 Welcome to the talk which is called something like radical decentralization as a path to anarcho-capitalism. This is based on a series of articles I did for Mises.org, one of the more well-known, relatively speaking, of course, being titled anarchism and radical decentralization are the same thing. So part of the issue was, this is a common topic for people to talk about, oh, how shall we achieve this anarchist society and this highly individualistic society, and really there are very few roadmaps on how this should be done, there's rarely are pictures painted about what this would actually look like, about the pragmatic issues involved and so on. There were lots of schemes about use the use of insurance and so on to administer civil government in an anarchist state and so on. But if you have taken any significant amount of classwork in political science, specifically international relations, you realize that anarchy already exists in the world in some places, specifically in the international system. So this is just typical. We use the word anarchy to describe the international system because it is a group of independent states that interact in an anarchic system which has no authority over it. So you've got a bunch of states and they have to interact and they have to figure out ways to interact among themselves. And this is not done within any sort of state environment. So the question is how can we take that system and continue to decentralize it to the point where we're getting closer and closer to the individual level. And then on top of that we can see that there's a variety of benefits that actually stem from this. So why would we even want to do this? But it turns out that practically speaking, decentralization has been shown historically to have significant economic and political benefits. And so let's start from that then and really look at what do the historians say about political decentralization and what are the effects of this. And then we'll move from there to speculate a little bit about how this might be done in the modern world and what it might look like. And I've done it in a list format. I was trying to figure out how to organize this and I'm used to just writing shorter articles for Mises.org and I realized we'll really call this eight ways that decentralization can be used to achieve a better society. Not even necessarily anarcho-capitalism, of course, just better civilization. The closer you get to a highly decentralized society, the better things are. It's not something where it's an all or nothing sort of thing where we achieve complete and perfect individual level decentralization or everything's terrible. Just the more you move in that direction, the better human society improves. Now I got the idea from this from Ralph Raco, who's a historian associated with the Mises Institute. He died a couple of years ago. And you can find his books in the bookstore, by the way. And years ago when I was at Mises University, I remember Ralph talking about how the reason that Europe had become, Europe and its outposts, including places like the United States and Australia, had become so wealthy and successful was because it was a product of a decentralized political system. And this goes back to really late antiquity and the Middle Ages. And Ralph was very good at busting old myths about how Europe was plagued by these dark ages before the so-called Enlightenment and then everything became better. And then we left all of that stuff behind us in the past when Europe was ruled by a theocracy and dictatorships and so on. You, Raco, noted in his work that that's all just nonsense for the most part, that was made up by states later to help justify their own state centric regimes. And what Ralph noted, however, was that after the Roman Empire, Europe never managed to reconfigure itself into being dominated by any single regime. That it it degenerated, as its critics would say, but actually improved to the point where Europe became a system, a complex system of a variety of city states, principalities and other micro states that existed throughout the region. And so we can sum it up here in what Ralph says, quote, 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, that is 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. So Europe was a place where different princes essentially had to compete against each other, especially for their most productive citizens. So the example that we might note would be, let's just imagine it's the 13th century and I'm a highly productive merchant living in the Rhine Valley. And so the local prince then says, well, I'm going to jack up everybody's taxes 10 percent and I'm going to impose some duties on trade with all the surrounding regions and so on. This this merchant then is highly motivated then to move somewhere else so that they can then be freed from this new and highly onerous system of taxation. So in that case, then they, because Europe is so decentralized in these principle, these principalities are so small, he only has to move, say, 20 miles down the river in order to find a different system of law, different jurisdiction. And so he does that. And another benefit of this, this is where the issue of the fact that Europe constituted a single civilization becomes important because in order to relocate and to find a place that is relatively more free, he doesn't necessarily have to learn another language. He doesn't have to change his religion. He doesn't have to learn an entirely new culture because in many ways, and of course there were variations, but for the most part, Europe fell within a single area in terms of religion and larger trends in culture, generally speaking, not to mention the fact that even if the local language changed, you still had Latin, which was widely spoken among a variety of people, especially more educated