madison's mind, those rubes in the state governments were too close to home, too parochial, and too unwilling to enter into a large coercive union that could control the people more properly and prevent the eruption of "too much" freedom.

By attacking democracy, Madison was creating a bogeyman to which he could point and say "the states are too much like this mob rule," and therefore a much larger, more centralized, and more powerful government is necessary.

The Federal Scheme What followed is fairly well known. Madison and the other pro-centralization nationalists claimed they were mere "Federalists" who wanted a well-balanced sharing of power between states and the central government. But, many of the true federalists, who history now knows as the misnamed "Anti-Federalists," saw through the ruse and understood that the new constitution was a radical step in the direction of creating a very large consolidated government.

Among these Anti-Federalist critics were Patrick Henry and the Federal Farmer (Richard Henry Lee) who opposed the adoption of the new constitution supported by Madison.

Unlike Madison, Henry and Lee appreciated the value of more locally-controlled governments which afforded easy access to representatives, and more democratic forms of representation.

Indeed, both Lee and Henry speak well of "democracy" with Henry even going so far as to define a democratic system as a system "wherein the people retain all their rights securely." In speaking critically of the new constitution, Henry feared that the nation would lose its "democratical spirit."

For his part, Lee was critical of the new proposed House of Representatives as not nearly representative enough, and complained that the Congress "will have but very little democracy in it." Observing that the new House of Representatives would consist of only 65 members, Lee noted "I have no idea that the interests, feelings, and opinions of three or four millions of people, especially touching internal taxation, can be collected in such a house."See letter III of the Federal Farmer.

Contrasting himself with the Madisonian position which was in favor of making legislatures less representative, Lee reminded his readers that "I am not among those men who think a democratic branch a nuisance."

Madison's Imagined "Emergency" The new constitution of 1787 was largely the product of panic among certain members of the upper classes in the new American states in the 1780s. Shays rebellion had been a triggering event, but other grievances among certain elites had been simmering for years.

In April of 1787, Madison compiled a list of alleged violations and faults of the state governments in a document known as "Vices of the Political System of the United States."

For Madison, these many problems included "Paper money, instalments of debts, occlusion of Courts," illegal treaties with Indian tribes, and barriers to trade between the states.

Naturally, Madison wanted a new central government that could regulate all of this, and more. He blamed American problems on a "want of uniformity in the laws concerning naturalization & literary property; of provision for national seminaries, for grants of incorporation for national purposes, for canals and other works of general utility, wch. may at present be defeated by the perverseness of particular States whose concurrence is necessary."

In other words, Madison wanted a new national government that could spend freely on infrastructure projects and schools while controlling copyrights and citizenship at the expense of state-level power.

The Federalists made their big move when, after the convention of 1787, they demanded a simple up or down vote on the new constitution at state assemblies, without the option of further amendment.Lee notes: "A constitution is now presented, which we may reject, or which we may accept, with or without amendments."

Lee questioned the rush to approve the radical new version of the Constitution:

It is natural for men, who wish to hasten the adoption of a measure, to tell us, now is the crisis—now is the critical moment which must be seized or all will be lost; and to shut the door against free enquiry, whenever conscious the thing presented has defects in it, which time and investigation will probably discover. This has been the custom of tyrants, and their dependants in all ages.See Letter I of the Federal Farmer.

Moreover, Lee noted that the panic of the new advocates for a much stronger centralized government — i.e., Madison — was largely manufactured:

If we remain cool and temperate, we are in no immediate danger of any commotions; we are in a state of perfect peace, and in no danger of invasions; the state governments are in the full exercise of their powers; and our governments answer all present exigencies, except the regulation of trade, securing credit, in some cases, and providing for the interest, in some instances, of the public debts; and whether we adopt a change three or nine months hence, can make but little odds with the private circumstances of individuals; their happiness and prosperity, after all, depend principally upon their own exertions.From Letter I.

Lee also recognized, quite reasonably, that many of the problems now being experienced in the new nation were the result of it recently coming out of a long and highly destructive war. After all, the American Revolution had been the longest war in American history up until the Vietnam war, and it had produced even worse body counts and refugee situations (proportionally speaking) than the American Civil War.

Thus, it would be a bit silly to hit the panic button over a lack of "controul on the States," as Madison so badly wanted, when the real business at hand was simply rebuilding after a disastrous war.

But, as Lee observed, the Federalists had taken to painting a questionable and biased view of the situation in the states in order to ram through their new reforms. For Lee, a more dispassionate view of the situation was warranted:

When we want a man to change his condition, we describe it as wretched, miserable, and despised; and draw a pleasing picture of that which we would have him assume. And when we wish the contrary, we reverse our descriptions. Whenever a clamor is raised, and idle men get to work, it is highly necessary to examine facts carefully, and without unreasonably suspecting men of falshood, to examine, and enquire attentively, under what impressions they act. It is too often the case in political concerns that men state facts not as they are, but as they wish them to be; and almost every man, by calling to mind past scenes, will find this to be true.

Madison's War on the States To win this battle of words, therefore, Madison sought to contrast his imagined "mob rule" — by which he meant the state legislatures — with his plan for "republicanism."

This, however, is not nearly as harmless as it sounded, and Patrick Henry stood up for local and democratic control, noting that "democracy" was the force behind the Virginia Bill of Rights and other libertarian triumphs of the period.

Like Lee, Henry took exception to the new federal plan in which only a tiny number of representatives from each state would be allowed in Congress, allegedly as direct representatives of the people. Mockingly asking if such a plan was the "the spirit of republicanism," Henry looked to another standard:

What, Sir, is the genius of democracy? Let me read that clause of the Bill of Rights of Virginia which relates to this: third clause. "That Government is or ought to be instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community: Of all the various modes and forms of Government, that is best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and is most effectually secured against the danger of mal-administration, and that whenever any Government shall be found inadequate, or contrary to those purposes, a majority of the community hath, an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal." [Emphasis in the original.]

Not surprisingly, the language found here is remarkably similar to that found in the Declaration of Independence — a document that reflected the spirit of the American revolution.

Henry would go on to note grave threats to American liberty in the form of greater military centralization and "a standing army...to execute the execrable commands of tyranny."

Ultimately, Henry was forced to question the entire enterprise, by noting an undue concern with "licentiousness" among the supporters of the new constitution:

We are cautioned…against faction and turbulence: I acknowledge that licentiousness is dangerous, and that it ought to be provided against: I acknowledge also the new form of Government may effectually prevent it: Yet, there is another thing it will as effectually do: it will oppress and ruin the people…I am not well versed in history, but I will submit to your recollection whether liberty has been destroyed most often by the licentiousness of the people or by the tyranny of rulers? I imagine, Sir, you will find the balance on the side of tyranny."

Henry noted that the new constitution signified a "revolution" of its own, but it was not the good kind of revolution that had occurred during the secession from Britain. Instead, it was a revolution of a much older kind. The kind where a small cadre of powerful men destroy the allegedly excessive liberties of the people:

Revolutions like this have happened in almost every country in Europe: Similar examples are to be found in ancient Greece and ancient Rome: Instances of the people losing their liberty by their carelessness and the ambition of a few.

Unfortunately, the Federalists ultimately won out, and the winners wrote the history books that followed. Thus, those who were for decentralized government and local control were denounced as proponents of "mob rule" and Madison got what he wanted. The new constitution enshrined slavery in its text. It imposed immense new taxes. It created a huge standing army. The new national government claimed only it could judge whether or not it had abused its power. It turned what was once a voluntary compact of states into an involuntary union. It created a Congress composed primarily of millionaires, most of whom rarely ever set foot in the districts they're supposed to represent.

What A Modern American "Democracy" Might Have Looked LikeToday's American mega-state represents the triumph of "republicanism" that Madison and federalists so badly wanted.

The alternative, of course, might have been something more like the Swiss Confederation, with its extremely localized government, its regional differences, and its weak central government. In some areas, government is even administered by something resembling "direct democracy." To this day, taxation powers in Switzerland are still heavily dependent on popular referenda and consensus among all member states. Taxes even have expiration dates and to continue they must be approved by a vote of the people.See David Carey, Kathryn Gordon and Philippe Thalmann, et al: "An unusual feature of the Swiss Constitution is that the federal government’s power to raise income taxes and VAT is time-limited. These taxes will expire by the end of 2006 unless authority to raise them is renewed in a referendum held before then." https://www.oecd.org/switzerland/1881005.pdf In other words, Switzerland might be looked upon as something close to the modern manifestation of what Madison so loathed in the state governments under the Articles of Confederation. Oh, what a hell we would live in had the Federalists failed! Thank goodness Madison saved us from something akin to the daily nightmare that is Swiss democracy.

View Details

Earlier this month, prominent names in the conservative movement gathered in Washington, DC, for a conference on “National Conservatism.” Speakers included such luminaries as Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, John Bolton, Michael Anton, Rich Lowry, Yuval Levin, and Josh Hawley. Representing the academy were F.H. Buckley, Charles Kesler, Amy Wax, and Patrick Deneen. Other conservative writers and thinkers participated in panels. The two figures most associated with national conservatism — Yoram Hazony and R.R. Reno — spoke during the opening plenary.

What is this national conservatism all about?

The succinct answer is the marriage of nationalism to conservatism. The conference organizers defined nationalism as “a commitment to a world of independent nations.” They presented national conservatism as “an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to theories grounded in race.” Their stated aim was “to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.”

Sounds interesting. However, neither national conservatism nor nationalism — whatever the distinctions between them — can take hold in the United States.

The Difference Between a Country and a Nation Why? Because the United States is not, and has never been, a nation. The founding generation referred to the United States as a plural noun (i.e., “these United States”) because several sovereigns fell under that designation. St. George Tucker called the United States a “federal compact” consisting of “several sovereign and independent states.” If his view seems unrecognizable today, it is because nationalism within the United States is dying or dead—and the United States killed it.

The United States of America in the singular is a country, not a nation. It contains nations within it, but does not itself constitute a nation. Nations involve solidarity among people who share a common culture, language, customs, mores, ethnicity, and history. A country, by contrast, involves political arrangements and governmental territories and boundaries.

From its inception, the United States has been characterized by faction and sectionalism, cultural clashes, and competing narratives — between Indian tribes in what is now Florida and California, Wyoming and Maine, Georgia and Michigan; between the British and French and Spanish and Dutch; between Protestants and Catholics and English Dissenters and nonconformists and splintering denominations; between the Calvinism of Cotton Mather and the Enlightenment rationalism that influenced Franklin and Jefferson. The United States has experienced, as well, numerous separatist movements, including, most notably, the secession of the states that made up the Confederate States of America.

The United States is not a nation.

A nation consists of a homogenous culture of which its like-minded inhabitants are acutely aware. By contrast, the United States of America is, and has always been, culturally heterogeneous, consisting of a variety of cultures and traditions.

While the Puritans of New England developed witch anxieties, a planter gentry established itself in Virginia. While slavery spread through the South, American Quakers — banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony — preached abolition and pacifism in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, industry sprung up in Philadelphia and Boston. Around 60,000 loyalists left the United States at the close of the American Revolution.Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles (Random House, 2011), p. 6. In many respects, the American Revolution was the civil war before the Civil War.

While William Gilmore Simms authored novels and disquisitions regarding Southern themes and settings, grappling with the meaning of the emergent frontier in the West, New England was characterized by Romanticism and transcendentalism, by authors like Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville, and Hawthorne. While Walt Whitman was singing America in all its multiplicities, María Ruiz de Burton was penning fiction that reflected her Mexican background and perspective. Decades later, Langston Hughes would write that he, too, sang America.

What of the Samoans in Hawaii, the Cuban refugees in Florida, the descendants of black slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, the Issei and Nesi and Sansei, the Creole in New Orleans, the Orthodox Jewish communities, the Gullah in the coastal plains and Carolina Low country, the Athabaskans of Alaska, the Amish, the Puerto Ricans, the immigrants from Columbia and Peru and Guatemala and Honduras and Panama and Nicaragua? Do they have a common heritage?

Americans United by Ideology, Not Nationhood The notion of conservative nationalists that libertarianism has dominated the Republican Party is odd in light of that party’s marginalization of Ron Paul, the foreign wars orchestrated by Republicans, and the steady growth of the federal government under Republican leadership. Conservative nationalists project a caricature of libertarians that, back in 1979, Murray Rothbard thoroughly refuted (audio here, text here ). The libertarianism of Rothbard is compatible with nationalism, and might even be a necessary condition for nationalism. Conservative nationalists, moreover, seek to tie their program to Russell Kirk, who, in fact, warned against “the excesses of fanatical nationalism.”

Conservative nationalism is misguided, predicated on a fallacy, namely that the United States is a nation.

But the United States is not a nation.

If the people of the United States are united at all, it is by a system of government, the Constitution, republicanism, and the concepts of liberty, checks and balances, separation of powers, and rule of law. In other words, the United States is a country whose people are connected, if at all, by liberalism. The history of the United States has been the obliteration of nationalism, not the embrace of it.

National Conservatives Are Celebrating Bigness and Homogeneity Rather than True Nationhood Given the emphasis on sovereignty, self-governance, and self-determination that characterize nationalist movements and rhetoric, you would expect among national conservatives searing arguments for secession, perhaps for an independent Southern nation, the breaking up of California, or the independence of Texas or Vermont. Instead, the national conservatives celebrate bigness and greatness, thereby undercutting group associations and native identities based on shared cultures, customs, practices, languages, religious beliefs, and history — phenomena which exist in distinct local communities throughout the United States.

The United States of America — the country in the singular — is too big, the scope and scale of its government too large, to be the object of true nationalism. The people of the United States are not united by a common descent, ethnic solidarity, or uniform values. The United States is not a “nation of immigrants,” “one nation under God,” “the first new nation,” or an “exceptional nation.” It’s not even a nation. National conservatives overlook or ignore that reality to their peril. The national conservatism they envision for the United States can lead only to the suppression of actual nationalism.

The United States is not a nation. Trying to make it so will stamp out any remaining nationalism in the United States.

View Details

A West Virginia state lawmaker plans to re-introduce a bill next session that would require Congress declare war or call forth the state militia before the West Virginia National Guard could be released from state control and sent into combat. Currently, as The Intelligencer (of Wheeling) puts it: "the authority to activate the Guard rests with West Virginia’s governor."

But this doesn't quite describe the reality. State governors are expected to send state National Guard troops wherever and whenever the Pentagon orders.

So, in recent decades, whenever states or governors have attempted to have some say over what the Pentagon does with state troops, the Department of Defense has responded with threats.

For example, in the case of McGeehan's bill:

Leaders with the West Virginia National Guard opposed the "Protect the Guard" measure, and said it could have cost the state millions as military missions would have been deferred to other states if the measure had been enacted.

According to McGeehan, "After the success on Monday, the Adjutant General of the West Virginia National Guard (James Hoyer) — along with the military brass at the Pentagon — aggressively worked behind the scenes to kill the bill,"

The Pentagon threatened to withdraw both federal military spending and materiel from the state, with a National Guard spokesman saying:

If enacted, the (U.S. Department of Defense) couldn’t count on us to be deployable ... Missions and projects would go to other states, and there would be a loss of millions of dollars to West Virginia.

This isn't the first time the Department of Defense has essentially bribed state politicians into buckling under demands for total state acquiescence to Pentagon demands.

The Governors' Revolt of 1986 In the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration's use of American troops in Central America had become increasingly controversial. The administration's policy was being criticized for favoring brutal regimes in the region's civil wars. Moreover, at barely more than a decade since the end of the Vietnam War, many Americans were less than enthusiastic about another round of US military intervention.

Consequently, many within the Democratic Party were both ideologically and politically motivated to find new ways to oppose the Pentagon's use of National Guard troops in Central America.

In a report for the US Army War College, Historian Col. James Burgess, Col. Reid K. Beveridge, and Lt. Col. George Hargrove write:

Governor Joseph Brennan of Maine was the first to act. That year, he prohibited the deployment of 48 Maine Army Guardsmen to Honduras. ... Brennan's statement was immediately picked up by a number of other Democratic governors, who either stated they would refuse deployments of their troops or would refuse if tasked for a deployment. Principal among these were Governors Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, Madeline Kunin of Vermont, Rudy Perpich of Minnesota, Bruce Babbitt of Arizona (although Arizona Guardsmen ultimately deployed), Richard Celeste of Ohio, Richard Lamm of Colorado and [Toney] Anaya of New Mexico. Expressing some reservations at the time also were governors Mario Cuomo of New York and Mark White of Texas.

Needless to say, this was inconvenient for the Pentagon which was used to using state troops to supplement deployments with a minimum of fuss, or any of the checks and balances that are supposed to be used in a federal system.

Washington, DC politicians certainly regarded the governors' resistance as a significant problem, with Congressman Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi recalling: "General Walker was telling me six-seven months before all this came to a head that they were having trouble with the governors. Even the governor of Mississippi was reluctant to let troops go into Central America. So I knew there was a problem developing there."

Montgomery noted "the commanders over in the Defense Department" were concerned the governors' actions "did affect the force structure of the military. They couldn't send people ... [the Pentagon] felt if they couldn't use these Guardsmen where they were needed in Central America, the whole force structure was in trouble."

Moreover, James Webb, the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs warned: "the governors' authority has become a vehicle to debate or influence foreign policy." Webb also noted that there are historical precedents for governors refusing to send troops when called up, even in times of war.During the War of 1812, the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts both refused to respond to federal demands for state troops. During the Civil War, the governor of Kentucky — which had declined to secede — nonetheless withheld troops from federal service. This was eventually reversed when pro-Lincoln politicians took control of the state government.

The response in Congress consisted of passing what is now known as the Montgomery Amendment.

Congress was reluctant to totally void a governor's authority over deployment of state troops, as such powers had been recognized since the earliest days of the republic. But in an effort to further limit these powers, the Amendment stated that no governor could withhold a unit from deployment on account of "location, purpose, type or schedule of such deployment."

Governors did retain powers to deny deployment if that deployment would interfere with state needs for troops, such as quelling civil unrest or providing disaster-relief activities.

But this didn't end the debate. On January 22, 1987, Governor Rudy Perpich of Minnesota filed suit in US District Court of St. Paul challenging the constitutionality of the Montgomery Amendment, asserting it violates the Militia Clause of the Constitution.

Events Escalate in Ohio While Perpich v. Department of Defense was working its way toward the US Supreme Court, the controversy between the Pentagon and the governors reached its most tense point in Ohio.

In 1987, the Pentagon ordered the Ohio National Guard adjutant general to deploy survey and engineering teams to Honduras in early 1988. Governor Richard Celeste then intervened and ordered the Guard to not deploy. Given that the state's adjutant general answers to the governor as his commander-in-chief, the Guard declined the Pentagon's order.

The Defense Department responded by playing hard ball.

Defense Department personnel began to develop a plan to remove all but a single unit of the National Guard form Ohio. Specifically:

the Ohio Guard grossly underestimated what [National Guard Bureau Chief Lieutenant General Herbert R.] Temple had in mind for them. Most of them apparently believed they stood to lose the engineer brigade headquarters (including one general officer as the commander) and perhaps the subordinate engineer battalions. None, however, dreamed — it seems — that the Ohio National Guard could be made to disappear over a period of a very few months except for only the 73rd Infantry Brigade. And. in particular, that the Ohio Air National Guard could be made to cease to exist.

The primary purpose of all of this was to use the Pentagon's financial power to take resources out of the state, thus reducing state revenue and economic activity generated by federal spending inside the state. The local media began running stories about how the move would lead to lost jobs.

Moreover, the Pentagon's move would have forced the state to fund all of its own remaining National Guard units. The bill would have been $256 million.

Eventually, the governor caved, and the Ohio National Guard deployed as the Defense Department wished.

In 1990, the US Supreme Court sided with the Department of Defense, and ruled the Montgomery Amendment was binding.

For the moment, the matter was settled.

Why the Pentagon Has so Much Power Over State Troops Today, when the militia clause of the Second Amendment is mentioned, it is not uncommon to hear the claim that "the National Guard is the militia."

This stretches the truth, to say the least.

Today's National Guard is nothing like the independent state militias that existed throughout the nineteenth century up until the adoption of the Militia Act of 1903. Prior to the 1903 act, state militias were primarily state funded, and were not integrated into the federal government's military structure except in times of declared war.

The Militia Act created a new type of "militia" which replaced the old decentralized model with a new system in which state National Guard units were to receive federal funding and were to be integrated into the national military as a permanent reserve force.

But even after 1903, the state National Guards retained a high degree of independence compared to today. That was further eroded with the National Defense Act of 1916 which allowed National Guard United to be deployed outside their own states — and even outside the country — for much longer periods of time than had been previously allowed. The 1916 Act further increased federal funding — and thus federal control — over National Guard units.

Another major change came in 1933. At that time, new amendments to the National Defense Act were passed which made members of the National Guard units members of both their state's National Guard, and the federal military.

Further integration occurred throughout the following decades, culminating with the adoption of the "Total Force Policy" in 1970. According to Burgess, et al., this meant National Guard units became fully "woven into the fabric of the Defense establishment."

By 1986, the idea of an independent state National Guard was all but dead. As we have seen, some governors briefly tried to revive the idea, but it was struck down by the courts, and by the Pentagon's immense power over military resources within each state.

This isn't to say that state governments, if they wanted to be, couldn't still be a nuisance for the Pentagon. The Defense Department's threats against West Virginia in the case of the McGeehan bill helps to illustrate this.

The Pentagon is used to state governors asking "how high?" whenever being told to jump. But the Pentagon keeps an ace up its sleeve in case any state politicians get uppity. The Pentagon will simply threaten to remove millions of dollars worth of spending from any state which refuses to immediately comply.

So long as most Americans blithely accept whatever new wars and invasions the Pentagon plans, this strategy will probably keep working.

View Details

With scarcely two months to go until the date Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union, mainstream pundits are increasingly coming to realise that the formerly remote prospect of a No Deal Brexit is now arguably the most likely outcome. New Prime Minister Boris Johnson based his entire leadership campaign around an explicit promise to leave the EU on October 31, either with a newly re-negotiated withdrawal agreement or with no deal at all, and given that the EU has repeatedly refused to return to the negotiating table, it’s becoming unclear whether any outcome other than No Deal is even possible, at this point.

This has led commentators to turn their attention toward the murky question of what will actually happen if Britain leaves the EU on October 31 without Parliament having passed a Withdrawal Agreement. However, many in the news media seem to be struggling under the weight of conflicting loyalties: their desire to communicate the facts of the situation on the one hand, versus their desire to persuade their readers that Brexit is bad on the other hand. The result has been an avalanche of substance-free propaganda and opaque writing, with the concrete facts about No Deal struggling to emerge from a thick miasma of alarmist speculation and hysterical denunciations.

So, if we set aside the politically tempting task of speculating about what might happen in the event of a No Deal Brexit, what can we say with certainty will happen? Naturally, the complexities and uncertainties of the whole situation leave us with only a small handful of facts that can be stated with certainty, and the following facts will surely not be the only consequences of a No Deal Brexit. Having set out these bare facts, however, it can be left to other articles, and to readers themselves, to judge what the more distant economic and political consequences may be.

Institutions and Laws If Brexit occurs on 31 October with no deal, the UK would immediately lose its seat on the 28-person European Commission, which is the unelected body that wields both legislative and executive power over the EU’s member states.

Britain would also withdraw its 73 members from the publicly elected 751-member European Parliament, which is able to approve, reject, or suggest amendments to legislation handed down by the Commission, but is not itself able to initiate legislation.

Britain would no longer need to be bound by current or future EU laws. However, it is widely expected that the UK government will adopt the vast majority of EU laws anyway, to avoid “black holes in Britain’s lawbook.”

In the event of a No Deal Brexit, the UK would also immediately leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, and the role of highest court of appeal for UK civil and criminal cases will transfer to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

However, the UK would remain subject to the jurisdiction of the controversial European Court of Human Rights, which is a non-EU organisation.

Trade If there is a No Deal Brexit, the UK would immediately leave the EU’s Single Market, which would mean the UK would no longer be guaranteed tariff-free and quota-free movement of goods, services, capital, and people between the UK and countries in the EU, as well as the handful of non-EU countries in the Single Market (Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein).

Leaving the Single Market would also mean the UK would no longer have to adhere to the uniform regulations the EU imposes to ensure a ‘level playing field’ within the Single Market. These regulations apply across the board in the countries where they are imposed, not just for goods that are actually traded between member states, and prescribe everything from food standards, to the use of chemicals, to working hours, to workplace health and safety procedures, and beyond. However, though the UK government would no longer be forced to retain these regulations, it may choose to do so anyway.

In addition to leaving the Single Market, a No Deal Brexit would also result in the UK immediately leaving the EU’s Customs Union. This would mean the UK would no longer have to enforce the same tariffs and quotas as other EU countries when trading with non-EU countries. In other words, the UK would regain the ability to independently set its own tariffs, and negotiate its own trade deals with other countries, rather than being covered by the EU’s trade deals.

In summary, the UK would move from the inside to the outside of the EU’s trade wall, losing its tariff-free trade with EU countries, but gaining the ability to pursue free trade with non-EU countries.

Payments and Subsidies If the UK leaves the EU with no deal, the UK government will no longer be obliged to continue paying its annual ‘membership fee’ contribution to the EU budget, which officially amounts to around £19 billion per year. However, since 1985 the UK has received a reduction or ‘rebate’ on its membership fee, bringing the amount actually paid down to around £15 billion per year. The reason the UK receives this rebate is to offset the fact that the typical rules and criteria for calculating the EU membership fee were disproportionately penalising the UK, due to Britain’s small agricultural sector and high openness to non-EU trade, compared with other EU countries.

Leaving the EU with no deal would also mean the UK would no longer continue receiving any payments from the EU budget. These direct EU payments to the UK amount to around £4 billion per year, and mostly take the form of agricultural subsidies to farmers in poorer areas of Britain.

Immigration The immediate consequences of a No Deal Brexit on immigration are not at all clear, and little can be said with certainty other than that EU citizens would no longer necessarily be guaranteed free movement into the UK, and unlimited rights to live and work there. The power to determine UK immigration policy will revert back to the UK state itself, and therefore such policy will be subject to change with the changing whims of different particular governments and prime ministers.

In December, Theresa May’s government published a plan stating that, in the event of a No Deal Brexit, EU nationals already living in the UK before 29 March 2019 would retain similar rights to live and work in the UK as they had enjoyed under EU membership, although the plan would “make it harder” for new migrants to move to the UK. However, in the intervening months an entirely new government has been formed under new Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and new Home Secretary Priti Patel has pledged to end freedom of movement for EU citizens and impose border restrictions on day one of a No Deal Brexit, although the specifics of this new plan remain unclear.

The Irish Border For most mainstream politicians and analysts, the issue of the border between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (part of the EU) has been arguably the single greatest difficulty in the whole Brexit process. Due to numerous factors, including the troubled history of the region, both the UK and the Republic of Ireland strongly reject the idea of imposing a hard border between the RoI and Northern Ireland, even in the event of a No Deal Brexit. However, this would create a major hole in the EU’s trade wall, as well as in the UK’s post-Brexit immigration controls, allowing completely free and unchecked movement of goods and people between the EU and the UK along the entire 310 mile Irish border. How, or even whether, this issue will be resolved remains entirely unknown.

View Details

If one mentions in a discussion that Liechtenstein's political system could possibly serve as a model for Germany, one usually reaps scorn and ridicule. If you dig a little deeper to find out what they know about Liechtenstein, the result is usually: little to none.

The Principality of Liechtenstein has no common border with Germany, it is trapped between Switzerland and Austria as a landlocked country. The national territory covers only 160 square kilometers, making Liechtenstein the sixth smallest state in the world. The country has 37,000 inhabitants, 34 percent of whom are (mostly German speaking) foreigners. The capital is Vaduz, the only official language is German. Liechtenstein has been a sovereign state since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806.

The principality does not have its own currency, instead it uses the Swiss franc and forms a customs union with Switzerland. Unlike Switzerland, however, Liechtenstein has become a member of the European Economic Area (EEA) following a referendum. There is free movement of goods, services, capital and persons among the member states (all EU states, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). However, Liechtenstein was able to restrict the free movement of persons to 64 new residence permits per year.

Contrary to popular belief, the Principality is not an operetta state that thrives on stamp sales and windy financial transactions. Rather, it is a highly industrialized country with a highly diversified economy, whose main value-added branch is the manufacturing industry, especially mechanical engineering. Numerous Swiss, Austrians and Germans commute to the principality to earn their living.

Despite its small size, Liechtenstein hosts market leaders such as Hilti (drilling machines) and Ivoclar (medical technology). About 40 percent of the employees work in the industrial sector, making Liechtenstein one of the most industrialized countries in the world! By way of comparison, less than 10 percent of employees work in the financial industry. With one company per nine inhabitants, Liechtenstein probably has the highest density of entrepreneurs in the world.

The Constitutional Reform of 2003 In 2003, after ten years of discussion, a referendum adopted a major constitutional reform that strengthened the rights of citizens, municipalities and monarchs at the expense of parliament and government. The reasons for this are instructive, as they shed light on fundamental problems of parliamentarism and democracy. Since the 1990s, Liechtenstein had developed a constitutional reality in which the politicians and parties that constituted the parliamentary majority and the government increasingly drew powers from the Constitution that were either clearly assigned to the Reigning Prince or whose assignment was unclear. In some cases, even laws were published without the constitutionally required signature of the Reigning Prince.

Prince Hans-Adam II did not agree. He justified his ultimately successful proposal for a constitutional amendment by saying that for practical reasons both sovereigns, the people and the Reigning Prince, would have to delegate the tasks of the state to smaller groups (politicians, parties, administration), which in practice would then acquire a disproportionate importance, and would transform themselves into "oligarchies". These, however, tried to increase their own interests at the expense of the interests of all others. Due to internal conflicts of interest, they would increasingly be less able to make important but unpopular decisions.

It is the monarch's task to ensure that democratic and constitutional institutions are not weakened by this oligarchy and that the interests of the state are placed before those of the party. In the long run, the monarch would only be able to carry out this task if he knew that the majority of the people would support him. People and monarchy, as the weaker elements, are the natural allies against the strongest element in the state, the oligarchy.

At the same time, he pointed out that he might also have to veto a majority. It should be clear that the majority is not always right and that it is the prince's task to protect the rights of minorities and the weak and to defend the long-term welfare of the people and the country. But if the people don’t want this, then the people should have the last word, according to the principle of the right to self-determination, regardless of the wishes of the prince, and be able to express their distrust or abolish the monarchy altogether.

An Innovative Constitution Liechtenstein is therefore not a constitutional monarchy in the conventional sense. Rather, it is a worldwide unique mixed system between direct democracy and parliamentary-constitutional hereditary monarchy. In addition to parliament, the people and the Reigning Prince have their own relevant rights of control and co-determination, which are not subject to the influence of the parties; the municipalities may also introduce their own legislative initiatives. In order to counter the danger of unrestricted majority rule through direct democracy, the Liechtenstein system has incorporated two safety valves: on the one hand, the prince's right of veto even against the results of referendums, and on the other, the right of secession of each individual community.

An abuse of the right of veto by the Reigning Prince, in turn, is prevented by the possibility for citizens to vote against him or to abolish the monarchy as a whole (!). In his work The State in the Third Millennium, Prince Hans-Adam II points out that no monarchy is necessary for such a construction. A President directly elected by the people could assume the same task as the Prince in Liechtenstein.

The current National Constitution of Liechtenstein is thus one of the most innovative in the world as far as the limitation of power in democracy is concerned, and that is the all-decisive point.

In fact, Liechtenstein is the only country in the world to allow its communities to secede and thus grants self-determination by virtue of the Constitution. This is actually a primordial democratic process. The majority of a territory decides by referendum to become independent or to belong to another community. If secessions down to the municipal level were in principle permissible, as is the case in Liechtenstein, the government would have an incentive to pay greater attention to the interests of the regions from the outset.

Hans-Adam II has recognized that the granting of self-determination and thus secession rights can increase the quality of government action by virtue of competition, just as it does in the product and service market. The states must then enter into peaceful competition with each other in order to offer their customers the best possible service at the lowest price. On the words of Hans-Adam II:

The process of transforming the state from a demigod into a service company will only be possible if we move from indirect to direct democracy and break up the monopoly of the state with the right to self-determination at the municipal level.

A Small State Does not Mean Isolation In Germany, not only the exclave of Büsingen but also various southern German municipalities would presumably have joined Switzerland long ago if the same legal situation had been in place. This in turn would have made politics much more cautious in its measures, because otherwise there would be the threat of further loss of state territory and citizens (= power).

We should therefore think about whether a world of a thousand Liechtensteins would not be a better world. Most decisions would be made at the local level and decentralized, serious mistakes would have limited effects, there would be numerous examples of what works and what does not. Due to the multitude of communities alone, there would be fruitful competition for "customers" instead of a state cartel, which on the one hand wants to milk the citizens as much as possible and on the other hand wants to exclude them from all decisions.

Europe's recipe for success has always been diversity and the associated competition. This does not necessarily mean weakness. Even city states such as Venice and Genoa or rather marginal states such as Portugal and the Netherlands were able to develop great political and economic power. The creation of superior institutions, such as a common free trade or economic zone or a common defense, is always possible and, especially in the case of similar communities, also obvious. Think, for example, of the League of Cities of the Hanseatic League or the German Confederation, an alliance of 39 sovereign states that maintained common political and military institutions. Small states do not automatically mean isolation or provincialism, but in any case, self-government and subsidiarity. And that opens up opportunities that are lacking elsewhere.

Compared to Germany, small Liechtenstein is a prime example of system robustness or antifragility. An antifragile system is one that has fewer swings, but is stable over a much longer period of time and ultimately more successful. In contrast, fragile systems look good for a while, but then collapse catastrophically at regular intervals.

Until 1866, Liechtenstein and present-day Germany were united in the German Confederation. Just as the intellectual mainstream is currently striving for a European federal state, the creation of a unified German state was the measure of all things at the time. When it became clear after the Battle of Königgrätz that Prussia, which rejected the continuation of the German Confederation, would be the centre of this new state, the member states decided to abolish it. A single member voted against at that time: Liechtenstein.

What subsequently happened to Germany is well known: Wars of unification, colonialism, World War I, two million of its own dead, loss of a quarter of its territory, revolution, hyperinflation, currency reform with loss of almost all savings, National Socialist dictatorship, Second World War, Holocaust with extermination of Jewish fellow citizens and their culture, six and a half million of war dead, loss of another third of the national territory, almost all cities bombed, expulsion of twelve million Germans, division of the country into occupation zones, renewed currency reform with loss of almost all savings, socialist dictatorship in the eastern part, revolution there and renewed currency reform. In total, there have been no less than four system collapses since 1870. In Liechtenstein, on the other hand: zero.

Today, the Principality of Liechtenstein has a much higher per capita income than the Federal Republic of Germany, is a stable country without significant crime and without national debt. All this was achieved without a single war, without a single revolution, and without a single annexation to a great and powerful collective.

Translated by Tim Benkner. This article was originally published in German at Achse des Guten.

View Details

This talk was delivered at the Abbeville Institute's conference on Secession and Nullification in Dallas, Texas on November 10, 2018.

My talk today is about decentralization and epistemology. At the outset I wish to disclaim any specialized expertise in this subject. I’m a lawyer by training who loves literature and earned a doctorate in English. It would be a stretch to call me a philosopher or a political theorist, hence this anchoring disclaimer to prevent me from sailing too deep into philosophical seas.

I have divided my argument, such as it is, into two parts: the impersonal and the personal. The former is a philosophical case for decentralization; the latter involves private considerations about intimate human relationships around which communities of common purpose organize and conduct themselves. In the end, the two approaches are mutually reinforcing, yielding, I hope, benevolent and humane considerations. Presenting them as separate, however, signals to different audiences whose tolerance for appeals to feeling may vary.

The Impersonal

The impersonal argument boils down to this: decentralized systems of order are more efficient, and hence more desirable, because they better account for and respond to dispersed knowledge across diverse communities with unique customs, ambitions, and values. Heterogeneous, bottom-up systems governed by local institutions that reflect native knowledge, talent, and choices more effectually serve humanity writ large than centralized, top-down systems that are unaccountable to local norms and mores.

Polycentric law, or polycentrism,is the term I use to describe this organizational arrangement. Other names that suggest themselves fail to express the dynamism of polycentrism. Federalism, for example, confounds because of its association with the early American Federalists. It presupposes, moreover, even in its articulation by the inaptly named Anti-Federalists, too strong of a central authority, in my view, beneath which local authorities contend as coequal subordinates. Localism, for its part, suffers from associations with protectionist, anticompetitive economic policies. Other names such as confederation, city state, or anarcho-capitalism likewise have their drawbacks.

So I’m stuck with polycentrism as the operative label for the working system of small and plural authorities that I seek to describe. The chief value of this system is its propensity to temper and check the natural ambition and pride that lead humans not only to aspirations of power and greatness, but also to the coercive institutions and machinations that inhibit the voluntary organization of individuals around shared norms and customs. An optimal polycentric order consists of multiple, competing jurisdictions of humane and reasonable scale, each with their own divided powers that prevent the consolidation of authority in the form of a supreme ruler or tyrant (or, more likely in our age, of a managerial, administrative, and bureaucratic state) and each with a written document outlining governing rules and institutions while affirming a core commitment to common goals and a guiding mission. To speak of an optimal polycentric order, however, is problematic, because polycentric orders enable distinct communities to select and define for themselves the operative assemblage of rules and institutions that fulfills their chief ideals and favored principles.

F. A. Hayek’s price theory provides a useful starting point for discussing the benefits of bottom-up, decentralized modes of human ordering that represent polycentrism. This theory holds that knowledge is dispersed throughout society and incapable of being comprehensively understood by any one person or group of people; therefore, centralized economic planning inevitably fails because it cannot accurately assess or calculate the felt needs and coordinated activities of faraway people in disparate communities; only in a market economy where consumers freely buy and sell according to their unique preferences will reliable pricing gradually reveal itself.

Hayek’s theory of knowledge is predicated on the fallibility and limitations of human intelligence. Because the complexity of human behavior and interaction exceeds the capacity of one mind or group of minds fully to comprehend it, human coordination requires deference to emergent or spontaneous orders, rooted in custom, that adapt to the dynamic, evolving needs and preferences of everyday consumers. Hayek’s articulation of price theory contemplates collective and aggregated wisdom—i.e., disembodied or embedded knowledge—and cautions against grand designs based on the alleged expertise of a select class of people.

Michael Polanyi, another polymath and an ardent anti-Marxist, exposited related theories about polycentricity, spontaneous order, central planning, and knowledge, but he focused less on economic theory and more on scientific discovery, independent inquiry, and the free, systematic exchange of research and ideas. Scientific advancement, in his view, did not proceed as the construction of a house proceeds, namely according to a fixed plan or design, but rather by a process analogous to, in his words, "the ordered arrangement of living cells which constitute a polycellular organism."Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (Indianapolis Liberty Fund, 1998) (1951), p. 109. "Throughout the process of embryonic development," he explained, “each cell pursues its own life, and yet each so adjusts its growth to that of its neighbors that a harmonious structure of the aggregate emerges."Ibid. "This", he concluded, “is exactly how scientists co-operate: by continually adjusting their line of research to the results achieved up to date by their fellow-scientists."Ibid.

Polanyi labored to show that “the central planning of production” was “strictly impossible"Ibid at 136. and that “the operations of a system of spontaneous order in society, such as the competitive order of a market, cannot be replaced by the establishment of a deliberate ordering agency.”Ibid at 137. He described the inefficiencies of purely hierarchical organizational structures within which information rises upward from the base, mediated successively by subsequent, higher tiers of authority, arriving ultimately at the top of a pyramid, at some supreme authority, which then centrally directs the entire system, commanding orders down to the base. This convoluted process, besides being inefficient, is susceptible to disinformation and misinformation, and to a lack of reliable, on-the-ground knowledge of relevant circumstances.

While Polanyi points to mundane instances of spontaneous ordering, such as passengers at train stations, without central direction, standing on platforms and filling seats on the trains,Ibid. at 141 he also examines more complex forms of behavioral adaptation to interpersonal interactions that, over time and through repetition, emerge as tacitly understood habits and rules that gain acceptance by the larger corporate body.

Centralization concentrates power in fewer people in smaller spaces, whereas decentralization divides and spreads power among vast networks of people across wider spaces. Under centralized government, good people who enjoy power may, in theory, quickly accomplish good, but evil people who enjoy power may quickly accomplish evil. Because of the inherent, apocryphal dangers of the latter possibility, centralized government must not be preferred. Our tendencies as humans are catastrophic, asserting themselves in the sinful behaviors we both choose and cannot help. There is, moreover, on a considerable range of issues, disagreement about what constitutes the bad and the good, the evil and the virtuous. If questions about badness or goodness, evil and virtuousness are simply or hastily resolved in favor of the central power, then resistant communities—threatened, marginalized, silenced, and coerced—will eventually exercise their political agency, mobilizing into insurrectionary alliances to undermine the central power. Centralized power therefore increases the probability of large-scale violence whereas decentralized government reduces conflicts to local levels where they tend to be minor and offsetting.

Polycentric orders produce self-constituting communities that regulate themselves through the mediating institutions they have voluntarily erected to align with their values, traditions, and priorities. Their practical scope and scale enable them to govern themselves according to binding rules that are generally agreeable to the majority within their jurisdiction.

A man alone in the wilderness is vulnerable to threats. When he enters into society, however, he combines with others who, with common interests, serve and protect each other from outside threats. If society grows large, materializing as vast states or governments, the people therein lose their sense of common purpose, their desire to unify for mutual benefit and protection. Factions and classes arise, each contending for power. The people in whom the sovereignty of the central power supposedly resides may become disempowered and marginalized as the network of bureaucratic functionaries proliferates. The people are displaced by arms and agencies of the central power. Although progress cannot be achieved without constructive competition among and between rival groups, societies cannot flourish when their inhabitants do not share a fundamental sense of common purpose and identity.

Centralized power may at first blush seem to be more efficient because its decision-making process is not complex, consisting as it does of top-down commands to subordinates. Theoretically, and only theoretically, ultimate efficiency could be achieved if all power were possessed by one person. But of course in reality no one person could protect his or her power from external threats or internal insubordination. In fact, the concentration of power in one person invites dissent and insurrection. It is easier, after all, to overthrow one person than to overthrow many. Therefore, in practice, centralized power requires the supreme authority to build bureaucracies of agents and functionaries loyally and dutifully to institute its top-down directive

But how does the central power generate a sense of loyalty and duty among and between these subordinates? Through patronage and political favors, pensions, rent seeking, influence peddling, immunities, cronyism, graft—in short, by strengthening the human urge for self-aggrandizement, elevating select people and groups to privileged positions at extraordinary expense to ordinary people or consumers. Accordingly, centralization as a form of human organization incentivizes corruption, malfeasance, and dishonesty while building convoluted networks of costly officials through whom information is mediated and distorted. The result is widespread corruption, misunderstanding, and inefficiency.

