 This morning the world woke up to find out to everyone's shock that the Brexit vote not only passed in the UK but it passed handily by a margin of 52 to 48 percent roughly. Here to help us make sense of it all and whether Brexit is libertarian and good for libertarianism is our own Ryan McMacon the editor and publisher of Mises.org and a frequent author at that site. So stay tuned for a great and rollicking interview with Ryan McMacon on Brexit. Well Ryan McMacon welcome to Mises Weekends. I don't think you've been a guest before am I correct? That's right I've not been. Well so we wake up this morning actually stayed up quite late last evening watching BBC and other news sources on the Brexit vote definitely came as a surprise and a shock to me especially the 52 48 numbers at the end of the tally. Do you think that this is actually what it's being touted as as potentially the beginning of the end of the EU and and a strike against globalism generally or do you think that's too facile are we making too much of it perhaps in our in our libertarian aspirations in the West. Well I think maybe we're making too much of it in the sense of that victory has been achieved but I do think it throws certainly a monkey wrench in the plans of centralizing Europeans it has highly symbolic value it is problematic it encourages other countries to hold their own referendums I think in terms of practice central banks will find their own way to work around it governments will find their own way to work around it but it does put up some barriers to the unification that European elites wanted. Well there's hand-wringing going on though there are members of the European Parliament saying oh my gosh this means that within five years the EU will be done and do you agree with that? Well EU was already in deep trouble in a variety of ways the Schengen zone was already falling apart after the French terrorist incidents and the border guards went back up people were already declaring Schengen dead which was a key component of the EU overall there are some parts of the EU that of course don't want to go anywhere the receiver states like Ireland like Greece like Poland yes Greece has complained a lot about the way the EU does business but they've been huge beneficiaries in terms of the money that flows out of the creditor states like Greece France and the UK and flows to the poorer states so it's for them that's a nice little system they got set up and so I don't think they're gonna give that up that easily so it it will the EU will definitely have to change will it just simply dry up and blow away well I'm not convinced of that yet well today we're seeing some turmoil in the markets we're seeing the British pound lose value relative to other currencies but that's about it if an actual eurozone country was to leave the EU like France for instance as Marine Le Pen has threatened that would require logistically and technically a lot more you'd have to revive the French Frank I mean that seems to me a much more daunting task to have an actual eurozone country leave than than it is to have Britain leave yeah it was a much less of a big deal for the UK because they were wise enough to keep their own currency so yeah if you're the French you got to you got to reintroduce the Frank I mean that's that would be a big deal so yeah there are much bigger obstacles for those countries plus those countries have always been just more wedded to the EU project going back to the 50s whereas the UK was something of a late joiner and on top of that the UK is in fact richer than France now not richer than Germany and I think you could make the the case that maybe France benefits more from being in the EU get gives them more influence but when we look at the UK right the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world a huge military all their own they just simply really didn't need the EU I think it was much easier to make a convincing case in that way and it wasn't going to change their monetary system in the way that you would have to change it if you were one of the eurozone countries so yeah it would be a bigger deal for one of these continental countries but in terms of symbolism the meaning of the Brexit vote I'm searching my memory let's say modern progressivism and the beginnings of modern globalism began in the world war one era coming out of world war one can you think of a single time since then that there has been such a momentous vote sort of against the forward progress of globalism or what we would call a global agenda well of course the good example the example I always think of as the best case scenario for massive liberalization and decentralization is the collapse of the Soviet Union in the the eastern bloc of course now that wasn't part of the western globalization effort but it certainly was part of a major effort at centralization which failed miserably and that was a relatively bloodless move away from that so that's always something that gives me hope that the world can in fact move to a place where things get decentralized where people things move out from the center where you're offered more variety where local culture prevails over massive state control from the outside or from the inside so it happened the one time and it wasn't in the west you know the way we think of the west necessarily but it happened in Europe and so it it happens every now and then right and it happened without voting but it also happened without bullets yeah so that that's a happy thing so when you mentioned decentralization I have to point out that some libertarians tend to be suspicious of secession movements they tend to be suspicious of decentralization as a tactical or legal approach to reducing the power of states in our lives now in some senses they say well gee whiz what if the resulting localized government is actually more left-wing or more statist than the more multinational or globalist government it replaces we hear this argument quite a bit from my perspective and certainly