people. And some spoke, of course, high Latin and others spoke what was called dog Latin at the time, but you could still communicate. And he would contrast this then with these other civilizations, say the Chinese, where if you wanted to escape the rule of the Chinese emperor, you basically had to leave China. And so that would impose a huge cost on you. Whereas in Europe, if all you need to do is move slightly down the river in order to get a new tax arrangement in China, you have to leave your entire civilization. You have to move not only hundreds, maybe even more than a thousand miles away, but you're also going to have to become accustomed to an entirely different culture, learn a new language and so on. So that's just simply impractical. And of course, we can see that at work today. If the United States were, say, actually dozens or even more actually sovereign units, then all that saying of America, love it or leave it would be far more practical. Whereas it is now, if someone tells you just move to Somalia, for example. Well, you have to move thousands of miles, even if you just want to move to Canada or you want to move to Mexico, not only do you have to move thousands of miles away from your family, but you have to learn a new language, perhaps in a very different culture. And these all impose very high costs on you. If, however, you had a just a border at the Mississippi River and you lived in Kansas, well, and you decided that your government is becoming unacceptable and you just need to move to another nearby place, say Arkansas. You don't need, is Arkansas on the right side of the river? I can't remember now. Well, there's some place east of the Mississippi, we'll say Illinois. And so now all you got to do is move, you know, a couple hundred miles, you don't have to learn a new language. It's a very different situation. So the cost of then escaping the state under which you live is considerably lower. So this is what the basic theory here then is. And this wasn't developed by Raco himself. This is a view among a variety of European historians who are simply noting that if we look at Europe and we're trying to identify what made it different, what led to the quote unquote European miracle. It was the fact that Europe was politically decentralized. It was different than these other civilizations. And that's one of the number one things we can point to to really illustrate this difference. And this is still relevant today. But looking at we can look at other historians as well. We can look at a French historian named Jean Béchler who points out that quote. 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 origin and raison d'etre to political anarchy, unquote. And this pretty much tells us what we need to know. Not only are you then able to free yourself from certain political restraints, but this then leads to economic expansion, to economic freedom, to more entrepreneurship and a better use of resources. And then finally, just as a final note from Raco, quote, decentralization of power also came to mark the domestic arrangements of the various European polities. Here, feudalism, which produced a nobility rooted in feudal rights rather than in state service, is thought by a number of scholars to have played an essential role 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, charter towns, religious communities, cores, universities, etc. Each with its own guaranteed liberties. The rule of law came to be established throughout much of the continent. The story we often get is that Europe was this horribly despotic place. And then some people just kind of came up with this idea of liberalism or the idea that freedom is a good thing. And then we just convinced everybody that was a good thing. But that's not really the order of events. What really happened is that Europe, due to a variety of competing groups that wanted to protect their own property rights, people that started to develop ideologies that justified the situation and explained those things. And so these developed then over time into why is Europe a more free place? Why do we have these property rights and coming, trying to systemize that thinking and come up with reasons about why that was good and why it should be perpetuated? So this wasn't like some sort of thing where the light shown down from the heavens and we realized that natural rights are a good thing. These things naturally over time came into development in Europe through the system of decentralization. And so we can see then today the continued effects of the benefits of small states versus large states. And this is true just if we kind of eyeball the world. We can see that many of the world's largest states are, in fact, not particularly good in terms of protecting private property rights. And we can see that many of the small states are considerably better at this. In Europe, especially, we can we can see some of these comparisons that continue to this day. In an article on mrs.org, Peter Sanong notes that even among linguistic siblings, the differences are stark. Germany is poorer than the smaller German speaking states like Switzerland and Austria. France is poorer than its French speaking regions that surrounded like Belgium, for example, and we're in, of course, French Switzerland. And part of the reasoning here is that those larger states are able to impose more controls on their residents. It's a higher cost to leave a larger state than a smaller state. And also larger states simply are more powerful. States in general, as organizations, they wish to increase their size as much as they can so that they can actually exercise more power and if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If you're a large state that has control over a large amount of space, a large number of people, you're able to extract more wealth from those people. You're