Even assuming arguendo that concentrated authority is more efficient, it would ease the ability to accomplish evil and mischief as well as good. The purported benefits of consolidated power presuppose a benevolent supreme authority with comprehensive knowledge of native circumstances. Whatever conceivable benefits may be obtained through hypothetically quick decision-making are outweighed by the potential harms resulting from the implementation of the decision as binding law. The limited and fallible knowledge on which the decision is based amplifies the resultant harm beyond what it might have been in a decentralized system that localized power and thereby diminished the capability of bad people to cause harm.

The efficiency, if any, of commanding orders and setting policy on a top-down model is therefore neutralized by the resulting inefficiencies and harmful consequences that could have been avoided had central planners not presupposed knowledge of local circumstances. Absent an offsetting authority, any centralized power may, without just cause, coerce and molest peaceful men and women in contravention of their distinct laws and customs. Naturally, these men and women, combined as resistant communities, will contest unwarranted, unwanted tyranny that threatens their way of life and understanding of community. Disturbance of social harmony and backlash against unjustified coercion render inefficient the allegedly efficient operations of the central power.

It becomes apparent, after long consideration, that centralized modes of power are not more efficient after all, that in fact they are inimical to liberty and virtue when compared to their decentralized alternatives. But that is not the only reason why the decentralized model is superior.

The Personal

You don’t enjoy fine wine merely by talking and thinking about it, but by actually drinking it, sniffing its aromas, swirling it in your glass, wetting your tongue and coating your mouth with it. A true appreciation of wine is experiential, based on the repeated pleasure of tasting and consuming different grape varieties with their distinctive flavor components. Most people develop their loves and priorities this way. They do not love abstractions, but they love their neighbors, families, and friends. They prioritize issues that are to them near and daily. They have done so from an early age. “It is within families and other institutional arrangements characteristic of neighborhood, village, and community life that citizenship is learned and practiced for most people most of the time,” said Vincent Ostrom.Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. x. “The first order of priority in learning the craft of citizenship as applied to public affairs,” he added, “needs to focus on how to cope with problems in the context of family, neighborhood, village, and community. This is where people acquire the rudiments for becoming self-governing, by learning how to live and work with others.”Ibid.

I learned to accept defeat, not from national election campaigns, foreign wars, or too-big-to-fail banks that nevertheless failed, but from little-league baseball, when my third-grade team, the Cardinals, lost in the semifinals, and when my freshman basketball team lost in the finals. I still dream about that championship basketball game. My coach had put me in the game for the sole purpose of shooting three-pointers, my specialty, but the defense double-teamed me. I was unable to get a clear shot. Every time I passed the ball away my coach yelled “no,” commanding me to shoot. Earlier in the season, before he knew my skill behind the three-point line, he shouted “no” whenever I took a shot.

I learned about injustice when my first-grade teacher punished me in a manner that was disproportionate to my alleged offense, which to this day I deny having committed, and about grace and mercy when my mother forgave me, without so much as a spank, for an offense that I had most definitely committed.

I learned about God and faith while having breakfast at my grandmother’s kitchen table. She kept a Bible on the table beside a bookshelf full of texts on Christian themes and teachings. At the middle of the table was a little jar of Bible verses. I recall reaching my hand into the jar and pulling out verses, one after another, weekend after weekend, reading them to her and then discussing with her what their meaning might be. This mode of learning was intimate and hands-on and prepared me to experience God for myself, to study His word and figure out my beliefs about Him when later I retired to places of solitude for silent contemplation. These experiences meant far more to me than the words of any faraway televangelist.

Whenever I stayed at my grandparents’ house, my grandfather would awaken early and start the coffee pot. My brother and I, hearing him downstairs, would rush to his side. He shared sections of the newspaper with us and allowed us to drink coffee with him. He made us feel like responsible adults, two little children with newspaper and coffee in hand, pondering current events and passing judgment on the latest political trends and scandals. This indispensable education did not come from public broadcasting or from some expensive civic literacy project orchestrated by the National Foundation for the Arts or the National Foundation for the Humanities. It came from family, in familiar spaces, in the warmth of a loving home.

Mrs. Stubbs taught me manners and decorum at cotillion, although she never succeeded in teaching me to dance. I learned etiquette on the golf course where I spent my childhood summers playing with groups of grown men, competing with them while learning how to ask questions about their careers and professions, staying silent as they swung or putted, not walking in their lines, holding the flagstick for them, giving them honors on the tee when they earned the lowest score on the previous hole, raking the bunkers, walking carefully to avoid leaving spike marks on the greens, fixing my ball marks, and so on.

I learned about death when a girl I carpooled with to church passed away from cancer. She was only four or five when she died. Then there was the death of my great-grandmother, then my great-grandfather, then my grandfather, and so on down the line, which to this day approaches me. In the South we still open our caskets to display corpses and remind ourselves of the fragility of life and the inevitability of death. This solemn ritual keeps us mindful of our purpose in life, draws us closer to our friends and family, and ensures that we contemplate the gravest and most important questions.

My two grandfathers meant the world to me. Both of them wore suits and ties to work every day. They dressed professionally and responsibly for every occasion. I copied them at an early age. In high school, while the other kids gave themselves over to the latest fads and fashions, I wore button-down shirts tucked neatly into slacks. I thought I wouldn’t score points with my peers by dressing up for class, but before long many of my friends adopted the practice as we began to think of ourselves as little men in pursuit of an education. Because we were athletes, our clothing was not just tolerated but eventually mimicked. When the other basketball teams showed up at our gym, we met them in coat and tie while they wore t-shirts that were too big and breakaway pants that sagged beneath their rear ends. Our team might have startled them by our formal attire. But we startled them even more after we removed to the locker room, put on our jerseys, stormed the court and then beat the living hell out of them.

I could go on. The point is that felt experience defines who we are and shapes how we behave. As Justice Holmes remarked, “What we most love and revere generally is determined by early associations. I love granite rocks and barberry bushes, no doubt because with them were my earliest joys that reach back through the past eternity of my life.”Oliver Wenell Holmes Jr. "Natural Law." Harvard Law Review, Vol. 32 (1918-19), p. 41. What he says next is more important:

But while one’s experience thus makes certain preferences dogmatic for oneself, recognition of how they came to be so leaves one able to see that others, poor souls, may be equally dogmatic about something else. And this again means skepticism. Not that one’s belief or love does not remain. Not that we would not fight and die for it if important—we all, whether we know it or not, are fighting to make the kind of a world that we should like—but that we have learned to recognize that others will fight and die to make a different world, with equal sincerity or belief. Deep-seated preferences can not be argued about—you can not argue a man into liking a glass of beer—and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far reaching, we try to kill the other man rather than let him have his way. But that is perfectly consistent with admitting that, so far as appears, his grounds are just as good as ours.Holmes at 41.

I take these words as cautionary—as a stark reminder of the horrifying potential for violence that inheres in the attempt of one group of people formed by certain associations to impose by force their norms and practices on another group of people formed by different associations. It is the distinct virtue of polycentricity to accommodate these differences and to minimize the chances of violence by diffusing and dispersing power.

Conclusion

The polycentric order I advocate is not utopian; it’s concrete and practical and exemplified by the mediating institutions and subsidiary authorities such as churches, synagogues, clubs, little leagues, community associations, schools, and professional memberships through and with which we express ourselves, politically or otherwise, and to whose rules we voluntarily submit.

When we turn on our televisions in the evening, we are, many of us from this part of the country, disturbed by the increase of lewd conduct, divisive rhetoric, mischievous behavior, and institutionalized decadence that are contrary to our local norms yet systemically and vigorously forced upon us by foreign or outside powers. Turning off the television in protest seems like our only mode of resistance, our only manner of dissent. Disgusted by mounting evidence that our politicians have marshaled the apparatus of the mighty federal government to achieve personal fame and glory, many of us feel exploited and powerless. In the face of massive state bureaucracies, large corporations, biased media, tendentious journalists, and commanding militaries, we nevertheless exercise our agency, bringing joy and hope to our families, friends, and neighbors, tending to concrete circumstances that are under our direct control. The promise of community reinvigorates and refreshes us.

Recently I strolled around Copenhagen, Denmark, on a bright Sunday morning. Though the church bells rang through the streets, echoing off buildings and cobblestone sidewalks, silencing conversations, and startling some pigeons, the churches themselves remained empty. I saw no worshipers or worship services. Some of the churches had been repurposed as cafes and restaurants with waiters and waitresses but no pastors or priests; customers drank their wine and ate their bread at fine little tables, but there were no communion rituals or sacraments.

A month later, also on a Sunday, I flew into Montgomery, Alabama, from Dallas, Texas. As the plane slowly descended beneath the clouds, the little dollhouse figurines and model buildings beneath me snapped to life, becoming real people and structures. I gazed upon the dozens of churches dotting the flat, widening landscape, which grew nearer and bigger as we approached the airport. And I observed, sitting there, stock still yet propelled through space, that the parking lots of each church were full of cars, that there were, at this early hour, hundreds if not thousands of my people there before me, worshipping the same God I worshipped, the same God my parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents had worshipped; and I sensed, right then, deeply and profoundly, for the first time in years, a rare but unmistakable feeling: hope not just for my community, but for community.

View Details

[Originally published at EconLog.]

Recently, some of my friends singled out this piece by Jeff Deist , president of the Mises Institute, as truly awful. When I actually read it, however, it seemed like a reasonable presentation of a plausible view. Deist:

[L]ibertarians are busy promoting universalism even as the world moves in the other direction. Trump and Brexit rocked the globalist narrative. Nationalism is on the rise throughout Europe, forcing the EU to defend itself, secession and breakaway movements exist in Scotland, in Catalonia, in Belgium, in Andalusia, even in California. Federalism and states’ rights are suddenly popular with progressives in the US. The world desperately wants to turn its back on Washington and Brussels and the UN and the IMF and all of the globalist institutions. Average people smell a rat.

We should seize on this.

Mecca is not Paris, an Irishman is not an Aboriginal, a Buddhist is not a Rastafarian, a soccer mom is not a Russian. Is it our goal to convince them all to become thorough Rothbardians? Should libertarians care about gay marriage in Saudi Arabia, or insist on the same border arrangements for Brownsville, Texas and Monaco? Should we agitate for Texas-style open carry laws in France, to prevent the next Bataclan?

Or would our time be better spent making the case for political decentralization, secession, and subsidiarity? In other words, should we let Malta be Maltese?

Deist concludes:

In other words, self-determination is the ultimate political goal. It is the path to liberty, however imperfect. A world of seven billion self-governing individuals is the ideal, but short of that we should prefer the Liechtensteins to the Germanys and the Luxembourgs to the Englands. We should prefer states’ rights to federalization in the US, and cheer for the breakup of EU. We should support breakaway movements in places like Catalonia and Scotland and California. We should favor local control over faraway legislatures and administrative bodies, and thus reject multilateral trade deals. We should, in sum, prefer small to large when it comes to government.

But does decentralization alone really promote liberty or prosperity? The mechanism is elusive at best. Imagine a world with a thousand sovereign countries of equal size. This is far more decentralized than the status quo, right? Suppose further, however, that there is zero mobility between these countries. Labor can’t move; capital can’t move. In this scenario, each country seems perfectly able to pursue its policies free of competitive pressure. Why should we expect such policies to promote liberty, prosperity, or anything else?

The story would change, of course, if you combine decentralization with resource mobility. In that case, each country’s government has to compete to retain labor and capital at home. If you don’t make the customer happy, somebody else proverbially will. But without this “universalist” mobility rule, decentralization leaves everyone under the rule of a preordained local monopolist.

But wouldn’t decentralized governments voluntarily embrace mobility? It’s complicated.

A profit-maximizing dictator might try to get rich by welcoming the world’s talent to a glorious land of (apolitical) freedom. But then again, he might try to hold on to the riches he already has by isolating himself from the rest of the world and crushing his real, potential, and imagined enemies. See North Korea.

Nor is democracy much of a remedy. Yes, democracies give leaders strong incentives to adopt popular policies. But if you study public opinion, you’ll discover that neither libertarian nor wealth-creating policies are very popular . While people around the world migrate for prosperity and freedom, they rarely vote for them.

But doesn’t decentralization by itself have any systematic effects? Sure. Decentralization yields variance. In a world of a thousand sovereign nations, you’ll see all kinds of weird alternatives – a veritable zoo of polities. A few will probably be great. But if resources are immobile and leaders have familiar political incentives, there’s little reason to expect their greatness to be contagious. And the fact that a few great polities exist on Earth is small comfort to the vast majority of people who will never get to live or invest there.

Now you could say, “Sure, decentralization works poorly without high mobility and good political incentives. But what good are high mobility and good political incentives without decentralization?” My main response: Once you make this concession, you should be suspicious of efforts to increase decentralization at the expense of mobility or incentives. If you can decentralize without changing anything else, great. Otherwise, hold your applause until you’ve carefully analyzed decentralization’s net effect on liberty and prosperity.

P.S. For further analysis, see Week 2, section X and Week 12, Section I of my graduate Public Choice notes.

View Details

When the southern states were debating secession in 1861, there was one other proposed secession that almost always gets overlooked in history: New York City. The Mayor of New York at the time, Fernando Wood, saw disunion as an inevitability at the start of 1861, and in a January 6th address to the city council, he advocated New York City’s secession.

“When Disunion has become a fixed and certain fact,” Wood asked the council, “why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master — to a people and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her, take away the power of self-government, and destroyed the Confederacy of which she was the proud Empire City?”

Although Wood did cite slavery as among the reasons for the city’s need to secede (he believed New Yorker’s benefited from trading with the slave economy, and the city was home to a respectable number of slave traders who continued to operate their not-entirely-clandestine businesses for places such as Brazil and Cuba), he did not propose joining the Confederacy, which had yet to be formed. He wanted to establish New York City as sovereign entity — the Free City of Tri-insula, referring to the islands of Manhattan, Long, and Staten.

The Common Council agreed with Wood, and the city looked poised to secede. They only changed their position after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, not because they objected to the Confederacy’s actions as much as their desire not to be surrounded by territories that would view them as traitors during the oncoming war.

But New York’s near-secession is an example of what many people in the North — particularly Republicans — feared from secession; they were not worried about severing their nation, but rather that it might dissolve altogether — or at the very least, break into multiple smaller countries. The relatively new Republican Party had grand plans for the country, rife with economic interventions such as infrastructure projects, a transcontinental railroad, a protective tariff, and a homestead act.

The only thing that had prevented such reforms taking place in the past was sectional disagreement on various policies. Southerners, for instance, supported a transcontinental railroad, but they wanted it to be built in the South, and no compromise was ever successfully made. Southerners also supported homestead legislation that would have sold public lands, rather than granting 160 acres for only a standard clerical fee. Infrastructure and economic protectionism were more widely rejected by southerners, and Southern Democrats continually blocked the passage of such bills.

But if anybody was permitted to secede, then the precedent would be set. If political disagreement could be established as sufficiently sectional (not necessarily North-South, but merely territorial in nature), then the disintegration of the central government could potentially continue ad infinitum. Thus, the national policies of the Northern Republicans (and some non-Republicans) could never be instituted.

Such possibilities were briefly part of the conversation about disunion. Virginia’s Governor, John Letcher, made the prediction in December of 1860 that disunion would not mean two nations, but rather four: The South, the Midwest, the Great Lakes region, and New England. The New York Times reported that Missouri was discussing independence from both the Union and the southern Confederacy. Other similar rumors continued to abound in the months prior to the start of the Civil War.

But all of these possibilities would upset the centralizing plans of the Republicans. In the words of historian Richard Bensel:

The legitimation of secession as a possible political option seriously weakens centralizing tendencies that would otherwise compel political and administrative integration and immeasurably strengthens the political position of the remaining regions in their own quarrels with the central state.Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 61.

The Republicans were formed as an alliance between various parties with their own particular interests. Anti-slavery politicians were a small part of it, but it also contained nativists from the Know-Nothing Party, and although Republicans wanted various economic interventions, different members favored some policies more than others or not at all. But “Lincoln’s election heralded the ascension of power of a broad alliance of northern industrial capital, labor, and land-owning farmers. As the alliance emerged as a contender for the dominant position in the national political economy, the Republican party became the vehicle for its political program.”Ibid., 64.

Secession stood in the way of the party’s national plans, but no single issue could unite the North in a way that would garner sufficient support for a war to suppress the secessionists.

Except Nationalism.

Quoting again from Richard Bensel:

The major problem facing northern leaders was finding a popular basis for unifying the free states behind a policy of coercion. A moral appeal for the abolition of slavery during this period would have driven the border states into the southern confederacy and made a policy of repression materially impossible. The only other popular basis was an imperialistic nationalism.Ibid., 62-63.

Nationalism thus served dual purposes. On the one hand, the patriotic devotion to the maintenance of the government the Founding Father’s enshrined in the Constitution, as many northerners saw the issue, was a persuasive claim for gaining support for a war. But by appealing to nationalism as the basis for war, it was also that much easier to gain support for national economic policies. Infrastructure no longer helped one state at the expense of another — it now promoted the national economy. Protectionism did not help the industrialized regions at the expense of the agrarian export economies, it promoted national industry.

With the Deep South states leaving the Union, Republicans no longer had their main source of political resistance standing in their way; even before Lincoln took office, many of the party’s plans were passed. But with appeals to nationalism in support of the war, national identity became a reflexive way of thinking for many Americans, and a permanent and powerful central state was embraced with open arms by patriotic citizens.

View Details

Can political arrangements be dissolved peacefully? Legally? At the ballot box? By referendum? Or by any other mechanism short of outright violence and civil war?

According to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the answer to these questions is no. Speaking in California yesterday on the subject of immigration and sanctuary cities, he issued this remarkable statement that manages to upend the entire concept of federalism in just a few short sentences:

There is no nullification. There is no secession. Federal law is the supreme law of the land. I would invite any doubters to go to Gettysburg, or to the tombstones of John C. Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln. This matter has been settled.

In Sessions’s mind, polities are forever. They're set in stone. The US Constitution established a permanent and supreme federal state — a view totally at odds with that much better document, the Declaration of Independence. The 50 states exist as nothing more than glorified federal counties, able to exert jurisdiction only in those areas not preempted by superior federal law.

And the cheap shutdown tactic of announcing a supposed legal precedent as “settled” is countered simply by pointing out how unsettled the American public really is, on issues from guns to immigration to abortion to Trump.

Constitutional jurisprudence, awful as it is, is hardly settled. It exists in a state of constant flux. As does history itself. Wasn’t English colonial rule “settled law” in 1700?

If only we could arrive at “settled liberties.”

Ludwig von Mises, unlike Attorney General Sessions, was a forceful and determined advocate of self-determination. Having witnessed firsthand the collapse of a far-flung Habsburg Empire, Mises was proudly Viennese in outlook after the horrors of the Great War.

In his classic Liberalism, written in the 1920s, Mises provides one of his most important political passages on human autonomy — in just three short pages subtitled "The Right of Self-Determination":

To call this right of self-determination the "right of self-determination of nations" is to misunderstand it. It is not the right of self-determination of a delimited national unit, but the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong. This misunderstanding is even more grievous when the expression "self-determination of nations" is taken to mean that a national state has the right to detach and incorporate into itself against the will of the inhabitants parts of the nation that belong to the territory of another state.

In Mises's view, self-determination was a fundamental principle of liberalism. Mises focused on the rights of individuals, while Jeff Sessions focuses on the power of the state. These two views are incompatible, of course, but just as in Mises’s time they remain the fundamental political question. Do individuals and civil society rule, or is the state sovereign? Do we organize society around economic means or political means?

To be clear, conservatives and left-liberals are equally guilty here. Both richly deserve Sessions as the chief enforcer of a lawless and unbridled federal government (sorry progressives, you don't get to rediscover states' rights just because you hate Trump's immigration posture). When it comes to issues of federalism, secession, and nullification, organs like Salon and National Review enjoy a meeting of the minds. Bring up the Civil War, much less the 9th and 10th amendments, and Ben Shapiro or Jonah Goldberg sound a lot like Joan Walsh or David Corn. And they all sound just like Sessions. Their kindergarten-level view of US history and the Constitution makes them all comfortable with a dominant central state that does not abide any degree of state or local noncompliance.

As I said in an interview with Bob Murphy of the Lara-Murphy Report:

Ah yes, secession — bogeyman of both left and right. I recently heard Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative with the Hoover Institution and National Review, refer to Calexit [an analog to “Brexit” for California leaving the Union — eds.] as a “neoconfederate” idea. Now Hanson is a brilliant guy, a formidable intellectual and definitely not some partisan hack. So when someone of his stature is so egregiously wrong and dismissive of the issue, you know we have a real problem. It’s the old intractable idea that the Civil War somehow decided things. Throw in a couple of specious Supreme Court decisions and you’ve unfortunately poured concrete into the minds of most Americans. What a pity, because breaking up and going through an admittedly painful divorce might be much more humane in the long run than forcing everyone to stay married to an abusive spouse in D.C. Chalk it up to Manifest Destiny and the mentality that USA Inc. must only expand, never contract — because something deep in the American psyche won’t let go of a single state.

Brexit, Catalonia, and the Scottish independence movement are just the tip of the iceberg. As debt-laden governments, their currencies, and their entitlement promises begin to unwind over the coming decades, we should expect more movement away from large centralized states. Every other aspect of life becomes more decentralized; why should governance escape the dominant trend of our age?

Political globalism and supra-national governance, under the auspices of organizations like the UN, IMF, World Bank, and NATO, will decline rapidly as geopolitical trends. Independence movements, whole or partial (via nullification, subsidiarity, and localism) are the happy future.

Smaller polities, marked by self-governing regions with loose treaties providing for shared defense and trading zones, will replace sclerotic national governments. Larger countries, with tens of millions culturally, economically, and socially diverse inhabitants, will become unmanageable and ungovernable.

Jeff Sessions is wrong: nothing is settled. Libertarians should cheer.

View Details

The phrase "pro-gun, pro-military" is used by some conservatives to describe themselves, as if the two go together seamlessly. For example, activist and political candidate Erin Cruz states she is both "Pro Second Amendment" and "Pro Military" in her promotional materials.

Another Republican candidate, Gregory Duckworth, advertises that he advances "pro-gun and pro-military initiatives."

And last year, Donald Trump, Jr. — as part of a controversy over Keurig coffee pulling its advertising from Sean Hannity's show — denounced Keurig and endorsed Black Rifle Coffee, which is advertised as a company with a "pro-gun and pro-military stance."

And yet, there is an inherent conflict between the two positions. This becomes evident when we consider the words of US Senator Tom Coburn in 2013:

The Second Amendment wasn't written so you can go hunting, it was to create a force to balance a tyrannical force here.

Given that the US military is one of the primary means by which the US government can exert its own coercive force, it seems a bit odd to think that one can simultaneously be "pro-military" while also being for gun rights designed to "balance a tyrannical force here."

Even the left, which is prone to an especially high level of confusion when it comes to the gun issue, has identified the conflict with memes such as this:

[[{"fid":"77035","view_mode":"image_no_caption","fields":{"format":"image_no_caption","alignment":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_caption_text[und][0][value]":"","field_image_file_link[und][0][value]":""},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"image_no_caption","alignment":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_caption_text[und][0][value]":"","field_image_file_link[und][0][value]":""}},"attributes":{"height":"268","width":"268","class":"media-element file-image-no-caption","data-delta":"1"}}]]

After all, we hear constantly from "pro-military" advocates that the military suffers greatly from too little spending on its needs, that Barack Obama cut back military spending to the bone, and that, in general, the military is underfunded. Never mind, of course, that US military spending is larger than the next seven biggest spenders combined, or that

The US Navy is about ten times bigger than the next largest navy, which happen to be its close ally, the Royal Navy. The United States has four air forces, one for each service, and all very capable ... the US Army has dozens of powerful brigade combat teams and dominates potential rivals in any form of conventional warfare. The US Marine Corps is much bigger than any comparable force. And US special operations forces are about the same size as all elements of the Canadian military.

If one is concerned about providing "balance" against abuse of government power, it would seem that pushing for a few more AR-15s in private hands isn't really going to make a critical difference.

The Authors of the Second Amendment Were Anti-Militarists The fact that many Americans today think it is possible to be both pro-Second Amendment and pro-military at the same time would have struck many Americans of the Revolutionary period as exceptionally odd.

After all, at the time of the ratification of the new Constitution — and the writing of the Second Amendment — Americans were notable for their opposition to a permanent and powerful military force — especially in the form of a so-called "standing army."

Greatly distrustful of putting military power in the hands of the federal government, the authors of the Second Amendment advocated instead for a far larger decentralized and locally controlled militia. Thus, in the nineteenth century, both state and local militias greatly outweighed federal military power, and it was assumed that any large standing force would have to be composed of state units supplied by state governments. In practice — until the late twentieth century — state governments could veto these deployments. Even state militia power was suspect, if it was full-time and professionalized. Thus, the concept of the "unorganized" militia retained significant support even into the early twentieth century. Today, however, these checks on federal power have been abolished, thus that which is "pro-military" is now necessary pro federal military.

Nor was this opposition to a national army unique to the Americans. The concept had already been well-established in English politics going back at least to the English civil war. At the time, opponents of unchecked monarchical power supported and obtained a decentralized non-professional militia system designed to partially supplant a standing army under the control of the king.

This later proved to be a significant issue during debates over the ratification of the new constitution, as many Americans felt the new reforms placed too much power in the hands of the federal military. As historian Anthony Peacock observed, "the anti-militarism of Americans during the founding period presented a significant problem for the federalists who wanted a larger, permanent army."

Peacock was expanding on the views of Richard Kohn who also contended:

No principle of government was more widely understood or more completely accepted by the generation of Americans that established the United States than the danger of a standing army in peacetime. Because a standing army represented the ultimate in uncontrolled and controllable power, any nation that maintained permanent forces surely risked the overthrow of legitimate government and the introduction of tyranny and despotism.

In the US, as in England, the proper role of military power consisted only in protecting lanes of commerce and in a strictly defensive military. In their minds, this did not preclude a large and strong navy, but it did preclude any nationally-controlled military force capable of occupying cities and enforcing the will of the central government.

Consequently, Anti-Federalists and their allies fought for the adoption of the Second Amendment, which, contrary to many modern misconceptions, was not focused on simply allowing some private individuals to own rifles. It was focused on enhancing a decentralized militia system that would head off any attempts to create a large national and professional standing army. This was designed to provide a bulwark against federal centralization of military power. In other words, the Second Amendment was a key component in efforts by anti-militarists to prevent just the sort of permanent military establishment the US taxpayer now so generously funds. As noted by historical Leon Friedman:

the people organized in the state militias were regarded as a counterforce against the threat that the regular army could be used as an instrument of oppression and service in the militia was a right of the citizen that could not be transgressed by the federal government.

Put another way, the authors of the Second Amendment clearly had a very different conception of "balance" when it came to balancing out a potentially "tyrannical force." For them, the non-federal fighting force was assumed to be armed with the same weapons as the federal military, and would exist in far greater numbers. This was even the vision of pro-federal James Madison who, in Federalist 46, estimated that an appropriate state of affairs would be one in which the US federal government could put approximately "twenty-five or thirty thousand men" in the field, while it could be opposed by "a militia of near half a million citizens ...united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence." In other words, this much-larger and presumably equally-well-armed militia would be loyal not to the federal government, but to the individual states. It would also be under the command of — and loyal to — the individual states and not the federal government.Ultimately, the early Congresses never endorsed even Madison's idea of a limited federal military. Throughout the 1790s, the Congress refused to fund a federal military of more than 5,000 soldiers. http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Stats/DOD_SelectedStats_FY97.pdf

Thus, properly understood, the Second Amendment goes hand in hand with opposition to federal military spending and to limiting a standing army to a mere fraction of the size of the state-controlled militias. If modern pro-Second Amendment activists claim to support a Second Amendment as understood by its authors, they could conceivably still support naval forces and a very small remnant of the US's standing army. Any consistency in supporting the Second Amendment as originally intended, though, would require drastic cuts to both the Army and the Marines, which combined make up a standing army of more than 550,000 troops.This is a very conservative estimate that ignores both reserves and the National Guard, both of which are de facto federal forces.

[RELATED: "Why We Can't Ignore the "Militia" Clause of the Second Amendment" by Ryan McMaken]

Needless to say, such a proposal is unlikely to gain much traction with many Americans who consider themselves defenders of freedom via the Second Amendment. Consequently, the ideology behind the "pro-military" mindset has destroyed the anti-militarist and decentralist vision of the Americans who fought for and won passage of the Second Amendment.

Long gone is the militia-dominated military force supported by the authors of the Second Amendment. The final death throes for the militia began with the Dick Act (the Militia Act) of 1903. And, as noted by David Yassky:

Statutes subsequent to the Dick Act have placed the National Guard under ever-greater federal control. Currently, anyone enlisting in a National Guard unit is automatically also enlisted into a "reserve" unit of the U.S. Army (or Air Force), the federal government may use National Guard units for a variety of purposes, and the federal government appoints the commanding officers for these units.See: David Yassky, The Second Amendment: Structure, History, and Constitutional Change, 99 Mich. L. Rev. 588 (2000).

This situation would be unrecognizable to a Patrick Henry or a George Mason who had advocated for a strong independent militia system to offset the power of the federal military.

Perhaps the final nail in the coffin came with the Montgomery Amendment which removed a state governor's ability to veto the federal governments ability to federalize National Guard troops and send them overseas. Enraged by the idea that a state "militia" unit was able to act with any independence, pro-military Senator C.V. Montgomery authored and ultimately passed his amendment which removed the final remnants of state control over what were by then barely state militias at all.

[RELATED: "Why Governors Should Veto National Guard Deployments More Often" by Ryan McMaken]

This destruction of the militia system — a system going back to the Revolutionaries and the English libertarians before them — struck at the core of the Second Amendment.The Amendment still legally protected some private gun ownership, but gone are the foundations built on the premise of federalism and decentralization in military power. Instead, all that is left is the notion that some untrained civilians with non-military-grade weapons can offer a "counterforce" to the US military.

What private gun ownership there is, of course, is better than nothing, but thanks to the "pro-military" mindset of people also claiming to be "pro-gun" the Second Amendment is now a hollowed out shell of what it once was.

View Details

One of the great controversies in modern society concerns the necessary and required functions of government. There are few who disagree that if government is to exist then it certainly has the duty and responsibility to secure and protect essential rights of every individual, including the right to life, liberty and honestly acquired property. But there are a wide variety of tasks that the private sector could better provide that many think must be supplied by the government.

Many of these activities have been subsumed under the general notion of “public goods” that are subject to “free rider” problems. Public goods are often defined as a good or service from the use or coverage of which an individual may receive a benefit, but from which he is not easily excluded even though he does not pay a price or fee to help cover some portion of the cost of making it available.

Free Riders and Public GoodsThis creates the problem, it is argued, of an individual choosing to take a “free ride,” that is, not voluntarily contributing to cover the cost of the good or service from which he benefits. The upshot of the argument being that less of this good or service may be supplied than might otherwise be the case if all beneficiaries were required to pay for some part of its costs of production.

The standard example almost always given is national defense. How can any individual be successfully excluded from an anti-missile defense system that provides umbrella coverage to everyone within the territory of a country, whether or not any particular person has voluntarily contributed to pay for it? Hence, the case is made for compulsory payment in the form of taxation. (See my article, “Public Goods, National Defense and Central Planning”.)

But whatever may or may not be the merits of the case for national defense as a “public good,” as so defined, there are many other goods that are argued to be in the same category, and thus also requiring government provision through taxation. This is often said to be the case with infrastructure and community conveniences and amenities such as roads, bridges, parks, street lighting, and neighborhood recreational areas, as well as town or city planning in general.

Yet, the fact is that very few, if any, of these need be thought of in this way. Indeed, virtually all of them can be marketed with little or no free rider problems, or would be in the self-interest of some market participants to supply free of charge.

Misguided and Undesirable Urban PlanningLet us start with the widest of these presumptions, which takes for granted the need for and necessity of town or city planning. A well-ordered and designed community, it is said, serves the interest of all who are or who may come to live within its environs. Yet, there is no certainty of individual or group interest to voluntarily layout and follow a prior plan before the development of an urban area.

Street grids need to be laid out, zoning ordinances must delimit where residential housing will be built, industrial or manufacturing facilities will be constructed, shopping and entertainment services are to be located, and recreational or “green” areas are to be set aside and preserved.

The question is, why? This presumes that the urban designers, planners and implementers know way ahead of time where the current or future residents in these communities would find it most attractive and useful to live, work and enjoy life. To use the phrase with which F. A. Hayek entitled his Nobel lecture in 1974, this involves a great “pretense of knowledge” on the part of the urban and rural planners.

How can these planners know years or even sometimes decades ahead, what types of neighborhoods and communities people, themselves, may find more useful, convenient and serviceable for their needs, values, and circumstances? Instead, infrastructure and the outlay of communities should reflect and follow where and how people wish to live, work and travel. It should not confine and straitjacket people to the planner’s arrogant conception of how he thinks people should live their lives in multiple layers and interconnections with others.

Communities as Spontaneous OrdersSome notable authors on this theme, especially Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) in her various studies of city life, highlighted again and again that localized neighborhood communities within towns and cities historically reflected the circumstances of the people, themselves. The seeming “chaos” and disorder of people working, living, and shopping all in the same place with apartments above retailing and small manufacturing business enterprises on the ground floors of buildings, and children playing on the streets under the watchful eye of parents or grandparents looking out their apartment windows, in fact made life easier, less costly and more safe. It created degrees of neighborhood cohesion that often is not seen in the planned communities of the urban designers’ dreams.

Also, communities change their membership as individuals and groups move up the income ladder or are able to take advantage of employment opportunities in other places. This, too, means that communities within towns and cities need the flexibility over time to reflect the values, needs and circumstances of their new residents. The rigidity of urban planning and zoning laws restrict the capacity for this adaptability to changing times and people.

The apparent disorder and chaos of urban and other areas not created according to central or regional plans may create discomfort and confusion for the city planners, but it represents the patterns, structures and arrangements of the spontaneous order of a free society. This is just another form and instance of the same “invisible hand” process that various economists highlight when they emphasize emerging market order without central intentional design.

Private Thoroughfares vs. Road SocialismThe same applies to thoroughfares. Roads, streets, and highways should be built and shifted and “modernized” over time to reflect where people want to go. But how could markets provide roads, streets or highways? Are these not “public goods” requiring the guiding, planning, and taxing hand of government?

To begin with, toll roads by both government and the private sector have long histories in both Europe and the United States. The fact that so many of us have become used to and take for granted “road socialism” (to use the phrase of the American nineteenth century economist, Francis A. Walker) does not mean that the private sector and the profit motive could not work here as elsewhere in society. Nor need there be the presumed inconvenient of frequent stops and slowdowns to go through tollbooths.

Many of us have driven on highways that are toll roads in certain states around the country. Sensors on these highways read the electronic “passes” attached to the front windshield of automobiles, and simply automatically deduct the charges similar to a bank debt card. For instance, through the northeast corridor of some mid-Atlantic and New England states is recognized a shared “EasyPass” that the different state’s highway sensors mutually respect and recognize.

This “smart” technology helps demonstrate that roads and highways are easily able to charge those using the common thoroughfares. As one observer has pointed out:

The private roads that exist now have fewer accidents than public roads, probably in part because they’re better maintained: If private road builders let potholes remain, get reputations for high accident rates, or do repairs during rush hour, they have to deal with complaints and with people choosing other roads.

Pollution and pollution controls on automobiles would also be handled by road privatization. If auto pollution were to grow too thick, people living near the offending roads would sue the biggest, most obvious target: the road owners. Road owners would therefore charge higher fees for cars without up-to-date inspection stickers.

Roads and Parking Areas Intentionally Made for Free RidersIn addition, there would be many instances in which land developers would see the profitable gain from supplying and maintain roads at no charge to the users. Go to any enclosed or open shopping mall. There is often a large parking lot surrounding it, with one or more access roads leading to the main, nearby, thoroughfares.

These are usually provided with no parking fees precisely because the company or corporation owning and operating the shopping mall want customers to come on to their property and have easy access to the mall facilities. The more people finding it easy and safe to come do their shopping on their property the more attractive are the rental units inside the mall and, therefore, the willingly paid occupancy fees by the retail businesses who want their stores in that mall.

Many of these malls are entertainment centers all their own. They are well maintained, designed to be aesthetically attractive, and offer holiday festivities to customers at no charge. “Free riders” who enter the mall at no cost, who may simply walk around, or sit on one of the mall walkway benches, and spend the time listening to music, reading a book, or text messaging to friends, and not buy a thing, does not inhibit the mall owners from making it “open to the public” and free of charge.

For every free rider there are many others who actually shop and generate revenues for the retail outlets and the mall owners. The free rider cost is more than worth the revenue generating benefit.

Downtowns, Condos and Housing AssociationsSimilarly, “downtown” areas with hotels, restaurants, and shops and apartment units could, and no doubt, would form their own owner and renter associations for the providing of related infrastructure, including streets, lighting, parking, and cleaning services in their mutual self-interests, if government no longer was considered to have tax-based responsibility for the provision of many of them.

We see this is in condominiums or gated communities. The developers and maintainers of the facilities have profit-making incentives for supplying common area amenities and conveniences precisely because it makes residence in these areas more attractive and higher valued for owners and rental residents.

Homeowner associations that are not “gated” are the complement to this, with residents paying fees in the areas and communities in which they live as part of the contractual agreement in purchasing a house in that neighborhood. Everything from streetlights, parks, recreational facilities, walking and biking paths, doggy poop bag disposing bins, to tree and shrubbery care in the “public” areas are widely provided, and even when visiting free riders are able to enjoy many of these amenities, and all at the expense of others.

Much Smaller Government in the Society of the FutureMy purpose has been to briefly bring attention to a few of the non-governmental possibilities in areas of everyday life in which it is presumed that it is necessary for government to provide these services or goods at taxpayers’ expense, because it is assumed that they fit some form of the “public goods” category, when in fact they need not or do not.

Some things presumed to be “non-excludable” for many users in fact can be privatized and offered for a fee or a price. At the same time, the world abounds with “free riders,” from the person who attends a church service but puts nothing into the collection plate when it is passed around to defray the expenses of maintaining that house of worship, to the individual who sits in a shopping mall to get out of the summer heat and whiles away some free time without buying a thing in any of the stores.

Normally, churches want to attract free riders as part of their outreach to non-believers at the expense of the parishioners who have voluntarily contributed to the religious organization’s activities. And many in the private sector offer access to and use of “free” goods as part of the operating costs of attracting customers from whom they hope to directly or indirectly earn profits.

Whatever may or may not be the functions of government, the market and the associations of civil society could easily and, no doubt, far more cost effectively and efficiently would provide a large number of these “public goods” and common area conveniences, rather than being dependent upon any tax-funded government to have them supplied. In a truly free society, the scope of government easily can be reduced to a much smaller domain than even many friends of freedom often think.

View Details

Not too long ago, US President Donald Trump made headlines by suggesting a potential military option in Venezuela in the face of the country’s rapidly decaying political situation.

It’s undeniable that Venezuela is suffering a humanitarian and economic crisis of unprecedented proportions all thanks to the socialist policies that the country has experimented with over the past two decades. But a military intervention in Venezuela is likely to be costly and damaging to Americans, while disastrous for Venezuelans.

The Problems with InterventionThe harsh reality is that an intervention in Venezuela is no cure-all for its present dilemma. In fact, it has the potential to make matters worse.

The U.S. has already bungled its interventionist nation-building schemes in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending billions intervening in these countries and concocting every scheme possible to continue its failed nation-building fantasies.

The only situation in which a US military intervention in Venezuela would be justified is if Venezuela committed military aggression against the United States. But the chances of that scenario occurring are very low. The country is in such dire straits that it can barely even feed its own military, let alone coordinate a military invasion of a foreign country.

Even if an intervention consisted of removing Maduro from power, Maduro’s exit does not guarantee a stable atmosphere for future governments. In fact, the current crisis could devolve into a chaotic civil war, where U.S. troops could get caught in the crossfire between various factions taking advantage of the chaos.

And one must also ask why should U.S. taxpayers be on the hook for "fixing" problems caused by a regime endorsed by the voting majority of Venezuela?

They not only blundered in electing socialist leaders like Hugo Chávez, but also elected preceding governments that created the adverse conditions for his eventual rise to power.

That’s not to say that American citizens should not attempt to provide private humanitarian aid to Venezuelans. But the American state is not going to be the solution in Venezuela's current crisis.

Potential Destabilization FactorsThe potential for disaster is emphasized by the fact that Venezuela’s collapse has spread well beyond the economic sphere. It has infected the very social fabric of the country itself.

One example of how state institutions have spread disorder to the larger society is the group of prison chieftains known as “pranes.” These pranes effectively control Venezuelan prisons through massive drug and weapon trafficking schemes. But their reach goes beyond the prison, these criminal strongmen act as de facto warlords that run protection rackets and provide black market jobs to those in desperate need of work. These criminal elements have been the main drivers of Venezuela’s notoriously high crime rates and have morphed into a parallel state in times where traditional Venezuelan institutions have all but collapsed.

Any type of destabilizing intervention in Venezuela would likely allow the pranes to use the situation to further consolidate their power.

A Modest ProposalIf the US were to have any diplomatic role in how Venezuela transitions out of its current tyrannical regime, It should pledge to recognize and engage in unilateral free trade with any breakaway regions of Venezeuala that seek to escape the current regime.

The state of Zulia, for example, in northwest Venezuela, is already known for its fiercely independent and regionalist culture that bucks popular social and political trends in Caracas. Indeed, Delcy Rodriguez, the president of Venezuela's national assembly, recently felt it necessary to reiterate opposition to secessionist movements in the country:

Rodríguez warned that they will not allow any secessionist movement known as 'the crescent moon', a denomination that confers to the figure that form the states of Zulia, Táchira and Mérida, won by the opposition in the elections of the October 15th.

With coastline, a border with Colombia, and with the largest oil and gas reserves in the Western Hemisphere, Zulia has the potential to transform into a regional powerhouse with the right institutional underpinnings and serve as a competing political entity to the traditionally top-down Venezuelan state.

Under such circumstances, at least some Venezuelans would no longer have to be shackled by Caracas’s orbit; and the new independent region could also offer safety to many Venezuelan dissidents.

Instead of promoting a heavy-handed intervention, the U.S should look at diplomatic recognition and trade with movements that seek to break up the tyrannical grip of the current Venezuelan political order. Lending support to a Venezuelan version of Taiwan would certainly be a wiser choice rather than yet another costly and potentially disastrous military intervention.

View Details

Should Catalonia be independent?

Surely Catalans, and nobody else, must answer that question. Some Catalans consider themselves Spanish and some don’t. Many Spaniards consider Catalonia part of Spain, while some don’t. But it’s clear that a significant number of Catalans feel politically conquered, and resent it. Why should they live under a Spanish government, when their history, culture, and language are not Spanish?