from the perspective of Murray Rothbard and I think from the perspective of Ludwig Amises decentralization moving self-determination closer and closer to the individual level is ever and always a good thing so talk about how some DC Beltway libertarians disagree and what you think they mean well I've never quite understood their position because the theoretical superiority on the other side is so overwhelming we don't have to rely even just on Rothbard and Amises of course Louis Ruinay did a great article recently called the how the EU is anti-european and he looked at this european tradition of how decentralization especially in terms of economic policies what created the quote unquote european miracle and Ralph Raco of course was one of his sources Raco did a long essay on this looking at how the key to Europe becoming prosperous to becoming more free was the fact that unlike any other place Europe had never managed to attain large dominant states a single large dominant state within Europe that as princes attempted to raise taxes and control the population more the small size of countries in Europe allowed people to easily escape to get away to move their capital elsewhere and it was this variety this decentralization that made Europe what it is today in terms of freedom and prosperity and so the decentralization model is what leads to more freedom because it allows escape it allows more immigration the worst possible model is of course one giant world megastate where you can never leave and there's nowhere to get out but it seems that the that some libertarians seem to think that that that is in fact the model that will have one giant state that can guarantee freedom everywhere and will have some sort of democracy i guess that would ensure that this would happen it's not quite clear how they think that's supposed to happen i guess that they would have supreme court of enlightened philosopher kings that would hand down good laws all the time and cancel out the bad laws that's just an extremely naive position and the reason the greatest check on government power is the fact that there are other options there are other places to move and this is all the more important powerful and and apparent to see in places where there are a large number of medium and small size countries so that you can in fact leave once you start to move to mega states and exit becomes nearly impossible then you have essentially no limits then on the state's ability to expand its power we are going to post a link to this article ryan nations by consent decomposing the nation state actually one of the last scotty articles mary rothbard wrote and he's talking not so much about the economic analysis he's talking not so much about the economic analysis but more about libertarian political theory and he really sort of changed his perspective or his outlook on the idea of nations and borders and culture and what it all meant towards the end of his life in other words he he subtly in it criticizes the the notion that libertarians focus only on the individual and never view that individual in the context of that individual's birthplace or family or religion or language or culture so give us your thoughts on what how this impacts what's happening in europe and how it impacted brexit well certainly yes i think i would agree with rothbard that we should not take the naive view of of interhuman relations this idea that uh either you're an individual and your only relationship is with the state um and when you look at that well clearly that's nonsense right people have relationships with all sorts of groups their families their religious group their ethnic group and uh i do not take the naive view of of ethnic relations or religious relations i assume that there are conflicts between this group is in fact i've done quite a bit of writing on mesas.org about here in america and also in latin america inter-ethnic conflict because this is a real issue and if you ignore it um you just end up kind of looking silly and so it exists in europe as well of course we just simply have to accept that language barriers are real that proximity is real and i think that's what the the british recognized as well is that yes we certainly should not take the brexit vote as some sort of vote for laissez faire or anything like that but i think the british recognized on a certain common sense level that people in britain should maybe make the laws that govern people in britain that maybe the people in britain should actually have a vote to remove people who do things they don't want then maybe laws should be made in london instead of somewhere on the continent and the london issue is relevant because you can take a train to london fairly easily it's closer it's easier to access and everyone there speaks english this is different than going to brussels and trying to influence policy makers there those things make a real difference and this is these realities have guided many revolutions and uprisings and political movements in the past and ignoring them is just plain silly well it's more than silly though it goes to this argument that so many people have that libertarians are naive with respect to human nature i think there is an element within the libertarian movement that tends to talk in ways that sound like globalism globalism or universalism right that we're all going to be these economic actors and we're going to just live in a digital world where we pick up and move to singapore to at a moment's notice because the industry or job skill which we spent many years developing has been blown up by new technology and that we're all going to live in this ever-shifting world of technology which sounds an awful lot like a european technocrat as much as it does a libertarian well this all this plays into so many stereotypes of libertarians that the left likes to bring up right the left likes to point out that this whole idea that people are really just economic actors is obviously wrong and they're right that