also able to form frontiers that mean you can more easily defend your urban, your metropolitan core and push outward. So states themselves have many motivations to make themselves large, both physically, geographically, and in terms of the number of people they have because that puts more wealth at their disposal. If they're limited in size, then they are less able to do that, to exercise their power and more dependent on peaceful interactions with the people both inside the state and in areas around it. So I think the theory is pretty convincing, holds water pretty well. But how would the end then we really apply this in the world? Well, another thing to keep in mind, number two, is that smaller states then foster free trade. This issue of, well, if they're smaller, they need to engage in more peaceful relations with the other states around them. If you think about it, only a larger state can even begin to fantasize about this idea that they might be truly autarkic. That is that they would have all of the resources they need in order to carry on normal economic relations. So we've got a large state that would include a lot of farmland, ideally. Also would have lots of mines, might have some good ports, lots of place for raising livestock, places to put factories, and then a large enough population from which we could draw the sorts of human resources that we need to run an efficient economy. Now, of course, that economy is always going to be more efficient if you can engage in trade around you, but a larger state could at least maintain a reasonable standard of living if it's very big and has a lot of resources contained within it. But when you're small, you can't even really attempt to pull that off because you're just not going to have enough space to be able to grow everything you need, produce everything you need. So you end up having to trade with the states and the civilizations around you. And Rekha or Rothbard pointed this out as well. This has a political effect. You noted that, of course, a small localized economy simply cannot function, but the psychological effect is significant as well in that if you're a small state and you're used to interacting with your neighbors across the border, then claims to buy American or just buy Swiss start to sound a little bit silly. And he would, of course, in this typical fashion, would do a reductio ad absurdum where he would note, just imagine if you would do this in the US. And I mean, so you're in Iowa and the leaders there try and convince you that you should just buy everything. That's Iowan and that, you know, I mean, how dare you look? You're ruining our economy. You keep importing this stuff from those jerks over in Illinois. And he made this point, too, on migration of workers as well as that. To look, you got all these workers coming in from from Illinois into Iowa to get employment there. Well, they're stealing your jobs, right? It was basically we're sick of having Illinois have its jobs stolen by people from Massachusetts and such. And so the more localized it becomes, the more ridiculous it seems to say that, well, you know, here in Liechtenstein, we are sick of buying things from the Austrians or the Swiss or so on. I mean, look, they're trying to destroy our economy. The reality, of course, is that you interact so much with those people next door and you realize that it would be absurd to claim that you could possibly produce everything you need within the borders of Liechtenstein. And so people just simply don't buy it. People, you know, we try this all the time. You should always buy local and that sort of thing. But for the most part, it doesn't work. People do buy into the stuff, at least in the U.S., about how you should only buy American largely because they haven't interacted much with people outside. The U.S. simply due to its sheer size. But the size of the state has both economic, political and psychological effects is something that Rothbard would point out. And so this often the argument is, well, you need to have, you know, you need to have democracy or you need to have a constitutional system or whatever within your small state. Otherwise, it'll become despotic. But Rothbard would point out that the very structure, the very nature of having a smaller state means that you're going to simply be more dependent upon free economic trade. And so the state regime itself is going to be more motivated to be more free in order to survive because smarter people who run a state will recognize they stand a much better better chance of becoming wealthy and becoming successful as politicians if they allow their people to become richer as well. And so then they're more likely to turn to free trade simply because it's necessary. So number three, more choice is a good thing. And this is, of course, when we get to the political issue, the freedom issue, when it comes down to it, the issue of states are problematic, states themselves are problematic because they're monopolistic organizations is that what they try to do is really impose a monopoly within a certain physical place. And this is how states have worked since about the 17th century since the 30 years war when they really consolidated the modern state system, as we now know of it. And this really invented the idea that you have this state and it has very specific borders and this one sovereign entity can do whatever it wants within those borders. Now, prior to that, there was it was more, there were more exceptions. There was overlapping there. There were competing legal systems to a certain extent. I don't want to make it sound like some sort of utopian thing. But this went deeply into decline after the 30 years war. And we started to have the formation of just simply one state controls everything within one place. So how do we then create more choice in a world filled