It’s a fair question, and one for which western democracies have no easy answer. If democratic voting is sacrosanct, are the results also sacrosanct, whatever the outcome? Do democrats really want democracy?

Ludwig von Mises summed up the problem succinctly in LiberalismInterestingly, Mises criticized the Spanish diplomat and ostensible liberal Salvador de Madariaga for opposing independence for Catalonia.:

The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.

Certainly many Hillary Clinton voters in the United States feel this way today. They don’t consider Trump a legitimate president (even aside from the electoral college issue), and are not particularly interested in respecting election results or the views of Trump voters. They feel “their” government not only does not represent them, but is actively hostile toward them.

They feel, in short, like many Catalans.

Understanding any region’s local politics and history is always a dangerous proposition for outsiders. Catalonia has a messy and complex past, dating back to the late 15th century and the nascent Kingdom of Spain. Momentum for independence from Madrid gathered throughout the 20th century, culminating in a 2014 referendum which the Spanish central government attempted to block in court. Over 80% of voters supported independence, yet only about a third of Catalans participated in the vote. It is unclear whether a scheduled October 1st vote on a new referendum will happen, given the possibility of Spanish criminal charges against the Catalan politicians behind it.

Should Secession Be Allowed for Groups We Disagree With? There are also very serious questions about what an independent Catalonia would mean, not only for economically wobbly Spain but also neighboring France and the EU.

Marta Hidalgo, a Spanish financial adviser and 2017 Mises University graduate, argues that Catalonia is Spain. She questions the region’s historical claims to independence, arguing that Catalan nationalism has been fraught with propaganda from those seeking to make a political movement out of a minority sentiment. She also points out that Spain is Catalonia’s principal market, propping up the Catalan economy through duties and tariffs on (otherwise) cheaper and better imports from England or Germany. And she stresses polls showing only about 2 million out of 7.5 million Catalans support secession.

But these arguments don’t address the fundamental underlying issue of self-determination. Should Catalans be allowed to make their own decisions, even if those decisions are “bad,” and we (or Spain or the EU) disagree with them?

Yes, some people would be worse off under an independent Catalan state — assuming Ms. Hidalgo is correct. But by the same token, some Spaniards may be objectively better off as a result of becoming unyoked politically from Catalonia. It’s a complex factual question, and both sides have arguments.

But whether an independent Catalonia would be better off or worse off is highly subjective, and simply not for us to decide.

Self-Determination Is the Highest Political EndFor libertarians, self-determination is the highest political end. In political terms, self-determination is liberty. In an ideal world, self-determination extends all the way to the individual, who enjoys complete political sovereignty over his or her life. The often misued term for this degree of complete self-determination is anarchy.

In an imperfect world, however, libertarians should support smaller and more decentralized governments as a pragmatic step toward greater liberty. Our goal should be to devolve political power whenever possible, making states less powerful and easier to avoid. Barcelona is less ominous than Madrid. The Legislature in a US state is less fearsome than Congress in Washington DC. Street gangs are bad, but they can be avoided in ways Uncle Sam cannot.

Ultimately, the argument in favor of Catalonian independence mirrors the argument for Scottish independence in 2014:

Some … libertarians claimed that we should oppose the referendum on the grounds that it would create a new government, and thus two states would exist in the place of one. But reducing the size and scope of any single state’s dominion is healthy for liberty, because it leads us closer to the ultimate goal of self-determination at the individual level, to granting each of us sovereignty over our lives. It’s always good to reduce the number of individuals over which any government asserts authority.

Furthermore, some conservatives argue that we should not support secession movements where the breakaway movement is likely to create a government that is more “liberal” than the one it replaces. This was the case in Scotland, where younger Scots who supported the independence referendum in greater numbers hoped to create strong ties with the EU parliament in Brussels and build a Scandinavian-style welfare state run from Holyrood (never mind that Tories in London were overjoyed at the prospect of jettisoning a huge number of Labour supporters!).

But if support for the principle of self-determination is to have any meaning whatsoever, it must allow for others to make decisions with which we disagree. Political competition can only benefit all of us. What neither progressives nor conservatives understand — or worse, maybe they do understand — is that secession provides a mechanism for real diversity, a world where we are not all yoked together. It provides a way for people with widely divergent views and interests to live peaceably as neighbors instead of suffering under one commanding central government that pits them against each other.

So let Catalonia go, if it chooses.

View Details

It's difficult to say what most Americans commemorate or celebrate on Independence Day nowadays. Many appear to focus on some vague notion of "America." Others even take to jingoism equating the United States government with the very notion of "freedom."

Lost in all of this is the fact that the Declaration of Independence — the document we're supposed to remember today — is a document that promotes secession, rebellion, and what the British at the time regarded as treason.

On the other hand, those who do recall the radical nature of the Declaration often tend to romanticize the American Revolution in a way that is neither instructive nor helpful today.

So, what should we remember about Independence Day, and what can it teach us? For starters, here are three things about the history and context of this holiday that should continue to inform us today and into the future.

One: If You Can't Secede, You're Not Really Free The very first sentence of the Declaration of Independence lays it out. Sometimes, "it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another..."

The document then goes on to list in detail why 1776's specific act of secession was justified and necessary for preserving the rights of the colonists.

By the 19th century, this philosophy of self-determination would become a foundational element of the ideology now known internationally as liberalism — or "classical liberalism" in the United States.

Not surprisingly, we find this idea in the later writings of liberals such as Ludwig von Mises who, writing in Vienna in 1927, concluded:

It must always be possible to shift the boundaries of the state if the will of the inhabitants of an area to attach themselves to a state other than the one to which they presently belong has made itself clearly known...

[W]henever the inhabitants of a particular territory ... make it known ... that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time ... their wishes are to be respected and complied with.

Mises, like Jefferson, understood that without this right of self-determination, there is no freedom.

Nevertheless, modern opponents of self-determination and secession will claim that secession cannot be tolerated because it is not "legal."

This is scarcely relevant. After all, the colonial uprising against the King was not "legal," and it hardly matters whether political victors consider any breakaway secession movements legal. Times and societies change, and nothing is forever or written in stone.

For Mises, secession must be tolerated for pragmatic reasons. It is "the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars." But For Jefferson, as for his fellow secessionists, it was a moral imperative, whether "treasonous" or not.

Two: Independence Day Is Not a Military Holiday For obvious reasons, government institutions have little motivation to emphasize the Declaration of Independence or the philosophy it represents. This would amount to the government undermining itself. Consequently, many have attempted to turn the Fourth of July into a holiday that embraces vague notions of celebrating "America."

These ahistorical interpretations notwithstanding, Independence Day recalls resistance and a withdrawal of fealty to a hostile political power. We should not twist it into a celebration of our current rulers in Washington, the federal government, or the troops that work for and represent the federal government.

It should be a celebration against government and a reminder that Americans can once again walk away from tyranny, even if force of arms is required.

This does not defame or insult the American troops, but rather reminds us that we are a civilian nation and the government (and its troops) is supposed to be our servant rather than our master. Slavish displays of patriotism and loyalty to the state are inimical to the real meaning of the holiday.

Three: Armed Revolt Is a Serious and Rare Event Among those who do wish to commemorate the true resistance offered by the revolutionaries, there is a different error: thinking that armed resistance is always right around the corner.

In some corners of America, it's become almost commonplace to hear claims that surely the Second American Revolution will come with just a few more outrages committed against life, liberty, or property. All it will take is a few more no-knock raids committed against peaceful families sleeping in their beds. Or perhaps the government need only seize a few more guns before the American people "wake up." Or perhaps once someone reveals the extent to which the US government spies on us all — as Edward Snowden has already done — then Americans will simply refuse to tolerate it any more.

In truth, armed resistance tends to only materialize in the midst of poverty or foreign invasion. Not surprisingly, over the past century, despite decades of immense growth in government power, rising taxes, and stifling government regulations, virtually no Americans have been taking up arms against the American state.

Some of this may stem from admirable prudence. After all, the American Revolution was an exceptionally bloody conflict, and such conflicts should not be started lightly. As noted by the Library of Congress, "[t]he Revolution ... was, after the Civil War, the costliest conflict in American history in terms of the proportion of the population killed in service. It was three times more lethal than World War II." The poverty, property destruction, and loss of life was immense given the tiny size of the American population at the time.

Most Americans are unaware of these specifics, but most people instinctively know that armed conflict can bring with it a very high price.

This doesn't mean armed resistance is impossible, of course. It's simply worth recognizing that so long as Americans enjoy some of the world's highest standards of living few will be motivated to take up arms.

Ideas Always Matter It is also helpful to remember that armed conflict can be especially disastrous when motivated by the wrong ideas and the wrong ideologies. Who can say with confidence that if the US government were wiped away today, that it would not be replaced with something even worse? Under such circumstances, we must never abandon the important work of laying the foundations first for a revolution in ideas. Without a true respect for the freedoms outlined in the Declaration of Independence, political resistance is of little value. Moreover, in a society where true freedom is valued — and where a majority embraces liberal ideals — violence will prove to be totally unnecessary. And this would be the best outcome of all.

View Details

One vexing current problem centers on who becomes the citizen of a given country, since citizenship confers voting rights.

The Anglo-American model, in which every baby born in the country's land area automatically becomes a citizen, clearly invites welfare immigration by expectant parents. In the U.S., for example, a current problem is illegal immigrants whose babies, if born on American soil, automatically become citizens and therefore entitle themselves and their parents to permanent welfare payments and free medical care. Clearly the French system, in which one has to be born to a citizen to become an automatic citizen, is far closer to the idea of a nation-by-consent.

Excerpted from Nations by Consent

View Details

Imagine a system in which a private company as a "government service provider" offers you protection of life, liberty, and property. This service includes internal and external security, a legal and regulatory framework and independent dispute resolution. You pay a contractually fixed fee for these services per year. The government service provider, as the operator of the community, cannot unilaterally change this "citizens' contract" with you later on. As a "contract citizen", you have a legal claim to compliance and a claim for damages in the event of malperformance. You take care of everything else by yourself, but you can also do whatever you want, limited only by the rights of others and the other moderate rules of living together. This includes teaming up with others for all sorts of purposes. Disputes between you and the government service provider are heard in independent arbitration courts, as is customary in international commercial law. If the operator ignores the arbitral awards or abuses his power in another way, his customers leave and he goes bankrupt. He therefore has an economic risk and therefore an incentive to treat his customers well and in accordance with the contract.

This system is called Free Private City. At first glance, it may seem outrageously radical or utopian. However, we are already using the service approach very successfully in other areas of our lives. The transfer to our social order is only the last step in a development already under way. What is new is that coexistence in this system takes place on a purely private basis, but the system is nevertheless able to provide all those services (especially security) requested by residents of previous states, and indeed better, cheaper and with far greater degrees of freedom for customers, the contract citizens. The main elements of the free market are simply applied to our living together, namely the voluntary exchange of services, the right to reject offers and finally competition as a method of discovery, a means of limiting power and a quality filter. Since participation in the Free Private City is voluntary, the concept must be permanently attractive, otherwise no one will come or the residents will leave again.

Especially the design as a service contract has the advantage that it has already been tested and proven. It corresponds to what we know from the private businesses of everyday life, be it the purchase of bread from the baker, the conclusion of an insurance policy or the appointment of a tax consultant. A reciprocal, mutually agreed contract is always the basis. It regulates which product or service is to be supplied at what conditions and at what price. This applies even if the contract - as with the baker - only came about through implicit action. The buyer knows that his contractual partner has an economic interest; he does not have to pretend to be motivated by either the common good or the rescue of humanity. Disputes may be referred to independent courts or arbitration bodies. No salesman would get away with changing the contents of the contract later unilaterally ("From now on you pay twice as much, but get an additional service for it, which you did not order") or having a dispute settled exclusively by his own institutions.

In a Free Private City, everyone is the Sovereign of Himself who, by voluntary agreement, has concluded a genuine contract with a more or less ordinary service provider, the Citizens' Contract. Both parties have the same formal rights and are therefore legally on an equal footing. The relationship between authority and subject is replaced by the relationship between customer and service provider. In contrast to conventional systems, where the citizen is obliged to pay tax without having a corresponding right to benefits, in a Free Private City service and consideration are directly related. Both contracting parties are entitled to fulfillment of the contract, i.e. the operator can demand payment of the fixed contribution from the contract citizen, but no additional fees. In turn, the contract citizen can sue the operator for compliance with his contractual obligations, for example by ensuring security and a functioning system of civil law. Who is currently in charge of the operating company or to whom it belongs is of no relevance for the functioning of the model.

A Free Private City is therefore not a utopia, but rather a business idea whose functional elements are already known and which need only be transferred to another sector, namely that of living together. Basically, as a service provider, the operator only provides the framework within which the society can develop openly in the sense of a "spontaneous order."

Main Features of the Free Private City Free Private Cities are characterized by the following main elements:

A Free Private City is a sovereign or at least semi-autonomous local authority with its own legal and regulatory framework, and its own tax, customs and social regime, as well as its own administration, security forces and an independent dispute resolution system.A Free Private City is run by an operating company as a for-profit business. For a fixed basic fee, it guarantees the inhabitants protection of life, liberty and property.Participation and residence in the Free Private City is voluntary.There is no legal claim to admission to the Free Private City; the operator decides on this according to his criteria and his discretion.Each individual resident has concluded a written citizens' contract with the Free Private City or its operating company, which conclusively regulates the mutual rights and obligations. This includes the services to be provided by the operator and the amount to be paid for them, as well as the rules applicable in the Free Private City.This Citizens' Contract cannot be unilaterally changed; it represents the "personal constitution" of every contract citizen.Furthermore, contract citizens can do as they please, provided that they do not violate the rights of others or the other rules laid down in the Citizens' Contract.All adult and legally capable contractors are responsible for the consequences of their actions themselves, not "society" or the city operator. Apart from claims for contractual or family support, there is no right to live at the expense of third parties.Any resident can terminate the contract at any time and leave the Free Private City again, but the operator can only terminate the contract for good cause, e.g. for breach of contractual obligations such as continued non-payment of the fee.In the event of conflicts with the operating company, each party is entitled to appeal to independent (arbitration) courts that are not part of the operator's organization. The operator's basic package, which must be accepted and paid for, comprises security and rescue forces, a legal and regulatory framework, a certain infrastructure and independent courts and dispute resolution bodies. To ensure voluntary participation, ideally the area should start out uninhabited.

Autonomy In order to implement a Free Private City, internal autonomy is necessary. This does not necessarily mean sovereignty under international law, but at least the right to regulate one's own affairs independently. The establishment of a Free Private City therefore requires a contractual agreement with an existing state. In this agreement, the Host Nation grants the operating company the right to establish the Free Private City on a defined territory in accordance with the agreed conditions.

Free Private Cities therefore do not correspond to privately administered new cities or gated communities that are fully subject to the laws of the respective state, or authoritarian city states such as Singapore or Dubai, which can unilaterally change the rules at any time. They also go well beyond special economic zones, but rather correspond to independent special administrative zones, comparable for example to Hong Kong's relationship with China. States can be attracted to such a concept if they expect advantages from it, like they do when establishing Special Economic Zones. Getting existing states to give up part of their sovereignty is certainly not an easy task. Nevertheless, this path seems easier than changing existing systems "from within" towards more freedom, legal security and self-responsibility.

Take a look at Hong Kong, Singapore or Monaco. Near each of these city states, a kind of belt of prosperity has grown up around them in the neighboring countries. Its inhabitants pay taxes in the neighboring countries. In addition, these city-states create many jobs for commuters from the surrounding countries who might otherwise have remained unemployed. If a Free Private City is created in a previously structurally weak or uninhabited area, then the host state has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Living together in a Free Private City is based on just a few principles. The guiding principles are self-determination and private autonomy. The Golden Rule applies to living together as it is expressed in the proverb "Do not unto others what you do not want others do unto you." In addition, the principle do ut des ("I give so that you give"), i.e. the recognition that merit is based on reciprocation; finally the principle of voluntarism or non-aggression, i.e. the priority of voluntary cooperation over coercion and expropriation, including expropriation for allegedly good causes. In order to comply with these basic rules, coercive measures can or must also be applied. Serious or repeated violations also lead to exclusion from the private city. The right to end one's stay in the Free Private City at any time is part of the concept of voluntariness.

Free Private Cities expect their citizens to be mature and independent. This includes taking responsibility for oneself and others, strengthening family and small communities, as well as using imagination and ingenuity to overcome difficulties. In return, there is the joy and satisfaction of being able to master your life by your own efforts according to your own ideas. In the long term, a community of self-confident, bright and realistic people will grow up in this way. If everyone is free to decide what they want to do and how they want to live, there is also no real need for participatory bodies such as parliaments. They are always at risk of being hijacked by interest groups or the government for their own purposes. The freeze on change in favor of freedom and self-determination in a Free Private City is the Citizens' Contract. Thus, the residents can agree on a representation of their interests and, for example, establish a municipal council. But even though 99% of the population participate and voluntarily submit to majority voting, this body has no right to impose its ideas on the other 1%, who want nothing to do with it. This is precisely the point at which state systems regularly fail: the long-term guarantee of individual freedom.

The city operator's profit requirement is of central importance. Many people consider the pursuit of profit to be immoral and prefer to have nothing to do with it. They fail to recognize that there is no better incentive to make the best use of scarce resources. It also ensures transparency. The operator of a Free Private City wants to earn money, that is clear. But what are the motives and rationales of politicians? Almost nobody believes that they are driven solely by concern for the common good. The incentive of meeting with presidents and kings as heads of state, seeking recognition by announcing world rescue plans to the United Nations, being prominent and wielding power over people – in Free Private Cities all these things play second fiddle to the profit motive. Of course, such considerations will also be of concern to the city manager or mayor appointed by the operator. But in the end he has to do what is good and profitable for the operating company and therefore cannot simply change the rules (customers would go away), join international organizations, participate in the worldwide conference circus, or frequently receive famous personalities (additional expenses for “pomp” without measurable value). The incentive system is therefore very different from that of a politician in conventional systems. There the politician can pursue the described personal interests to increase his fame at the expense of the citizens, while the head of administration of a Free Private City cannot for the reasons mentioned.

Rather, competition and the requirement to turn a profit force the operator of a Free Private City to permanently improve his product and optimize the use of resources. Every decision he makes has immediate effects. Does this increase the satisfaction of the residents or is it not reduced by cost-cutting measures? In other words: will this ultimately generate higher revenues than expenses? If so, profit is made and the enterprise value of the Free Private City is increased. If not, the measure must be reversed or improved. Such efficiency will never be achieved by public state systems.

What Could Life in Free Private Cities Look Like? Innovative service providers such as Uber or Airbnb are not prohibited but a matter of course. There are private entrepreneurs who cover everything that is in demand, from hospitals, schools and kindergartens to waste collection. If desired, residents can insure themselves privately against all eventualities of life or set up self-help groups, be it to protect against illness, death, need of care or accidents. Highways, ports and shopping centers are constructed and operated by investors. Anyone can offer new products and services without authorization or license, and get paid in any desired currency. There is also use for unskilled workers - for lack of minimum wage regulations. Cheap products can be imported from all over the world because there is free trade and therefore no customs duties. New drugs and treatment methods are available to any adult who wants to test them with knowledge of the potential risk. Environmental thresholds apply only to truly dangerous products and processes as determined by serious scientific research.

There is freedom of speech, even a certain religion can be criticized, and full freedom of contract. Cigarettes are again traded and advertised without ugly warnings. High-performance vacuum cleaners and shower heads are available, even old-fashioned light bulbs (in the European Union, conventional light bulbs are forbidden today). The city makes its own immigration rules. It can summarily throw out anyone who becomes a criminal or, for example, causes a nuisance by propagating the primacy of religious dogmas over the rules of the city. Due to this positive selection, contract citizens do not require a visa for most states. Free Private Cities that belong to the same operator or are otherwise associated also have a globally uniform emergency number as well as consulates abroad, in which contract citizens are helped in emergencies.

Crime and vandalism hardly exist, you can even let your children out on the streets at night without worrying about them. Sociologists, political scientists, art historians and other humanities scholars, who usually populate the civil service and state-funded NGOs, have become rare. Since their studies have to be paid for themselves, training courses that promise the prospect of real customer demand are generally preferred. Some companies, including well-known names, have failed to settle here. There are neither new laws that can be influenced in their own favor nor subsidy pots that can be tapped. Hosts of clever people who would have become civil servants, tax consultants, lawyers or auditors elsewhere work in the private sector and increase productivity and value creation.

Political activism, missionary zeal, distributional struggles and the stirring-up of social groups against each other have practically disappeared. The contract citizens respect each other's different views and assessments. People are once again responsible for taking care of themselves and are thus automatically more self-confident, more stable and more realistic in their assessments.

After two generations at the latest, Free Private Cities would be wealthier, freer and more peaceful than anything we have known so far.

This article was adapted from the book Free Private Cities: Making Governments Compete For You.

View Details

The battle over sanctuary cities is not just a matter of pitting some cities against federal policy. The conflict is also pitting cities against state governments.

More than 30 states have moved with varying degrees of success to rein in so-called sanctuary cities that have pledged to not assist federal agents with rounding up and prosecuting suspected illegal immigrants.

So far, though, Texas appears to have taken the biggest step with new legislation that "requires local law enforcement agents to honor requests by federal immigration agents to detain jailed immigrants suspected of being in the country without proper documentation. It also empowers local law enforcement officers to ask about a person’s immigration status during routine encounters, such as traffic stops." The legislation, known as Senate Bill 4, was signed into law by Texas Governor Abbott on May 7.

In response, several cities have sued the State of Texas, claiming the attempts by state government to force compliance on cities is an abuse of "big government."

RELATED: "Make Every State a Sanctuary State" by Ryan McMaken

Legally speaking, it's not clear that the cities have much of a foundation to stand on. Unlike states, which are guaranteed a certain amount of sovereignty in the US Constitution, local governments are usually creatures of the state government itself. In most states, the state government does not guarantee specific rights to specific cities and counties. County and city lines have historically been drawn and re-drawn by the state governments. While the United States is a federalist system — albeit an increasingly centralized one — state governments are not federalist, but are unitary.

Thus, state-city relations are not analogous to state-federal relations.

But, laws and constitutions can be changed, and political solutions can offer answers where legal ones do not.

The Historical Models for States Are Becoming Obsolete In our age of increasing migration to metropolitan areas, we need to re-evaluate out model for political jurisdictions and state boundaries.

Historically in the United States, the states themselves often took shape as one or two urban centers attached to a hinterland of rural areas and small towns.

This was true for Massachusetts, New York, and Illinois historically. In these areas, one large city often dominated state-level politics. Naturally, this led to conflict. Voters and politicians in the urban centers often had very different priorities than the voters and politicians in smaller cities, and in rural areas. Moreover, different regions competed in a zero-sum game for tax funds, and some regions of the state ended up subsidizing other regions. Nevertheless, mega-cities and villages were stuck with each other because through an accident of history, they all ended up under the same state government and set of laws.

Today, of course, we see this reflected in the conflict of values we see between urban centers, rural areas, and suburban areas. Voters from suburbs and small towns in many states find themselves at odds with the residents of the urban core.

Often, this conflict is oversimplified. As I have recently noted, the conflict between suburban areas and urban areas is just as real as the conflict between urban areas and rural areas. Metropolitan areas are diverse in themselves.

RELATED: "It's Not Urban vs. Rural — It's Suburban vs. Urban" by Ryan McMaken

It is true that suburban areas are generally dominated by different political values and different economic interests than are the urban core. Nevertheless, like the small towns and villages before them, suburban areas are locked into a union with core urban areas because they happen to fall under the same state government.

Today, we live in a country where the status quo of state boundaries are accepted as immutable, so conflicting groups take to the courts so one side can force its values on the other side. But, it doesn't have to be this way.

A better response is to decentralize and allow urban core areas to act with greater independence from the suburban and rural areas that surround them.

This is to the advantage of the suburban and urban areas as well, and in this solution, we see a direct and meaningful way to address the "sanctuary cities" conflict — and many others — in which core city governments find themselves at odds with the rural and suburban populations who often dominate the state government.

Grant Statehood to Cities Within the American context, decentralization should take the form of granting statehood to large cities.

There are at least two ways this could happen.

One option is to grant statehood to each individual core city. In this context, a city is a specific city (i.e., the City of Phoenix), and not the larger metropolitan area in which it is located (I.e., the Phoenix metropolitan area). This would allow these cities more freedom in enacting (or not enacting) laws in accordance with the population's values.

Politically, there is something for everyone in this plan. Left-leaning cities would be freed from more right-leaning state governments, and would no longer have to deal with suburban and rural members of a larger state legislature.

At the same time, an exit of city centers would shift the "rump" legislatures in a more conservative direction. In a scenario such as this, Texas's effort to restrict localized sanctuary cities, for example, would cease to even be controversial. The remaining suburbs and rural areas would hardly object to anti-immigration measures, and the new urban state or states could freely oppose anti-immigration initiatives from both the federal government and from what would now be called "Old Texas."

RELATED: "The US Should Have 10,000 Members of Congress" by Ryan McMaken

In terms of congressional representation, this would of course increase left-leaning representation in the Senate, as new urban-core Senators were added. But the change would also shift many Senators to the right as majorities changed in the suburban and rural states. A similar balancing act would occur in the House of Representatives.

Moreover, while the initial inclination of the new urban-core states will be to raise taxes and more stringently regulate business, the smallness of the new states will frustrate these efforts.

RELATED: "No Country Should Be Bigger Than This" by Ryan McMaken

For example, were the new "State of Chicago" to break off from Illinois, it is likely the city would immediately raise taxes and begin imposing a bevy of new regulations on local businesses. Business, however, will quickly find that it will be in their best interest to move their operation over state lines into the Chicago suburbs where more laizzez-faire ideas prevail. Thus, over time, the wealth of the cities will be sucked into the surrounding suburban and rural areas.

The core cities, of course, could respond by lowering taxes and regulatory barriers, and this is what many would do out of necessity.

But Won't These New City-States Be Too Small? There is no Constitutional definition of what size population is "too small" for statehood. But, most major American cities are already larger than the smallest US states. Moreover, many US states were tiny when when admitted as states. When California was made a state in 1850, the entire statewide population was under 100,000 people. When Hawaii became a state in 1959, it contained only 600,000 people.

Today, even a medium-sized city like Denver can pass this litmus test.

In the case of Houston, the new "State of Houston" in our example would have a population of around 2.3 million, making it larger than 15 other states.

San Antonio is considerably smaller than Houston, but with 1.4 million people, the new "State of San Antonio" would still be larger than 10 current US states, including Montana, Maine, and New Hampshire. It would be about equal in population size to Hawaii.

Should critics complain this creates too many new states, then several cities can be joined into one large state. There is, of course, no reason why cities must be contiguous to create a new state. Originally, Massachusetts included a large exclave that is now Maine.

Were Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio to join into a single new state, the total population would be 5 million, making it the 23rd largest state in the nation.

Once we venture outside of Texas, we find the examples are numerous indeed. The City of New York is of course the most extreme example, with 8.5 million people. Were it to become a city state —as was suggested during the Civil War — it would be the 12th largest state in the US. Were the city of Los Angeles its own state, it would rival the state of Oregon in terms of population.

Nor do we need to limit this analysis to only large cities. Smaller cities could choose to be annexed by larger cities, if they choose, as part of our new statehood initiative, and merge into one larger urban state.

Why It Won't Happen Soon Unfortunately, all of this is unlikely to happen any time soon because most Americans are so enthralled with the idea of using political power to shove one's values down the throats of the minority. If a certain group now controls the state legislature in State X, then the inclination is to keep using that power to keep forcing ones political values on the out-of-power groups. This way of thinking is the reason why most Americans oppose decentralization and secession in general. Ideological slogans like "unity" and "democracy" dictate that, no matter how much two or more populations may subscribe to irreconcilable value systems, everyone must be forced into a single political jurisdiction and submit to the majority will, even if it means forcing 49.9 percent of the population into a political regime they detest.

View Details

Candidates in this year's elections are raising record amounts of money for their campaigns. Democrats are out-raising Republicans, but on both sides, the numbers are huge. According to Reuters:

Senate candidates — who have six years to raise funds due to their longer terms — have raised more than $950 million, surpassing the $844 million raised during the same period ahead of the 2010 election.

While it's certainly true that campaign funding is not always the deciding factor of who wins an election, the fact remains access to large amounts of cash helps quite a bit.

When such large sums of money are involved, though, this greatly limits who can plausibly run a serious campaign, and also how many interest groups must be promised many favors in order to raise the necessary sums.

In other words, to run a campaign, a candidate must curry favor with specific groups and wealthy individuals who can write big checks. The exception, of course, is candidates who are already very wealthy themselves and can self-finance their campaigns.

But, with such enormous amounts of money being necessary to run a campaign, how could an ordinary person ever hope to compete without having to first sell out to numerous powerful groups and individuals?

Lawmakers have attempted to address these issues in a number of ways, including limitations on various types of donations, and the use of taxpayer funds for campaigns. Both are objectionable since the former limits the freedom of individuals to give their money to whom they wish, while the latter is just yet another tax-and-spend scheme. Both favor the established political parties and powerful incumbents — both of which already possess the wealth and power necessary to navigate the costly and legally intricate campaign-finance world. This further allows powerful incumbents to exclude other groups by upping the financial ante necessary to mount any meaningful opposition.

In spite of this, the mainstream debate over campaign finance rarely admits of any other possibilities. The debate continually centers around either limiting donations by regular people, or by efforts to fund more campaigns with taxpayer money.

There is one reform, however, that would respect the freedom of donors while not requiring any new tax-funded programs.

If reformers really wanted to reduce the role of money in politics, and reduce the need to raise huge sums to challenge incumbents, reformers would call for political jurisdictions to be made smaller and more localized.

Big State Require Lots of Campaign Spending We know, for example, that US senators in large states must raise more money and must spend more time raising money in order to remain viable candidates.

In their study on the US Senate, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation, Frances Lee and Bruce Oppenheimer found:

[S]enators representing more populous states must devote more of their time in office to raising funds than those from smaller states ... senators representing large states must raise more campaign funds than those from small states. ... Differences in constituency size in the Senate create great variation in a senator's need for campaign funds.

Senators, from small states, in contrast, report no such problem. When surveyed by Lee and Oppenheimer, one small-state senator remarked "I don't ever remember working hard at raising funds," while a staffer for another small-state senator suggested "fund-raising ... takes less time than people think." Meanwhile, for large-state senators, fundraising is essentially "continuous," requiring in many cases that the senator begin raising funds as soon as his or her six-year term begins. Small-state senators, meanwhile, report doing little fundraising in the first four years of the term.

The High Cost of Television The reason for this is primarily connected to the need for media buys in large states, where television and radio provide the primary means of a candidate getting support from a large population. In Congress and its Members, Roger Davidson, Walter Oleszek, Frances Lee, and Eric Schickler write:

As a rule, statewide Senate races are mass-media contests, with messages conveyed mainly through radio and television. Costs are especially high in densely populated states with large metropolitan media markets. Senate candidates typically spend far more on media advertising and fund-raising than do their House counterparts, who spend more on traditional means of voter contact.

Despite its astronomical costs, television advertising is popular because candidates believe it works. Almost all households in the United States own at least one television, and the average adult watches five hours of television a day.

For a large state with multiple media markets, of course, this presents a very high expense for even a single candidate.

Davidson, et al. also conclude "constituency size is also a crucial variable in elections."

Thus, in smaller states, the picture is quite different and "[c]ompared with their large-state colleagues, [candidates] are more visible and accessible to constituents and have less difficulty raising the campaign money they need to run for reelection. But they are not electorally safer, as their challengers, too, have an easier time mounting their campaigns and gaining visibility."

In other words, the bar to challenging a US senator in a small state is lower — at least financially.

Candidates in smaller states can engage in less-expensive forms of campaigning, as Lee and Oppenheimer note:

Senators representing small states may even choose to rely less on "wholesale" expensive mass media in their campaigns, preferring to meet voters at lower expense in face-to-face "retail" settings such as festivals, fairs, and factory gates.

Senators from large states, by contrast, have little choice in the matter. They simply must raise enough funds to mount a media-intensive campaign.

Naturally, these same issues apply to political campaigns outside the US Senate.

Races for seats in the House of Representatives, not surprisingly, tend to involve considerably smaller sums of money than Senate races. State legislature races are cheaper still.

This isn't just due to what's at stake in each race. In state-level and House-level races, it becomes less economical to rely primarily on the mass-media approach for the same reasons small-state senators rely less on mass media: it's easier and cheaper — and often just as effective — to rely on more "retail" types of campaigns.

Over time, though, it shouldn't be surprising that the cost of running a campaign has risen substantially as the size of constituencies have risen.

Districts Used To Be Much Smaller Once upon a time, the number of members of Congress rose as the overall size of the population increased. This was clearly in line with the intent of the people who wrote the US Constitution, and who imagined political districts much, much smaller than we have today. Since 1929, though, the size of Congress has remained fixed, and the number of people in each Congressional district has more than doubled in nearly every state. And with this change, comes a need to reach more people with more strategies that allow a candidate to reach a mass audience. The price of doing this has increased substantially.

[RELATED: "The US Should Have 10,000 Members of Congress" by Ryan McMaken]

State legislative districts have seen similar changes, too, and some of the worst cases are found in Western states that have seen enormous population increases over the past century.

Colorado's General Assembly, for example, has always had 100 members. It had 100 members in 1876 when Colorado became a state, meaning that the average constituency size was about 1,900 people in 1880. Today, that has increased to around 53,000 — for an increase of more than 2,600 percent.

Some places, though, are worse than others. To this day, state legislative districts in Vermont and New Hampshire contain fewer than 4,000 people.

US lawmakers, however, have long since abandoned any idea of making sure that political districts are sized in such a way as to enable candidates to advertise themselves in ways other than costly mass media. In small states like North Dakota or New Hampshire, of course, constituencies continue at moderately manageable scales.

States like Texas, California, or Virginia, are an entirely different matter.

Thanks to the way the United States is constructed, of course, changing the size of states — and thus the constituency sizes for US senators — is a long and arduous process. But politicians aren't even interested in the far-easier process of shrinking constituencies for House members or state legislators. Changing the size of congress would require nothing more than legislation. Many states would need to change their constitutions, but state constitutions are changed all the time.

Some people who think they are clever dismiss these reforms and say "the last thing we need is more members of Congress, the fewer of those lousy people the better!" What these people are really saying, though, is "I think it's perfectly fine that members of Congress spend most of their time begging for money from powerful donors and interest groups. It's fine that districts are so large as to render the single vote or campaign donation of any citizen as essentially meaningless."

In the real world, however, these things do matter, and the fact that the American political system now makes it exceedingly difficult to challenge incumbents like Dianne Feinstein isn't a good thing. If politicians spend all their time begging for money from the rich and powerful — and we're fine with that — then we have little room to complain the next time the Congress votes in favor of a huge bailout package for Wall Street. The cost of campaigning makes it inevitable.

View Details

While many defenders of private gun ownership recognize that the Second Amendment was written to provide some sort of counterbalance against the coercive power of the state, this argument is often left far too vague to reflect an accurate view of this historical context surrounding the Amendment.

After all, it is frequently pointed out that private ownership of shotguns and semi-automatic rifles could offer only very limited resistance to the extremely well-equipped and well-armed United States military.

It is often, therefore, just assumed that the writers of the Second Amendment were naïve and incapable of seeing the vast asymmetries that would develop between military weaponry and the sort of weaponry the average person was likely to use.

Was the plan really to just have unorganized amateurs grab their rifles and repel the invasion of a well-trained military force?Thanks to Hollywood and images of the Revolution from popular culture, many Americans suppose that the Revolution was fought by individuals fighting outside organized units and with their own arms — and even without pay. This, however, is not an accurate portrayal of military affairs in the colonies before and during the Revolution. In his essay on militias "The American Militia and the Origin of Conscription: A Reassessment," Jeffrey Rogers Hummel provides a brief bibliography of works discussing the central role of colonial militias during the Revolutionary War. Militias had been set up in the colonies as soon as the English arrived in North America, and a tradition of militias was well established by the late 18th century. Indeed, by the time of the Revolution, many colonial militias offered salaries and weaponry provided for militia service. In Chapter 13 of his book The Americans: The Colonial Experience, Daniel Boorstin discusses how colonial militias even competed with each other to attract more recruits during the war. Boorstin also notes that militias, while significantly more relaxed in discipline than the British army, nevertheless existed under the authority of the colonial governors and were typical military units in that members were organized according to rank and functioned under a chain of command — however losely implemented. The history of the Revolution was very much a history of colonial militia units, and the later authors of the Constitution and the Second Amendment were well aware of this.

The answer is no, and we know this by looking at the wording and reasoning behind the Second Amendment. The text, of course, reads "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Gun-rights advocates often fixate on the second half of the amendment, claiming that the phrase about a militia is just something that provides a reasoning for the second phrase. Many opponents of gun control even suggest that the only phrase here of key importance is "shall not be infringed."

The Second Amendment as a Guard Against a Standing Army Looking at the debates surrounding the Second Amendment and military power at the end of the eighteenth century, however, we find that the authors of the Second Amendment had a more sophisticated vision of gun ownership than is often assumed.

Fearful that a large federal military could be used to destroy the freedoms of the states themselves, Anti-Federalists and other Americans fearful of centralized power in the US government designed the Second Amendment accordingly. It was designed to guarantee that the states would be free to raise and train their own militias as a defense against federal power, and as a means of keeping a defensive military force available to Americans while remaining outside the direct control of the federal government.

This grew out of what was a well-established opposition to standing armies among Americans in the late eighteenth century. In his book Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802, Richard Kohn writes:

We can see this plainly in the speeches and writings of the Anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry, but we also see it in the more moderate attendees of the constitutional convention as well, such as George Mason, who "When once a standing army is established in any country, the people lose their liberty."

Sentiments like Mason's did not represent the views of oddball outliers. Rather, Kohn notes, these were mainstream views of the danger of an unimpeded federal military establishment.

But how to combat the power of a federal standing army?

On this, the Americans did not need to re-invent the wheel. After all, the idea of locally-controlled military forces answerable to civil officials was put into place in seventeenth-century England. The English militias had been created out of fear of a large standing army directly answerable to the king.

Although the system had fallen into disuse in England by the time the Americans were debating the matter in the eighteenth century, the Americans were well aware of this history.

These ideas were further developed at the Virginia ratifying convention where Patrick Henry mocked the idea that liberties could be preserved by simply "assembling the people." Without locally controlled, military might, Henry noted, federal force could destroy the independence of the state governments. Similarly, George Mason concluded that the "militia ... is our ultimate safety. We can have no security without it."

As historian Leon Friedman concludes, "the people organized in the state militias were regarded as a counterforce against the threat that the regular army could be used as an instrument of oppression and service in the militia was a right of the citizen that could not be transgressed by the federal government."See Leon Friedman, "Conscription and the Constitution: The Original Understanding," 67Mich. L. Rev. 1493 (1969)

In light of this, it's easier to see the key element offered by the "militia" phrase of the Second Amendment.

Even after the adoption of the new constitution, opposition to a powerful federal military continued. Congress opposed not only attempts to increase the size of the professional US army much beyond 1,000 men, but also opposed attempts to mandate any specific training in a "federally organized militia system." In the end, opposition to federal control of military affairs meant training of militias was "left entirely to the states."Although the US Constitution allowed for the federalization of these state militias, state governments could — and did — refused to comply with federal demands under various circumstances. As noted in "Decentralize the Military: Why We Need Independent Militias," both Connecticut, during the War of 1812, and Kentucky, during the Civil War, offer examples.

The "Unorganized Militia" and Private Gun Ownership As Brion McClanahan has shown, the Second Amendment — like the First Amendment — was never written to apply to the states themselves, but to Congress. The states were still free to regulate the ownership of weaponry in their own constitutions and by their own legislatures. Most state governments, however, elected to include provisions in their own constitutions protecting private gun ownership as an element of the state's overall militia strategy.

This is understandable given the long tradition of the "unorganized militia" in American history. While some advocates of gun control might claim that gun ownership is guaranteed only to those engaged in active militia service, this idea is directly opposed by the provisions in state constitutions guaranteeing private gun ownership and a general inclusion in the militia of all able-bodied males. This notion was recognized by policymakers even before ratification of the federal constitution, as noted by legal historian David Yassky:

As we have seen, in practice Founding-era militias were far from universal, but in the Founders' conceptual framework the militia consisted of the mass of ordinary citizens, trained to arms and available to serve at the call of the state. As George Mason put it: "Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except [for] a few public officers. ... When the Second Congress sought to exercise its constitutional authority to "provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the Militia," it directed "each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states [except for persons exempted under state law and certain other exempted classes] ... who is ... of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years" to enroll in the militia of their states. Or as Patrick Henry declared at the Virginia ratifying convention: "The great object is, that every man be armed."See David Yassky, The Second Amendment: Structure, History, and Constitutional Change, 99 Mich. L. Rev. 588 (2000)

By the close of the nineteenth century, this sort of language would be commonplace. An 1894 collection of texts from state constitutions shows that not fewer than 22 state constitutionsTexts declaring all able-bodied adults as members of the militia were, in the late nineteenth century, found in in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming. contained language along the lines of "the militia of the State shall consist of all able-bodied male residents of the State, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years."As useful compilation of these texts can be found in "The Convention Manual of Procedure, Forms and Rules for the Regulation of Business in the Sixth New York State Constitutional Convention, 1894: v. 1-2 American constitutions".

To ensure a ready availability of men used to handling firearms, these constitutional provisions are often accompanied by state guarantees of a right to keep and bear arms similar to the 1780 Massachusetts declaration of rights which states:

The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the civil authority, and be governed by it.

Some states specifically stipulated that the ownership of arms is for personal use. One of the most specific of these is perhaps the Colorado Constitution (1876) which states:

That the right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question.

But if there was left any doubt that this might apply specifically to one's own personal property — and not to some general idea of "defense of homeland" — the Montana Constitution states a person may keep arms "In defense of his own home, person and property..." [emphasis added.]

Both Montana's and Colorado's texts are remarkably similar to that of Missouri's which states persons may "keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property or in aid of the civil power..." Other similar clauses include Arkansas's text: "The citizens of this state shall have the right to keep and bear arms for their common defense." Maine's: "Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms for the common defense; and this right shall never be questioned." And Kansas: "The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security; but the standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and shall not be tolerated, and the military shall be in strict subordination to the civil power."

Ideally, each state would have its own "unorganized militia" of residents who could "aid ... the civil power" in case of civil unrest or invasion.

Note that the idea of the unorganized militia nevertheless remains connected to the organized militia. There is no evidence that the authors of the Second Amendment would have considered just any group of armed civilians to be a militia. An element of state sanction was assumed. The unorganized militia was imagined as a sort of potential militia, that could be, as made clear in numerous state constitutions, called to assemble, with arms, to "aid the civil power."