is a good critique of libertarians to suggest that and that has long been a leftist something that leftists has pointed out is that this idea that people form a country and then they only have economic relations just simply has no example in reality whatsoever so if that's ever going to happen it has no precedent in human history and then of course just this this idea of homo economicists that of course has long been debunked that apparently some libertarians still cling to that people are going to simply pursue their economic self-interest then they're going to vote only with their pocketbooks these are simply untrue in fact if that were true i think perhaps uh britain would have never voted the way it did clearly there's going to be a short-term effect i think to the pocketbooks because europe is going to attempt to maybe exact a little bit of revenge on the uk and so on but in the long term i don't think it's going to make that much of a difference however people went ahead with it because they had cultural religious linguistic concerns that rose even above their simple economic concerns ryan you bring up the left which is one of my favorite topics it seems that people on the left in the west are always centralizers they always believe in vesting power in washington dc or beyond that in the un or in the imf or in brussels but yet they call themselves democrats and at each stage the individual's power to affect the outcomes or to affect those who would purport to govern him or her become more and more attenuated right it's easier to lobby your state house than it is to lobby dc it's easier to lobby dc than it is to lobby the imf for example uh but here's the conundrum the left hates the idea of states rights they hate the tenth amendment that sounds like neo confederacy to them they hate decentralization movements like brexit but yet if they were really serious about their progressive aims i argue they could have virtually everything they want here and now as long as they were willing to accept that it would be geographically limited in other words what if california sacramento is dominated by progressives in the legislature what if california said screw you federal government screw you brexit screw you donald trump or even screw you hillary we are going to begin today enacting the whole panoply of progressive desires we're gonna have single-payer health care in california we're gonna have very high progressive tax rates we're gonna have very much more generous welfare state we're gonna have open borders we're gonna have draconian gun control we are going to have social justice warrior social policies put into law we are going to have unrestricted access to abortion these kinds of things is obama is hillary is trump going to send in the federalis to enforce federal law that preempts these things i don't think so in other words why don't progressives who claim to want what they want actually support as a tactical measure decentralization and secession movements because they could have what they claim to want they could have it now in their lifetimes well part of the reason that they don't settle just for the secession models because they perceive things as already going in their direction so it's just a matter of time and we'll get everything we want anyway maybe it'll take five or ten years longer but but that's it now of course if they weren't in power i think if they didn't have a stranglehold on the universities on media on culture on everything i can't think of a single institution that right wingers have any sort of serious influence on anything that matters so since they control all those institutions that matter you know why settle for just local now of course the savvy thing to do if things aren't already going in your direction is of course to move for secession as much as possible and then of course that doesn't mean you're giving up if you if you attain secession you would then of course still attempt to win people over to your point of view and progress outward from there and and to a certain extent the left has used this tactic as well uh to good effect just look at how and it's mostly been the left of the libertarian movement has been basically useless on this topic has been the the legalization of marijuana in western states and so now it's probably for western states colorado was the first and you know ever since the vote went through nobody even discusses it anymore it's just it's a done deal nobody cares pot's legal now yeah there are some some mainstream democrats and some right wing republicans who still complain about it a lot and are trying to claim that murder rates are going up or something which they're not uh but for the most part that one now part of the reason now that the feds are moving in and arresting everybody who smokes a joint is because they sense that public opinion is on the side of the drug legalizers so public opinion matters in this case the overall ideology of the country matters in this case and so if things are going in your direction you can actually speed things up by using the decentralized model as well the the anti-tenth amendment people the libertarians that think the supreme court will give everybody freedom were wrong the the method of ending the drug war through dc has failed the way that it is being won is through a decentralized nullification model in the states and so i think there's a lot to learn from what's been done with the marijuana thing well speaking of giving the left what it wants we have a very poignant example this morning after the brexit vote i think and that's scotland so scotland had an opportunity in 2014 to vote for independence from britain and to become actually more aligned with brussels and almost undoubtedly would have resulted in scotland becoming even more left-wing and scotland votes far much more labor more left than west minster generally so in that vote the older scots voted against leaving the uk many of them were worried about their pensions but all the