with monopolistic states? Well, the answer lies in creating more states. And of course, you sometimes hear an argument where when we're talking about secession or we're talking about breaking up states, people say, well, you don't want to do that because that creates more states. So secession creates more states. And so that's a bad thing. I have people who say this, I'm pretty sure they think they're clever when they say this, but it's not clever at all. Unless you are creating a new state in outer space or in the middle of the ocean and international waters, or I guess Antarctica, maybe the creation of a new state comes at the expense of an existing state because there's a set amount of space on planet Earth right now. So I suppose you could go to Mars and create a new state and you'd say, hey, they just create a new state on Mars. OK, I guess that's bad, arguably. But we don't have to worry about that right now. And so if you have the United States, it's one big nation state. You break it up into two. Now you got two. You break those up into two more, then you got four. And you can see then that immediately your choices multiply and you could just look at it as essentially kind of a clear relationship where the worst possible state is one global state. It's a single state that you can never escape. And then that government is really finally the full notion of the state because by definition, a state has a monopoly over all of the people within their territory. But that's always been mitigated by the fact that you can escape. However, if there's just one global state, there is no escape. So now this is this would be the most successful state in the history of the world. Finally, a total, complete and unadulterated state monopoly. But fortunately, this has never been achieved. And there are a variety of states to which people have been able to go, even with there's a very high cost of emigration. So you take that one global state, you now divide it into two, you divide it into five, you divide it into a thousand, you divide it into 10,000. Now you have immense numbers of choices. And this, of course, is the same thing in any market, right? You have places that you have one burger chain worldwide. Well, now they have a monopoly on burgers. And but what if you wanted a different type of burger? Well, hopefully then there would be some group that would break off and produce slightly different burgers that would maybe char broiled. And this, of course, then would bring down the price considerably and it would increase variety considerably. And so we would want, we should want the same thing in states. We should want states to be broken up into smaller pieces. We should want to limit their monopoly. We should want people to have a large variety of choices. So one of the most fundamental things we can do in order to improve states to put pressure on what states can do is to make them smaller, to make them more varied, to give us more choice. And this can be done, of course, then through secession, through an altercation, through a variety of strategies that simply make states smaller, which has the effect of making them weaker. And there's really there are fewer to this day than 200 sovereign states in the world. And that's just not really nearly enough when you consider that there's billions of people in the world. And we look at some states that are just immense like China, Russia, the United States, Brazil and so on. These are places that could be much, much smaller. And I mean, you can just see that in terms of just how large some of these places are. There are still people who claim, oh, well, you can. Texas couldn't secede because it would be too small. I mean, spoken like a true American, right? The idea that a state with 25 million people, the same number of people as Australia and an economy larger than Brazil's could not survive as an independent entity. I mean, they could they could have a perfectly competent military defense even, just as a standalone entity. So it's it's just not very convincing. California, of course, which has 39 million people, one of the largest countries in the world. Most countries in the world don't have that many people. I mean, I've got, especially if you look at these European countries, you've got countries with eight, nine, 10 million people. You've got some with 80 million, like like Germany. But that's a large state as far as Europe is concerned. And so we've got a lot of states that have a lot of people and which are very large and could stand to be broken up into much smaller pieces, especially when we look at it historically, when we look at, for example, that the United States, when it became the United States, had just a few million people all spread over this enormous territory. And now we're being told that I mean, we're talking like six, seven million people over basically the entire eastern seaboard. But now we're being told that a place with 25 million people could never survive as its own thing. So people, you can see how people just really been indoctrinated into this idea about how great the status quo is and anything that you change, it would just be so weird, so radical. I mean, how could we even live with it? And of course, completely ignores the reality that there's lots of countries with small numbers of people. So just be aware of that in that this these biases that we have had built into us. Now, so number three was choice. That's a good thing. Now, here comes the issue of people start to raise objections about being in smaller states and how are smaller states more like a anarchic system? Oh, OK, that's great. We see that people are, you know, they have more choices now. There's some big, there's some smaller countries where there are bigger countries. What does that mean for me? Is this really moving us in the direction of anarchy