As noted by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, many states experimented with various measures designed to increase the training and readiness of this militia. That is, there were efforts to make the unorganized militia moderately more "organized." Some militias even became de facto private militias functioning under state charters. Nevertheless, regardless of the exact level of readiness demanded by the state government, the idea was that each state's general citizenry served as the "reserve" force for the state government.

Clearly, this stands in contrast to the idea of today's National Guard. According to Yassky:

the Founders' did have a concept that approximates today's National Guard — but it was a concept they disapproved. This is the "select militia" — a specially trained part of the citizenry. To the Founders, a select militia was little better than an army. The Philadelphia Convention explicitly rejected a proposal to create a "select militia" for the federal government, as did the Third Congress. The Constitution's proponents, moreover, repeatedly denied Anti-Federalist charges that Congress' power to "provide for training" the militia would lead to creation of a select militia.

But if not a "select militia" in today's more technical world, then what? In Hummel's analysis, we find that many states attempted to deal with the problem of gaining military expertise through state-based conscription. Additionally, many volunteer militias promoted a pro-militia atmosphere by providing social benefits and prestige for those who participated in militias voluntarily. The idea, presumably, was to ensure that a large enough percentage of the "able-bodied male population" had some sort of militia experience so as to plausibly conclude that the unorganized militia could offer meaningful military expertise and service. Whether or not this vision ever came to fruition remains a matter of debate. Certainly, the common view among establishment military historians — a biased source to be sure — is that state militias were always inept. Even if this were the case, however, this doesn't prove that the militia ideal can't be — or ought not be — revived as a check on federal power. After all, the conditions that often provided obstacles to the creation of reliable militias — such as the presence of an extremely rural, widely dispersed, and undercapitalized population in many states in nineteenth century America — no longer exist.

In spite of the anti-militia bias among federal policymakers, the ideal of the unorganized militia persisted even into the twentieth century. When the federal government did finally manage to push through the creation of what today is recognizable as a National Guard — with the Militia Act of 1903 — official explanations of the act still paid lip service to the supposed value of an unorganized militia. Writing in the North American Review (August 1903), Lieutenant-Colonel James Parker provides an official summary of the new act, endorsing the traditional view that

the militia shall consist of every able-bodied citizen between eighteen and forty-five, and divides the militia into two classes the organized militia or National Guard, and the unorganized or reserve militia.

Parker even goes so far as to suggest that the organized militia provide resources to the unorganized militia to increase proficiency with rifles:

To shoot well is a large part of the education of the soldier; and if the government can arouse interest in shooting, in not only the organized but also unorganized militia, that our male population shall be familiar with the accurate use of the rifle, we shall have gone far towards evening up the advantage the foreigner gains by his universal conscription.

The Decline of the System and the End of the Second Amendment Ironically, though, Parker's explanation and defense of the Militia Act of 1903 serves largely as an unwitting epitaph and eulogy for the idea of the unorganized militia in the US. The National Guard, as created by the the Militia Act, would spell the doom of the unorganized militia in the US, and serve to completely undermine the Second Amendment and its defense of decentralized military power in the US.

After 1903, the federalization of the state militias only accelerated until, as Yassky concludes, "Today's National Guard is thus a far cry from what the Founders' understood a militia to be" and the result of these changes has brought about "the disappearance of anything the Founders would have recognized as a militia." Far from acting as a bulwark against abuse of federal power, today's National Guard is something the authors of the Second Amendment "would have seen as little better than a standing army."Part of the reason for the demise of the militia system was the fact that the courts have never defended it. Yassky adds: "The principle of military decentralization - the avoidance of standing armies - was a cornerstone of the Founders' political theory; yet neither the courts' doctrine nor the revisionist alternative [i.e., modern anti-gun-control interpretations of the Second Amendment] respect this principle."

It is interesting that while the original conception of the militia has been destroyed by federalization — and thus the central rationale of the Second Amendment has been eviscerated — state provisions encouraging private gun ownership have proliferated. When it comes to home defense against small-time thieves and murderers, this is all to the good. Widespread unorganized gun ownership, however, does little to re-create the idea of a locally-controlled militia that would be used to keep the size and power of federal standing armies in check and to decentralize political power away from the federal government. Yes, private gun ownership is undeniably moderately inconvenient for governments at all levels, but compared to the militia concept protected and fostered by the Second Amendment, these privately-armed citizens can only offer relatively token resistance.

Moreover, the idea that a large standing army ought to be vehemently resisted and viewed with suspicion — in favor of both an organized and unorganized militia — is long gone. Indeed, many Americans who fancy themselves defenders of the Second Amendment also enthusiastically support a large federal military establishment. George Mason and Patrick Henry would have found such an attitude incomprehensible.

View Details

It is not every day the iconic F.A. Hayek is associated with support for one-world government. Yoram Hazony’s critique of Hayek on that score highlights interesting fissures in theories of political economy on the Right. In some of his newspaper writing, and in The Virtue of Nationalism, the Jerusalem-based academic argues that Hayek advocated replacing independent nations with a world-wide federation.

The book, Hazony’s fourth, is a strong defense of nationalism that has been welcomed by many conservative free marketeers. Yet it portrays the great economist Hayek—a leading proponent of liberty who was beloved by Hazony idol Margaret Thatcher, and by many supporters of Hazony’s case for nationalism—as one whose views on international order would stifle liberty.

The apparent contradiction signals a conspicuous divide on questions of national sovereignty between classical liberals and conservatives.

Arguably the most contentious citation by Hazony, referenced in an op-ed he published two years ago in the Wall Street Journal, is from Hayek’s 1939 essay, “The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism”(collected in Individualism and Economic Order, 1948): “The abrogation of national sovereignties and the creation of an effective international order of law is a necessary complement and the logical consummation of the liberal program.”

Hazony’s conclusion is that “classical liberalism thus offers ground for imposing a single doctrine on all nations for their own good.” More than that, classical liberalism “provides an ideological basis for an American universal dominion.”

All this is initially confusing at best. In his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, Hayek is critical of international organizations like the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations, even as he condemns the atrocities that were committed by nation-state governments, backed often by widespread nationalist sentiment. Hayek does not as a consequence call, in that work, for an upward channeling of power into some sort of worldwide federation.

Greater context sheds some light. The contentious citation from “The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism” was first published in 1939 in the New Commonwealth Quarterly, and follows with the next line in both the article and later book: “In a recent discussion of international liberalism, it has been rightly contended that it was one of the main deficiencies of nineteenth century liberalism that its advocates did not sufficiently realize that the achievement of the recognized harmony of interests between the inhabitants of the different states was only possible within the framework of international security.” Hayek then goes on to endorse the idea that “there must be neither alliance nor complete unification; neither Staatenbund nor Einheitsstaat but Bundesstaat.”

Here, Hayek is referring to Lionel Robbins and his Economic Planning and International Order (1937). Professor Robbins of the London School of Economics favored a return to laissez-faire but “he made numerous ad hoc exceptions,” as his entry in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics notes. The issue for Robbins and Hayek was not how to force one’s own values on governments that did not respect liberty, but how to meet the threats posed by internationally expansionist governments, given the rise of communism and its pursuit of global domination, and Nazism’s militarism and the carnage wrought by the Third Reich.

Hayek defined international federalism at the time as a means to protect liberty, exerting pressure on governments by respectable peers to observe property rights and rule of law domestically, even within the “balance of power”—itself a situation some contemporary scholars argue comes into existence through spontaneous order. Without a balance of power, individual liberty disappears, as Edwin van de Haar notes.

The danger of newly independent postcolonial nations falling into the communist bloc was justifiably of concern when Hayek made these observations. (A third of the world would subsequently fall under Soviet sway.) A system of worldwide federalism was simply a way to safeguard property rights and freedom against the forces of totalitarianism. It was a matter of promoting good governance in international affairs, not a global government per se.

Hayek had a sophisticated take on international relations. Van de Haar gives an excellent overview of Hayek’s stance in its classical liberal context, demonstrating that, while the Austrian economist was indeed a federalist in international relations, he was no starry-eyed believer in international peace and harmony. Hayek was among the more hawkish of the classical liberals, in fact.

In later life, he regretted not focusing more on international affairs. The connection between the balance of power and Hayek’s ideas, writes Van de Haar, “is less surprising than it might seem because the great classical-liberal thinkers, such as Hume, Smith, Mises, and Hayek, were rather power oriented in their views on international affairs.” It seems to me this assessment is not inconsistent with Hazony’s belief in the applicability of the spontaneous order of markets to our international relations.

For Hayek, some form of federalism among nation-states was needed in situations where these nations were unable to live side by side; clearly evidenced by wars at the time. The nation remains the basic unit of international society in Hayek’s view. Where federations are required to maintain individual liberty, they ought to be classically liberal in nature, which is to say, with a minimal set of tasks.

Returning to Hazony, he too agrees that there exists a basic minimum of what constitutes governance within international affairs, though specifics are not outlined in The Virtue of Nationalism. Addressing critics at the Heritage Foundation, Hazony conceded that there are limits to principles like national independence, and non-intervention in the affairs of states, and he cited the cases of the Rwandan genocide and atrocities in Cambodia. “There exists there a moral obligation to go in, stop the killing and get out,” he argued, adding that his principles of nationalism should not assumed to be dogma.

However, Hazony strongly distinguished such interventions from the rather limitless concept of moral obligation circulating at present, one that calls for military intervention against regimes not respecting standards expected by Americans. He favorably cites thinkers including the Baron de Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, and Alexander Hamilton, who believed that different political arrangements would be fitting for different nations, “each in keeping with the specific conditions it faces and traditions it inherits.” Traditions preserve institutions. In their absence, when systems are implanted from outside, those interventions fail.

Hazony’s assessment of the nation-state today in Western Europe and North America is framed by his understanding of the primary role in its development played by Protestant thought. He draws on the work of Calvinist and Anglican thinkers who reassessed the Old Testament, drawing theological terms for the state via the nation of Israel. Scholars disagree on the extent to which this nation-state approach has been conducive to liberty enjoyed today, including Rodney Stark. Some commentators have highlighted the remarkable liberty that was once evident in hundreds of smaller city-states across Europe, a situation in which identity did not derive from belonging to a nation in the modern sense. Alberto Mingardi asserts that the nation-state has “claimed the world for itself,” making bodies like the EU “cartels of nation states”—that is to say these bodies are extensions of the nation-state rather than alternatives to it, as Hazony would have us believe.

Mingardi says the entire idea of a national identity as a source of the legitimacy of government was a revolutionary shift away from basing legitimacy in ideas, rather than a notion of identity tied to the happenstance of birth. Pre-Reformation ideas of political legitimacy emerging from, among others, the Late Scholastics—in which Hayek’s Austrian School claims roots—is perhaps worth more analysis, much as the economic ideas of the 16th and 17th centuries have come under a more intense spotlight in considering the makings of the modern economy.

What is needed is a deeper assessment of the traditions that formed the basis of the nation-state’s legitimacy, and that formed the basis of the liberty enjoyed by those who reside in those states (as well as the endurance of those liberties, which Hazony sees as rapidly eroding without inquiring very much into the causes of the erosion). We may do well to focus on the pre-Reformation traditions that preceded, but were not wholly replaced by, the dominant Anglo-Saxon traditions that have played a crucial role in the development of liberty.

Assessing those traditions would be an exercise entirely consistent with, dare I say called for by, the passionate love of freedom that is evident in The Virtue of Nationalism.

Originally published at Law & Liberty

View Details

It's becoming more and more apparent that the United States will not be going back to "business as usual" after Donald Trump leaves office, and it is easy to imagine that the anti-Trump parties will use their return to power as an opportunity to settle scores against the hated rubes and "deplorables" who dared attempt to oppose their betters in Washington, DC, California, and New York.

This ongoing conflict may manifest itself in the culture war through further attacks on people who take religious faith seriously, and on those who hold any social views unpopular among degreed people from major urban centers. The First Amendment will be imperiled like never before with both religious freedom and freedom of speech regarded as vehicles of "hate." Certainly, the Second Amendment will hang by a thread.

But even more dangerous will be the deep state's return to a vaunted position of enjoying a near-total absence of opposition from elected officials in the civilian government. The FBI and CIA will go to even greater lengths to ensure the voters are never again "allowed" to elect anyone who doesn't receive the explicit imprimatur of the American intelligence "community." The Fourth Amendment will be banished so that the NSA and its friends can spy on every American with impunity. The FBI and CIA will more freely combine the use of surveillance and media leaks to destroy adversaries.

Anyone who objects to the deep state's wars on either Americans or on foreigners will be denounced as stooges of foreign powers.

These scenarios may seem overly dramatic, but the extremity of the situation is suggested by the fact that Trump — who is only a very mild opponent of the status quo — has received such hysterical opposition. After all, Trump has not dismantled the welfare state. He has not slashed — or even failed to increase — the military budget. His fights with the deep state are largely based on political issues, and not on major policy disagreements. Trump, for example, sides with the surveillance state on matters such as the prosecution of Edward Snowden.

His sins lie merely in his lack of enthusiasm for the center-left's current drive toward ever more vicious identity politics. And, more importantly, he has been insufficiently gung ho about starting more wars, expanding NATO, and generally pushing the Russians toward World War III.

For even these minor deviations, we are told, he must be destroyed.

So, we can venture a guess as to what the agenda will look like once Trump is out of the way. It looks to be neither mild nor measured.

And then what?

In that situation, half the country — much of it from the half that calls itself "Red-State America" may regard itself as conquered, powerless, and unheard.

That's a recipe for civil war.

The Need for Separation But how can we take steps now to minimize this polarization the damage it is likely to cause?

The answer lies in greater decentralization and local autonomy. But as long as most Americans labor under the authoritarian notion that the United States is "one nation, indivisible" there will be no answer to the problem of one powerful region (or party) wielding unchallenged power over a minority.

Many conservatives naïvely claim that the Constitution and the "rule of law" will protect minorities in this situation. But their theories only hold water if the people making and interpreting the laws subscribe to an ideology which respects local autonomy and freedom for worldviews in conflict with the ruling class. That is increasingly not the ideology of the majority, let alone the majority of powerful judges and politicians.

Thus, for those who can manage to leave behind the flag-waving propaganda of their youths, it is increasingly evident that something other than repeating bromides about teaching high-school civics, reading the Constitution, or electing "strong leaders" will have to be done.

As I've noted in the past, the notion of increasing local autonomy through nullification and secession has long been gaining steam in Europe, where referendums on decentralization are growing more frequent.

And conservatives are increasingly seeing the writing on the wall. Among the more insightful of these has been Angelo Codevilla. In 2017, Codevilla, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, laid out a blueprint for local opposition to federal power and noted:

Texas passed a law that, in effect, closes down most of its abortion clinics. The U.S. Supreme Court struck it down. What if Texas closed them nonetheless? Send the Army to point guns at Texas rangers to open them? What would the federal government do if North Dakota declared itself a “Sanctuary for the Unborn” and simply banned abortion? For that matter, what is the federal government doing about the fact that, for practical purposes, its laws concerning marijuana are being ignored in Colorado and California? Utah objects to the boundaries of national monuments created by decree within its borders. What if the state ignored those boundaries? Prayer in schools? What could bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., do if any number of states decided that what the federal courts have to say about such things is bad?

Now that identity politics have replaced the politics of persuasion and blended into the art of war, statesmen should try to preserve what peace remains through mutual forbearance toward jurisdictions that ignore or act contrary to federal laws, regulations, or court orders. Blue states and red states deal differently with some matters of health, education, welfare, and police. It does no good to insist that all do all things uniformly.

And by 2019, the need for separation was becoming more urgent. Last week Codevilla continued in this line of thinking:

[A]fter the 2020 elections ordinary Americans will have to deal with the same dreadful question we faced in 2016: How do we secure and perhaps restore our fast-diminishing freedom to live as Americans? And while we may wish for help from Trump, we have to look to ourselves and to other leaders for how we may counter the ruling class’s manifold assaults now, and especially in the long term...

The logical recourse is to conserve what can be conserved, and for it to be done by, of, and for those who wish to conserve it. However much force of what kind may be required to accomplish that, the objective has to be conservation of the people and ways that wish to be conserved.

That means some kind of separation.

... [T]he natural, least stressful course of events is for all sides to tolerate the others going their own ways. The ruling class has not been shy about using the powers of the state and local governments it controls to do things at variance with national policy, effectively nullifying national laws. And they get away with it.

For example, the Trump Administration has not sent federal troops to enforce national marijuana laws in Colorado and California, nor has it punished persons and governments who have defied national laws on immigration. There is no reason why the conservative states, counties, and localities should not enforce their own view of the good.

Not even President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would order troops to shoot to re-open abortion clinics were Missouri or North Dakota, or any city, to shut them down. As Francis Buckley argues in American Secession: The Looming Breakup of the United States, some kind of separation is inevitable, and the options regarding it are many.

It is notable that Codevilla's strategy is not marked by grandiose gestures of independence or a yearning to re-create the alleged glorious military victories of the days of yore. Such were the mistakes of the Confederates in the mid-nineteenth century.

Interestingly, Codevilla's more sensible approach shares quite a bit in common with the strategies recommended by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his essay "What Must Be Done." The idea is to assert local control and refuse cooperation with federal policymakers. But with restraint. Hoppe writes:

It would appear to be prudent ... to avoid a direct confrontation with the central government and not openly denounce its authority or even abjure the realm. Rather, it seems advisable to engage in a policy of passive resistance and non-cooperation. One simply stops to help in the enforcement in each and every federal law. One assumes the following attitude: “Such are your rules, and you enforce them. I cannot hinder you, but I will not help you either, as my only obligation is to my local constituents.”

Consistently applied, no cooperation, no assistance whatsoever on any level, the central government’s power would be severely diminished or even evaporate. And in light of the general public opinion, it would appear highly unlikely that the federal government would dare to occupy a territory whose inhabitants did nothing else than trying to mind their own business. Waco, a teeny group of freaks, is one thing. But to occupy, or to wipe out a significantly large group of normal, accomplished, upstanding citizens is quite another, and quite a more difficult thing.

Some will be unable to break out of the mindset that the United States must forever be governed by a singular national policy. They will insist any attempt at decentralization of this sort must necessarily result in violence.

Writing at The American Conservative, Michael Vlahos, for example, appears unconvinced that violence can be avoided. But even he concedes the violence is unlikely to take the form of mass bloodshed as seen in the 1860s:

Our antique civil wars were not bound to formal rules, yet somehow they held to well-etched bounds of expectation. American society today has very different norms and expectations for civil conflict, which certainly will constrain how we fight the next battle.

Today’s America no longer embraces a national landscape of an industrial-lockstep battlefield (think Gettysburg, D-Day). Our next civil war — as social media so eloquently reminds us — will enact its violence on a battle campus of equal pain, if less blood.

Many devotees of perpetual federal supremacy, of course, won't admit even this. Any attempt at decentralization, nullification, or secession is said to be invalid because "that was decided by the Civil War." There is no doubt, of course, that the Civil War settled the matter for a generation or two. But to claim any war "settled things" forever, is clearly nonsense.

It is true, however, that if the idea of a legally, culturally, and politically unified United States wins the day, Americans may be looking toward a future of ever greater political repression marked by increasingly common episodes of bloodshed. This is simply the logical outcome of any system where it is assumed the ruling party has a right and a duty to force the ways of the one group upon another. That is the endgame of a unified America.

View Details

In his criticism of imperialist policies in the service of socialism, labor-unionism, and the socialist war economy Ludwig von Mises could not restate many conventional arguments. He faced an unprecedented task in confronting the claim that imperialism can enhance the welfare of a nation. His pioneering analysis brilliantly confirmed Carl Menger’s insight that methodological individualism is able to analyze even large collective phenomena.

The main thesis in the first chapter of Nation, State, and Economy is that governments are incapable of improving the condition of the nations they rule. The reason is that the origin, emergence, growth, flowering, and decline of nations are subject to natural laws. The operation of these laws can be modified by government power but not abrogated, and any alteration will play out to the detriment of the nation. Mises proved his case by first analyzing nations in a free society and then turning to examine the impact of government power on their evolution. His practical conclusions called for the denationalization of the nation, or more precisely, for keeping government intervention as far as possible out of the life of language communities.

Following Scherer, Grimm, and Otto Bauer, Mises defined nations as language communities. He stressed that as far as democratic regimes are concerned, this definition is more than a mere convention. In democracies, communication—and thus language—is the primary political means. Language communities are therefore of critical political importance.See Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, pp. 9f. He stated that a nation’s specific language generated specific “political constructions” and in particular specific foundational ideas determining the operation of their governments (Staatsgedanken); see ibid., pp. 12, 38, 41, 87.Mises did not argue that language communities are the only factor, or the most important one, in modern politics. He speculated that racial communities were far more important. The problem was that the sociology of race and of race relations was not sufficiently developed to warrant scientific statements. He acknowledged, however, that it had become a “principle of modern political world law” that it is “no longer acceptable to use force on peoples of the white race.” That is, the use of force against dark-skinned people in the European colonies was considered legitimate, but not the use of force against fellow-whites. German imperialism made enemies in all quarters by violating this distinction. See Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, pp. 62, 64f.; Nation, State, and Economy, pp. 76, 79f. What were the natural laws determining the rise and fall of language communities? Mises considered various objective factors determining their evolution.For example, he examined the role of written language and stated that it had played a crucial role in the competition between dialects. The first written dialect became the standard language. See Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, pp. 17ff. But his decisive considerations start from the fact that the membership in a language community is not something unalterable. Each human person can decide to leave his former nation and join another. In a free society, Mises stressed, nations would be purely voluntary associations:

No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want. The totality of freedom-minded persons who are intent on forming a state appears as the political nation; patrie, Vaterland becomes the designation of the country they inhabit; patriot becomes a synonym of free-minded.Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, p. 27; Nation, State, and Economy, p. 34.

Liberalism knows no conquests, no annexations; just as it is indifferent towards the state itself, so the problem of the size of the state is unimportant to it. It forces no one against his will into the structure of the state. Whoever wants to emigrate is not held back. When a part of the people of the state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism does not hinder it from doing so. Colonies that want to become independent need only do so. The nation as an organic entity can be neither increased nor reduced by changes in states; the world as a whole can neither win nor lose from them.Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, pp. 31f.; Nation, State, and Economy, pp. 39f.

What, then, determines individual membership in a language community? Neglecting objective factors such as the familial, historical, cultural, and political environments of the individual, Mises focused on the voluntary factor of assimilation. He asserted that, for practical reasons, language minorities tend to assimilate to the language majorities with whom they are affiliated through trade and other forms of social intercourse. Therefore, local minority nations ceteris paribus tend to disappear in the course of time. Mises stressed that this assimilation process was dependent on individual membership in certain social classes because social contacts were class-dependent. Minorities could preserve a separate existence for as long as spatial and social mobility were heavily controlled through custom and laws. Things changed radically when classical liberalism abolished such laws. The result was a dramatic migration—both physical and social—that disrupted the established balances between nations. Mises gave special attention to the impact of the increased spatial mobility, which by the late nineteenth century had already reached a massive scale. These migrations constantly produced areas of mixed cultures, threatening the established groups with their disappearance through assimilation, thus prompting political rivalry and conflict.See Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, p. 48

Mises did not believe these movements could be stopped because they reflected the self-interest of the migrants.En passant he mentioned his contribution to the economics of migration by highlighting the importance of relative overpopulation, in distinction to already-known absolute overpopulation. See Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, pp. 45ff. He had developed the concept of relative over-population in his “Vom Ziel der Handelspolitik,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 42, no. 2 (1916): 576. What could be done, then, to alleviate the national conflicts that were the necessary consequence of those migrations? The only viable solution, Mises argued, was to reduce the role of the state within society, because the political conflicts between nationalities primarily concerned control of the state apparatus:

Of course, the struggle of nationalities over the state and government cannot disappear completely from polyglot territories. But it will lose sharpness to the extent that the functions of the state are restricted and the freedom of the individual is extended. Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, p. 62; Nation, State, and Economy, p. 77.

The way to eternal peace does not lead through strengthening state and central power, as socialism strives for. The greater the scope the state claims in the life of the individual and the more important politics becomes for him, the more areas of friction are thereby created in territories with mixed population. Limiting state power to a minimum, as liberalism sought, would considerably soften the antagonisms between different nations that live side by side in the same territory. The only true national autonomy is the freedom of the individual against the state and society. The “statification” of life and of the economy leads with necessity to the struggle of nations.Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, pp. 78f.; Nation, State, and Economy, p. 96.

Mises offered here a radical alternative to the prevalent models for solving national conflicts. Austria had the longest experience with national struggles within a common state, and its intellectual, political, and institutional history was therefore richer than that of any other country in analyzing and solving this problem.For surveys on Austrian language legislation, see Alfred Fischel, ed., Materialien zur Sprachenfrage (Brünn: Irrgang, 1902); idem, ed., Das österreichische Sprachenrecht, 2nd ed. (Brünn: Irrgang, 1910); Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, pp. 421ff. For example, the constitution of the Austrian great-dukedom of Siebenbürgen, which existed until 1848, provided for separate parliaments and administrations for Saxons (Germans), Hungarians, and Szeklers. Affairs of general interest were dealt with in a common parliament, which debated in Latin. The ugly side of this otherwise charming arrangement was that the Romanians, who were in the numerical majority in Siebenbürgen, had no representation.See Eduard Bernatzik, Die Ausgestaltung des Nationalgefühls im 19. Jahrhundert (Hannover: Helwing, 1912), p. 30. During the revolution of 1848, a promising approach was developed to overcome this and similar problems. On March 4, 1849 the deputies of the constitutive assembly (which had by then moved to the city of Kremsier) voted on the proposed Kremsier Constitution, the point of which was to abolish the old territorial units composing the empire (the “kingdoms and lands”) and to replace them with administrative counties, the boundaries of which would be drawn according to the national affiliation of the inhabitants. The German nationalists reacted on the very same day with a counter-proposal presented by Prince Schwarzenberg. From then on, the principle of equal legal treatment of the different languages was on the defensive and finally defeated.See Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, p. 323; RöskauRydel, “Galizien, Bukowina, Moldau,” p. 97.

The failure of the revolution prevented the practical application of the Kremsier Constitution, but the idea lived on, especially in the various programs of the social-democratic party. At their 1899 convention in Brünn, the social democrats decided to tackle the problem of national conflicts by creating parallel state organizations along national lines. This approach, they believed, would ensure “national autonomy” to each nation and thus prevent struggles between the nations once and for all. To serve as a model for the rest of Austria, they transformed their own party, creating parallel national organizations.The social-democratic faction in the central parliament thereafter called itself “union of social-democratic deputies.” See Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, pp. 351ff. In the following years, its intellectual leaders, Karl Renner and young Otto Bauer, revived and refined and popularized the idea of replacing the old territorial units with new national counties.See Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1907); translated as The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Before World War I, Karl Renner published his ideas on the nationality question under the pseudonyms “Synoptikus” and “Rudolf Springer.” See Synoptikus, Staat und Nation (Vienna: Dietl, 1899); Rudolf Springer, Die Krise des Dualismus und das Ende der Déakistischen Episode in der Geschichte der Habsburgschen Monarchie: eine politische Skizze (Vienna: published by the author, 1904); idem, Grundlagen und Entwicklungsziele der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie (Leipzig: Deuticke, 1906). At the end of World War I, he published under his true name: Das Selbstbestimmungrecht der Nationen: in besonderer Anwendung auf Oesterreich (Leipzig: Deuticke, 1918). It turned out however, that nationalistic passions were too strong to be tamed even by the spirit of socialist solidarity. After the introduction of universal suffrage in 1907, the party quickly dissolved into national organizations and lost all impact on Austrian politics. With hindsight, and with the help of Mises’s theory, we can identify the root cause of these failures. All of his predecessors had tried to use government to solve the problem of national struggles. None of them recognized (or admitted) that coercive association—the sine qua non of the state—was the very source of national conflicts. A different government scheme cannot possibly be a solution for a conflict caused by the nature of government itself.

But how far could one go in keeping the state out of society? How far should one go? Mises argued that the only limits are of a technical-administrative nature:

The size of a state’s territory...does not matter. It is another question whether a state is viable when its population is small. Now, it is to be noted that the costs of many state activities are greater in small states than in large ones. The dwarf states, of which we still have a number in Europe, like Liechtenstein, Andorra, and Monaco, can organize their court systems by levels of jurisdiction, for example, only if they link up with a neighboring state. It is clear that it would be financially quite impossible for such a state to set up as comprehensive a court system as that which a larger state makes available to its citizens, for example, by establishing courts of appeal.Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, pp. 66f.; Nation, State, and Economy, p. 82.

Hence, Mises advocated a complete liberalization of society. There should be no political limits to this process. And it would in practice be limited only by banal technical considerations. In other words, Mises welcomed the unhampered competition among national territories, which in a free “inter-national” society would be a peaceful competition between language-based cultures, in which each individual, through his assimilation choices, would determine the fate of the various language communities. Mises sensed that the only dignified attitude toward the reality of cultural competition was national self-confidence:

A nation that believes in itself and its future, a nation that means to stress the sure feeling that its members are bound to one another not merely by accident of birth but also by the common possession of a culture that is valuable above all to each of them, would necessarily be able to remain unperturbed when it saw individual persons shift to other nations. A people conscious of its own worth would refrain from forcibly detaining those who wanted to move away and from forcibly incorporating into the national community those who were not joining it of their free will. To let the attractive force of its own culture prove itself in free competition with other peoples— that alone is worthy of a proud nation, that alone would be true national and cultural policy. The means of power and of political rule were in no way necessary for that.Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, p. 61; Nation, State, and Economy, p. 76.

Mises argued not only that political rule is unnecessary to improve the condition of a nation, but also that it is incapable of doing so. In a free society people constantly migrate to those locations offering the most favorable conditions for production. Every individual has an incentive to migrate from a relatively poor area to a relatively rich area. These migrations would continue until wage rates and interest rates are equal in all locations.With this consideration Mises complemented the Ricardian analysis of free trade, which was based on the assumption that capital and labor were mobile only within the borders of the state. See Mises, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft, pp. 51ff. In a liberalized world, therefore, there would be a tendency away from differences in income. There would eventually be no rich or poor countries in the world. There would only be countries that are more densely populated, and other countries that are less so.

Mises pointed out that government intervention does not change anything about people’s motives to migrate from relatively poor areas into relatively rich ones. On the contrary, if government tries to keep its people in the land through a system of protective tariffs, it only exacerbates the problem. Protective tariffs might prevent the emigration of those who would be most affected by foreign competition, but they reduce the per capita income of all the other members of society, further multiplying the incentives for emigration. Again, a dispassionate suitability analysis comes out against government intervention. Mises concluded that the only rational approach in matters of political nationalism was to follow classical-liberal precepts: shrink the state, open borders, and face the cultural competition of international migrations.

Excerpted from Chapter 8 of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism

View Details

Donald Trump and California Governor Jerry Brown have failed to come to an agreement over how California National Guard troops should be used at the US-Mexico border. Gov. Brown has agreed to send California troops, but has stated he will not allow them to function in a "immigration enforcement" role.

Trump had earlier lauded Brown for sending some California Guard troops, but, it seems that in Brown's mind, the troops ought to be there only for activities related to drug trafficking and organized crime. Trump then expressed his displeasure with these state-imposed limitations.

The Drudge Report in recent days has played up the conflict between state and federal governments with headlines like "DEFIANT: California deploying 400 troops -- but not for immigration enforcement..." and BORDER BATTLE."

Other publications, like the UK's Daily Mail report with some degree of surprise over the fact that a governor of a state would refuse to send troops where requested by the US president.

Legally speaking, it's all much ado about nothing. So long as the president does not federalize National Guard troops for the purposes of a "national emergency," a state governor, who is the Commander in Chief of the state's National Guard troops, can refuse to send personnel as requested.

Presidents can, of course, federalize the National Guard and involuntarily deploy them if he wishes, but Trump has not done that — and doing so remains a sensitive political issue when the president intends to use the troops on American soil.

In the case of using National Guard troops on the US side of the US-Mexico border, of course, the President could run up against the Posse Comitatus Act which prohibit using federalized US troops within the United States itself.

As explained by Tim Macarthur, not even that prohibition is a hard and fast rule, but sending federalized US troops to the border would potentially invite legal challenges and political resistance.

1986: When Governors Refused to Send Troops to Latin AmericaPolitically, of course, it's not shocking that the other border states — Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas — all of which have Republican governors, have all voluntarily sent troops, apparently without limitations imposed by the governors in question.

Jerry Brown, a Democrat, meanwhile, has taken a different approach.

This is not the first time, however, that a state governor has offered resistance to deployment requests or orders from presidents.

During the 1980s, when President Reagan sought to send National Guard troops to Central America, several Democratic governors refused — including Toney Anaya of New Mexico and Joseph Brennan of Maine — to send their troops, triggering a legal battle.

The Christian Science Monitor in 1986 summarized the situation:

Governor Brennan took the lead in January when he refused a federal request to have his Army Guard participate in a road-building exercise in central Honduras. The governors of Ohio and Arizona subsequently turned down requests to send National Guard units from their states to maneuvers, and two other governors said they would not send their Guard to Honduras if they were asked.

Honduras plays a crucial role in Washington's war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government. The US-backed contra rebels are based in Honduras, American forces have built airstrips and radar facilities around the country, and US troops have held several large-scale maneuvers in Honduras since 1983.

Alarmed by the governors' rebellion, the Reagan administration moved to cut the mutiny short. In July, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs James H. Webb Jr. told a Senate subcommittee that ``the governors' authority has become a vehicle to debate or influence foreign policy.''

The federal statute at the time, however, lent itself to an interpretation in which state governors could exercise some control over where their National Guard troops were sent on training missions in peace time.

Many of the Nation's Governors continued to assert greater control over National guard troops, as reported by the Chicago Tribune at the time:

The nations governors do not normally get excited over questions of foreign policy or defense, but they are now asserting their right to have a say over them, at least to the extent that National Guard units are concerned. A resolution adopted at the national governors conference says that governors alone have the right to decide how guard units will be used and where they will be sent.

Washington still may nationalize guard units in time of war or other emergency. But short of that, the governors claim, in effect, veto power. If the Defense Department wants a state`s National Guard sent on an overseas training mission, the new resolution would require approval of the governor of that state. And the destination had better not be Central America.

This in itself reflected an already greatly-reduced role for governors — compared to power they had over state troops in the 19th century. But, even this small amount of remaining veto power was too much for Rep. C.V. (Sonny) Montgomery (D) of Mississippi who, in response to the governors' resistance, successfully fought for the passage of new legislation stripping governors of their right to refuse deployment in similar cases:

Montgomery introduced his amendment, arguing that `a few governors just cannot say,I will not let my guardsmen go to train in a certain part of the world because I do not like the politics of that situation.''

This "Montgomery Amendment," was later challenged in federal court, and was even struck down at the appellate level. In December 1988, the

U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2 to 1 Tuesday that the so-called Montgomery Amendment, taking away a governor's control over National Guard units, is unconstitutional...The amendment was challenged by Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich, who objected to the Defense Department's ordering Minnesota Guard units to Central America. Governors of other states also have objected, and the states of Massachusetts, Ohio, Colorado, Vermont and Maine supported Minnesota's lawsuit.

That, unfortunately, was not the end of the matter. By 1990, the George H.W. Bush administration had appealed the case, now known as Perpich v. DoD. In the proceedings, the state of Minnesota argued that "the Founding Fathers feared a large standing army and believed state control could serve as a check on the federal government." The Bush administration, on the other hand, fought for greater federal control over the states. The Court sided with the federal government, and upheld the Montgomery Amendment. The result was that the states were weakened, yet again, when it came to asserting any control over federal usage of what historically have been regarded as state militias.

A Brief History of Federalizing State Troops The conflict over control of military personnel goes back more than 200 years to the days of the American revolution. Conflicts surrounding the English Civil War led to a well-established legal tradition of avoiding large standing armies while relying on non-professional militias to supply land-based forces. Similar views were adopted by the American Colonists who maintained anti-standing-army views with ever greater enthusiasm than the English themselves.

Many of the debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists centered around control of state militias, and how much of a standing army the federal government would be allowed.

RELATED: "The Origins of 'Militia' in the Second Amendment" by Ryan McMaken

Up until the American Civil War, the standing army in the United States remained tiny, and most military personnel outside the Navy were state militiamen.

Nowadays, "official" military histories — most of which have been written by military scholars employed by the federal government itself — portray state militias as inept, unimportant, and irrelevant. In fact, state-militia troops were effective and key players in the Mexican War and in numerous frontier engagements during the 19th century.

Moreover, in several key episodes during the 19th century — specifically in Vermont, Connecticut, and Kentucky — state governors explicitly refused to provide troops to the federal government in wartime. Such instances were rare, but the idea that states could control their own military resources independently from the federal government was nevertheless preserved.

Such ideals were summed up by the legislature of Connecticut during the War of 1812 when it declared it would not send state troops as requested: "it must not be forgotten, that the state of Connecticut is a FREE, SOVEREIGN, and INDEPENDENT state; that the United States are a confederacy of states; that we are a confederated and not a consolidated republic." (emphasis in original)

RELATED: "Decentralize the Military: Why We Need Independent Militias" by Ryan McMaken

Even during the Civil War, most Northern military outfits were organized by state governments — although they were subsequently placed under federal command. The part-time soldiers who volunteered in the Civil War in the North — only 8 percent of soldiers were draftees — continued to see themselves as "citizen soldiers" in the style of state militias.

By the early 20th century, however, the ideal of state-level militias, while preserved philosophically, was legally brought under much greater federal control, and the militias became the "National Guard." According to George J. Stein:

The modern National Guard began with the Dick Act of 1903 which established the several state militias as the militia system of the United States and gave the president the authority to "call up the Guard" in time of war or national security.Stein, George J. "State Defense Forces: The Missing Link in National Security." Military Review, September 1984. https://sgaus.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SDFsTheMissingLinkStein1984.pdf

This solidified the state militias as essentially an auxiliary of the federal government. This was strengthened even more so with the the National Defense Act of 1916 which

recognized the Guard as the first line of defense after the regulars and mandated that Guardsmen had to take a dual oath to both federal and state governments and could be drafted into federal service...Coffman, Edward M. "The Duality of the American Military Tradition: A Commentary." The Journal of Military History; Lexington Vol. 64, Iss. 4, (Oct 2000): 967-980.

Thus, state militias were explicitly expected to be loyal to both federal and state officials simultaneously.

Nevertheless, the idea that state governments exercised some control over National Guard troops, at least in specific circumstances, persisted.

Matters for the federal military were not improved, either, by the unpopular and disastrous Vietnam War in which National Guard troops were largely absent from the conflict. This may have created the impression in some cases that the regular federal military was not quite as flawless as it imagined itself to be.

In any case, by the 1980s, some state governors felt empowered to once again assert some modicum of state control over the state troops who had been increasingly brought under direct federal control.

With the passage and subsequent Court decisions upholding the Montgomery Amendment, however, state control over National Guard troops is currently extremely weak.

The current conflict between California's governor is very specific to one of the few cases in which a state can refuse a federal request for National Guard troops. Overall, however, the federal takeover of state troops is nearly complete in legal terms. Nowadays, Presidents can call up National Guard troops for lengthy active duty deployments in far-away foreign lands, where no perceptible threat to the United States can be detected. Moreover, this can all be done without any specific declaration of war from Congress. Even the old rules about National Guard troops being called up "in peacetime" have been largely erased in practice.

This, of course, is too bad since for its first century after the Revolution, Americans shows much greater reticence toward a large, centralized military that could be used to satisfy the whims of presidents. Even without easy call-ups for National Guard troops, though, the US's standing army is now enormous by historical standards, and current National Guard policy is only one factor of many that pave the way for a federal government that is almost continually involved in starting new wars or threatening new wars.

Once upon a time, the ideals behind the idea of locally-controlled state militias offered an important check against centralized executive power, and provided a dose of true federalism as an antidote against ever-growing federal power.

View Details

The recent rioting and virtual civil war in Northern Ireland points out, both for libertarians and for the world at large, the vital importance of pushing for and attaining the goal of national liberation for all oppressed people. Aside from being a necessary condition to the achievement of justice, national liberation is the only solution to the great world problems of territorial disputes and oppressive national rule. Yet, all too many anarchists and libertarians mistakenly scorn the idea of national liberation and independence as simply setting up more nation–states; they tragically do not realize that, taking this stand, they become in the concrete, objective supporters of the bloated, imperialistic nation–states of today.

Sometimes this mistake has had tragic consequences. Thus, it is clear from Paul Avrich’s fascinating and definitive bookPaul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). that the anarchists in Russia had at least a fighting chance to take control of the October Revolution rather than the Bolsheviks, but that they lost out for two major reasons: (1) their sectarian view that any kind of definite organization of their own movement violated anarchist principles; and (2) their opposition to the national independence movements for the Ukraine and White Russia on the ground that this would simply be setting up other states. In this way, they became the objective defenders of Great Russian imperialism, and this led them to the disastrous course of opposing Lenin’s statesmanlike “appeasement peace” of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, where Lenin, for the sake of ending the war with Germany, surrendered Ukrainian and White Russian territory from the Greater Russian imperium. Disastrously, both for their own principles and for their standing in the eyes of the war-weary Russian people, the Russian anarchists called for continuing the war against “German imperialism,” thereby somehow identifying with anarchy, the centuries-old land grabs of Russian imperialism.

Let us first examine the whole question of national liberation from the point of view of libertarian principle. Suppose that there are two hypothetical countries, “Ruritania” and “Walldavia.” Ruritania invades Walldavia and seizes the northern part of the country. This situation continues over decades or even centuries. But the underlying condition remains: the Ruritanian State has invaded and continues to occupy and exploit, very often trying to eradicate the language and culture of the North Walldavian subject people. There now arises, both in northern and southern Walldavia, a “North Walldavian Liberation Movement.” Where should we stand on the matter?

It seems clear to me that Libertarians are bound to give this liberation movement their ardent support. For their object, while it might not be to achieve an ultimate stateless society, is to liberate the oppressed North Walldavians from their Ruritanian State rulers. The fact that we may not agree with the Walldavian rebels on all philosophical or political points is irrelevant. The whole point of their existence—to free the Northern Walldavians from their imperial oppressors—deserves our wholehearted support.

Thus is solved the dilemma of how Libertarians and anarchists should react toward the whole phenomenon of “nationalism.” Nationalism is not a unitary, monolithic phenomenon. If it is aggressive, we should oppose it; if liberatory, we should favor it. Thus, in the Ruritanian–Walldavian case, those Ruritanians who defend the aggression or occupation on the grounds of “Greater Ruritania” or “Ruritanian national honor” or whatever, are being aggressive nationalists or “imperialists.” Those of either country who favor North Walldavian liberation from the imperial Ruritanian yoke are being liberators and, therefore, deserve our support.

One of the great swindles behind the idea of “collective security against aggression,” as spread by the “internationalist” interventionists of the 1920s and ever since, is that this requires us to regard as sacred all of the national boundaries which have been often imposed by aggression in the first place. Such a concept requires us to put our stamp of approval upon the countries and territories created by previous imperial aggression.