younger scots voted for leaving the uk well last night we have almost the opposite results scotland overwhelmingly voted against leaving the eu and the irony is that in england we saw all of the older english folks voting to leave the eu and all the younger english folks wanting to remain so in you know in some weird ways it sort of mirrored the scottish independence vote but why not give scotland the opportunity now to go join the eu and be independent of england and why i i have to say ukip has been hypocritical on this because ukip opposed the scottish independence vote but they supported the brexit vote last evening so why not use scotland as a laboratory as a test case they've got some oil wealth they have some very dopey ideas about how society ought to be organized they they're deeply socialist are probably equivalent to the sweden or the kebek of the uk but why not give them a chance to align themselves with the eu and go their own way now because there's got to be a lot of very unhappy scottes and the the the sub question involved in that is why should we as libertarians be concerned at the geographic area like scotland wants to go off in a in a decidedly ill libertarian direction as long as we're not forced into it and as long as they're not warring against countries outside their their borders is it really our business or our job as libertarians to want to libertarianize the world i say no well that's one of the dumber arguments you hear on the secession issue is oh the people who want us to see they have impure motives so therefore we have to uh we have to support continued centralization we heard this all the time from unionists in spain uh on the catalonia issue oh those catalonia people there's such leftists and i would we hear the same thing in america if say new york tried to secede what a bunch of southerners say well those new yorkers are a bunch of leftists they have to be kept inside the country uh that that would be terrible so i hope that wouldn't happen but yeah of course scotland should be allowed uh to leave of course they should be allowed to go their own way in fact boy did said some of these uk people luck out because when i noticed that nigel ferrage had actually had campaigned vehemently against scotland leaving had asked the queen to intervene to keep scotland in the country and then when it looked like the scotland votes might keep the uk inside the eu i thought well yeah great great job there but uh he he lucked out and the uk left anyway but boy yeah what would happen to england if scotland let boy this would massively slant things in favor of the tories and of course i don't understand uk internal politics very well i don't even know what that would mean necessarily but certainly it would seem it would be in the favor of many english nationalists to get rid of scotland so what's the problem i i guess nostalgia is a big thing that oh they've been in the country for 300 years so we can't let them go now uh but i don't see the big argument otherwise they're net tax receivers it would be like you had uh in the us oh let's just take a state like uh west virginia wanted to leave the union or something boy that would be a net benefit to everybody who pays into washington dc would be less of a tax burden for the rest of the country so i just don't see the problem right but we also have to understand this is about the people's interest versus the government's interest right politicians hate to see their turf shrink so last night the european parliament uh saw the turf over which it purports to govern shrink somewhat and i think the queen and most people in west minster don't want to see scotland leave the uk for that very point but ryan i want to ask you one last thing as we wrap this up i'm a little surprised i must admit by the brexit vote not only that it won but that it won by the margin it did and i alluded earlier in the show to what does this really mean is this really a blow against globalism does this bode ill for hillary and well for trump does this mean nationalist uprisings or at least decentralized uprisings are going to occur all over the world i will only say this and i'll leave you to comment it seems to me that voters are timid folks voters tend to be very sheep-like so let me say this when things get weird or uneasy or uncomfortable voters tend to vote for what they know which would be remain in the uk and hillary when things get very weird uncomfortably weird they tend to vote for what they don't know which would be leave brexit and trump so give us your final thoughts on this what do you think this augurs for november in the u.s. well you're right the ton of the political science literature says that yes people who are who tend to be kind of less educated they're they're late voters they're not very engaged they tend to go with the status quo because that's what's comfortable unless of course their fears are so heightened as you say that they just want to get out now in this case that doesn't necessarily translate to trump i mean there are some issues there that certainly overlap right the issue of nationalism the idea of being anti-globalist the the anti-immigration issue and so on i think it's still too early to say is this it certainly this vote is not bad for trump i think we could say that will it translate into americans voting more for him maybe in fact it might even convince some people who are who consider themselves to be reasonable moderate types to even lean a little bit more populist because now if if those reasonable brits even will do something radical like well then maybe we can do this as well and so yeah definitely not bad for trump could be good for him too hard to say the the big issue in the united states is the electoral college it leans so heavily in favor of the democrats will trump be able to overcome that huge obstacle and that definitely remains to be seen well ryan thanks so much for your time fascinating topic fascinating interview ladies and gentlemen have a great weekend