Let us now apply our analysis to the problem of Northern Ireland. The Northern Irish rulers, the Protestants, insist on their present borders and institutions; the Southern Irish, or Catholics, demand a unitary state in Ireland. Of the two, the Southern Irish have the better case, for all of the Protestants were “planted” centuries ago into Ireland by English imperialism, at the expense of murdering the Catholic Irish and robbing their lands. But unless documentation exists to enable restoration of the land and property to the heirs of the victims—and it is highly dubious that such exists—the proper libertarian solution has been advanced by neither side and, as far as we can tell, by no one in the public press. For the present partition line does not, as most people believe, divide the Catholic South from the Protestant North. The partition, as imposed by Britain after World War I and accepted by the craven Irish rebel leadership, arbitrarily handed a great deal of Catholic territory to the North. Specifically, over half of the territory of Northern Ireland has a majority of Catholics and should revert immediately to the South: this includes Western Derry (including Derry City), all of Tyrone and Fermanagh, southern Armagh and southern Down. Essentially, this would leave as Northern Ireland only the city of Belfast and the rural areas directly to the north.

While this solution would leave the Catholics of Belfast oppressed by outrageous Protestant discrimination and exploitation, at least the problem of the substantial Catholic minority in Northern Ireland—the majority in the areas enumerated above—would be solved, and the whole question of Northern Ireland would be reduced to tolerable dimensions. In this way, the libertarian solution—of applying national self-determination and removing imperial oppression—would at the same time bring about justice and solve the immediate utilitarian question.

Originally appeared in Libertarian Forum, vol. 1, no. 11, September 1, 1969. Published in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays.

View Details

Far from being outdated and past their time, the ideas behind the electoral college are greatly underutilized. The electoral college is thought by many to be somehow uniquely American, but this is not the case. Similar mechanisms — sometimes called "double-majority" systems — have been used in many different times and places in political history.

The current confusion about the mechanics of the electoral college appear to be largely a function of the fact that it is now widely forgotten that the United States is intended to be collection of independent states, and not a unitary political unit.

For an illustration of why a system like the electoral college is so essential, we can look to the European Union. Consider, for example, if the European Union were to hold a union-wide election for a single chief executive. (The EU does not hold such an election, however, because the EU is controlled by appointees, and because there is no president in the conventional sense.)

If the EU were to do this, we would immediately notice that a small handful of large and populous member countries could dominate election and policy decisions union-wide. Without some sort of mechanism to even out these disparities, smaller states wold continually be at the mercy of the larger ones.

For instance, Germany, France, and Italy by themselves constitute 47 percent of the population of the European Union (not counting the UK). The member countries with interests at odds with the large dominant states would be at a lopsided disadvantage. Small countries like the Czech Republic, for example, contain a mere two to five percent of the EU population and would be largely irrelevant to building a majority coalition in any sort of majority-rule system.

In the US, there is a similar imbalance with the 4 largest states (California, Texas, New York, and Florida) constituting one-third of the US population. The top-ten largest states total 54 percent of the US population. Thus, a citizen of, say, New Mexico, might find himself in a similar situation to the Czech voter if ever national political trends go against local needs and preferences.

In both the US and in our theoretical EU, double majority requirements have been — or could be — constructed to enhance the importance of small and medium-sized states. Wyoming's population for example — because of the way the electoral college is constructed — is more than four times more influential in the electoral college than in a nationwide popular vote. While being a small minority is always a problem when it comes to projecting political power, a system like the electoral college lessens the minority's disadvantage. Voting schemes like the electoral college, in other words, function as a check on overwhelming numerical advantages while giving a nod to geographical, cultural, and economic diversity across a large confederation.

Not surprisingly then, double-majority systems (or variations on the theme) have long been used to prevent the centralization of political power. A current example is the double-majority system used in Switzerland. Under the Swiss system, voter ballot initiatives must win both an electoral majority, and a majority vote in more than half of the member states (i.e., cantons).

Were such a system employed in the US, for example, any winning candidate would have to win both a popular majority and more than 25 states (or D.C.).

As it is, the electoral college rests on a modified "multiple-majority" system which nonetheless somewhat evens out population differences between small states and large states.

This could, of course, be extended to the states themselves. Politics would be quite different in California, for example, if gubernatorial candidates had to win both a popular majority and a majority of the state's counties.

Expand the Electoral College to Other National Contests Double-majority and multiple-majority systems mandate more widespread support for a candidate or measure than would be needed under an ordinary majority vote.

Unfortunately, in the United States, it is possible to pass tax increases and other types of sweeping and costly legislation with nothing more than bare majorities from Congress which is itself largely a collection of millionaires with similar educations, backgrounds, and economic status. Even this low standard is not required in cases where the president rules via executive order with "a pen and ... a phone."

In response to this centralization of political power, the electoral college should be expanded to function as a veto on legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court rulings.

For example, if Congress seeks to pass a tax increase, their legislation should be null and void without also obtaining a majority of electoral college votes in a manner similar to that of presidential elections. Under such a scheme, the federal government would be forced to submit new legal changes to the voters for approval. The same could be applied to executive orders and treaties. It would be even better to require both a popular-vote majority in addition to the electoral-vote majority. And while we're at it, let's require that at least 25 states approve the measures as well.

Those laws, regulations, and treaties that fail to obtain widespread geographical approval from a large number of states will automatically fail, and the elites in Washington will take to condemning elections and public political engagement as "cumbersome," "costly" and contrary to the wise decisions of the "experts" who know better.

View Details

It has long since become a doctrine of the modern American welfare state that the federal government must be the primary administrator of the nation's so-called safety net. Any attempt to devolve the welfare state to the states is routinely treated as backward and reactionary.

This doctrine remains in place though many US states are far larger and wealthier than many European countries that have welfare states of their own. Naturally, each of these states have economies large enough to manage state-based welfare programs. But, the federal government extracts so many billions of dollars from each state — primarily for the federal welfare state and the military — that states are left without the resources they would need to do their own.

How US States Compare to their European CounterpartsNow, for the sake of argument, let's just assume that every country needs a welfare state, and that it's a good thing.

But even if that's the case, why does Texas need the federal government to have a welfare program? Texas is the size of Australia in both population size and in the overall size of its economy. Australia has a large welfare state of its own (albeit slightly smaller than the US welfare state), so why can't Texas manage its own welfare state with its own resources?

This holds true even for small US states such as Colorado, which has a population similar to that of Norway, and a per capita GDP similar to that of Austria. So, again, this would suggest that Colorado has no need of the US federal government to create and administer its own welfare state.

The same can be said of all other US states.

If we look at a comparison of US states to European countries in terms of per capita GDP, we find that even the poor US states are comparable to member states of the European Union. Mississippi is similar to Portugal, and New Mexico is similar to Spain.

Nevertheless, Americans are regularly told that the welfare states in these foreign countries are well-funded, well-run, generous, and superior to the American welfare state. If the Spaniards, with a per capita GDP similar to New Mexico can allegedly run their own welfare state so well, why can't the New Mexicans be allowed to do the same?

They aren't allowed to do this, of course, because the gatekeepers of leftwing and DC-based opinion would have us believe that New Mexicans, Texans, and Mississippians are too stupid and ideologically incorrect to run a welfare state properly. "Best to keep the power and control in Washington, DC," they might say "so we can make sure the rubes out in flyover country don't screw things up."

One argument the feds will use in this regard is that poor states need to be subsidized by the richer states. Nevertheless, the relative income levels and wealth levels of the states in the US have been converging over time. While it is certainly true that some states are wealthier than others, trends in capital investment are bringing the states closer together.See this article from the Washington Post:

These facts won't be enough to convince Washington to lessen its death grip on the welfare state, though. But, those of us who don't consider people outside of New York and Washington, DC to be members of a lesser species, it strikes one as prudent to leave government social programs to the people who actually live in the communities that are affected by them — and to keep the money closer to the taxpayers who actually pay the bills. Moreover, by breaking up the welfare state into 50 smaller units, the programs will be more responsive to the taxpayers who don't have time to go to Washington and attempt to compete with the huge national special interests that keep the national welfare state fat and happy. It's a lot easier and cheaper to meet with your state representative than your US senator.

After all, rather than send billions of tax dollars to Washington, then wait for some DC bureaucrats to spend that money in one's home state — after taking a generous cut for themselves, of course — why not just keep that money where it came from?

Besides, the amount of money that flows from taxpayers to the federal government is far, far larger than the amount of money that goes from taxpayers to the states themselves. This graph shows just how much more money goes straight to the feds rather than to state governments.IRS collections are found here. State revenues are based on the Census Bureau's survey of state level revenues. This does not include local taxes.

Note that in the case of Texas, Texans pay five times as much in taxes to the federal government than to the state government. In Illinois, residents pay four times as much to the feds as to the state. Even in tax-heavy California, Californians pay more than two-and-a-half times more in taxes to the federal government than to the California government.

A Thought Experiment: A State-based Welfare StateBut what if all the states's federal tax revenues — we're completely ignoring state tax revenues — were allowed to stay in the states and were distributed to everyone on public assistance without going through DC first?

Yes, I know some readers will say "let the taxpayers keep it!" Right, I get it. And I agree. But for the sake of argument, let's just assume that money remains in the government's hands. Except we'll cut the feds out of the equation (somewhat).

But how much money are we talking about? And how much money would each state "need" to make payouts to low-income populations?

First, let's look at how much the feds collect from the states overall.See the IRS website for totals. As one might expect, the IRS's tax collections in each state vary wildly from place to place. The smallest amount is $4.4 billion in Vermont and the largest is $405 billion in California. In medium-sized Colorado, the total is $47 billion.

Again, all of this ignores the money the states take in themselves through state taxes.

So, we know how much money the residents of each state ship off to the IRS.

We'll also leave the issue of the federal government's massively bloated military funding issue to other articles. (See here and here.) But in this case, we'll take 25 percent of each state's IRS collections as funds for military, foreign affairs, and interest on the debt. Out of the $3.3 trillion total collected from state residents, that leaves $825 billion for spending on military, veterans, the State Department, and foreign affairs.The federal government has revenue sources outside the residents of the states. There are customs revenues and remittances from other countries, and revenues from leases on federal lands, etc. So, federal revenues are actually larger than what is discussed here. It's more than enough for a government that has a navy ten times the size of the world's next-largest navy, and the feds will just have to figure out how to use some of that money to keep paying the interest on the national debt.

So, in our model, the feds are awash in money with their $825 billion, and that leaves 75 percent of state IRS collections to the states themselves, or $2.4 trillion total.

All that remains is for each state to dole out what they have to their low-income populations — or they can use it for anything else the voters will let the state legislature get away with.

Next, we need to figure out how many low-income people are in each state.

To do this, we'll use the total numbers of people in poverty published by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That can be found here. But we can't stop there. In our model, we're giving public assistance only to people who fall below the federal poverty line. That excludes all the non-poor who receive fat Social Security checks every month. In our hypothetical world, the taxpayers won't be subsidizing the Baby Boomers' second homes and annual vacations anymore.

But, without social security anymore, some elderly will fall below the federal poverty line. To include those, we'll add in these numbers put out by the leftwing Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

After we've added all that up, we have an estimate of how many people in poverty are in each state. The way the feds measure it, it's not a small number.

Now, we divide up all those IRS tax collections (minus the 25 percent that goes to the military and interest) by the total number of people in poverty — and write a check to every person in poverty. Here's the size of the check in each state:

In some states with high federal tax revenues, low poverty rates, and low numbers of elderly, these numbers are huge. The federal progressive income tax means that states with even a small number of very rich people have much more money to play with. Few billionaires live in West Virginia, for instance. Using this model, Ohio can hand over a $48,000 check per year to each person in poverty. But even in lower-income states with fewer federal tax revenues and more poverty, states can hand over some pretty big checks. In our model, every single person in poverty gets free money. That's certainly not the way it's done now.

Moreover, keep in mind this is a per person number. This isn't a household number. There are 2.64 people in the average Mississippi household, where each person in poverty would get a check for $11,800. That means an average household of people in poverty would get checks totaling more than $31,000 or nearly 80 percent of the state's median income. Mississippi, by the way, is a state where the median monthly housing cost is a mere $687.According to the Census Bureau.

Even in the poor states, we're talking about fairly large amounts that can be distributed to low-income households. And, of course, people in states with low levels of welfare benefits can freely emigrate to states with more generous benefits.

Some readers at this point will complain that we're ignoring that 14 percent of the budget that goes to all those "miscellaneous" purposes like arts funding, and research. There's nothing to stop the states from spending their share of the loot on these purposes. After all, not even Massachusetts is going to hand out $72,000 checks to every person in poverty. According to this model, the state could do that. But, it could also have plenty of money to spread around to make sure that starving avant-garde artists get their precious tax-funded arts grants.

ConclusionsNow, I'm not saying that this is how states should do things were they allowed to keep most of the massive amounts of tax revenue their citizens generate for the federal government. I'm simply pointing out that even the poor states pay vast sums to Washington when that money could simply be distributed in the state from where the money came. Moreover, when we start to look at the sums of tax money produced in each state, we see there is simply no need for the federal government's vast welfare machine. The states and their taxpayers have all the resources necessary for each state to have its own locally-controlled welfare state.

The question we're then left asking ourselves is this: why is the federal government "necessary" to spread around the welfare checks?

Many of our readers already know the answer, of course. While most state governments must, by law, have balanced budgets, the federal government can always just resort to massive amounts of deficit spending. The federal government, unlike the states, can also simply print more money to help cover its massive budget shortfalls. As it does.

This means that federal welfare programs can continually expand regardless of the state of the budget or the economy.

And, of course, just as a matter of politics, the federal government, having seized the reins of the welfare state decades ago, will never give up this power because the political benefits of having control over the welfare state allow the federal government to collect enormous sums that it can dole out to its friends, especially in the military. Indeed, we see today how the Trump administration is planning to cut down on welfare spending in order to beef up military spending.

Between the welfare state and the military, the US government enjoys the best of both worlds as both conservatives and leftists fall over each other demanding more government spending for their own pet projects.

In truth, the welfare state could be decentralized back to the states and we'd still be looking at massive amounts of money that could be spread around low income populations.The military should be decentralized too, of course. As discussed here. It would also keep a lot of money out of the hands of the Pentagon. Don't expect Congress and its cronies to look kindly on the idea, however.

View Details

In recent years, we've examined any number of ways of decentralizing the American political system. These step-by-step moves can include decentralizing the monetary system, decentralizing the military, decentralizing immigration policy, and decentralizing elections.

Most recently, we looked at decentralizing the welfare state, and found that each US state is more than wealthy enough and big enough to run its own welfare state at the state level without any need of planning or centralization through Washington, DC. Whether or not one thinks a welfare state is a good or necessary thing, the fact remains the US government is not an essential part of the equation.

One piece of information that stood out the state-level analysis of tax revenue: the amount of taxes collected by the federal government far outpaces that collected at the state level. Nationwide, state-level tax bills are 28 percent the size of the federal tax bill. In a midsize state like Georgia, for example, residents pay 21 billion in taxes to the state government. However, those same residents pay a total of 86 billion to the federal government. The federal tax bill for Georgians is more than four times the size of the state tax bill.See the IRS website for federal tax totals. State revenue information comes from the Census's American Community survey.

Let's look at it another way:

Of all the state-level and federal-level tax money squeezed from Georgia residents, only 19 percent of it goes to the state government.

In the second graph, we can see how much of the tax revenue produced by each state's residents (in dollars) go to either state or federal levels.As with the first graph, federal totals come from the IRS gross-collections page, and state-level totals come from the Census's ACS.

Hawaii, for instance, tops the list with 45 percent of all its tax revenue going to the state. At the other end of the list is Delaware where only 13 percent of the total tax revenue is going to the state of Delaware. (This excludes local taxes.) At the national level, 22 percent of all revenues collected — by either a state government or the federal government — go to the states.

This could be due to several things. In states where a high percentage of tax revenue goes to states, this may be due to low incomes, since federal revenues are heavily dependent on wages and income. A low income state may nevertheless collect state level sales taxes, property taxes, and other taxes. This may then drive a relatively high amount of tax revenue to the state. This may very well be the case in West Virginia, New Mexico, and Mississippi where incomes are relatively low.

In some cases, though, the states at the top of the list may simply be high-tax states that collect a lot of revenue. Indeed, Hawaii, Vermont, and Maine are all relatively high-tax states according to the Tax Foundation.

in every state, rich or poor, high-tax or low-tax, the federal government is getting the lion's share of taxes wrung from the pockets of the taxpayers.

But, most of that ends up being spent in the states, anyway. So, an obvious question presents itself: why send all that money to Washington first? Why not just spend it where it originates?

More importantly, why not let the taxpayers themselves have more of a say over where that money goes in the first place?

Let the Taxpayers DecideYears ago, Murray Rothbard proposed a thought experiment:

It would be ... instructive to allow the various [taxpayers] to check off what specific services or agencies they wish to earmark for expenditure of their funds. It would be still more fun to see vicious and truthful competitive advertising between bureaus: “No, no, don’t contribute to those lazy louts in the Department of Transportation (or whatever), give to us.” For once, government propaganda might even prove to be instructive and enjoyable.

But Rothbard's reform here is too timid. It assumes that the tax monies must first go to Washington, DC.

But what if the taxpayers could decide — holding the total size of the tax bill constant, for the sake of argument — what level of government they wanted their tax money to go to.

In the spirit of Rothbard's reform, let's allow the taxpayers to check a box deciding whether or not their tax dollars will go to DC or if they'll simply be sent directly to state or local government.

Then we'll see just how much the taxpayers think they need federal bureaucrats do divvy up their money and eventually send some of it back to the taxpayer's home state.

It's a safe bet that the amount of federal revenue would decline under such a reform. Yet, not all taxpayers would want their tax revenues directed to the state and local levels only. After all, there is a very large number of Americans that live off federal tax revenue, whether they're Social Security recipients, military personnel, or highly paid engineers who fancy themselves as "private sector" workers, but who are really living off tax revenues as defense-contractor employees.

Looking at a map of federal spending on a state-by-state basis, we might guess which states might see a relatively small amount of tax revenue directed to the state level by taxpayers in our little experiment.

But even within these states, we'd see interesting conflicts among taxpayers. Younger workers, for example, might want their tax money to go to the state and local levels where their young children would benefit from state and local spending on schools. This would be in direct conflict with Social-Security recipients, of course, who live off the sweat of the brow of current wage earners, and who are more interested in getting a government check than in funding schools.

In that case — as Rothbard might suggest — it would be fun to see the AARP run ads denouncing young workers for directing their funds away from federal programs and ignoring old pensioners.

We might see similar conflicts between private sector and public sector workers. Small business owners might be more likely to appreciate state-funded and locally-funded amenities such as roads and local law enforcement. Your local plumber might be less enthusiastic about shipping his money off the Washington to fund the invasion of yet another country he's never heard of.

On the other hand, a reform like this would allow states like California to achieve the more "enlightened" welfare state the state has always wanted. After all, this is a state that wants its own Canada-style single-payer health care system. Where the tax revenues produced by Californians kept the state, Californians could have their long-desired social-democratic paradise. The plus side is the rest of us wouldn't have to pay for it.

View Details

While apparently waiting for a taxi, or to be seated for lunch, Larry King was accosted by TMZ in a discussion which eventually led to King declaring that the whole purpose of the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights was to "repel slave uprisings."

"What'd they mean by militia?" King asks, and then answers by claiming that "Southern senators" hatched the idea as a means of keeping slaves down.

Normally, the utterings of an 84-year old TV presenter wouldn't necessitate a column on mises.org. But it turns out that it's really quite difficult to find reliable online information on militias in the period King is talking about. And, experience suggests, that the more obscure the historical topic one is discussing, the more outlandish claims one can make. Larry King could pretty much say anything about 18th-century militias, and we'd probably not hear much to contradict it. Rush Limbaugh's "comeback" to King illustrates this plainly, since all that Limbaugh could muster as a retort was to point out that pro-slavery people in the 19th century were often Democrats.

Needless to say, this weak-sauce non-rebuttal by Limbaugh doesn't answer the question of how and why American militias came into being, or what it all has to do with private gun ownership. But, if we do look into some of the more obscure sources, we do find that the origins of American militias stem from a distrust of standing armies controlled by the central government. This distrust dates back at least to 17th-century England, and pre-dates the US Bill of Rights by more than a century. Moreover, militias in the United States were widespread in non-slave states and hardly a phenomenon of Southern slavemasters.

The Creation of Militias and the English Civil War In 17th-century England, the country was experiencing a growing resistance to a standing army that the English king could use to impose new laws and crush dissent.

By the 1640s, reformers such as the libertarian "Levellers" were calling for a decentralized militia system which would lessen the power of the king in domestic affairs. In The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution, Rachel Foxley writes: Foxley is referring to this document:6.11. John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, Richard Overton, An Agreement of the Free People of England (London: Gyles Calvert, 1 May 1649).XXIX. We declare and agree, That no Forces shal be raised, but by the Representatives, for the time being; and in raising thereof, that they exactly observe these Rules, namely, That they allot to each particular County, City, Town, and Borrugh, the raising, furnishing, agreeing, and paying of a due proportion, according to [6-253] the whole number to be levyed; and shall to the Electors of Representatives in each respective place, give Free liberty, to nominate and appoint all Officers appertaining to Regiments, Troops, and Companies, and to remove them as they shall see cause, Reserving to the Representative, the nominating and appointing onely of the General, and all General-Officers; and the ordering, regulatng, and commanding of them all, upon what service shall seem to them necessary for the Safety, Peace, and Freedom of the Common-wealth.See more: David M. Hart, Tracts on Liberty by the Levellers and their Critics (1638-1660), 7 vols. Edited by David M. Hart and Ross Kenyon (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2015). Vol. 6 (1649). http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2601#lf1542-06_label_130.

In the Third Agreement of the People, in May 1649, the Levellers proposed that armed forces were to be raised strictly by local divisions, and officered by men elected locally; only the general officers were to be appointed by Parliament. [John] Wildman was to express similar views in more specifically republican terms in the 1650s, opposing 'mercenary' armies in favour of the people being 'masters of their own Arms' ...

Not surprisingly, militias were not exactly in favor during the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, who centralized power considerably. But support for militias again returned with the monarchy. British historian Marcus Cunliffe explains in his history of American military institutions:

At the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, both Charles II and Parliament would for different reasons have liked to be rid of the Cromwellian legacy of the New Model Army. But some troops were needed to keep order. A compromise was reached. First, a small regular force was to be maintained: this was the actual foundation of the British standing army. Second, there was to be a nationwide militia, composed of civilians who would — as in earlier days — be summoned in time of need. The militia, however, was to be under civil law, and to be organized locally by the lord lieutenant of each county. It was thus decentralized and divorced from royal control.

Cunliffe further explains that later American attitudes toward a standing army were adopted nearly wholesale from earlier English attitudes about militias and civil control of the military. These attitudes can be found in the Declaration of Independence itself which lists among its grievances the fact that the king "has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures... [and] has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power."

Thus it is in English history that we find the origins of the Second Amendment, which not only calls specifically for militias, but that the people be, in the words of John Wildman, "masters of their own arms."

The idea that "Southern senators" came up with the idea years after the American Revolution ended doesn't exactly stand up to any serious historical analysis.

Moreover, in the early United States, militias most certainly were not peculiar to Southern states. It was the Massachusetts militia, after all, that put down the "rebellion" of Daniel Shays and his compatriots in the 1780s.It's also notable that the Massachusetts declaration of rights, written in 1780, states "The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the civil authority, and be governed by it." Note the similarity between this and Section 17 of proposals for the US Bill of Rights: "That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power." For more, see "The American Revolutionary Era Origin of the Second Amendment's Clauses" by David E. Young in Volume 23 (2011) of the JOURNAL ON FIREARMS & PUBLIC POLICY. (http://www.secondamendmentinfo.com/Journal/index.html) Moreover, as Jeffrey Rogers Hummel recounts, "three hundred" volunteer militias "sprang up in California between 1849 and 1856," and it's not at all difficult to find numerous Northern militias with names like the "New England Guards of Boston," the "7th Regiment of New York ‘National Guards,’" and the "First Troop of the Philadelphia City Cavalry." By the mid 19th century, slavery had all but disappeared in these states, and it was hardly necessary to maintain a militia for the purposes of countering slave rebellions. Pennsylvania, for example, began to phase out slavery in 1780. By 1810, there were fewer than 1,000 slaves left in Pennsylvania. By 1840, there were fewer than 100. The Pennsylvania militia continued to exist, of course — militias continued in all states for the similar reason that the "National Guard" exists today.

The Slavery-Conscription ConnectionWhile slavery cannot be shown to be the motivation behind the militia guarantee in the Second Amendment, we do find that conscription (i.e., "the draft") was perpetuated by efforts to force whites into service as part of slave patrols.

Hummel explains how, contrary to popular myth, the United States did indeed have conscription prior to the Civil War. It's just that compulsory military service was done at the state level through militia laws.

By the 19th century, though, compulsory service began to fall out of favor, and compulsory militias were replaced by volunteer militias in much of the country. The South, however, did not participate in this trend:

Massachusetts eliminated all compulsory militia service in 1840, followed by Maine, Ohio, and Vermont in 1844, Connecticut and New York in 1846, Missouri in 1847, and New Hampshire in 1851. New Jersey eliminated imprisonment for failure to pay a militia fine in 1844, followed by Iowa in 1846, Michigan in 1850, and California in 1856. In several states, fines were no longer enforced, or became truly nominal. Mandatory training days were already less frequent, and had degenerated into more social than military events. Only in the South were the compulsory features of the militia maintained, probably because of their vital connection with slave patrols. [emphasis added]

This "common militia" based on conscription, in contrast to the more skilled and better equipped semi-private volunteer militias, thus continued longer in the South, and it should not be a surprise that the Confederacy implemented nationwide conscription before the North did.

If we want to blame slavery as the impetus for certain types of military service in the United States, it's conscription, and not the existence of the Second Amendment to which we had best direct our ire. After all, had it not been for the Southern practice of temporarily-enslaving whites to patrol for permanently-enslaved blacks, conscription might have been far more taboo than it already was by the mid-19th century. That, of course, would have been all to the good.

However, as leftists search around trying to connect the Second Amendment to anything unsavory they can, they have decided to try and connect its origins to slavery. In reality, however, the true legacy of the Second Amendment is more likely found in the Northern volunteer militias. Not only were these militias free of conscription, but they were also largely augmented by private gun ownership and private funding. Moreover, the "militia" was in many states also considered to be all male citizens as, for example, stated in the 1876 Colorado Constitution "the militia of the State shall consist of all able-bodied male residents of the State, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years." This further blurred the lines between the issue of raising state militias and private gun ownership.For greater context, we can refer to Patrick Henry's comments at Virginia's constitutional ratifying convention in 1788 when he stated that a key factor in arming the militia be private arms: "The great object is, that every man be armed." :"https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?hlaw:1:./temp/~ammem_LtIk:: (Elliot's Debates --Saturday, June 14, 1788.) Similarly George Mason states " I ask, Who are the militia? They consist now of the wholepeople, except a few public officers." https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?hlaw:1:./temp/~ammem_5pXn:: (Elliot's Debates --Monday, June 16, 1788.)

It's no doubt true that many media celebrities have convinced themselves that the Second Amendment must be based on some sort of racist conspiracy. But this theory is mostly based on wishful thinking.

View Details

CBS reports that "California may prohibit local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities, creating a border-to-border sanctuary in the nation’s largest state as legislative Democrats ramp up their efforts to battle President Donald Trump’s migration policies."

In this context, of course, California — should the proposed legislation pass — would decline to participate in helping federal agents enforce federal immigration law.

In terms of American political and legal traditions, California is well within its rights, and by refusing to assist federal agents would simply be building on a past tradition in which state governments have refused to assist the federal government with a number of policies.

A Long History of Nullifying Federal Laws Historically, the more famous of these cases include:

Several Northern states refused to assist federal agents with capturing (i.e., kidnapping) fugitive slaves.Kentucky and Connecticut refused to provide military assistance to the federal government in the Civil War and the War of 1812, respectively. Colorado (and other states) currently refuse to assist the federal government in prosecuting and arresting marijuana users. Other states have proposed additional forms of nullification in this regard including refusals to assist the federal government with enforcing Obamacare and federal gun laws. Such cases are not merely symbolic. In practice, the federal government possesses nowhere near the resources necessary to enforce federal law consistently without the assistance of state and local law enforcement. Moreover, this becomes all the more true if federal budgets are squeezed.

Not only are refusals to comply with federal laws well grounded in historical practice, but they also have Supreme Court decisions on their side. In the 1842 Supreme Court case Prigg v. Pennsylvania, justice Joseph Story — writing for the majority — noted that states cannot be compelled to enforce federal laws:

The fundamental principle applicable to all cases of this sort, would seem to be, that where the end is required, the means are given; and where the duty is enjoined, the ability to perform it is contemplated to exist on the part of the functionaries to whom it is entrusted. The clause is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any state. It does not point out any state functionaries, or any state action to carry its provisions into effect. The states cannot, therefore, be compelled to enforce them; and it might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation, to insist that the states are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the national government, nowhere delegated or instrusted to them by the Constitution.

There is little doubt that many Trump supporters, and other advocates for powerful and centralized federal power, will complain that California must help the federal government in its immigration laws.

Not only is this claim generally untrue, it is especially ungrounded in Constitutional realities in the case of immigration. As Judge Napolitano has pointed out, "[T]he Constitution itself — from which all federal powers derive — does not delegate to the federal government power over immigration, only over naturalization."

The two are not the same thing, and this distinction also partly explains how, in the nineteenth century, 22 American states and territories granted voting rights to non-citizens.

When we look at how limited the federal government should rightly be in these cases, we see that one of the few federal powers here is the power of federal spending. Should California wish to ignore federal laws, the federal government can and should withhold federal spending from California. The sooner states get used to making do with less federal money, the better. Indeed, federal spending is critical in expanding centralized federal power. If federal spending loses its importance as a source of funding for state governments, the US will become increasingly decentralized.

California is well aware of federal threats to cut funds, but given the immense amount of tax revenue produced by Californians, California has proposed limiting its own payments to the federal government.

Every State Should be a Sanctuary State This sort of state independence cuts both ways, however. If California establishes — yet again — that states can ignore and even inhibit federal arrests and prosecutions in the states, then it becomes all the easier for other states to refuse to enforce federal gun laws, federal drug laws, Obamacare, or federal mandates that states provide welfare programs and "free" taxpayer-funded services to non-citizens.Federal courts have often held that states must adhere to federal mandates in regards to welfare spending.

RELATED: "Immigration Policy Must be Decentralized"

The only tool the federal government should have in these cases is to cut off funding. This is a very powerful tool, mind you, but it is also hardly a given that every state would face disaster if facing a cut in federal spending. Nor is this a one-way street. for political reasons, the federal government wants to spend money in the states just as much as the states want to receive it.

So, let's make every state a sanctuary from federal gun laws, federal immigration law, federal drug laws, federal election laws, and more.

The down side to this, of course, is that many productive Americans will be left holding the bag of funding California's many grandiose welfare schemes for immigrants and others. This, however, is preferable to all Americans being on the hook for the same. And, it's hard to see why the California tail should wag the American dog. If California wishes to expand a welfare state on its own, or set its own immigration priorities, let Californians pay for it. It is true that for many Californians, the only escape will be to move across the border to Reno, Las Vegas, or Phoenix. But even this, as inconvenient and unjust as it is, is preferable to a nationwide policy from which there is no escape except to leave the US entirely and move perhaps thousands of miles away, across international boundaries.

The small amount of decentralization still permitted in the US today continues to be a benefit for many citizens. Even today, many states function as a sanctuary for emigrants from other states with high taxes and high regulations. Many citizens move from state to state seeking more favorable legal and economic climates. Just as it should be. But let's not be content with what little decentralization exists. Let's make sure all states can become sanctuaries from federal regulations as well.

View Details

With Donald Trump set to be sworn in as President in January, many leftists have suddenly discovered a new love for political decentralization.

The most notable example, of course, is the effort by some Californians and Oregonians to secede from the United States and set up independent republics.

While secession is perhaps the most visible and "extreme" manifestation of political decentralization, nullification serves a similar purpose.

[RELATED: "When Nullification Works, and When it Doesn't"]

And, not surprisingly, the left has embraced nullification in recent weeks when faced with Trump's proposed policies on immigration.

State and Locals Refuse to Assist Federal Agents For example, the Los Angeles Police department has stated it will not assist the Trump administration in rounding up immigrants for deportation. Earlier this week, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck announced:

We are not going to engage in law enforcement activities solely based on somebody’s immigration status. We are not going to work in conjunction with Homeland Security on deportation efforts. That is not our job, nor will I make it our job.

Similarly, officials in two of Colorado's largest cities — Denver and Aurora — have said "they will not enforce federal immigration laws."

John Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado, has "hinted he would block any federal agents from coming in."

Numerous other mayors and local officials have also pledged to not cooperate with the Trump administration.

In response, Donald Trump has vowed to cut federal funding to uncooperative jurisdictions.

Both Sides Are RightThe fight for local control over immigration policy is a step in the right direction. Immigration policy should be enforced at the local level without federal control. As Judge Andrew Napolitano has noted, the US constitution does not grant the Federal government power over immigration policy:

[T]he Constitution itself — from which all federal powers derive — does not delegate to the federal government power over immigration, only over naturalization.Moreover, during the 19th century, it was common for state governments to determine voting rights and other elements of the naturalization process.

Current efforts to assert state and local control over immigration policy are nothing new in light of historical precedents, and these modern attempts at nullifying federal laws are reminiscent of laudable state and local refusals to enforce federal fugitive slave acts.

On the other hand, while the locals should be entitled to enforce laws independent of federal central planners, the Trump administration should also cut federal funding. After all, taxpayers should not be forced to pay for government programs in distant parts of the nation where political values are different.

Only when state and local governments begin to refuse to be bribed by federal spending programs will there be any hope of reassertion of state and local independence from Washington, DC.

Welfare Spending Is the Key The refusal by local governments in enforcing the proposed deportation efforts also illustrate the overall lack of feasibility in Trump's plan. As if often the case with federal policy, the federal government cannot hope to enforce federal laws without help from local law enforcement agencies.

This is why, as early as August 2015, Ron Paul was mocking the Trump plan, and called the plan to deport millions of people "impossible" to carry out.

Paul also opposed the idea of a wall, declaring that "I could never take a position that we need more barbed wire to solve this problem."

The dim prospects for the plan become even more clear as members of Congress have wondered aloud where they're going to find the money necessary to enact Trump's deportation plan. Colorado Congressman Ken Buck, who was an anti-immigration hard-liner when he was a district attorney in Colorado, is already skeptical that the plan will ever take shape given its "50 or 60 billion" dollar price tag.

Thus, this leads us to the only practical and laissez-faire method of dealing with the presumed costs of illegal immigration: cutting government spending.

If federal policymakers want to do something that requires no assistance from local bureaucrats or politicians, the course of action is simple: cut federal spending.

While federal spending of all types should, of course, be cut, the Trump administration, assuming it wishes to lower immigrant totals, should simply craft policy to deny federal spending on non-citizens or recently-naturalized citizens.

If the federal courts oppose these restrictions on welfare spending, the Congress should engage in jurisdiction-stripping to hobble the ability of the Supreme Court to rule on the matter. In any case, without the acquiescence of the executive branch, the courts are powerless to force the federal government to spend anything.

If Trump were truly serious about impacting immigration, he would embark on a federal version of California's Proposition 187 which sought to deny government benefits to illegal aliens. This policy would have the benefit of actually reducing the size and scope of the federal government, unlike most of Trump's proposed immigration-related plans.

Unlike taxpayer funded walls and police raids on private homes to find immigrants, a welfare-spending approach would mean less government spending while requiring no buy-in from local officials.

Moreover, restrictions on federal spending would put the onus on state and local officials who are committed to favoring immigrant-friendly interest groups. State and local government should be free to create and enforce immigration laws as they see fit. However, they should also have to convince their own taxpayers to pay for their plans to extend social benefits and not rely on workers from somewhere else to finance the politicians' "generous" policies.

Encouraging NullificationUnfortunately, many Trump backers are likely to attack state and local governments who nullify federal immigration laws while making kneejerk claims that federal policy is "the law of the land." In doing so, they are simply repeating the claims of leftists who attack anti-gun-control advocates who seek to nullify federal gun laws or Obamacare.

In fact, it is altogether healthy that the left continues to find its appreciation of nullification — as it has done with federal marijuana laws in recent years. It should be further encouraged to do so. At the same time, rightwingers should feel free to point out leftwing hypocrisy the next time the left demands that rightwingers enforce federal laws. If the governor of Colorado wants to "block any federal agents" from enforcing Trump's immigration policy, he should also recognize he has abandoned the right to demand that other governors enforce every federal law on the grounds that federal laws trump state laws.

View Details

[The Daily Caller, June 23, 2017]

A new Rasmussen poll reports that a majority of voters think so, and it certainly feels that way. Since Donald Trump’s election in November, the pace and intensity of deeply divisive rhetoric has accelerated. Antifa and the Alt-Right are literally fighting in the streets. Combative talking heads on cable news, vicious social media exchanges, riots at universities, a bitter special election in Georgia, and even the shooting of a congressman have both sides rethinking the entire political process and talking about abandoning the “rule of law.”

It is an uneasy time, a time for hard questions. Can politics really provide a solution to our problems, or is it the cause? Should we still abide by democratic processes when a significant portion of the country is enraged by the outcome? What if voting and elections simply weren’t anymore? These are the questions we need to ask and answer honestly.

Progressives, including Hillary Clinton, now openly label themselves the “resistance” and call for Trump to be removed from office. Anti-Brexit forces in the UK call for Theresa May simply to repudiate the referendum. Democratic elections, a cornerstone of neoliberalism, are not so sacrosanct when the wrong guy wins. Progressives’ sense of inevitability has been deeply shaken by Trump and the rise of nationalist movements in Europe. Has it been shaken enough to consider real alternatives to social democracy?

Conservatives too have radically changed their talking points. Bill Kristol tweets that he prefers a Deep State silent coup to living under the Trump state. David Frum calls Trump a liar and an autocrat. George Will claims the president has a “disability.”

But one conservative offers a workable answer to our unsettling situation. Angelo Codevilla, retired professor of the Claremont Institute recently wrote a remarkable article titled “The Cold Civil War.” The piece is remarkable not only because he worries about that civil war turning hot, or because he agrees —from the Right — with the idea of sanctuary cities or states that defy Washington. Why, Codevilla asks, could red states not employ some “Irish democracy” when it comes to hyper-politicized social issues like abortion, sexuality, and guns?

And why shouldn’t blue states do the same? This is already happening, as prominent mayors like Bill de Blasio have announced their opposition to the Trump agenda on issues like global warming. Could blue state nullification of federal edicts extend to healthcare, gun laws, and taxes?

The sheer scope of progressive victories in the culture wars compels Codevilla to offer a prescription for truly radical decentralization. Let the federal government control a few key functions like defense, but leave the rest to the states. Let California be California, and let Texas be Texas. To Codevilla, our intractable political, social, and cultural differences are simply not worth fighting over anymore. They’re certainly not worth shooting each other.

Mr. Codevilla’s is asking himself, and us, nothing less than whether the current political arrangement should continue.

Ludwig von Mises, the great economist who experienced combat in World War I, famously stated that “having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.”

This bold statement rings as true today as 1927, when Mises wrote it in a book titled Liberalism. Certainly most Hillary Clinton voters view the Trump administration as a hostile and illegitimate occupier with no legal or moral authority to govern. And undoubtedly Trump supporters would feel equally aggrieved under a Clinton regime.

A government big and powerful enough to cause widespread psychosis after presidential elections is a government without much legitimacy. People become irrational about politics precisely because government depressingly controls so much of our lives. It chooses winners and losers. It is the superstar player in American society, rather than the referee.

The obvious and reasonable option staring us all in the face is to go our separate ways. Let us consider political secession, radical decentralization, nullification, and localism as the realistic alternatives to a much more unpleasant conflict. Let us reconsider living as a loose confederation of states. 320 million vastly diverse people, from Anchorage to San Francisco to Topeka to Miami, cannot be governed by a top-down central authority in Washington.

Surely divorce, in whole or in part, is better than an abusive marriage.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

View Details

It's nice to see that the issue of repealing the 17th amendment to the US Constitution isn't going away. The 17th Amendment, you may recall, is the one that mandates popular election of US Senators. Before that, US Senators were often selected — strictly speaking — by the state legislatures.

While it is true that repealing the amendment would grant greater freedom to states in their selecting of US Senators, repealing the amendment won't really revolutionize the Senate the way many supporters of repeal imagine.

First of all, it's important to note that many states had already worked out de facto popular election of US Senators even before the Amendment had been adopted. As noted at mises.org in an article titled "Decentralize the Elections":

Ralph Rossum at the Heritage foundation has explained the process in a little more detail:

Of course, even if most states still employed de facto popular election in the wake of repealing the 17th Amendment, the states themselves should be free to decide how they elect Senators. The voters don't need DC politicians to tell them how to elect their own representatives. Indeed, everything in the US Constitution dictating to states as to how to select representatives should be deleted.

Nevertheless, repealing the 17th Amendment would be a small step in the right direction (i.e., the direction of decentralization), and as The Huffington Post has ruefully admitted, the movement retains it supporters:

A widespread sentiment among more extreme conservatives — including a surprising number of prominent Republican candidates, former candidates, office holders, and former office holders — is that the 17th Amendment should be repealed. That Amendment, ratified in 1913, changed the way of selecting United States senators. It empowered a state’s voters and took the power of selection away from legislatures...Those advocating repeal no doubt are a minority among Republicans, but they are significant, and are more numerous than one might imagine.

But, if one is going to go through all the trouble of reforming the US Senate in this manner, why not go for a more radical solution?

A fundamental problem of the Senate has long been the fact that Senators do not vote as representatives of a state delegation, but as independent legislators. This reality has long obscured the fact that the Senate was intended to be a council of the states and not simply an "upper house" of a national legislature. There is, after all, already a legislative body at the federal level where legislators from a single state can vote against each other and act independently. It's called the House of Representatives.

The fact that each state has two independent legislators in the Senate, however, sends the message that Senators are really just older, richer versions of members of the House of Representatives. Thus, under the current system, when Senator A from State X votes yea or nea on a measure, it is seen simply as the preference of Senator A. Senator A's vote may in fact be canceled out by Senator B's vote from the same state. This is ne of the many ways that the current US Constitution is inferior to the older constitution now known as the "Articles of Confederation." The older version granted votes only to delegations and not to individual members of Congress. Thus, the status of the United States as a collection of member states was reinforced.

The status quo should be abandoned in favor of allowing each state delegation only a single vote in the Senate, and that vote should be interpreted as the member state's position.

Ryan McMaken is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Contact: email, twitter.

View Details

Early Americans feared the federal government would overwhelm the states with a large standing army and better-armed military force. To prevent this, many supported a decentralized system of state militias which would provide the bulk of military land forces within the United States. Over time, though, the federal government has increasingly centralized military power and diminished the role of state governments in military funding and planning. While privately-owned firearms have their role in balancing against federal power, the decentralized militia system — now defunct — was intended to play a much larger role in preventing the establishment of an overwhelming federal military force.

The Early Years: A "Well-Regulated Militia" As originally conceived in the 1770s, the United States was a confederation of independent states assembled for the purposes of military defense. Thus, it is not surprising that the text of the first US Constitution — the so-called Articles of Confederation — is primarily concerned with foreign and military affairs.

Most of the document deals with arming an army and navy, and conducting international affairs such as making treaties, appointing military officers, and funding military equipment. The framers of the document, however, were careful to allow states opportunities to veto federal actions. According to the text:

The United States in Congress assembled shall never engage in a war, nor grant letters of marque or reprisal in time of peace, nor enter into any treaties or alliances ... nor agree upon the number of vessels of war, to be built or purchased, or the number of land or sea forces to be raised, nor appoint a commander in chief of the army or navy, unless nine States assent to the same.

In other words, a super-majority of nine member states — more than two-thirds of the states — was necessary for approval of any military actions on the part of the central government.

This did not mean the states were defenseless, otherwise. The document was clear that the states themselves were to provide most of the land forces:

[E]very State shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutered, and shall provide and constantly have ready for use, in public stores, a due number of filed pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage.

Those familiar with the Second Amendment will recognize the phrase "well-regulated ... militia" which was eventually incorporated into the new Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights.

This phrase reflected what was, by the late eighteenth century, a commonly accepted political reality in the United States. Namely, that state militias were the primary means of dealing with threats from neighboring governments, Indian tributes, and internal rebellions. The United States maintained a permanent professional military force, but it remained small and inadequate to address any large scale military operations.

As designed, the militias were to be the means by which threats from an excessively powerful central government were to be repulsed. We see this in Patrick Henry's own arguments against the new constitution when he concluded that without locally-controlled arms to oppose the armies of a national government, the member states themselves would be defenseless. In response to the suggestion that citizens could assert their rights by assembling the people in a legislative body, Henry sarcastically declared:

Oh, Sir, we should have fine times indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only necessary to assemble the people! Your arms wherewith you could defend yourselves are gone. … Did you ever read of any revolution in any nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? A [federally-controlled] standing army we shall have also, to execute the execrable commands of tyranny: And how are you to punish them? Will you order them to be punished? Who shall obey these orders?

During the ratification period for the new Constitution, anti-federalists frequently expressed concern that the new federal government may be strong enough to raise a standing army that would dwarf the power of the state-controlled militias. Standing armies, of course, had long been synonymous with abusive government, and targeted by liberals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anti-federalists understood the importance of a decentralized and locally-controlled military power as a check on centralized political power.

The Purpose of a Decentralized MilitiaFor this reason, the anti-federalists demanded the adoption of what we now know as the Second Amendment which reflected their view that state control of military resources was an important defense against the power of Congress and the federal executive power.

Nowadays, many opponents of gun control often support the idea that the militia is — to use George Mason's words — "all men capable of bearing arms." This is no doubt one (correct) interpretation of the term "militia" as used by the anti-federalists. But it is not the only interpretation.

The anti-federalists — and the framers of the earlier constitution — assumed the necessity of a "a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutered" by the state governments themselves. They assumed this precisely because it was such an established part of the status quo in the late eighteenth century. In times of war, it was also assumed that the states themselves would supply a sizable number of the troops and armaments necessary for defense. That is, the federal government would be partially dependent on the state governments for supplying troops to wars.

This situation endured through the nineteenth century, during which, in many cases, the states themselves would continue to play an active and independent role in supplying military forces. We see this in the text of the current constitution itself where it gives Congress the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions."

State Opposition to "calling forth the militia"While the Constitution of 1787 does not provide an explicit veto on the use of state militias, there were nevertheless both statutory and customary barriers to presidents drawing upon local troops without local consent.

In some cases, state governments asserted control over state militia troops when federal orders conflicted with state agendas. For example, during the War of 1812, the governor of Vermont Martin Chittenden attempted to recall Vermont troops that had been federalized by the US government and sent to New York. Chittenden declared "[It] has been ordered from our frontiers to the defence of a neighboring state ... [and] placed under the command, and at the disposal of, an officer of the United Sates, out of the jurisdiction or control of the executive of this state."

During the same conflict, the state legislature of Connecticut issued a declaration passed by both houses: "it must not be forgotten, that the state of Connecticut is a FREE, SOVEREIGN, and INDEPENDENT state; that the United States are a confederacy of states; that we are a confederated and not a consolidated republic." (emphasis in original)

At the time, the governor of Connecticut refused to comply with a requisition request from the United States Secretary of War. The governor condemned the federal attempt at nationalizing the militia and wrote: "By the principles of the proposed plan ... our sons, our brothers and friends are made liable to be delivered, against their will and by force, to the marshals and recruiting officers of the United States, to be employed not for our defence, but for the conquest of Canada ..." The state assembly concluded that the federal demands were "not only intolerably oppressive, but subversive of the rights and liberties of the state, and the freedom, sovereignty, and independence of the same, and inconsistent with the principles of the constitution of the United States."

According to William Chauncey Fowler, writing in his book Local Law in Massachusetts and Connecticut:

The Governor of Connecticut took the ground that, by the constitution fot he United States, the entire control of the militia is given to the state, except in certain specified cases, namely: to execute the laws of the union, the suppress insurrection, and to repel invasions, and he contended that neither of these cases actually existed. He also took the ground that the militia could not be compelled to serve under any other than their own officers, with the exception of the president himself, when personally in the field.

The state legislature concurred.

Kentucky Declares NeutralityAnother notable case of a state asserting control over its own military resources is Kentucky's insistence on neutrality in the early days of the American Civil War.

By 1860, demographic and economic changes in Kentucky had made it a semi-industrialized state with a declining reliance on the slave economy. Kentucky had close economic ties with both Northern and Southern states. Although the Kentucky governor Beriah Magoffin was a Southern sympathizer, he was unwilling to support secession and insisted on neutrality in the war. Magoffin announced "I will send not a man nor a dollar for the wicked purpose of subduing my sister Southern States," and he refused a federal demand for four regiments from Kentucky to be added to the Union army.

Magoffin was not alone in neutralist views, and former Kentucky Senator Archibald Dixon urged local citizens "to stand firm with her sister Border States in the centre of the Republic to calm the distracted sections." By this, Dixon claimed, Kentucky "saves the Union and frowns down Secession." Similarly, an assembly of voters in Louisville convened a public meeting on the matter in Louisville and concluded it was the "duty of Kentucky ... to maintain her present independent position, taking sides not with the [Lincoln] Administration, nor with the seceding states, but with the Union against them both." Reflecting on the extent to which Kentucky had separated itself from both the North and the South during this period, Lowell Harrison has suggested that, at the time, "a bewildered observer from abroad might well have concluded that the United States had become three countries: the Union, the Confederacy, and Kentucky."

Predictably, Lincoln himself — who had concluded he must avoid military intervention to force Kentucky's compliance — took a dim view of Kentucky's neutrality, declaring the doctrine of "armed neutrality" to be "disunion completed," while neutrality "recognizes no fidelity to the Constitution, no obligation to maintain the Union" and as "treason in effect."

Lincoln would eventually obtain political support from Kentucky, but not because he won the constitutional or legal argument. Eventually, Unionists took control of the state government and sided with the Union over the confederacy, ending the debate.

Nevertheless, the Kentucky case merely continued the established practice of state governments vetoing federal use of state militias and military resources. In the case of Kentucky, the assertion that state governments could prevent federalization of local troops had worked as intended: Unionists — both in Washington and locally — were forced to win political support for the Northern side among Kentuckians before state resources could be used to prosecute the war.

Technically, Lincoln faced this problem in every northern state, although most state governments willingly sent state-organized troops to the war effort because they were ideologically aligned with the anti-secession movement. Had Lincoln failed to win political support from the individual states, however, he would have lacked the resources necessary to prosecute the war. At the time, the federal government simply lacked the resources necessary to carry on a large military operation of the type needed to invade the Southern states.

The Twentieth Century: State Militias NationalizedBy the early twentieth century, the federal government began to consolidate control over military resources in the states.

The first large step toward consolidation came in the form of the Militia Act of 1903 which for the first time began the use of the phrase "National Guard" in federal statutes. This new legislation also paved the way for the use of National Guard units to be used outside the territory of the United States, with a 1906 amendment specifically creating a provision for the use of militia units "either within or without the territory of the United States."

This provision was later contested on constitutional grounds, but the Congress responded with the National Defense Act of 1916 which made it even easier for the president to call up state troops for federal purposes.

Over time, the line between state militias and federal troops became increasingly blurred, and today, with the exception of the "state defense forces" state National Guard units today do not function independently of the United States government in any meaningful way.

The final nail in the coffin of local control came in 1987 courtesy of Mississippi Congressman Gillespie Montgomery. Montgomery introduced a provision in the 1987 National Defense Authorization Act which specifically states that "The consent of a Governor ... may not be withheld (in whole or in part) with regard to active duty outside the United States, its territories, and its possessions, because of any objection to the location, purpose, type, or schedule of such active duty."

In the nineteenth century, of course, this measure would have been considered to be blatantly unconstitutional. But in 1990, the US Supreme Court, reflecting dominant opinion among American politicians, sided with the Congress and its Montgomery Amendment, and ruled against attempts by governors in California and Minnesota to stop deployments of state troops overseas.

Thus, the Montgomery Amendment ended any remaining ability of states to veto federal use of state "militias." By the mid twentieth century, though, state militias had already been dwarfed by the national army and air force that could function totally independently of states. Thanks to the federal income tax, the federal government no longer need rely on state resources to prosecute large and expensive wars. State reserve forces offer augmentation to the federal standing army, of course, but they no longer provide the essential core of any national fighting force.

Why Military Decentralization is ImportantModern opponents of gun control often claim the need for private ownership of guns as a balance against state military power. Yet, these same people will often also support a powerful, centrally-controlled national military. These two positions are directly at odds with each other.

Moreover, it is not a terribly convincing claim that unorganized and untrained private gun owners by themselves could offer anything other than token resistance to federal military forces as they currently exist. While private firearms ownership does have value in this respect, its value pales in comparison to the need for a means of decentralizing federal military forces and providing a way for local institutions to deny federal institutions access to state military forces. If gun control opponents were serious about limiting military power, they would advocate for a radical change to the balance of military power in the United States with an eye toward creating a federal dependence on state-controlled militaries that can only be deployed with the consent of state governments.

(As with all attempts to decentralize political power, devolution to the state level should, of course, not be viewed as the end-all-be-all of decentralization, but only as a step in the right direction toward even more radical decentralization and localism.)

It has long been apparent that as long as the federal executive has direct access to immense amounts of military resources, it can send troops anywhere in the world at will, and the Congress lacks the political tools to stop it. The War Powers Act, for example, has never provided any meaningful opposition to presidential military action. Moreover, with the Libya invasion of 2011, the president established that the White House can launch wars in foreign countries without so much as a non-binding Congressional debate.

Given current legal realities and access to enormous amounts of tax revenue, it is likely presidents can continue to launch wars unimpeded by Congress or any other political institution. Given the sheer amount of wealth directly controlled by the federal government, National Guard units would not even be essential to many military conflicts, even if states refused to participate.

Thus, any meaningful opposition to federal military power would need to come in the form of both radical cuts to federal revenues — and federal military spending — and increases in state and local autonomy over military resources.

Additionally, If the federal government were to decide to use the American military against a state or group of states in the US, there is no practical or constitutional obstacle to prosecuting a war on American soil against Americans. The Posse Comitatus Act is a weak reed on which to hang hopes for limiting federal military actions against American citizens.

View Details

[An interview with Hans-Herman Hoppe in the Polish weekly Najwyższy Czas!]

What is your assessment of contemporary Western Europe, and in particular the EU?

All major political parties in Western Europe, regardless of their different names and party programs, are nowadays committed to the same fundamental idea of democratic socialism. They use democratic elections to legitimize the taxing of productive people for the benefit of unproductive people. They tax people, who have earned their income and accumulated their wealth by producing goods or services purchased voluntarily by consumers (and of course especially the “rich” among those), and they then re-distribute the confiscated loot to themselves, i.e., the democratic State that they control or hope to control, and their various political friends, supporters, and potential voters.

They do not call this policy by its right name: punishing the productive and rewarding the unproductive, of course. That doesn’t sound particularly attractive. Instead, they tap into the always popular sentiment of envy and claim to tax the few “rich” to support the many “poor.” In truth, however, with their policy they make more and more productive people poor and a steadily increasing number of unproductive people rich.

But what about the EU?

Looking at the EU, the picture becomes even worse. The EU is the first step on the way toward the creation of a European Super-State, and ultimately of a one-world government, dominated by the USA and its central bank, the FED. From its very beginnings, and despite all high-sounding political proclamations to the contrary, the EU was never about free trade and free competition. For that, you don’t need tens of thousands of pages of rules and regulations! Rather, the central purpose of the EU, supported all-along by the USA, was always the weakening in particular of Germany as Europe’s economic powerhouse. To facilitate this, Germany was sent on a seemingly never-ending “guilt trip” and thus pressured to transfer increasingly larger parts of its already limited (vis-à-vis the USA) sovereignty to the EU in Brussels. Especially noteworthy in this regard: Germany’s giving up its monetary sovereignty and abandoning its traditionally “strong” currency, the DM, in favor of a “weak” Euro, issued by a European Central Bank (ECB) composed overwhelmingly of politically connected central bankers from traditionally “weak” currency countries.

The EU, then, is characterized by three main features:

First: The harmonization of the tax and regulation structure across all member states, so as to reduce economic competition and especially tax-competition between different countries and make all countries equally uncompetitive.

Second: On top of the economic and moral perversity within each country of punishing the productive and subsidizing the unproductive, another layer of international income- and wealth-redistribution is added: of punishing economically better performing countries like Germany and the countries of northern Europe and rewarding economically worse performing countries (mostly of southern Europe) and thus successively rendering the economic performance of all countries equally worse.

And third, of increasing importance especially during the last decade: In order to overcome the rising resistance, in many countries, against the steadily increasing transfer of national sovereignty to Brussels, the EU is on a crusade to erode, and ultimately destroy, all national identities and all social and cultural cohesion. The idea of a nation and of different national and regional identities is ridiculed, and multiculturalism is hailed instead as an unquestionable “good.” As well, in promoting the award of legal privileges and of “special protection” to everyone, except white, heterosexual men, and especially married family men (who are portrayed as historic “oppressors” owing compensation to everyone else as their historic “victims”) — euphemistically called “anti-discrimination” or “affirmative action” policy — the natural social order is systematically undermined. Normality is punished, and abnormity and deviance is rewarded.

Can one say, then, that the politicians running the EU are even worse than the politicians running national affairs?

No, and yes. On the one hand, all democratic politicians, with almost no exception, are morally uninhibited demagogues. One of my German books is titled The Competition of Crooks, which captures what democracy and democratic party politics are really all about. There is in this regard little if any difference between the political elites of Berlin, Paris, Rome, etc., and those running the show in Brussels. In fact, the EU elites are typically political has-beens, with the same mentality as their domestic counterparts, on the lookout for the super-lavish salaries, benefits, and pensions doled out by the EU.

On the other hand, the EU elites are worse than their political cronies at home, of course, in that their decisions and rulings always affect a far larger number of people.

What do you predict, then, will be the future of the EU?

The EU and the ECB are a moral and economic monstrosity, in violation of natural law and the laws of economics. You cannot continuously punish productivity and success and reward idleness and failure without bringing about the disaster. The EU will slide from one economic crisis to the next and ultimately break apart. The Brexit, that we have just experienced, is only the first step in this inevitable process of devolution and political decentralization.

Is there anything that an ordinary citizen can do in this situation?

For one, instead of swallowing the high-sounding blabber of politicians about “freedom,” “prosperity,” “social justice,” etc., people must learn to recognize the EU for what it really is: a gang of power-lusty crooks empowering and enriching themselves at other, productive people’s expense. And secondly, people must develop a clear vision of the alternative to the present morass: not a European Super-State or even a federation of nation States, but the vision of a Europe made up of thousands of Liechtensteins and Swiss cantons, united through free trade, and in competition with one another in the attempt of offering the most attractive conditions for productive people to stay or move.

Can you give a comparative assessment of the USA and the situation in Europe?

The difference between the situation in the US and Western Europe is much smaller than is generally surmised on either side of the Atlantic. For one, the developments in Europe since the end of World War II have been closely watched, steered and manipulated, whether through threats or bribes, by the political elites in Washington DC. In fact, Europe has essentially become a dependency, a satellite or vassal of the US. This is indicated on the one hand by the fact that US troops are stationed all across Europe, by now all the way right up to the Russian border. And on the other hand, this is indicated by the steady pilgrimage, performed more regularly and dutifully than any Muslim’s pilgrimage to Mecca, of the European political elites and their intellectual bodyguards to Washington DC, in order to receive their masters’ blessings. Especially the German political elite, whose guilt complex has meanwhile assumed the status of some sort of mental illness, stands out in this regard by its cowardice, submissiveness, and servility.

As for US domestic affairs, both Europeans and Americans have it typically wrong. Europeans still frequently view the US as the “land of the free,” of rugged individualism, and of unhampered capitalism. Whereas Americans, insofar as they know or claim to know anything about the world outside the US at all, frequently view Europe as a place of unhinged socialism and collectivism, entirely alien to their own “American way.” In fact, there exists no principal difference between the so-called “democratic capitalism” of the US and Europe’s “democratic socialism.”

To be sure, America has always had more and more vocal proponents of free-market capitalism, it still manages to attract many of the world’s best and brightest, and indeed, the US tax-take as a percentage of GDP lags behind that of most European countries — but not by very much, and it is actually higher than in non-EU-member Switzerland, for instance. And as for US government debt as a percentage of GDP, this is actually higher than in most European countries and places the US is in the same league as an economic basket case such as Greece, for instance. True enough also: In the US you may still pretty much say whatever you want without having to fear criminal persecution, whereas taking the same liberty in most of Europe may well land you in jail. However, the disease of “political correctness,” of “non-discrimination” and “affirmative action” that is currently sweeping the Western world like an epidemic actually originated in the US, with the so-called “civil rights” legislation of the 1960s, and it is the US, where it has been carried to the greatest excesses and the height of absurdity. And so, while saying the politically “wrong” thing may not land you in jail in the US, you will have your career destroyed there just as certainly, if not more so, than in any European country.

And as for US foreign policy: All the while the political elites of the US started to “invite” the (third) world to come to the US, long before the same disastrous “multicultural” policies were also adopted in Europe, the very same elites have pursued an aggressive policy of “invade the world” and attacked, just in the most recent decades, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and spawning a wave of Islamist terrorism, mostly funded by Saudi Arabia, with whose political elites one entertains a most cordial relationship.

Finally, how do you evaluate the economic success of formerly communist countries such as China, that combine one-party dictatorships with partly free markets?

The economic success of a country depends on three interrelated factors: the security of private property and property rights, the freedom of contract and trade, and the freedom of association and disassociation — and, of course, the diligence, intelligence, and ingenuity of its people. Each and every State, insofar as it relies on taxation for its own funding, acts in violation of these requirements. But these violations can be less extensive and far-reaching, or more so, explaining the relative success of some countries and the failure of others. The internal organization of the State, whether it is a one-party dictatorship or a multi-party democracy, is essentially irrelevant in this. Indeed, as the present example of Venezuela vividly demonstrates, democracy and democratic elections can well lead to the almost complete abolition of private property rights and the freedom of contract and trade, and result in spectacular economic collapse.

As well, the comparison of the economic performance of India vs. China is instructive in this regard. While modern India, for almost seven decades now, has been ruled by democratic governments, modern China has been ruled throughout by a communist party dictatorship, roughly half of the time, during the Mao-era, by an orthodox all-out-communist party leadership, and the second half by a regime of “liberal” reform-communists. The result? Both countries are still desperately poor as measured by Western standards, indicating that both governments showed little if any respect for private property rights. But: While the economic situation was about equally desperate in both countries until the early 1980s, since then, with the onset of the “reform communism” in China, the Chinese GDP per capita has well surpassed and risen significantly above that of India, indicating a comparatively greater scope of economic freedom in China and/or an on average brighter and more diligent Chinese population.

In conclusion, then: Don’t put your trust in democracy, but neither should you trust in a dictatorship. Rather, put your hope into radical political decentralization, not just in India and China, but everywhere.

View Details

Those who wish to portray Ludwig von Mises as the "moderate" one, compared to the more radical Murray Rothbard, will often point out that Mises was no "anarchist."

This assertion, however, runs into trouble when we consider Mises's comments in Liberalism on the topic of radical decentralization:

The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars. To call this right of self-determination the "right of self-determination of nations" is to misunderstand it. It is not the right of self-determination of a delimited national unit, but the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong... However, the right of self-determination of which we speak is not the right of self-determination of nations, but rather the right of self-determination of the inhabitants of every territory large enough to form an independent administrative unit. If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done. This is impracticable only because of compelling technical considerations, which make it necessary that a region be governed as a single administrative unit and that the right of self-determination be restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country. "But, wait" the anti-anarchists will say. "Mises says it's impractical for every person to have total self determination.

To this observation, the answer can only be "so what?" In the selection above, Mises clearly states that he agrees with the theoretical case for secession down the individual level. He merely states that there are certain practical considerations that make its application in the real world unlikely.

And who could disagree with him? Of course there are practical limitations on the ability of each and every person to be a — to use Mises's term — "national unit" unto himself. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that most human beings would even want to be stand-alone national units. It's far more likely that even laissez-faire minded persons — provided practical options for exit always remain an option — would seek the convenience of life within a city, association, confederation, or league managed by some group of elected or appointed persons. These organizations would be charged with keeping the peace and promoting commerce by maintaining reliable and predictable laws governing the use and protection of private property.

Moreover, its difficult to see how Murray Rothbard would have disagreed with this assessment. After all, any student of history and human nature, which Rothbard indeed was, recognizes that people have always grouped themselves together for social reasons and to take advantage of economies of scale in defense and economic production.

The question for anarchists has always been not whether or not individual human beings can exist as nations unto themselves, but whether it is possible to create a society in which a person would have numerous practical options from which to freely choose. That is, can we create a situation in which persons choose their political regimes in a truly voluntary way?

We Need More States For this reason, the practical answer to any current lack of choice (i.e., lack of "self-determination") lies not in the immediate abolition of all states (as no one has ever convincingly described how this might be done) but in the breaking down of existing states into smaller and smaller states.

This can be done in a de jure fashion, such as through formal secession movements, or it might be done through de facto secession through nullification and insistence on localized autonomy.

What Mises describes above refers to formal votes and declarations of independence, but the same effects, in practice, can be obtained through the methods of local nullification and separation as suggested by Hans-Hermann Hoppe here. And, of course, de facto secession, for practical reasons may often be preferable.

The claim is often made by some doctrinaire and impractical anarchists that secession is a bad thing because it "creates a new state." This is a rather simplistic view, however, given the realities of geography on planet earth. Unless one is forming a new state completely in international waters or in Antarctica or outer space, the creation of any new state will have to come at the expense of some existing state. Thus, the creation of a new state, in say, Sardinia, would come at the expense of the existing state known as "Italy." Deprived by secession of tax revenues and the military advantages of territory, the state that loses territory would be necessarily weakened.

In addition to weakening states, the advantage from the perspective of the individual, then, is that he or she now has two states to choose from where only one existed before. The individual now has more options from which to choose a place to live that best suits his or her personal lifestyle, ideology, religion, ethnic group, and more.

With each additional successful act of secession, the choices from which each person has to choose grow larger and larger:

Note that in this case, when the number of states is one, a person has no other choices at all. The number of actual choices equals zero, since a monopoly exists. That is, a single global state is the most powerful state possible and a fully-formed state in the strictest sense. It has a complete and total monopoly of force over its population, since its citizens cannot escape the state even if they emigrate. There is nowhere that they can emigrate to.

On the other other hand, a world composed of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of states (or regimes of varying types) would offer many, many choices to residents who might wish to change their living situation.

Moreover, the smaller states become, the more practical relocation options become. This is due to the fact that proximity and distance does matter, and a state that can only be escaped by emigrating 1,000 miles is considerably different from a state than can be escaped by emigrating 50 miles.

The realities of time and distance and travel mean that emigration to distant locales will limit one's ability to share time and resources with family, friends, and loved ones left behind. Emigration to a location within a half-day's drive requires far fewer lifestyle changes.

This is part of the reason that states prefer to be larger than smaller. Large states can make emigration impractical for people who wish to stay close to friends and family.

Similarly, if emigration requires adaptation into a radically different culture and language, this will further limit the practicality of emigration for those who are not fluently multilingual. Thus, states have benefited considerably from the fact that many states enjoy monopolies (which they reinforce) on linguistic areas. For example, if one speaks only Swedish, one has a big incentive to stay in Sweden, and if one only speaks Greek, one is pretty much stuck in Greece. Even in the case of English, which is seen as being spoken internationally, it's significant that 80 percent of native English speakers live under a single state — the United States. The implications of this for potential emigrants are evident.

Many of these limitations to human choice can be reduced and overcome by even limited success in breaking down state monopolies in cultural and linguistic areas.

For example, if the United States were broken into two pieces at the Mississippi River, this would immediately provide an additional choice to potential American emigrants seeking to live under a separate regime. And, it would allow them to move to a new political jurisdiction where the language and culture are extremely similar. Naturally, these choices would multiply the more the US were broken down into smaller pieces.

(As it is presently, continued residency in the United States can hardly be offered as proof of one "voluntarily" choosing to live under the American regime. Given the size and scope of the US, the real personal cost of emigration is incredibly high.)

The same can be said of breaking other countries into smaller pieces as well. If Mexico, for instance, were broken down into "North Mexico" and "South Mexico," Mexicans would have two choices of regimes under which to live without leaving the part of the world that could be designated, culturally speaking, as "Mexico."

Ralph Raico expands on the role and importance of culturally similar but politically diverse areas here.

Therefore, if we imagine a world described by Mises, in which self-determination is marked by a dynamic and locally-based system of choice and secession among political regimes, we gain what is fundamentally a system marked more by choice than by monopoly — unlike the current system of large states.

Choices Are Limited, Even in a Stateless World Now, some anarchists may object even to this by claiming that one must be provided with an unlimited number of societies and governments to choose from. But if one were provided with unlimited choice in governments to live under, it would be the first time in the history of the world that anyone attained the possibility of unlimited choice in anything.

In the real world, choices are always limited, whether by physical realities, time, or by the willingness of others to voluntarily do business. One does not have the ability to choose a "perfect" hamburger restaurant at exactly the price point one desires, even in a totally free market. Although entrepreneurs have provided an immense variety of hamburgers to choose from, one can only pick from the available choices. "Unlimited freedom" (in the sense of being able to do whatever one wants wherever one wants) can not exist.

The same is true in choosing among political regimes under which to live. Even if one had the ability to create one's own personal state, one would still be limited by the realities of scarcity. The issues inherent in such an autarkic endeavor, including problems of economies of scale, the division of labor, and the issue of enforcing contracts, are the reason that most people would simply elect to embrace membership in some type of state or civil government, preferably after considering a number of possible options.

(See here for more on the difference between a "state" and a civil government.)

It is indeed true in any realistic scenario that certain types of regimes would remain unavailable, or at least unavailable at a price desirable to most of the population. But this would be true even in a totally unhampered market for regimes. This is true for the same reason that by the mid-1980s it was nearly impossible to rent a movie on Betamax at the local video store. Resources tend to flow toward products and services that enjoy the most widespread demand. This is not a market failure, but simply entrepreneurs attempting to make the most of scarce resources.

So, just as Mises suggested, there will always be some practical limitations to attaining the so-called model of "perfect" anarchy. But, in a situation such as Mises's scenario — in which the option of exit always exists — the stakes involved in joining any particular political grouping would be much lower. In a voluntary situation such as this, taxes become "fees" since payment is effectively voluntary. And they are voluntary even in cases where a person cannot find a jurisdiction that aligns with his desires perfectly. When a consumer chooses a product or service that most closely aligns with his desires, we still consider the purchase voluntary, even if he could not find a product that perfectly reflected his imagined ideal.

The Problem of Defense Anyone familiar with the work of Mises knows that he was not naive about foreign policy. Mises also understood that — contrary to the often-repeated claim that centralized and "strong" states are the most powerful in terms of diplomacy — the most liberal and decentralized states often commanded the most economic power, and thus the most political power in the international sphere. This in itself is a reason to liberalize and decentralize regimes in pursuit of more effective self-defense.

As an illustration of the nuance of Mises's views on this matter, we find that built into Mises's view of self determination and secession is his recognition that some of these secessionist and independent regions may wish to, as Mises put it, "attach themselves to some other state."

Why would a state want to attach itself to another state? Well, advantages can come with membership in existing and powerful political associations. There are advantages in terms of military defense and also in terms of trade if trade is facilitated by means of customs unions or other guarantees of free trade within states.

The United States as originally envisioned — as a customs union and a confederation for military defense — was created for this purpose, with a specific eye toward attracting new territories for voluntary membership. Indeed, prior to the 1860s, the US was a very weak state in which political and military power was heavily decentralized down to its member jurisdictions.

It is likely that Mises was aware of this example as well as the fact that Europe itself contained several historical examples of membership-based regimes that existed to provide services of defense and legal administration.

Membership-Based "States" The most notable example of this is the Hanseatic league — a trade federation of sorts — which international-relations scholar Hendrik Spruyt describes as "an interesting case because it suggests an alternative logic of organization to that of the sovereign state." As a membership-based organization, the League "could raise an army, decree laws, engage in social regulation, and collect revenue."

Unlike a state, however, the League — composed of commercial and urban centers across northern Europe — could not compel membership (although it could expel members), nor did it have a capital city or a direct relationship with the taxpayers of the member jurisdictions. Member cities and towns, each of which had one vote, met on occasion to vote on policies and goals for the League.

As described by Spruyt, cities and towns would pursue membership in the League to take advantages of the League's services in providing defense from foreign states and from pirates. Membership also allowed easier trade with other League members and with cities outside the League that the league's agents had opened to trade through diplomatic means.

In short, the League offered the services of a state without exercising a monopoly over the internal governance of member jurisdictions. Those issues that did not warrant league-wide involvement were addressed at the regional or purely local level.

Obviously, in a scenario like this, there are real advantages to membership since the cost of dealing with meddling foreign states and pirates and can be rather high. Cities that had greater need of these services were more active members, while more marginally attached cities were less involved. The complexity, fluidity, and voluntary nature of membership in the league emphasizes its ability to allow localized self-determination while nevertheless providing the benefits of defense and facilitation of trade.

Although it was not the only organization of its kind, the Hanseatic league was among the most influential and successful. Like other city-leagues, Spuyt notes, the league had no "clear hierarchical authority and formal territorial borders."

Additionally, the League was often successful militarily, and in this regard was able to compete with the more traditional monopolistic states that surrounded it. It survived from the 13th century to the 17th century, outlasting many competing regimes.

Nor was the Hanseatic League alone in this type of political regime. Spruyt continues:

the "burghers formed these leagues with the explicit purpose of defending towns against the encroachment by the nobility. Militarily they promised each other mutual aid against the common enemy... they assessed troop contingents which each town had to provide...Juridically, the leagues defended the towns' rights of self-governance...There were a considerable number of such leagues. The Swabian-Rhenisch League proved in 1385 that such leagues could muster considerable military might. The league consisted of about 89 towns and could field an army of 10,000." The city-leagues did not invent the concept of mutual defense, of course. The idea is as old as politics, although with the triumph of pro-state ideologies by the turn of the 19th century, these voluntary mutual-defense non-states such as the city-leagues disappeared. Nevertheless, the concept of mutual defense, as employed by the city-leagues, persists to this day, precisely because it works.

The Defining Characteristic of Anarchism and Radical Decentralization is Choice Even in a world where one could choose freely among providers of legal and defense services (i.e., a marketplace for civil government) there would not be an unlimited number of choices. What makes markets preferable to states, however, is that they are voluntary, dynamic, flexible, and constantly seeking to provide desirable services in exchange for the freely-given cooperation from the consumers.

This sort of voluntary society can be facilitated and expanded through the use of free association and secession as envisioned by Mises, or through the type of local nullification and civil disobedience as envisioned by Hoppe. In either case, conflict resolution shifts away from state coercion and toward negotiation, compromise, arbitration, and consensus. While even these methods can still result in violence when they fail, they are preferable to the state model of governance in which coercive violence is assumed, legitimized, and frequently used.

Those regimes that offer more freedom, more respect for private property, and more self-determination, will also be those that are most economically successful. But fundamentally, the power of states can only ultimately be controlled by human beings adopting ideologies that question the prerogatives and legitimacy of monopolistic states. In the absence of these ideologies, no organizational structure, no document, and no historical event can by itself create the conditions necessary for the successful exercise of self-determination.

View Details

In a Mises Daily column last summer, I suggested that the proper strategy for addressing the immigration issue is to begin decentralizing decision-making and political jurisdictions.

I noted that the immigration issue had been taken over by the Federal government in the courts, but that it is really a state and local matter. As Andrew P. Napolitano has noted, "[T]he Constitution itself — from which all federal powers derive — does not delegate to the federal government power over immigration, only over naturalization." Nevertheless, the Federal courts over the past century have attempted to make immigration a strictly federal issue.

Historically, however, this has not been the case at all. Through much of the 19th century, and into the early 20th century, matters of voting rights — and by extension, citizenship — were the domain of the states and of state constitutions.

A Low Bar For Citizenship and Voting in State Constitutions

When I wrote my column on the need to decentralize immigration policy, some readers may have assumed that this was just an anti-immigrant bluff, and that I was laboring under the assumption that, if allowed, states would go much farther than the federal government in restricting immigration. While it is no doubt true that some states would do this, it is also likely that many states would not.

In fact, research by Huyen Pham and Pham Hoang Van demonstrates quite clearly that there are wide variations in how different states approach the immigration issue. This is true across geographies, but it's also true across time periods.

Throughout much of the 19th century, numerous state governments were extremely open to immigration, and immigrants. The drive to ease entry for immigrants was so widespread, that it led to the legal phenomenon known as "declarant alien" voting.

Specifically, states that welcomed declarant alien voting explicitly noted in their constitutions that non-US citizens were eligible to vote in elections if they declared their intent to become citizens within a certain time frame before the election. That's all that was required to become an eligible voter. In the case of Colorado, for example, the state's original 1876 constitution reads (Article VII section 1):

[The voter] shall be a citizen of the United States, or not being a citizen of the United States, he shall have declared his intention, according to law, to become such citizen, not less than four months before he offers to vote.There was nothing innovative about this position, however. This standard for voting rights was simply continuing what was the status quo in Colorado since declarant alien voting rights had already been established years before within the Kansas Terroritory, out of which Colorado was eventually formed.

[RELATED: "Immigrants Aren't The Only Ones Who Shouldn't Be Voting"]

Declarant alien voting in state constitutions goes back at least to the Wisconsin constitution of 1848. By the mid 19th century, it had spread to numerous Western territories via Congressional approval. And, as Gerald Neuman notes:

Congress enfranchised declarant aliens in the [Oregon, Minnesota,] Washington, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, Dakota, Wyoming, and Oklahoma Territories. In all nine of these territories, Congress imposed the additional requirement of an oath to support the United States Constitution.Some, though not all, of the territories that permitted alien suffrage retained it when they achieved statehood. Older states joined the trend. When Indiana and Michigan adopted new constitution in the early 1850s, they enfranchised declarant aliens. Reportedly, the change reflected competition for immigrants among the Midwestern states. Numerous former Confederate states adopted the same tactic, at least temporarily, after the civil war. Texas was among those states that adopted declarant alien voting during Reconstruction, but it was not eliminated at the end of Reconstruction. Alien voting was retained in weakened form until 1921. Ron Hayduk writes:

Like several other southern states, Texas formally adopted declarant alien voting during the Reconstruction era. The Texas Constitution of 1868 provided that: “Every free male person who shall have attained the age of twenty-one years, and who shall be (or who shall have declared his intention to become) a citizen of the United States, or who is at the time of the acceptance of this constitution by Congress a citizen of Texas, and shall have resided in this State one year next preceding an election, and the last six months within the district or county in which he offers to vote, and is duly registered (Indians not taxed excepted,) shall be deemed a qualified elector.”The Constitution of 1876 retained declarant alien voting, providing suffrage to “every male person of foreign birth [not subject to a list of disqualifications] who, at any time before an election, shall have declared his intentions to become a citizen of the United States, in accordance with the Federal naturalization laws, … shall also be deemed a qualified elector.” In 1896 the declarant alien voting provision was amended to require a declaration of intent to naturalize not less than six months before the election. As late as 1916, a Texas appellate court reprimanded officials in Bee county for wrongly denying the vote to declarant aliens during an election over a county-wide prohibition on liquor; the election officials had announced that “no man not born in the United States would be allowed to vote unless he had his final naturalization papers, and that it would be necessary for him to produce them in order to be entitled to vote.”Declarant alien voting eventually died out in the 1920s as new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were deemed insufficiently "white" and the anti-immigration policies became more popular for a variety of reasons. Anti-German hysteria during World War I, for example, was one cause.

In many states of the far west, however (such as Colorado) voting requirement had been very weak, even when there was a risk of non-whites voting. The 1876 Colorado constitution even stipulates that all new laws be published in English, Spanish, and German, so as to be intelligible to both Mexican-American and German-American immigrants.

Citizenship Became (Indirectly) a State Matter

In the 19th century, in a time of no income tax and few federal laws, citizenship was largely synonymous with voting rights. In the declarant alien tradition, aliens could effectively become state citizens with minimal effort outside declaring an intent to become citizens, paying taxes, and submitting to local laws. The federal government implicitly recognized this fact when it concluded during the Civil War that declarant aliens were close enough to citizens to be drafted into the army.

James Raskin, in "Legal Aliens, Local Citizens" finds that "white male aliens ... exercised the right to vote in at least twenty-two states and territories during the 19th century."

Given the central role of state law in granting access to federal elections (see below), states thus had the power to indirectly determine who could act as US citizens in terms of political participation:

As a chapter in the history of American federalism, the period of alien suffrage reflected a conception of states as sovereign political entities. The states with alien suffrage allowed non-US citizens to participate in voting at all levels of American government, thereby turning them, explicitly or implicitly, into "citizens" of the state itself. Participant states were thus exercising independence from the national government for the purposes of communal political self-definition.The emergence of voting policies peculiar to certain states grew naturally out of the fact that during the 19th century, there was a distinction between citizenship in a particular state, and citizenship in the United States overall. In her book on the Illinois state Constitution written in 1818, Ann Lousin discussed the requirements for voting in Illinois. (Virtually all adult white men could vote.) But she then adds: “as was typical in early state constitutions, there was no requirement of United States citizenship.”In fact, by the late 19th century, there arose a legal phenomenon of multi-level citizenship that did not assume that all state citizens were also US citizens.In Neuman's legal analysis, he finds that the state courts in several cases concluded that "alien voters were citizens of the state, though not of the United States.”Specifically, according to Neuman, the Wisconsin Supreme Court "described the independence of state citizenship from US citizenship as an acceptable consequence of the dual-sovereign system of federalism...A few other state courts similarly construed declarant alien voters as citizens of the state." Essentially, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared that “declarant aliens were citizens of Wisconsin” regardless of what the federal courts might say.As voting was a central indicator of citizenship at the time, it should be noted that this followed logically from the fact that the states and not the central government were recognized as the proper instrument for regulating elections and voting rights. After all, in the text of the US constitution (ignoring later case law) it is clear that the states decide who is eligible to vote, and not the federal government. In fact, the federal constitution rarely mentions voting at all. Joshua Douglas writes "unlike virtually every state constitution, the US constitution does not actually confer the right to vote on anyone." There are only negative mandates as to who may not be disenfranchised. Even the US Supreme court admits this, and in 2013, the court's majority wrote: "Congress ... regulate[s] how federal elections are held, but not who may vote in them. The latter is the province of the States."In state constitutions, voting and voting eligibility is a central topic, and this is a relic of 19th century decentralist attitudes in which voting rights and thus citizenship (practically speaking) were well within the territory of the state legislatures.Douglas goes on to note that frequent claims by federal courts that voting rights are "fundamental" to federal law cite no actual text in the US constitution, but appear to be based on nebulous philosophical claims. Only the state constitutions treat voting rights as fundamental. Historically, it has been states and state constitutions that decide who can and who cannot exercise the prerogatives of a full citizen.

Philosophically, the declarant alien ideal sprang from an alternative vision of citizenship that was based primarily on residency. Neuman writes: The Illinois Supreme court concluded that its constitution extended “the right of suffrage to those who, having by habitation and residence identified their interests and feelings with the citizen, are upon the just principles of reciprocity between the governed and governing, entitled to a voice in the choice of the officers of the government, although they may be neither native nor adopted citizens.” Conclusions I make no claims that the US constitution is the benchmark by which government should be measured. I agree with Murray Rothbard and Lysander Spooner, for example, that the constitution is a failure. Nor do I consider the state level to be the "proper" level of government to address the issue since many states are enormous. Decentralization to a local, more human level is preferred. As a radical decentralist, however, I find it both instructive and important to be aware of the tradition in American history that lies behind state-level immigration policy, and this is especially important in the topics of political participation and immigration. Some conservatives who claim to be for "states rights" or "local control," when confronted with suggestions that immigration policy be decentralized, make the erroneous claim that only the federal government has even been able to constitutionally regulate immigration. This has never been true from any strict constructionist point of view, and it was not even true according to the courts before 1875, when the Supreme Court rather dubiously declared in Chy Lung v. Freeman that California's immigration restrictions constituted "foreign relations." In practice, states have exercised large amounts of influence in determining immigration policy and citizenship issues. The idea that the states can have no role in immigration policy is an innovation of the late 19th century. Some critics of this reality may claim that the free movement of persons between states make it impractical to allow individual states to decide immigration policy. If that is the case, however, then the problem needs to be addressed not by centralizing policy, but by decentralizing the borders as well, and allowing restrictionist states more control over their own borders. States would then be forced to balance nativist desires for border control against the economic benefits of free movement for goods and labor.

View Details

The Tenth Amendment Center covers a recent podcast by Jeff Deist:

Last week, Mises Institute President Jeff Deist released a podcast featuring a discussion about the political future of libertarianism, advising libertarian activists to embrace decentralization and de-federalization as a foundational strategic goal.

“The only way we can get along is to de-yoke from Washington,” Deist said on the Patriots Lament radio show. “We have to ratchet back the federalization of everything, and we have to decentralize political, economic and social power away from Washington.”

The Mises Institute is a free market think-tank devoted to promoting the works of Austrian economics and libertarian political theory. Although he heads up a strictly anti-political organization, Deist endorses using the principles of decentralization as the means for reducing state control.

“Our task as libertarians is to make the case for unyoking and decentralization,” Deist said. “It may be a tough sell to say get rid of the government in its entirety… An easier sell is de-yoking and decentralizing to de-escalate all this hatred and nastiness. That is how I see it.”

The Mises Institute promotes the work of many prominent Austrian economists, most notably Ludwig von Mises and his protégé, Murray Rothbard. Rothbard, generally credited as the founder of modern libertarianism, fully recognized the importance of the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution.

Read the full article.

View Details

Almost a decade later, the Federal Reserve this week announced it will begin reversing quantitative easing. Slowly. Very slowly. The balance sheet currently stands at $4.5 trillion and they will begin allowing $10 billion in assets to roll off their sheets next month. Given the unprecedented nature of QE, even this modest reduction has many market observers on edge. Of course, the fallout from the Fed's actions are still being felt, while the Trump Treasury is making threats that it would have disastrous consequences if acted on.

On Mises Weekends, Jeff is joined by Dr. Mark Thornton to get his take on the Fed's actions and what it all means for stock markets, investors, and the US economy. Can quantitative easing, a roundabout form of monetizing debt, actually work? Can monetary policy make us rich? Or are Fed officials just groping in the dark, putting off a day of reckoning?

And in case you missed them, here are this weeks Mises Wire and FedWatch articles, covering a wide array of topics:

There's a Bubble in New York City Taxi Medallions by Doug FrenchThe Agony of the Welfare State, Finnish Style by Joseph T. SalernoWhy is NASA Covering Up Elon Musk's Mistakes? by Drew ArmstrongGovernment Regulation and Crony Capitalism is Keeping Thousands in Florida without Power by Tho BishopIf the Majority Votes to Secede — What About the Minority? by Ryan McMakenMises and Cosmopolitanism by David GordonQuestions Remain as the Fed Finally Begins to Reverse QE by Tho BishopThen Came Nixon by Chris CaltonThe Washington Post's Latest (and Lamest) Attack on the Mises Institute by Ryan McMakenWhat Is the Correct Amount of Money? by Frank ShostakTrump's China-Sanctions Madness Imperils the Dollar by Ryan McMakenLet Catalonia Decide by Jeff DeistPasschendaele: A Century after the Horror by Matthew McCaffreyUS Sanctions Against Venezuela Will Hurt Americans by Ryan McMakenThe World Is Creeping Toward De-Dollarization by Ronald-Peter StöferleCongress Shirks Its Duty on Foreign Policy Yet Again by Ron PaulLudwig von Mises on Collectivist Fallacies and Interventionist Follies by Richard M. EbelingThe Capitalist Revolution by Ludwig von MisesMoney-Supply Growth Drops Again — Falls to 108-Month Low by Ryan McMakenJohnny Appleseed: Land Speculator, Alcholol Dealer, Capitalist by Chris Calton

View Details

Before we jump in, let’s have a show of hands. How many of you have ever been told that your conception of liberty sounds good in theory, on paper, but could never work in practice? How many of you have ever been called utopians? Good, I see this is most of you.

Well I am here to dispel this notion and to show all of you that you are nothing if not realists. After all the word utopia comes from the Greek words Ou and Topos. Ou means Not and Topos means Place. Utopia therefore literally means, “not a place.” In other words, those who call us utopians believe that our ideas have not been and cannot be implemented in any physical space in the real world.

I am about to tell you about a place where fundamental libertarian pillars of self-ownership and private property are never violated, a place of almost absolute, maximum individual liberty. A place where state coercion is nonexistent, or actually, as I will later argue, a place where there might be no state at all.

But here is what I am not going to do: I am not going to try to convince you to move there. Actually, I would discourage most of you from even trying. This place is too small, its culture too skeptical of foreigners, and quite frankly the cause of liberty is too great for us libertarians to attempt a mass exodus of this kind. Instead, what I want to do is show you how this place became so free, and what this freedom actually looks like, because libertarians often have a flawed conception of what would happen if we suddenly got rid of the state. Second, I would like to share my ideas about what kind of strategic changes we can make to our discourse, that is to say the language that libertarians use, in order to make our countries a bit more like this amazing place, the Principality of Liechtenstein.

First of all, I would like to start by recommending three amazing books that have shaped my political beliefs and served as the main inspiration for this talk. The first one, which I will be focusing on today, is The State in the Third Millennium by His Serene Highness Prince Hans-Adam II, the second is Democracy: The God that Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and the third is Liberalism by Ludwig von Mises.

Though these books may offer quite different perspectives on the matter, they all agree on a single, central point: That is, that the State is not a divine entity; that we have an individual right to self-determine our political affiliation and that like any other industry, providers of government services are subject to the basic rules of economics with respect to competition, monopoly, and human action.

This is a quote from Prince Hans-Adam in the first few pages of his book, explaining the goal of his writing, which incidentally is also the goal of this lecture:

I would like to set out in this book the reasons why the traditional state as a monopoly enterprise not only is an inefficient enterprise with a poor price-performance ratio, but even more importantly, becomes more of a danger for humanity the longer it exists.

Although I mean no disrespect to Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe, three great intellectuals who are very dear to my heart and to whom I owe so much, it has always been of a particular and distinct fascination to me that a head of state worth $3.5 billion, a person of actual power and influence beyond the common man’s imagination, would write about abolishing the monopoly of the state and establishing government competition under the right of secession. It is for this reason that I will now devote the next part of my presentation to explaining Liechtenstein’s unique political system, and the context under which these ideas have been implemented.

Liechtenstein is a country of about 38,000 people; at 160 square kilometers it is not very densely populated. For comparison, Monaco has around the same population and is 80 times smaller. The principality boasts among the highest GDP per capita and average salary in the world, but contrary to popular belief, the financial sector only contributes a total of 24 percent to Liechtenstein’s GDP and 16 percent of the workforce. 27 percent of the GDP is in non-financial services, 8 percent is agriculture, and 37 percent is industrial, as Liechtenstein is a popular spot for highly specialized and niche manufacturing. Some notable examples include Hilti, one of the global leaders in the production of power tools, Ivoclar, one of the biggest producers of dental goods, through which Liechtenstein has actually become the world’s biggest exporter of false teeth, and the well-known jewelry manufacturer Swarovski also has significant operations within the country.

Liechtenstein is one of the last functional monarchies in Europe, with the Princely House being able to exercise almost complete power through the Sovereign Prince, currently Prince Hans-Adam II, and unlike most monarchies, power is transferred from father to son not at the time of the father’s death, but some time before, in order to allow the successor to learn from his predecessor while on the job. The current regent is Prince Alois, who is now effectively ruling the country, although his father still has the power to step in and overrule him.

However, despite the Princely Family’s constitutional power, Liechtenstein is also a democracy. In the words of Prince Hans-Adam:

We in the Princely House are convinced that the Liechtenstein monarchy is a partnership between the people and the Princely House, a partnership that should be voluntary and based on mutual respect.

There is a parliament with 25 seats. Currently 10 seats belong to a party called the Progressive Citizens Party, or FBP, which is the only party that explicitly supports the princely family and has the best relationship with them. Eight seats belong to the Christian and conservative Patriotic Union, four seats belong to independents, and three to the Free List, which is the equivalent of the Green Party.

In practice, it would seem that the parliament and the princely house are more or less equal in power. But actually the princely house has the rarely-exercised power to veto or dissolve the parliament, which makes it slightly more powerful.

All of this exists within the context of direct democracy, so any disagreement between the parliament and the princely house can be resolved by popular vote. You only need 1,000 signatures in order to start a national referendum, or 1,500 if your proposal includes a change to the constitution.

The Prince can actually veto any national referendum, unless they are one of two specific types of referendum: The first is a referendum to dismiss the Prince, in which case the Princely House must elect a new Prince, and the second is a referendum to get rid of the entire Princely House altogether and abolish the monarchy. If the people start one of these two referendums, then the Prince’s power of veto is void.

Then Liechtenstein has 11 municipalities, often referred to as villages or communes, with populations of roughly between 400 and 6,000. These villages have a fairly high degree of autonomy, and are able to pass a great deal of their own laws, and levy their own taxes (for reference, the national income tax is 1.2 percent, but the average income tax level is about 17.8 percent if you include village income tax).

Now here comes the really interesting part: Each of these villages have their own system of direct democracy, with referendums usually requiring the signatures of 5 percent of local eligible voters to initiate. Since the constitutional reform of 2003, the villages have had the right to secede. Even tiny Planken with its 280 voters could have its independence recognized following a local vote.

All of this was initiated by His Serene Highness, who personally went down into the streets of Liechtenstein to collect signatures in order to start a constitutional referendum. The 2003 constitutional reform also gave the people of Liechtenstein the aforementioned right to dismiss the prince or the princely house, by the way. Such was his belief in liberty that he actually worked to convince a people over whom he had complete dominion to take hold of their rights and demand more freedom. In his own words:

The State should treat its citizens like an enterprise treats its customers. For this to work, the State also needs competition. We therefore support the right of self-determination at the municipal level, in order to end the monopoly of the State over its territory.

Actually, you will probably be shocked to hear that he initially did not only propose that villages have the right of self-determination, but even individuals and their private property! This is from an article called, “Freedom and Prosperity in Liechtenstein,” by Andrew Young, published in 2010 in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. I strongly recommend reading the full paper.

At this point some of you may be scratching your heads, asking yourself if any of this is real. After all, why would a head of state willingly give up so much power, and in fact go through a lot of trouble to try and give up this power. In The State in the Third Millennium, Prince Hans-Adam explains:

Naturally, an anarchist could claim that a monarch from a family that has reigned for centuries cannot possibly be in favor of abolishing the state. In response, I should like to note that the Princes of Liechtenstein are not paid for their duties as head of state by either the state or the taxpayer. The total cost of our monarchy, in contrast to almost all other monarchies, is covered by the Prince’s or the Princely House’s private funds.

Personally, I do not think this response tells the whole story, and that there are several other factors that have led Liechtenstein to where it is. I will get back to this a little bit later, but first, let me share the following newspaper clipping from the BBC in 2003.

That article was written shortly after the constitutional reform. Now, in this constitutional reform, let me remind you, while the Prince tried and failed to give every individual the right of secession, he succeeded in giving every village that right, and he gave the people the right to dismiss him and his family. He also happened to simultaneously slightly increase his influence in the election of judges. The BBC’s reaction is right there in the subhead, “The people of Liechtenstein have voted to make their prince an absolute monarch again.”

No mention of the right of secession or the right to abolish the monarchy. Not one. The BBC outright lied and claimed Prince Hans-Adam was been made “an absolute monarch again,” when actually it was quite the contrary. Now this lecture is supposed to be positive; I came here to cheer you up, but I thought it was necessary to include a small reality check right in the middle, just to remind you what we are up against.

Now you might be thinking, Prince Hans-Adam talks about abolishing the State, but doesn’t Liechtenstein still have taxation, speed limits, a police force and such “statist” things?

Yes, that is true, but these things do not actually define a State. Allow me to propose a distinction between a government and a state. Most people indeed think of these words as synonymous, but these are in my opinion statist semantics which push back our movement perhaps more than any member of the Clinton family ever has.

A government is an organization that provides its customers with “governance services,” which includes the enaction of common rules (legislation), their enforcement (justice), and general protection (defense), among others. Whereas a state is a self-proclaimed government that claims a de jure territorial monopoly wherein all inhabitants must be customers, and typically enforces this monopoly through the systematic use of force, disregarding property rights. The difference between a government and a state is the difference between leadership and tyranny.

I would actually classify government as any hierarchy of leadership, including those within corporations or families. National governments today, besides Liechtenstein’s, are all states. However, not all states are actually governments, as we can see in some African countries where justice and defense are not provided with any consistency. In other words, although the two concepts often overlap, they do not have to: you may have state without government, government without state, as well as government within state.

In the same way, one may find leadership in tyranny, but one can also have leadership without tyranny and of course tyranny without leadership.

In Prince Hans-Adam’s words:

The state has to become a service company which competes peacefully, and not a monopoly which gives the customer only the alternative either to accept a bad service at the highest price, or to emigrate.

In effect, Liechtenstein is the only modern example of leadership without tyranny. The Princely family have been able to gain the love and loyalty of their people by giving them something they never even realized they wanted.

Now you might wonder, if there really is no state in Liechtenstein, how come there is only one government? Why aren’t there multiple competing governments?

Well to understand this it is fundamental to grasp the difference between what I call a de facto monopoly and a de jure monopoly. In a de facto monopoly there are no competitors because there is no demand or practical use for competitors. Barriers to entry are merely social and market-based, not legal or regulatory. A de jure monopoly is a monopoly enforced by threat of coercion. Competitors are in demand, but face “legal” persecution from the established providers.

In other words, under a de facto monopoly, the potential for competition always exists and always keep the so-called monopoly in check, although the price and quality of the goods or services provided are so good, that no competitor could currently stand a chance.

As a side note, I’d like to note that in the case of government, the quality of the services is not entirely tangible or objective; governments, particularly democratic ones, are usually seen as an expression of the national identity and there is therefore a highly emotional factor to be considered. I would therefore say that serving and reinforcing patriotism is part of what we may consider the services that a government provides and should compete for.

A possible objection one may raise is whether Liechtenstein is really a country with a non-state government, as I claim, if the right of secession is at the village rather than the individual level. The answer is quite arguable. At first thought I would say no, the village governments basically act as states if they do not recognize individual secession, but then, if we think about it thoroughly, is this starting to become a bit too pedantic?

I have personally surveyed many Liechtensteiners and so far have not found a single one of them who would have exercised individual secession if they had that right.

Try to imagine seceding individually. What an unviable nightmare that would be. Your neighbors could very easily blockade you within your property, you would become a sovereign household in a world of sovereign states unwilling to cooperate with you.

So let’s be realistic, if we had the individual right of secession and wished to exercise it, we would need to at least convince our neighbors, our community, and the people we deal with on a day to day basis. In Liechtenstein, this more or less corresponds to a village, so I would say that in practice, it is as if every individual had the right of secession.

So to conclude this point, secession must account for the economies of scale in the governance industry, and the socio-cultural implications of national identities that are expressed through government. Ludwig von Mises expressed this:

If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done. This is impracticable only because of compelling technical considerations, which make it necessary that a region be governed as a single administrative unit and that the right of self-determination be restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country.

However, I do agree that the individual right of secession should be the ideal for us to strive for, and Prince Hans-Adam knows this full well, even though he thinks this might be reserved for a distant future.

Returning to the present, I would now like to speak about democracy, but not the common, mainstream definition which Professor Hoppe so elegantly dismantles in Democracy: The God that Failed. I wish to speak about what I have started calling “Democracy in the Mises-Liechtenstein tradition.”

This form of democracy does not refer to the form of governance. Indeed, a democracy in this sense could be a monarchy, a theocracy, or any other type of government, so long as it is democratically approved and therefore legitimized by the governed people, as is the case in Liechtenstein.

Actually, a democratic government does not necessarily have democratic legitimation, as strange as this may sound. This is the case of most representative democracies, which regularly consult the people about who should be elected into power, but not on whether the system of representative democracy should be continued.

Instead, these States rely on divine legitimation, assuming as a God-given fact that the country should keep the same geographical boundaries and political system, and falling on democracy only for other, less important matters.

Some will refer to divine legitimation as quote unquote “national self-determination.” Be aware of this semantical trap, as it does not refer to the same kind of self-determination as an individual right that I’ve been talking about. National self-determination refers to the supposed rights that a historically-defined state has to determine its own borders, and annex other territories if it decides that the people in that territory belong to their nation. Russia has of course been a notorious champion of this kind of so-called self-determination.

As Prince Hans-Adam put it:

Democracy and self-determination are closely linked and difficult to separate. Either one believes that the state is a divine entity to be served by the people and whose borders are never to be questioned, or one believes in the principle of democracy and that the state is created by the people to serve the people.

If one says “yes” to the principle of democracy, one cannot say “no” to the right of self-determination. A number of states have tried to separate democracy and the right of self-determination, but they never successfully put forward a credible argument.

The good news is that most people already basically accept this concept, on an international scale. Allow me to illustrate this point with a hypothetical example: Imagine if the U.S. had a national referendum on annexing Canada. Would the rest of the world see this expansion as valid according to democratic principles? I don’t think so.

Even if the entire population of Canada was invited to this referendum alongside the entire population of the US, most people would still not accept the result as an example of democracy. Only if Canadians, and Canadians alone, were able to vote in this referendum, would we see this as an exercise of democracy.

The bad news is that most people still are unable to consistently expand this principle nationally. If they did, they would have to recognize that the U.S. government is only legitimate in Texas if a majority of Texans approve, that the government of Texas is only valid in Austin of a majority of Austinites approve, and so on and so forth down to the individual level.

But considering all of this, I’d like to propose a point of reflection for all of you. Are we libertarians not the true democrats? Is anarcho-capitalism not the ultimate expression of democracy and are statists who defend the divine rights of the state not the true anti-democrats?

This insistence on the divine legitimation of established states may be justified by some as a way to preserve national unity, but in reality, it does only the opposite. As Mises put it, self-determination “is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.”

An example of this was produced in the Swiss canton of Bern in the late 70s, during times of civil unrest between French-speaking Catholic minority, and the German-speaking Protestant majority.

The French speakers sought independence or annexation into France, and the conflict rose to the point of violence and bombings. However, the Swiss government then allowed every French-speaking community in Bern to decide whether they wanted to stay in Bern or be part of a new canton, and this is how Jura, the newest canton in Switzerland, was created. Many French-speaking communities chose to stay in Bern however, which is still a bilingual canton today, and some decided to join Jura only several years later after being able to observe its socio-economic success.

By doing this, Switzerland prevented loss of land, and immediately calmed the conflict before it could get too bloody. This goes to show that even limited implementations of the principle of self-determination are capable of great results which actually promote, instead of reduce, national unity. In fact, the leverage and bargaining power given by self-determination can have some unexpected, yet still positive implications.

For example, imagine that 55 percent of Liechtensteiners voted to abolish the monarchy. It is very likely in this case that there would be several villages where the majority of the population is still loyal to the family and wishes to keep them as their leaders. With the current constitution, these villages would then be able to secede and reinstate the monarchy within their new country.

Knowing this, and desiring to maintain national unity, it is unlikely that 55 percent of Liechtensteiners would vote to abolish the monarchy even if 55 percent were in favor of doing so. Thus there is a largely unspoken, implicit bargaining process, where people are more conscious of the long-term effects of their votes.

Though what is right for Liechtenstein is perhaps not right for Malta and vice versa, the principle of self-determination allows a process of experimentation that is potentially beneficial to both.

While perhaps an Islamic sharia government would be chosen in several parts of London today, absent state-sponsored distortions in migration flows, this would probably not happen. Particularly not under the natural order of market governance, which the mostly homogenous, closed-borders Liechtenstein finds itself under.

The right of self-determination could also allow us to create governmental sandboxes to make market experiments in different forms of government. There are admirable efforts to do this today from the Seasteading Institute, the free republic of Liberland, Titus Gebel’s Free Private Cities, and the overall Startup Societies movement, however, without the recognized right of self-determination, these projects have uncertain futures.

The bargaining process of self-determination also allows us to discover the ideal and desired level of local or municipal government devolution, as a national government would always have to negotiate with local governments and take its demands seriously, since they could leave the country at any time. Liechtenstein illustrates this with its high level of local devolution.

Finally, as also illustrated in Liechtenstein with its mix of prince, parliament, direct democracy and local governance, a government that is subject to self-determination will tend to try to offer its citizens a maximum number of avenues for political action or activism, as this reduces the wish to become independent. The more you feel you can change the way your government functions, the less you feel inclined to get rid of that government altogether. From personal experience, I can tell you that in Liechtenstein, meeting with regulators, members of parliament, or other elected officials is the easiest thing in the world – they are always ready to meet anybody at very short notice, and take any proposal that may be beneficial for the country very, very seriously, no matter who brings it to them.

As a side note, Spain for example could learn a lot from all of this, Perhaps Catalonia would not wish to secede if it was in a position where its right to do so was guaranteed, and where it would therefore be able to seriously negotiate with the Spanish government. Instead, the Spanish government refuses to recognize their right to self-determination and acts as if their independence is simply impossible and not even worth trying to reach a compromise on.

Prince Hans-Adam essentially makes this point when he says:

Only a strong direct democracy and the end of the state monopoly on its territory will turn the state in the third millennium into a service company that will serve the people. It seems to be the only way to guarantee that the state is not misused by monarchs and oligarchs to oppress and plunder the people. If indirect democracy is the democracy of illiterates, then direct democracy and the right of self-determination at the local level is the democracy of educated people.

Is Liechtenstein so free because it is educated, though? This is an interesting question. Liechtenstein’s freedom cannot be exclusively thanks to the Prince’s wisdom, for that would never have been enough if his people totally opposed what he was saying. There are a mix of overlapping and interlinked factors. High trust and loyalty towards the Princely family is part of this, in part due to the family’s long history of benevolent and wise leadership. A respect for and will to conserve tradition is a big factor, as well as the principality’s highly religious population.

But I have a fairly unique theory to add to all. You see, Liechtenstein lies on the banks of the Rhine, and historically, before the construction of dams, the river used to periodically overflow, thereby flooding everything in the valley and causing massive destruction. Being right below alpine peaks, Liechtenstein also suffered from regular avalanches, delivering destruction from above. These two constant occurrences meant that Liechtensteiners have had to develop their culture in a context of ever-repeating cycles of reconstruction and destruction which required high rates of savings. Add to that the fact that until very recently, Liechtenstein was an exclusively agricultural, mountain farming community. Liechtenstein is not an extremely fertile place, and mountain farming is a very demanding, and not particularly efficient practice.

Such a lifestyle requires a lot of forward-thinking preparation to survive, and it is my belief that it has resulted in a systematically low, culturally-imbued time preference. Time preference, for those who are not aware, refers to how much you prefer a present good over a future good. A high time preference means that you prefer short term satisfaction even at high future costs, while a low time preference generally means that you prefer long term (perhaps even cross-generational) satisfaction even at high present costs.

Low time preference in society is obviously more likely to lead to conservative and libertarian governance, while high time preference favors more destructive ideologies and lifestyles such as communism and hedonism. And allow me to say, in all of my travels, I have never met a lower time preference society than Liechtenstein’s.

However, as I said at the beginning, I don’t think you should, or can move to Liechtenstein. You may still get involved with the Principality in other ways, though. The princely family runs an Austrian Economics Think Tank called the ECAEF, and every year they hold an essay contest called the Vernon Smith Prize for the Advancement of Austrian Economics, two and a half years ago at the age of 19 they gave me third prize, this year you have until the 11th of November to participate. They also hold a conference in Liechtenstein called the Gottfried von Haberler conference during the last week of May, and I would love to see some of you there.

A version of this speech was given at the Corax Conference, July 28-30, 2017. Originally published at Jacobite Magazine.

View Details

A Mises podcast.

View Details

There is a disproportionate buzz about the newly signed Florida legislation that allows its school districts (each at its own discretion) to authorize concealed carry of firearms by teachers in their schools.

Why disproportionate? Because the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, signed into law in March 2018 soon after the Parkland mass shooting, had already established the “Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program” named after the coach who gave his life attempting to shield students with his body during that shooting. That program gave school boards the option of allowing school staff members to carry firearms, excluding most classroom teachers who were not JROTC teachers, or current service members, or current or former law enforcement officers.

Last year’s bill established a tough training standard, and left the decision to local school boards, both very good things. And since school staff who are not classroom teachers often comprise as high as 50% of the total, this approach was rational, if overly cautious, as school boards would still have the authority to approve or disapprove any applicant, without the no-teacher provision imposed by law.

The only change with the new law is that now all classroom teachers are also eligible to volunteer for the Guardian program. Note “eligible” and “volunteer” and you will understand why so much of the near-hysterical opposition to this law is baseless.

Of course, no one is actually “arming” any teachers — there is no arms room where they will line up to be issued weapons before filing into the trenches — much less “all” teachers, which is how the opposition likes to frame its strawman argument. They will arm themselves, if their school board votes to implement the Guardian program, and if they individually volunteer, pass rigorous screening and selection, and complete the legally mandated 132 hours of training. No one is guaranteed approval, and the standards they must meet are high.

The Miami New Times, not known for smart or principled positions on any firearms issue, is one of the media outlets appalled that the legislature and governor, elected by citizens to legislate and govern, have not allowed themselves to be ruled by teachers’ unions, high school students, and some school boards and administrators. All those folks display their statist leanings by wanting to impose their own fears of positive protective measures on everyone. Under Florida law, if they (and, pointedly, the voters in their school districts) do not want to implement the Guardian program, they don’t have to. They can keep the Gun Free Zone signs over their doors and hope for the best. But that’s not enough for them; they think they know better than anyone else what is best for every school district in Florida.

Local control on this issue is a sound and sensible approach, in line with the rule of subsidiarity, the concept that decision-making should occur at the lowest level appropriate to its purpose. Local control is often preferable to decision making by officials far-removed from the affected population, less responsive to their local and regional preferences, and more likely to impose one-size-fits-all solutions. Voters can more easily influence or replace an unresponsive local elected official than his state or federal counterparts. Here it means what Florida and many other states have ruled: let the school districts decide for themselves.

Beyond that repugnant statist attitude, opponents of “arming” school staff try to bolster their argument with unsupportable claims and sloppy ‘research’ — textbook examples of confirmation bias, the tendency to only consider evidence that supports one’s preconceived notions. The Miami New Times cites an analysis by Gabrielle Giffords’ anti-gun organization that purports to show how dangerous introducing “more guns” to schools will be. It is such a sloppy piece of research and reasoning that I cannot let it go unanswered.

This long piece cites 67 “incidents of mishandled guns in schools” from all over America, from 2014 to the present, to support their opposition to concealed carry of firearms by school staff who meet the requirements of Florida’s Guardian program. But here’s the rub: only one of these 67 incidents involved a school staffer carrying a firearm under similar requirements. That one involved a Texas superintendent who left her authorized firearm locked in a district vehicle when she and her staff visited another district where she was not authorized to carry it – and then forgot to recover the weapon and left it in the van overnight, to be found in the morning.

Every other incident on this list actually supports the premises behind Florida’s Guardian program, and similar programs in the many other states with similar laws on the books. Not one carefully vetted armed staff member carrying a concealed firearm with knowledge and approval of their school board, in accordance with strict standards, in well over 1,000 schools around the country, was involved in any of the other 66 incidents cited.

Fifteen of the incidents on this list involved subjects who were not staff members at all; some of these were commissioned officers, while others were merely family members or or other visitors carrying firearms on school property in violation of the law. Another incident involved two coaches, but occurred off school property. Desperate to plump up the numbers, are we?

(For a tabulation of the incidents the Giffords piece cites, see here.)

What this list actually does is to demolish the assertion often made by opponents of armed school staff, that guns in school should be left to the “armed professionals.” While the Miami New Times quotes some who seem to believe that armed officers make schools safer, Giffords does not think so, and on this point at least, we can at least understand the sentiment. Fully 27 of the 67 incidents in the Giffords study involve “armed professionals” — commissioned police officers or deputies assigned to a school, officers responding to a call for assistance or visiting for other reasons, or other uniformed security guards or school resource officers employed on site. These “armed professionals” had unintentional discharges (several of which injured themselves or others), left their weapons in restrooms or elsewhere unattended, and in two egregious cases, failed to stop a child from pulling the trigger of their holstered weapon.

So much for "armed professionals" — we who are armed professionals know how little sustained, realistic, demanding training most officers undergo, and how easily complacency creeps in. Uniformed guards — commissioned or not — are not ten feet tall. They are unfortunately sometimes less dedicated and often less proficient than educators who understand their responsibilities “in loco parentis” and undergo rigorous and frequent training required by law and school district policy. Who has not heard educators saying, “we would sacrifice our lives to protect the kids in our care”? Give the tools and the skills to those who are willing, and they can do better than just sacrifice themselves like Coach Feis did at Parkland.

This is not to say that officers are all deficient in their skills and judgment — far from it — or that they cannot train to a high standard; but we who are trainers know without a shadow of a doubt that motivated civilians can do just as well, with the proper training. In the schools as on the streets, they are not volunteering to act as law enforcement officers, which is a very broad skill set indeed, but only to protect innocents against lethal threats — a very narrow skill set that comprises only a small slice of a police officer’s responsibilities.

In fact, what we do know is that responding police — even when do not have unintentional discharges like several in this list — do not protect schools against active shooters, because they almost always arrive too late; and that uniformed officers on site have a very spotty record. The uncertainty in a potential aggressor’s mind that is created by the prospect of an unknown number of trained staff members carrying concealed weapons at various but unpredictable locations throughout a school, appears to be a better deterrent than one uniformed officer, as evidenced by the complete absence of active shooter incidents in such schools. Arguably, if one is swayed by logic, they will prove to be a more effective and flexible defense as well, if that unprecedented day does arrive when a shooting happens in their school.

Again, with the exception of that Texas superintendent, none of these incidents involved an approved, trained, school staff member carrying a concealed weapon. The closest thing to it is the anomalous case of a teacher in Utah in 2014. State law there allows any resident with a concealed carry permit to carry in the schools. There is no requirement to even notify the school board or administration, much less be vetted or approved, or to be trained to any standard beyond the 8 hours of mostly classroom training required for a permit. This teacher dropped her weapon in a toilet stall (before school, with no students in the building); it discharged, shattering the bowl and cutting her calf with a flying shard. That’s not a laughing matter, or not only a laughing matter, but should be taken in context. Utah’s law has been in place for 20 years, and out of 700,000 citizens with concealed carry permits (14 million person-years?), this is the only reported occasion in which anyone has been injured by a legal concealed carrier’s firearm in a Utah school. And she doesn’t work there any more. It may also be significant that Utah has had no mass shootings in its schools, but we can only speculate. Pretty safe state, Utah, for all that their statute is far less prescriptive than Florida’s or many other states.

Gifford titles its piece “Every Incident of Mishandled Guns in Schools” and assures us that theirs is a “systematic analysis,” and that this list of 67 incidents is “comprehensive” for the date range of 2014-2014. But in reality, theirs is a list of those who violate the law and/or handle firearms incompetently — precisely the sort who are unlikely to volunteer in the first place, or to pass a careful vetting and selection process, or a demanding, standards-based training program, as required by statute in Florida and many other states that authorize concealed carry by school staff.

The actions of criminals and incompetents do not form a rational basis for criticizing or opposing these programs, which have been successful everywhere they are in place. Giffords has absolutely failed to make a case against armed school staff members in districts that opt in, under authorizing state law, with well-drafted programs and requirements.

Opponents of protecting our schools and children with armed staff on site will have to do better than this, to make a case worth listening to.

View Details

Boris and the Conservatives won the General Election with a very good majority. In truth, opposition parties stood little chance of success against the Tory strategists, who controlled the narrative despite a hostile media. At the centre of their slick operation was Dominic Cummings, who masterminded the Brexit leave vote, winning the referendum against all the betting in 2016. It was Cummings who arranged for the Tory Remainers to fall on their swords, which by removing the whip reduced the Tory ranks, making them appear vulnerable enough for the opposition parties to tear up the requirement for a supermajority and vote for a general election.

It was straight out of Sun Tzu’s playbook: “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” The way the Remainers were removed was both brutal and public. On September 3, fifteen of them went for a meeting in Downing Street, obviously convinced, with Johnson only having a parliamentary majority of one, that they were in a very strong position to negotiate either for a second referendum or Brexit in name only. Dismissing them, Cummings was blunt to the point of rudeness: “I don’t know who any of you are.” And they left with nothing.

Observers at the time saw this as suicidal, but Cummings appears to have known what he was doing. The hapless rebels had no coherent plan other than to threaten, and their bluff was called. Better, it seems that Cummings concluded, to purge the parliamentary party of serial rebels than to be beholden to them.

Much has been written about how the election victory was won. About the focus groups, about listening to Labour voters. About the "Get Brexit Done" slogan. But Sun Tzu Cummings also encouraged Labour to hang themselves. The Tories kicked off addressing the number one concern of ordinary people, tackling crime. Then came the NHS — more nurses and hospitals. This was a carefully set trap, getting the Marxists in Labour to outbid the Tories on spending to patently ridiculous levels. Having set down that route, they added nationalising water, trains, and broadband. Everyone then knew that Labour promises were not only a joke, but downright dangerous. The Conservatives' promises were just deliverable, particularly since they were prepared to sacrifice an earlier promise to cut corporation tax.

What Now? Obviously, Britain will leave the EU on or before January 31 next. All of 2020 subsequently is set to be taken up in trade negotiations with the EU, which will not be extended. The first post-Brexit negotiation of note will be over fisheries policies and the right of access to British waters for EU fishing vessels, due to be agreed by July 1 and implemented after the transition period.

The hope initially expressed by establishment figures in both Westminster and Brussels was that with a thumping majority the Conservatives would soften their Brexit demands, because it is no longer beholden to the ERG, an alliance of free marketeers in the Conservative parliamentary party. This being the case, it was argued, British demands for a return to total sovereignty over British fishing waters could be compromised in the context of wider negotiations. This is what always happens in Brussels, and the establishment on both sides assumes the British will continue to play that game. But the Remainers have not been paying attention: the way in which the Conservative rebels were dealt with is the new negotiating philosophy.

Far from taking the opportunity of a large Conservative majority to soften their stance in negotiations, all the indications (for those who bother to look rather than just assume) are that the British will take a firmer negotiating stance. If the EU tries to blackmail the UK over fisheries — France being an obvious instigator given her powerful fishing lobby, and Spain over Gibraltar, which has nothing to do with fisheries — the British will be prepared to walk away from negotiations, because at that point, the Political Declaration will be breeched, not by the British, but by the EU.

In truth, the negotiating power has shifted firmly to Britain from the EU. Brussels will be dealing with a new anti-establishment administration, unsympathetic toward the Brussels bureaucratic administration and determined to free the UK from as much of it as possible. The Brits are now focused, and Sun Tzu strategically clever with it.

Dominic Cummings possesses an exceptional intellect. His tutor in ancient history at Oxford, Robin Lane-Fox, reckoned him to be altogether in a different league to Boris Johnson. But Johnson is no slouch, either, and with backgrounds in the classics the two work well together. Other notable brains are Jacob Rees-Mogg, Sajid Javid, Michael Gove, Dominic Raab, and Priti Patel. Collectively, the leading lights in the Johnson cabinet stand head and shoulders intellectually above any other cabinet seen for a long time.

The ERG, whose members are drawn from the pool of Conservative MPs that favors a free market approach over statist intervention, has enjoyed a substantial influx of members from the new parliamentary intake. A definite shift towards free market, one-nation conservatism has taken place. This is not what an arrogant establishment readily understands or wants. In the corridors of Westminster, establishment figures will now have an added concern: the threat to their bureaucratic power and even their jobs. They are used to a Downing Street whose time horizon is never more than a few days. It will now actively plan for the future.

The New Political and Economic Philosophies Leading members of the new cabinet are philosophically free traders, whose politics favour lower government intervention and lower taxes, fostering entrepreneurial ambition and encouraging wealth creation. A smaller government focused on outcomes will be a lesser burden on productive society and also provide the means of affording the best public services on a cost-effective basis. We have heard similar intentions before from incoming Conservatives, but this time there is a greater determination for it to be delivered, and with Cummings in charge of the special advisers (Spads), it is perhaps more likely to succeed.

While we can only guess at his true understanding of the benefits of free markets over socialism, Johnson has dropped a few clues that he has some knowledge of the economic issues involved. He quoted Bastiat’s broken window fallacy in an article for the Daily Telegraph on September 15, 2017, which only a genuine free trader who has discarded Keynesian intervention will understand. Equally encouraging was his remark at a private function in June 2018, when he said “F[…] business,” which was aimed at business lobbyists, otherwise known as crony capitalists seeking preference over everyone else.

These hopes are usually buried by the reality of government. But there is some hope that over the course of this parliament and next the UK will gradually free the economy from overbearing government intervention. While also being an advocate for the private sector, Cummings has a managerial approach. From his writings, we know he is a believer in the use of soft power to enhance a nation’s prospects. He quotes Thucydides, who described Athens as the school for Greece, with his ambition for Britain to be the school for the world. In other words, Britain will need to foster and develop the highest levels of education, technological know-how, and entrepreneurial opportunity if it is to progress as a nation relative to the powers of tomorrow such as China and India.

Having grabbed the reins of government, Cummings intends to finance his objectives by slashing bureaucracy and centralising political power in the hands of a few key players. Thence his intention that the cabinet be substantially reduced from the current thirty-three members.

What appears to be absent, if only because the subject has not yet arisen, is an understanding of money, the relationship between budgets, trade balances, savers, and the credit cycle. Generally, politicians delegate monetary matters to the central bank. This government will be no different. But the current governor of the Bank of England is due to retire at the end of January, a date that may be shifted because it now coincides with Brexit. We can be sure the necessary qualification for a candidate will be acceptability to the world of central banking — in other words, another inflationist.

Sajid Javid, chancellor of the exchequer, says he intends to borrow to finance infrastructure spending while keeping a tight rein on current spending. Every incoming finance minister says something similar, betraying a Keynesian approach to the relationship between government and the wider economy. Besides ignoring Bastiat’s parable on broken windows, any increase in government borrowing not met by an increase in savers’ savings is inflationary. If Javid truly believes he can separate current from investment spending and therefore follow sound money policies, he fails to understand economics at its most basic level. Doubtless Cummings would sweep this concern to one side on the basis that investment in infrastructure, particularly for northern constituencies, is necessary to convert regional voters fully from Labour to Conservative and secure office for the whole decade. And in time, it would be covered by funds released through more effective administration.

The Establishment Is Due for an Enormous Shake-Up To understand in a little more detail what the Johnson administration plans to do, we need to take a step back. Over much of 2019, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and a few others were actively planning to oust Mrs. May and replace her with Johnson. In its early stages, the plans had little support in the parliamentary party, though Boris was wildly popular with grassroots Conservatives. But when Mrs. May was forced to defer Brexit until after the EU elections in May, Nigel Farage swept the board in those elections with his Brexit Party, and it was clear that the Conservatives, without a firm Brexit commitment, would be wiped out in Westminster. Mrs. May was forced to resign, Johnson’s campaign gathered momentum, and he became prime minister in July.

Three days before becoming prime minister, Johnson invited Cummings and his original Vote Leave team to work again with him to deliver Brexit. Cummings was appointed a special adviser to the prime minister and is now the chief Spad, controlling all ministerial Spads across government. As a former senior civil servant put it, “Mr. Cummings told all Whitehall’s Spads that he was now effectively their line manager, rather than their Secretaries [sic] of State.” It is no exaggeration to say that Cummings now exercises more control over the permanent civil service than any permanent secretary, as well as a high degree of control over elected politicians appointed as ministers.

With Johnson’s support, Cummings has plans for radically reforming the establishment. In a lecture given at the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2014, he said his wish list would include rule changes to enable ministers based in the House of Lords to be questioned in the House of Commons. He believed the cabinet should be shrunk from some thirty ministers to six or seven. When he was Michael Gove’s Spad of education, he wanted to push through reforms to ensure that less money was spent on process and more on objectives, but he lacked the power for wholesale reform. He ensured so far as he was able that spending was on improvements to the education system instead of ministerial flights of fancy, from which Gove, to his credit, was generally free. Cummings's strategic success at education is now planned to be extended throughout all ministerial departments, and the money saved should be considerable, enough to meet spending objectives and provide tax cuts in due course.

The problem with the civil service is that during the Blair years it became overly bureaucratic. Tony Blair’s government paid enormous sums to management consultants to advise and implement improvements. Unfortunately, payments to consultants became linked to the length of time they spent on contracts, time which was extended by introducing detailed and procedure-heavy checks and balances on every aspect of government spending. The practice extended to contracts given to the private sector, forcing enormous bureaucracy onto projects such as HS2 (the high-speed rail link from London to the North), which, before any track has been laid, is already due to run substantially over budget. A simple task which should cost something in the low hundreds becomes thousands.

As Cummings put it in his speech to the Progressive Policy think tank in November 2014, employment policy in the civil service encourages failure. There is very little incentive to reduce regulation, and no incentive to save money, because the treasury is primarily interested in power over the system. Cummings says that civil servants are overpaid for what they are meant to do, are interested in process and empire building, and never take the blame for things that go wrong, which happens more often than not.

If Cummings gets his way (and he is the most powerful operator in the new administration) the civil service will see substantial change, leading to less bureaucratic waste and better decision-making. The all-encompassing power of the treasury will be broken. After Brexit, we can also expect a radically slimmed-down cabinet, giving greater control at the centre of government, but at the same time power is likely to be devolved from the Westminster establishment to the regions. Electoral reform will follow, with a planned reduction in Westminster seats from 650 to 600, favouring the Conservatives, and the Fixed-Term Parliament Act rescinded. Reform of the House of Lords, particularly given their Brexit-blocking tactics, seems likely to be on the agenda as well.

The establishment has lost and will be heavily punished. The influence and cost of bureaucracy will be curtailed, and the costs released will be apportioned between final objectives (police, nurses, hospitals, etc.) and cuts in taxation. The objective is to reverse the current Pareto principle at play, in which it seems 80 percent is spent on process while 20 percent is spent on final objectives. If it can be achieved, the prospects for Britain relative to other nations in the EU, which are bound by their bureaucracy, will improve greatly.

Public Investment Policy Despite senior ministers being free traders at heart, government plans for intervention will increase its role in the economy. The closest parallel is probably China, whose government gives private individuals and their businesses a framework of five-year plans within which to develop. Instead of five-year plans, the UK government works to an electoral cycle of five years with no certainty of continuation. The first priority will be to deliver infrastructure and regional government hubs to the North, with particular emphasis on newly converted constituencies to ensure future loyalty.

Transport, better broadband, and mobile signals are on the agenda. State support for research will allow technology hubs to devolve beyond the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle, beefing up the northern universities. Cummings is known to favour copying the US’s Advanced Projects Research Agency, designed to develop military technology, with a British equivalent pursuing a wider commercial objective.

Johnson is also a keen proponent of free ports, where goods can be moved in and out without paying customs duties. Alternatively, businesses working within a designated free port area benefit from duty-free imports and from a cluster effect through the attraction of other businesses. Free ports, which include airports, are a simple way to target local development.

A Credit Crisis Is Due during Trade Negotiations Although the Johnson/Cummings plans hold much promise, there is an exogenous factor likely to threaten them. The global credit cycle appears to be on the turn, and with it will come a systemic crisis.

There are signs (for example, the repo crisis in New York and mounting problems in eurozone banks) that the periodic credit crisis that always follows a period of credit expansion is imminent. If it breaks out before January 31, the government will undoubtedly face pressure to put Brexit on hold. The civil servants in the treasury and the Bank of England in particular will almost certainly try to persuade the government to extend the implementation period and even reverse Brexit, but with Johnson and Cummings in charge, it is unlikely to be delayed. Following Brexit, however, Britain may still be faced with contractual obligations to the EU in the event of an EU banking crisis during the negotiating period. There can be little doubt that it would be an enormous mess, likely to undermine the course of planned government spending.

The blame game will then commence. With Britain having established that you can, after all, leave Hotel California, the political adhesion that binds EU member states together will almost certainly be weakened by economic reality. A rational expectation would be that mounting problems would encourage a more realistic EU policy regarding Brexit and trade negotiations. But the relationship between the EU’s panjandrums and reality is barely tangential, so it would be sensible to expect talks to break down in these circumstances.

Therefore, in the event of a global or European credit crisis taking place, a so-called no-deal Brexit becomes an increased possibility. But this is unlikely to worry the new Conservative government, which is inclined towards free trade anyway. It’s just good politics to have someone else to blame.

View Details

The US Senate is increasingly targeted by left-wing think tanks and legislators for the fact it is based on "voter inequality." According to critics, the Senate ensures small states are "overrepresented,"and the body favors voters in smaller and more sparsely populated states. In contrast, reformers hold up the concept of "one man, one vote" as an ideal and a solution.

"One man, one vote" is not a clearly defined concept, but it is often used to oppose legislative schemes used in federal political systems. Among these schemes is the US Senate in which each state is given an equal vote so as to balance out the interests of small states against the interests of large states. Large states, of course, dominate legislatures in population-based representation systems like that used in the US House of Representatives.

[RELATED: "To the Left: Stop Whining About Wyoming's Two Measly Senate Votes" by Ryan McMaken]

The US is not alone in using such measures. The Australian Senate, for example, allots twelve members to each state. The Senate of Canada is composed of appointed members who represent regions rather than individual provinces. Regional representation is not based on population size as in the House of Commons. In the Swiss Council of States, each canton is represented by two members, regardless of size.Into the mid-twentieth century, individual US states often employed non-population-based apportionment in their own senates. In some cases, each county was represented by one or two senators, regardless of the county's size. Eventually in the federal courts, the "one man, one vote" principle was instrumental in ending this system. These rulings essentially turned state senates into just smaller versions of each state's house of representatives

Non-population-based methods can be used in elections as well. The American electoral college system is one example. Another example is the Swiss method of "double majority," in which some legislation requires approval by both the overall Swiss population (using a "one man, one vote" principle) and also by a majority vote in a majority of the cantons.

Naturally, systems like these give power to a relatively small number of voters from small cantons or states to exercise a veto in the election. For example, if a double majority system were employed in US presidential elections, a president could win an overwhelming majority in the popular vote, but be defeated by a coalition of small-state voters who are able to deny the needed majorities from twenty-six of the fifty states.

Those who support "one man, one vote" oppose this sort of thing because they think straight-up majorities should have the final say in every legislative matter.

Why Big and Powerful States and Regions Must Be Restrained Switzerland, however, provides us insights into why simple majorities tend to be a problem. The Swiss confederation is a makeshift conglomeration of regions and cities with varying interests depending on the linguistic, religious, and cultural preferences of the population in each area. Some areas are Catholic and some are Protestant. Some areas are French speaking, and other areas are German or Italian speaking.

These differences were even more significant in the past, so the confederation was designed with some anti-majoritarian measures to prevent any small number of highly populated regions from steamrolling over the rest of the country. If, say, the German-speaking cantons became very populous, then a system based on rank majority vote would mean that the German-speakers could ram their preferences down the throats of everyone else. The same might be said if one religious group gained a majority.

What the "one man, one vote" advocates would have us believe, however, is that there is no need to balance these interests. In their view, if there are more pro-French voters in Switzerland, than so be it: everyone must now do what the French-speaking majority says.

Applied to the US, we see this frequently pushed by progressives: the federalist measures designed to provide additional voting power to smaller states are denounced as "undemocratic" and we're told that if Californians and New Yorkers have an overwhelming number of votes, then that's just tough luck for everyone else. The minority must do what the majority says, even if those people have very different interests from the majorities in New York or California.

The way the Left shunts this argument aside is by insisting that there aren't any real differences between people in, say, South Dakota, and people in New Jersey. If there are differences, it is because people are South Dakota are intellectual troglodytes and their opinions shouldn't matter. This problem is solved by forcing "one man, one vote" on everyone so that South Dakotans' unacceptable political views are neutralized by far larger majorities in faraway cities.

Historically, such claims would have been regarded as ridiculous. No one denied that there were significant cultural differences between the Pietists of New England and the Catholics and Lutherans of the Great Lakes region. Even setting aside religious or ethnic differences, various regions of the nation had very different economic needs depending on what industries—agricultural, maritime, or manufacturing—were dominant in the region. It was recognized that agricultural areas ought to be able to offer legislative resistance to new laws designed to favor manufacturers at the expense of farmers. In case an accident of history occurred by which one group became more populous than the other, many thought it would be prudent to put safeguards in place to prevent one region from dominating the other.

Cultural differences, of course, have been historically undeniable in Switzerland. Although there has been cultural convergence in recent decades, few would suggest that Italian-speaking Catholics in the south agree with northern German Protestants on all important matters. Differences are real, and a healthy respect for self-determination and human rights suggests that local cultures ought not be subject to the will of a distant majority.

Chinese Voters Would Out-Vote Everybody This fundamental principle can be more easily illustrated in a hypothetical confederation with China as a member.

How should the governance of this organization be organized?

Using a unicameral legislature predicated on "one man, one vote" presents an obvious problem: the Chinese would obviously out-vote all the other countries on a regular basis. Even if South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan all voted together as a block, their relatively small population sizes could not possibly allow them to veto pro-China measures pushed by a majority of Chinese voters. Because of China's size, any other members of the confederation would quickly realize that the USEA was really just a union dominated by China most of the time.

On the other hand, a remedy could lie in creating requirements for double majorities or in assigning equal representation to all members in a senate. This would moderate China's power. If these steps were taken, though, the "one man, one vote party" advocates would object and insist that China's dominance is perfectly fine because all the voters deserve equal representation and it would be "unfair" to give Japanese voters the same number of votes in the USEA senate as China. Chinese voters would be disenfranchised!

Moreover, the "one man, one vote" advocates—were they to use the same arguments used in the US—would claim that if the people of Japan and Indonesia are unwilling to live by "the will of the majority" among "all voters" in the USEA, it just illustrates how backward and undemocratic those Japanese and Indonesians are. "Democracy," we'd be told, demands that every voter, whether Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese must count equally.

Clearly, such a situation would quickly lead to the dissolution of the USEA, whether peacefully or through violence.

Yes, it's true that the cultural differences between people in New York and people in Utah are not as stark as the differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. But the fundamental principles behind the need for federalism in the USEA and in the USA are the same.

View Details

In the wake of the Brexit vote, Scottish nationalists have renewed their calls for a new referendum on Scottish independence. But many remain unconvinced, and many claim Scotland is "too small" to be an independent country. Others claim that Scotland is too poor, since Scotland's GDP per capita is only 90 percent that of England.

But by no measure is Scotland a "poor" country. It may be poorer than England, but Scotland's GDP per capita puts it about halfway down the rankings of all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. That means it's similar to France and Japan by this measure.

If Scotland is relatively less well off than many other rich Western nations, there is no reason to assume that this is due to its size. With 5.4 million people, Scotland is about the same size as New Zealand and Finland, and only slightly smaller than Denmark. None of these countries are "barely scraping by."

Yet this hasn't stopped critics from claiming that even the United Kingdom is itself small. Scottish pundit George Galloway, for instance, denounced the idea of Scottish independence because it would "break up this small country.” He meant the United Kingdom. The UK, however, is larger than all but twenty countries. If Scotland seceded, the Rump UK would still be the most populous in Europe except for Germany, France, and (of course) Russia.

Bigger Is Not Better But why this obsession over bigness? There is no evidence that bigger countries are wealthier, happier, or more orderly than small countries.

After all, many of Europe's wealthiest countries have fewer than 10 million people. Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland are among the wealthiest places on earth.

If anything, experience suggests that bigness is an impediment to health and wealth.

For instance, in his new book on American secession, F. H. Buckley notes that small northern European countries tend to be relatively wealthy and healthy. But this isn't due to these countries' supposed socialism. More likely, these countries are notable for their economic and political stability because they have small populations with a high degree of social cohesion. Buckley notes Finland, for example, is

one of the richest and least corrupt countries in the world. It also has the kind of social cohesion and unity that only small countries can have….If the country were twenty times bigger, it would be more diverse and less unified. Its leaders would be more remote from the people, and their policies more tainted by interest group corruption.

Americans, of course, don't think this way. Living in a huge and diverse country ruled by a distant political elite in a city thousands of miles away might seem normal to many Americans. But it's not normal for most of the world's most well-off populations.

Nevertheless, Buckley writes in the New York Post:

[The United States is] overly big, one of the biggest countries in the world. Smaller countries are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.

Buckley employs the usual statistical comparisons popular among social scientists today, and he concludes that bigness is not necessarily an obstacle to relative safety, prosperity, and social cohesion. But it doesn't help. And there are steps that can be taken to lessen the effects of largeness. Decentralization helps, as does the presence of a relatively high degree of economic freedom. But it appears that the US is prosperous in spite of its size rather than because of it.

The Economics of Small Countries Indeed, small countries have been notable for their economic success. The authors of a study from the World Bank ("Small States, Small Problems?") conclude that "controlling for location, smaller states are actually richer than other states in per capita GDP." It is true that, because of their small size, these countries can be more susceptible to volatility in times of economic crisis. This is partly driven by the fact that small countries tend to be more interconnected with other countries in terms of trade and investment. But the authors conclude: "their openness pays off in growth."

Research devoted to the issue of smallness as a national economic characteristic has been relatively sparse. Nonetheless, it has been observed that small countries were notable in the days of the Great Depression because they "adjusted better." Small countries have been of interest since the end of the Cold War, because they embraced economic globalization quickly.

For instance, in the 1990s, although many pundits and social theorists warned that the post-Cold-War break-up of large countries into smaller ones posed an economic danger, the empirical evidence suggested otherwise. Economist Gary Becker noted, "since 1950 real per capita GDP has risen somewhat faster in smaller nations than it has in bigger ones." Becker concluded that "the statistics on actual performance show that dire warnings about the economic price suffered by small nations are not all warranted….Smallness can be an asset in the division of labor in the modern world, where economies are linked through international transactions." Of the fourteen countries with populations over 100 million, only the US and Japan are wealthy.

None of this should be shocking. As historian Ralph Raico has shown, Europe's rise to prominence as a world economic power was driven in large part by the smallness of Europe's political jurisdictions in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. A lack of large states meant a higher degree of de facto economic freedom. This meant more economic growth. The rise of large states and absolutist regimes during the Renaissance was in many cases an impediment to growth, not a driver of it.

But what about metrics beyond income?

When it comes to crime, there are three big ways to achieve low homicide rates: be authoritarian (i.e., Saudi Arabia and Vietnam), be ethnically and culturally uniform (i.e., Japan), or be small. Indeed, countries with remarkably low homicide rates include Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Malta. At the other end of the spectrum are large diverse countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.China's official crime statistics point toward low homicide rates, but China is notorious for manipulating metrics of this sort. However, given that it is one of the world's more intrusive surveillance states, it is possible that homicide rates are quite low, as reported. India—nominally a "democracy" has become increasingly authoritarian and prone to ethnic and religious strife. It's homicide rate—not even counting terrorist-related killings—is a matter of dispute. As noted by Shoban Sexena at The Wire, India's official homicide statistics are well below what is estimated by outside sources. Sexena concludes "India doesn’t fall into the category of hyper-violent societies, but the sheer high number of murders make it one of the most dangerous countries."

Nor is smallness a problem in terms of health. While small countries don't necessarily outpace medium-sided countries like Spain or Italy in terms of life expectancy, we see once again it's the large countries that tend to struggle by this measure.

Some researchers have paired these metrics with survey data to compile an alleged "happiness index." While survey data should always be taken with a grain of salt, it's not entirely implausible that in the World Happiness Report, we find that no country with more than 50 million people ranks in the top ten.

[[{"fid":"87966","view_mode":"image_no_caption","fields":{"format":"image_no_caption","alignment":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"happiness","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_caption_text[und][0][value]":"","field_image_file_link[und][0][value]":""},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"image_no_caption","alignment":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"happiness","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_caption_text[und][0][value]":"","field_image_file_link[und][0][value]":""}},"attributes":{"alt":"happiness","class":"media-element file-image-no-caption","data-delta":"1"}}]]

Source: World Happiness Report 2018 and UN Population estimates. The Geopolitical Problem In spite of their economic and social advantages, small states are nonetheless eschewed by many because they are presumed to be weak in geopolitical and military contests. These concerns often drive the creation of larger states. To state it more precisely: it is assumed that there are advantages of economies of scale in military affairs.

Militarists, of course, tend to come down on the side of presuming that one can never be too safe in terms of building up a huge military apparatus. Among the worst offenders in this case have been American conservatives, whose intellectual godfather William F. Buckley once insisted so long as there are military threats to the US "we have got to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged…except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores."

More level-headed theorists, however, have recognized the downside of this sort of paranoia, and the fact remains that large states—although assumed by some to be militarily safer—often underperform in economic and social indicators. In the long term, this will negatively impact a state's ability to project power and to maintain stable alliances. Rich countries have greater access to the best military hardware, and they can wield soft power more easily than less rich ones.

For these reasons, even where defensive military coalitions are necessary, it is best to avoid centrally managed political and economic unity. After all, the presence of large and diverse populations within a single jurisdiction—a problem encountered by nearly every large country—comes with considerable costs. As noted in this study of the political economy of large countries, democratization drives populations in large diverse countries toward secession. That is, unless a state becomes dictatorial, largeness eventually leads to more instability—and presumably, greater geopolitical weakness.

The solution, not surprisingly, is decentralization, and the authors conclude, "rather than thinking about the division of the world into different countries, think about the division of a country into autonomous regions." If there is a need for "economies of scale" in terms of defensive capability, the need for social, economic, and political autonomy at a smaller scale remains of great importance.

The world, unfortunately, is moving for now very much in the opposite direction. Although the United States is clearly headed down the road of political and social disunity, the central state has only become more aggressive in asserting both economic and political control. Meanwhile, in Europe the EU—with the exception of the United Kingdom—asserts ever greater regulatory and unifying force. Promises of a liberalized China are as yet illusory.

This isn't to say that movements for greater decentralization and independence aren't bubbling under the surface. Those trends are there, but the machinery of the modern nation-states has yet to show much willingness to acknowledge the benefits of smallness and political independence.

View Details

When we hear of political movements in favor of decentralization and secession, the word "nationalist" is often used to describe them.

We have seen the word used in both the Scottish and Catalonian secession movements, and in the case of Brexit. Sometimes the term is intended to be pejorative. But not always.

When used pejoratively—as by the critics of Brexit—the implication is that the separatists seek to exit a larger political entity for the purposes of increasing isolation, throwing up greater barriers to trade, and pursuing a more autarkic economic policy. In other words, we're supposed to believe that efforts at decentralizing political systems leads to states becoming more oppressive and more protectionist.

But there's a problem with this claim, and with connecting protectionist nationalism to decentralization and secession: the act of breaking up political bodies into smaller pieces works contrary to the these supposed goals of nationalism.

That is, when a political jurisdiction is broken up into smaller independent units, those new units are likely to become more reliant on economic integration and trade, not less. This dependency increases as the country size becomes smaller. If the goals of the nationalists include economic autarky and isolation, nationalists will quickly find these goals very hard to achieve indeed.The use of the UK as an example here is primarily based on the fact it has moved from a larger borderless confederation (i.e., the EU) to a position as an independent state with much less direct access to a single market. Overall, for our purposes here, the UK can only be described as a "smaller" state and economy (compared to the EU), but not as a "small country." "Small" is a term best reserved for countries that are significantly smaller than the large European states of Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain. This would arguably include the Netherlands (with approx 25 million pop.) but would definitely include Switzerland (with 8 million pop.) and other states of similar size. And then there are the "microstates" (e.g., Luxembourg, Liechtenstein) with populations under one million.

This is true for at least three reasons.

One: Economic Self-Sufficiency Is Costly and Difficult Economic self-sufficiency—i.e., autarky—has long been a dream of protectionists. The idea here is that the population within a given state benefits when the residents of that state can cut themselves off from other states while still maintaining a high standard of living. Fueled by the false notion that imports represent economic losses for an economy, protectionists seek policies that block or minimize the importation of foreign goods.

Large countries can pull this off—for a little while. For countries with vast agricultural hinterlands, large industrial cities, and innovative service sectors, it is possible to move toward economic reliance on only domestic foodstuff, domestic raw materials, and domestic industry.

Over time, however, protectionist states begin to fall behind the rest of the world, which is presumably still engaging in international trade. It will become increasingly clear that the protectionist states are not keeping up in terms of their standards of living. This will have geopolitical implications as well, since protectionist countries will become relatively impoverished and relatively less innovative compared to other states. Protectionist states thus lose relative power both economically and militarily. We saw this at work in Latin America, for instance, when it was in the thrall of Dependency theory during the mid-twentieth century. The idea was that countries could become wealthier and more politically independent by reducing trade. The strategy failed miserably.

The process is the same with small countries, but the effects of protectionism become more apparent more quickly. After all, a small country that lacks a diverse economy or a large agricultural sector will quickly find itself running out of food, skilled labor, and raw materials. Moreover, a small country without close ties to other nations will quickly find itself in a very dangerous geopolitical position.

Perhaps not surprisingly, empirical studies have found that small countries tend to be more open to international trade than larger countries, and that

Ceteris paribus, small nations…become more trade-focused than large ones.

Indeed, this is the only way for them to prosper. As Gary Becker noted during the period when new post-Soviet states were entering the global marketplace,

Small nations are proliferating because economies can prosper by producing niche goods and services for world markets.

Small countries can't offer the world a wide variety of goods and services, but they can specialize and offer at least some goods or services for which there is global demand. Without doing this, small states have little hope of raising their standards of living. This is why economists Enrico Spolaore and Alberto Alesina concluded in 1995 that "smaller countries will need more economic integration" in order to benefit from independence.

This all suggests that the need to integrate becomes greater the smaller the state, and that the need for economic openness and integration are even greater for microstates—the smallest of the small states. William Esterly and Aart Kraay found in 1999, for example, that in spite of the "widely held view that small states suffer from their openness," financial "openness may help microstates insure against the large shocks they receive." This is in part due to the fact that financial openness "allows countries to share risks with the rest of the world."

The impetus for small states to pursue open trade policies exists even in the presence of potentially threatening larger states. In his study of how trade is affected by state size, Stephen Krasner notes that

Small states are likely to opt for openness because the advantages in terms of aggregate income and growth are so great, and their political power is bound to be restricted regardless of what they do.

Two: Smaller Countries Seek Tax Competition and Tax Arbitrage Trade isn't the only place where small states look to lessen regulatory burdens and tax burdens.

Smaller states also have a habit of competing with larger states by lowering tax rates. As recounted by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times, numerous small states were integrating into the European economy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Accoridng to Rachman:

Small and nimble nations slashed taxes and regulation to attract foreign capital and business. The Irish set some of the lowest corporation tax rates in Europe; the Balts and Slovaks went for flat taxes; Iceland became an improbable financial centre. International capital flooded into the smalls.

Did this mean that smaller states in general—at least those with easy access to Europe—tended to embrace lower tax tax rates? The answer appears to be yes. In a 2012 study author Franto Ricka concludes "capital tax rates in the EU countries are positively related to their size partly because small countries choose a lower tax on capital than larger countries, with which they compete." While large states can rely on economies of scale to keep capital from defecting in response to tax increases, small states have no such advantage. Thus, small states must be, as Ricka puts it "tougher competitors for scarce capital."

Moreover, Ricka found that the presence of small countries—and the tax competition they created—drove down tax rates in the larger countries.

Not surprisingly, large states have attempted to pressure small states into raising tax rates and embracing so-called tax harmonization. In early 2019, for example, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker pushed the idea of ending the ability of EU members to veto changes in tax policy so as to make tax rates across EU countries more equal. The relatively small states of Ireland and Hungary have long opposed such efforts. Malta has vehemently objected as well.

Europe isn't the only place with small states looking to attract capital with low tax rates. Small island nations in the Caribbean also function as tax havens and have earned the ire of the European Union's leadership.

When it comes to tax rates, it's the large states—and especially unions of large states like the EU—that are the drivers behind efforts to raise taxes worldwide. The efforts threaten to end the havens offered by smaller states looking to attract capital that would likely ignore small states otherwise.

Three: Small States Actually Perform Better Finally, as an added motivation to small states to lower trade barriers and tax rates, there is the empirical evidence showing that small states can achieve higher growth rates and higher standards of living through more liberal economic policy.

Economist Gary Becker in 1998 noted, "since 1950 real per capita GDP has risen somewhat faster in smaller nations than it has in bigger ones." Becker concluded that “the statistics on actual performance show that dire warnings about the economic price suffered by small nations are not all warranted….Smallness can be an asset in the division of labor in the modern world, where economies are linked through international transactions.” Of the fourteen countries with populations over 100 million, only the US and Japan are wealthy.

Moreover, Easterly and Kraay write: “controlling for location, smaller states are actually richer than other states in per capita GDP….microstates have on average higher income and productivity levels than small states, and grow no more slowly than large states,” the only “penalty of smallness” being the relatively higher GDP growth rates volatility due to trade exposure.

Nor are the indicators favoring small states based only on numbers like income and productivity.A 2014 report from Credit Suise titled "The Success of Small Countries" concludes: "If we add education, healthcare or intangible infrastructure as measures of success, we find that small countries do proportionately very well. For example, with respect to UN’s Human Development Index (which combines GNI per cap-ita, education and health metrics), small countries make up over half of the world’s top 30 countries." (https://www.ara.cat/2014/08/05/1187961194.pdf?hash=f2b1f4ba8c1b6bd92a473d05791bfb8fdad50e60) Nick Slater at Current Affairs observes that

[People] tend to live longer [in microstates]: out of the top ten countries in terms of life expectancy, nine could be considered microstates (of these, Switzerland is a bit of a stretch, but its population is still smaller than New York City’s). It can also be good for your bank account: the quality of life in European microstates like Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, and San Marino is perhaps the highest in the world.

Now, this isn't to say that smallness is a foolproof strategy for economic success. There's a reason Easterly and Kraay control for location in their comparisons. Other research suggests that small and remote countries tend to be uncompetitive.

But even in Africa, small states outperformed large states in economic growth. According to a 2007 report from the World Bank, the resilience of small states was likely due to the greater economic flexibility observed in them, and thanks to political stability. This stability, it is believed, stemmed in part from the fact that smaller African countries are less “ethnically fractionalized.”

Unilateralism Doesn't Mean Protectionism All too often, opponents of decentralization and secession insist that whenever a region, member state, or nation is allowed to go its own way, it will immediately raise trade barriers, raise taxes, and forget the benefits of international cooperation. Yet, in recent decades, there is scant evidence to suggest that this is a likely outcome in practice. It appears far more likely that seceding countries and territories will move away from economic nationalism and toward a more open economy.

View Details

When the Soviet Union began its collapse in 1989, the world witnessed decentralization and secession on a scale not seen in Europe since the nineteenth century.

Over the next several years, puppet regimes and states-in-name-only broke away from Soviet domination and formed sovereign states. Some states which had completely ceased to exist—such as the Baltic states—declared independence and became states in the own right. In total, secession and decentralization in this era brought about more than twenty newly independent states.

This period served as an important reminder that human history is not, in fact, just a story of ever increasing state power and centralization.

Since then, however, the world has seen very few successful secession movements. A handful of new countries have come into being over the past twenty years, such as East Timor and South Sudan. But in spite of many efforts by separatists worldwide, there have been few changes to the lines on the maps.

This has certainly been the case in Europe and the Americas, where from Quebec to Scotland to Catalonia to Venice demands for independence have been met with trepidation and sometimes outright threats of violence from central governments.

Countries Don't Like to Get Smaller This is partly due to the fact state organizations—that is, the people who control them—have little motivation to give up the benefits conferred by bigness. States that control larger geographic areas and larger populations have greater ability to project their power and get more power.

Greater size means a larger frontier that can act as a physical buffer between the state's enemies and the state's economic core. Physical size is also helpful in terms of pursuing self-sufficiency in both energy production and agriculture. More land means greater potential for resource extraction and acreage devoted to food production. From the state's perspective, these activities are good things because they can be taxed or expropriated.

In terms of population size, state control over larger populations means more human workers to tax, and, potentially, more highly productive urban workers. Historically at least, larger populations also provided personnel for military uses.

Thus, states that control large territories and populations are able to directly control larger and more diverse economies within their borders. This means more tax revenue, which in turn means greater military capability. Naturally, state organizations are not inclined to abandon these advantages lightly, even when secession movement express a desire that they do so.

Why States Sometimes Get Smaller Sometimes, though, states are forced to contract in size and scope. This usually happens when the cost of maintaining the status quo becomes higher than the cost of allowing a region to gain autonomy.

Historically, the cost of maintaining unity is raised through military means. Examples of this tactic being successfully employed include the cases of the United States, the Republic of Ireland, and some of the successor states of Yugoslavia.

But secession and decentralization have also often been achieved through bloodless or near bloodless means. This was the case in Iceland and throughout most of the post-Iron Curtain states.

Bloodless secession movements, however, only occur when the parent state is weakened by larger events beyond the secession movement itself. Iceland, for example, seceded in 1944, when World War II ensured that Denmark was in no position to object. The post-Soviet states seceded when the Soviet state had been rendered impotent by decades of economic decline and (in 1991) a failed coup. Nor is it a coincidence that India gained independence from the United Kingdom in the years immediately following World War II. It is likely the UK could have held on to India through military means indefinitely, but this would have come at a very high cost to the British economy and standard of living.The Republic of Ireland employed violence to obtain independence, although it is unlikely that Ireland would have obtained independence when it did had the British state not been weakened by the First World War.

It is possible to envision largely "amicable" separations. The model for this is the separation of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand from the the United Kingdom. But even in these cases, British control over these Commonwealth states' foreign policy was not totally abandoned until after World War II, when the British state had been weakened by depression and war. Moreover, the British state assumed that these newly independent states would remain highly reliable geopolitical and economic allies indefinitely. Thus, the geopolitical cost of separation was perceived to be low.

Mega-States Are the Ideal State In cases where the seceding state is perceived to have differing cultural, economic, or geopolitical interests—which is true of the overwhelming majority of cases—the parent state is, all else being equal, likely to meet demands for secession with much hostility.

Although liberal ideology has diminished the perception among much of the world's population that bigger is better, most government agents—who are by nature decidedly illiberal—see things differently. For them, the ideal state is most certainly a large state.

Those who delight in the generous application of state violence have noticed that it is not a coincidence the world's most powerful states—e.g., the US, Russia, China—are those that control large populations, large economic centers, and large geographic areas with sizable frontiers. The combination of these three factors in various configuration ensures that existential threats to the regime are few and far between. Russia's relatively small economy—only a fraction of the size of Germany's economy—is mitigated by its enormous geographical frontiers. Its economy is nonetheless large enough to maintain a nuclear arsenal. China's per capita wealth is quite small, but Chinese territory and the sheer size of its overall economy ensures protection from foreign attack. The US's enormous economy and its huge ocean frontiers render it essentially immune to all existential threats other than large-scale nuclear war.

Large states such as these are limited only by the defensive capabilities of other states, and by the threat of domestic unrest and resistance. As Ludwig von Mises noted in Liberalism, states can take only as much power as their populations are willing to give it. There are limits to the public's generosity.

Totalitarian States Require Bigness This relationship between bigness and state power has been illustrated in the fact totalitarian states are virtually always large states.

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt examines a number of nontotalitarian dictatorships that sprang up in Europe before the Second World War. These included (among others) the Baltic states, Hungary, Portugal, and Romania. In many of these cases, Arendt contends the regimes attempted to turn themselves into totalitarian regimes, but failed. This was largely due to their lack of size:

Arendt was not an economist, but had she been one, she might have noted that the necessity of size is so central to totalitarian regimes because they are so economically inefficient. Contrary to promises of machine-like efficiency made by advocates of ever more powerful states, totalitarian states are absurdly wasteful both in terms of capital and human life. The same is true—to varying extents—for all regimes. But as the most centrally-planned ones—whether totalitarian or not—quickly become economic basket cases, large size is necessary. A smaller state would quickly exhaust its capital and its population, and the regime would collapse. Size can provide the appearance of sustainability for longer.

Cultural factors cannot be ignored, however. Arendt concedes this process of collapse can be drawn out longer in societies that are more ideologically tolerant of it:

Conversely, the chances for totalitarian rule are frighteningly good in the lands of traditional Oriental despotism, in India and China...

That region's relative tolerance for despotism is enabled by local ideologies that foster a "feeling of superfluousness," which according to Arendt "has been prevalent for centuries in the contempt for the value of human life."

Continued Movement toward Smaller States Fortunately for humanity, the trend in the world today is toward smaller states. As numerous scholars have noted, the average number of states in the world is larger now than at any other time in recent centuries. Moreover, the rise of global trade has lessened the benefits of imperialism and expanding a state's frontiers and population. As Mises observed, freedom in trade negates the need for a state to acquire more of the world's wealth through militaristic or imperialistic methods. States often still seek economic "self-sufficiency," but the cost of this is so high, and the benefits of open trade so enticing, that more states are willing to accept trade as a substitute for "lebensraum." This can already be observed, as globalization has allowed small states to thrive, and small states have even acted to force greater discipline on large states through tax competition.

There are certainly exceptions to this. Some small states, such as North Korea, have maintained an economically isolationist and totalitarian stance—fueled both by internal paranoia and by real perennial threats issued by its enemies (especially the US), in the case of the latter. For the most part, however, the spread of markets (and promarket ideology) has raised the opportunity cost of militaristic expansion from the state's perspective. If offered the chance to expand at low cost, though, virtually all regimes would take the opportunity in a heartbeat. And this is why we will likely continue to see regimes enthusiastically resist secession within their own borders. States don't have many opportunities to expand their territories and populations. So they're not about to sign off on secession lightly. Nevertheless, new economic realities, wars, and demographic shifts may certainly affect the equation in coming years. And then we may again see a redrawing of maps of a sort not seen since the end of the Cold War.

Small Countries Are Better: They're Often Richer and Safer Than Big Countries3 Reasons Why More Secession Means More Freedom

View Details

Earlier this month, West Virginia state senator Charles Trump introduced a senate resolution requesting that the citizens of Frederick County consider joining West Virginia. That is, the West Virginia Senate invited the county to secede from Virginia and join West Virginia. The Senate later adopted the resolution.

Resolutions like these don't change any laws, but the Senate vote was in part a response to the dissatisfaction voiced by some Virginians over the legislative agenda of the new government in Richmond. As Tho Bishop noted on Monday here at Mises.org, many residents of Frederick County, like residents of other counties outside Democrat-controlled areas of the state's east and northeast, are concerned about mounting efforts by the state government to impose new gun ownership restrictions—among other new regulations—on Virginia residents.

If opponents of the current ideological winds blowing in Virginia find themselves in a permanent minority, it may very well be that the only method of defending the minority position is by leaving the state. But "exit" can theoretically be obtained in more than one way. It can be done on an individual basis, of course, where a single person relocates. Or it can be done through jurisdictional secession.

In the case of Virginia, there would be nothing novel about some parts of the state breaking off from the Richmond-controlled government. The same thing happened during and after the American Civil War. At the time, the mountain South was less inclined to support slavery—and more inclined to be Unionist—than plantation areas. This was true for mountain areas of Virginia as well.

Northern politicians took advantage of this split and promised independence—and thus greater self-determination to the western counties of Virginia—if they would break away from the Virginia government controlled by wealthy planters. Although the process by which this happened was legally sketchy, the US Supreme Court nonetheless put its stamp of approval on West Virginia's secession in 1871.There is no particular reason why Virginia secessionists would need to join West Virginia, of course. It could make just as much sense to join Virginia counties to North Carolina, Tennessee, or Kentucky instead. Moreover, it is not even necessary that these seceding counties be contiguous with neighboring states. They could function perfectly fine as exclaves.

Some Practical Considerations There are practical obstacles to secession, to be sure. Businesses would be subject to different regulations, and the criminal code would be slightly different for county residents as the county switched to a new state. State budgets would have to be changed to reflect the new borders.

Federal law, of course, would remain unchanged in all areas, and matters of global diplomacy would be virtually unaffected. Congress's involvement need not extend much beyond the apportioning of members of Congress once the next decennial census comes along.

Unfortunately, status quo bias would cause many to emotionally reject any change. The way things have "always" been done will be trotted out as justification for keeping things the way they are, essentially forever.

Secession: A Moral Imperative But is there a moral argument against secession from Virginia? Not if we take ideas of self-determination and human rights seriously.

If minority groups find themselves perennially in the minority, what recourse do they have if boundaries are also permanently fixed? Some might suggest these people can move across state lines. But since state lines could be hundreds of miles away in a large state like Virginia, a forced diaspora would likely require minority populations to disband their communities. Some suggests members of the minority ought to trust the court system to protect their rights. But American history is littered with Supreme Court decisions in which the courts either refused to take action, or explicitly sided with governments against the rights of citizens.Examples are numerous. US courts, for example, endorsed the internment of US citizens of Japanese descent. Federal courts failed to intervene to preserve the property rights of Mexican-Americans in accordance with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Federal courts failed to intervene when California law banned the ownership of property by Japanese-Americans. Federal courts have approved obviously unconstitutional provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. Federal courts failed to uphold the provisions of US treaties with Indian tribes when the US government illegally and unilaterally abrogated those treated. Courts, of course, also reverse themselves on major issues. Courts abandoned the idea that governments can't void private contracts with the end of the Lochner era. Courts made up the idea that a right to "privacy" means the matter of abortion, considered to be a state and local matter for 190 years, was suddenly to be regulated by federal law. Placing trust in the courts is a fanciful idea at best.

Even if court decisions go the minority's way in the short term, there's no fighting the majority in the long term. After all, judges are not immune from the currents of ideological change as imposed by majority groups—and the law schools they control. Thus, as economist and social theorist Ludwig von Mises noted in his 1927 book Liberalism:

[W]hen [a member of the minority] appears before a magistrate or any administrative official as a party to a suit or petition, he stands before men whose political thought is foreign to him because it developed under different ideological influences.…At every turn the member of a national minority is made to feel that he lives among strangers and that he is, even if the letter of the law denies it, a second-class citizen.

Writing in the decades following the First World War—when national boundaries were being redrawn along ethnic lines—Mises was acutely aware of the problems that presented minority communities who found themselves in larger jurisdictions controlled by groups who differed in their backgrounds and ideologies.

When it came to protecting their rights, minority groups could not simply place their trust in the next election, or in the hands of government judges, and hope for the best. Often, the most peaceful and reliable strategy was to redraw borders so that minority communities might ally with other sympathetic groups. Mises continues:

Mises recognized that over time, populations and ideologies change in various times and places. People migrate and culture changes. Majorities can be turned into minorities, and vice versa. This, Mises recognized, nonetheless does not render the legal and property rights of the minority groups null and void. Communities are still entitled to the right of self-determination, even when in the minority. Strategies must therefore be adopted to protect these minority groups. One of the most practical strategies, Mises understood, was changing borders of political jurisdictions to fit the realities of the populations within those borders.

As Mises noted, to force members of conflicting groups to live side by side within a single jurisdiction is problematic to say the least. It only encourages each side to become ever more fanatical in its drive to gain control of the machinery of government so as to oppress the other side. This is why Mises presented his plan as a means of avoiding violence: increasingly intense competition over centralized institutions of political power tends to lead to violence in the long term. The answer lies in decentralization and secession. Conversely, the potential for violence is minimized by minimizing the state's power. In the presence of a mostly laissez-faire government, neither side has much reason to worry about who controls the state. But the stakes climb ever higher as the state gains more power over people's lives.

But "minimizing state power" certainly isn't what is going on in Virginia right now. If anything, the state is moving very much in the opposite direction. In a prudent and flexible political system, those parts of the state dominated by the now out-of-power groups would be permitted to join themselves to regimes more in line with their cultures and ideological views. But we do not live in a prudent and flexible political system. We live in a system where the dictates of "democracy" are such that whichever group finds itself in the minority must submit to the elected ruling regime. "Or else." No other option is permitted. This is a road that often leads to violence, either by private parties, or by the regime against the people.

View Details

There are many reasons why one might choose to avoid the voting booth. This often stems from ethical dilemmas over the state’s monopoly on force. Some may emphasize their right not to vote, a right undervalued in undeveloped political systems with transparently corrupt regimes (making the “Vote or Die” tagline somewhat ironic). Others may view popular forms of democracy as opaquely crooked, and consider voting a signal of participation that perpetuates the system. Celebrity Russell Brand, for example, has publicly held this view (although he has distanced himself from this position more recently).

One may sympathize with this form of reasoning, but disagree regarding the importance assigned to such values. It follows that value-based decisions, while valid, are unlikely to be persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already hold the same values.

Thus, I hope to challenge the altruistic stigma associated with voting by presenting perspective grounded in more objective principles. My goal is not to attack democracy proper, but to illuminate how many obstacles there really are between the vote one casts and the abstract greater good they hope to reach.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem First, let’s consider the domain of achievable outcomes for a voting system. How good can the best voting system get? Kenneth Arrow provided important insight in his seminal doctoral thesis of 1950 (updated in 1963). Arrow’s theorem illustrates a paradox of choice, revealing flaws in ordinal voting systems. Broadly speaking, if a group of two or more voters is faced with more than two options, a ranked voting system cannot aggregate the ranked preferences of voters into a single ordered list of preferences for the group without violating at least one of the following conditions:

Nondictatorship – the preferences of a single voter should not be decisive.
Pareto efficiency – if all individuals prefer A over B, the group should prefer A over B.
Independence of irrelevant alternatives – the removal of irrelevant choices should not change the preference ordering for the remaining ones. For example, if every voter prefers A to B and B to C, removing C should not change the fact that A is preferred to B.
Unrestricted domain – all possible preference orderings can be aggregated.

Although Arrow tediously proves this mathematically with a series of proofs by contradiction, the interpretation is straightforward. No voting system can establish social preferences by aggregating individual preferences. Condition 3 is most often violated by majoritarian electoral voting systems, leading to cycling group preferences (intransitivity of preferences after aggregation, loosely speaking). Enforcing transitivity after aggregation must imply a dictatorship.

Local voting for ballot measures (propositions) most obviously struggles to meet condition 4, but problems here may even transcend Arrow’s theorem. Voting only provides a binary signal of demand, not a magnitude of demand. Hence there is no economizing signal (i.e., people don’t express preferences for one thing relative to another in a comparable way). As a result, public real resource allocation is still difficult to prioritize following a local vote.

I don’t want to overstate the importance of Arrow’s theorem. This argument does not conclude that democracy is a lost cause. Rather, it demonstrates that there are limitations with all types of voting systems, and that getting more people to the polls won’t overcome them.

Political Scale Dependence There is an additional issue complicating expected voting outcomes: scale. In 2019, Nassim Taleb drafted a paper arguing the importance of scale-free politics. He argues that democracy (or any political system) is not scale invariant.

As a societal unit grows larger, the coupling among agents becomes weaker and weaker, nearing independence. Local signals become subordinated by more dominant, concentrated signals at the federal level. As such, there is both less accountability behind political decision-making and a more uncertain impact.

This stands in contrast to strong reductionism, which suggests that we can understand intricate systems by summing up the effects of its constituents. In a world ruled by strong reductionism, the appropriateness of a political system for the entire planet could be induced by observing a single individual. Such a view leads people to confusingly treat politics as a top-down engineering project rather than a complex, adaptive, bottom-up system. In the face of complex interactions and nonlinear relations, properties can emerge under aggregation that are absent at the component level.

To better illustrate this concept, consider decision-making at the family level. One may agree that a pure democracy is of limited use for the family unit beyond settling dining or television disputes, lest a Lord of the Flies scenario transpire. Does this alone mean democracy is bunk? Of course not; it is simply being implemented on an inappropriate scale.

Consider further the unification of the United States and China into a single democratic nation. In such a scenario, majority voting may lead to policies that disproportionately favor the more populous culture. At the very least, outcomes are likely to deviate significantly from those that follow from two separate democracies.

The same concept applies at levels between these extremes. Political systems work differently at the various possible levels of population aggregation (i.e., town, city, state, etc.).

Accordingly, economic dynamics must be matched to the proper scale. This is naively existent in modern political systems, but is by no means ubiquitous. Consequently, people can rationally have different political stances at different levels of aggregation (e.g., Democrat at the local level, libertarian at the federal level, etc.).

When faced with a set of scale-ignorant options at a fixed level of aggregation (e.g., federal), intensions become moot, as voters are faced with insurmountably uncertain outcomes. Through this lens, one can’t blame the citizen who finds voting versus abstention a matter of indifference.

Independence Let’s now assume that a severe lack of votes resulted in a deeply negative outcome. Under such an assumption, the decision not to vote would indeed be a fallacy of composition. Although the individual may get no marginal benefit from voting, the system as a whole would suffer.

This criticism is fair, but insufficient at the level of the individual. Following a discussion about scale, it’s fitting to point out that the decision of the individual is not the decision of the collective. This is because my decision to vote is independent from others’ decisions to vote. Even if I felt that political outcomes would improve if everyone who thought like me would change their tune and vote, I can’t personally vote for them, nor can I force another to abstain.

As a result, in a large enough democracy, the impact of an individual vote is statistically zero on the margin. No single person’s vote will ever impact an election in a democracy of even modest size (electoral college, popular, or any other), and since their decision is independent from other voters, the decision to vote is itself irrelevant. So the criticism can be both correct and immaterial.

Conclusion A somewhat famous theorem of public choice theory states that in a voting system driven by majority rule, the median voter’s most preferred outcome will be selected. Such an idea casts voting in a comforting light. Each vote pulls the median closer to the voter’s preferences by a tiny margin.

Unfortunately, the median voter theorem has too many unrealistic assumptions to apply in practice. Not only does it fail in the face of Arrow’s theorem, it requires a separate vote for each issue, no more than two options, and an unbiased voter turnout, none of which are commonplace in a political election.

Voters are also assumed to be fully informed in the median voter theorem. In reality, although voters are often informed on particular topics, none are fully informed. This allows politicians to tailor their positions to what each group of donors or electorate is likely to be informed about. Election results end up molded by lobbyist and donor preferences rather than those of the median voter.

With the median voter theorem of little use outside the halls of academia, there is no marginal benefit for a single voter to hold on to. This leaves emotional stimulus, feelings of inclusion, and a vague sense of acting for the greater good as the chief motivators for being a proud and active voter.

I’ve attempted to elucidate the complexity and limitations accompanying the last motivation, purposely highlighting the prior two as the primary impetus behind castigation of nonvoters.

Decentralization and Secession: Recent Episodes

None