and so on? And we could note that really smaller states are more voluntary in a certain sense, because there's more choice than the amount of volunteerism increases. And we can see this in the Misesian view. For Mises, they they the the world should have been constructed in such a way that self determination could be created at the local level. And so he writes this in liberalism. He talks about how people should be able to secede with their own town or their own county or their own region, their own administrative unit. And this is something that people often ignore when they talk about Mises as the the more rational of the two or the more reasonable guy. You know, I can't get into that Rothbard guy, because he's too radical. But I can, you know, Mises, he's far more reasonable person. And of course, you read that and Mises has a very different style, a different tone and so on. But when you start to get into his actual writings and look about what his vision was for how Europe should function, you start to see just how truly radical it is. And in liberalism, he discusses this, but this isn't the only place that he writes about it. But he says 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 freely conducted plebiscite that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but to 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 to preventing revolutions and civil and international wars. So in his mind, we've got, you know, West Alabama and the people there, they decide that they've got some other different ideas and they want to do things differently. So Mises say, well, you don't want to risk a civil war over this. You don't want people to feel like they're trapped in one single political jurisdiction, then they're going to fight over resources and so on, just just let them do their own thing. They can have a vote on it and if the majority votes, then they can do their own thing. Now, of course, then the immediate come back to that as well. What about the people who voted no? Well, what's the answer to that? The answer then is to take that new state and divide it up again into a smaller piece so that the people who voted no can then have their own territory to reflect their own values. And so in Mises's mind, this was really the only way to achieve international peace, that you had constantly moving borders, reflecting, changing demographics, reflecting, changing needs, reflecting changes in the regime and to simply impose these unchanging forever borders was a recipe for disaster because it would end up you would end up through migration, through changes in values and ideology and so on. You would have people becoming powerless minorities within each of these areas. And the only way those minorities could then assert their power again will be to break off into some smaller piece and to assert their self determination that way. And so without that tool, then you're just basically left with a bunch of political gimmicks such as, well, we got democracy. So, you know, whatever the 51 percent says goes and the 49 percent, well, just too bad, whereas that 49 percent in his system would have the option of forming a separate state and actually asserting self determination. And so in that sense, then these places really are more voluntary, not perfectly voluntary, of course, but at least then you had some real choices and you were able to go to some place where you thought, well, this better suits my needs. And this is extremely important then because the more voluntary is your situation in terms of the state you choose than the closer you're getting to an anarchic type situation. But of course, no product is perfect. This is number five. No state will ever cater perfectly to our needs because this is an imperfect world and you can never get the product that you want exactly. For example, even just say it was purely privatized system. The whole world was determined by private markets and so on. Are you ever going to be able to live in a place that's just exactly what you wanted? Well, of course, let's just look at other products. Can you ever get the product that's exactly what you want in an automobile? What you do is you look around at the automobiles that are available and you try and find one that has the the amenities that you want. It's got the kind of seat you want the the motor and they're not always configured together. Boy, I would really love that car that has both a gigantic engine and also has this particular type of computer display and so on. But a lot of time, the people that make the cars, they don't put those two things together. So you're just stuck picking the one that's least bad. And this would be true of any number of products. Now, the exception, of course, would be is if you're a billionaire, you could probably have yourself a car made from scratch from the ground up. But most people simply don't have that option. And this would then be true in even if you had a choice of 10,000 states within 50 miles, you would still have to pick one. And you would still be then limited by what the market overall demanded and what was available to you. So I'm unconvinced when I hear people complain that even decentralization is no good because, well, you would still be stuck having to live somewhere where everything wasn't perfect for you. So I want to live somewhere where I can just walk around naked all the time. And I got my cat on a leash. And I've got virtual reality goggles on. And anybody that finds that annoying, oh, and I'm smoking a huge bong, by the way, while I'm doing this, and anyone that finds that annoying, well, you know, this, I thought we were free. I thought, you know, how dare you tell me what I can do. And of course, this just isn't reality. I mean, the definition of freedom is what you can afford to get. And when you have a variety of choices and the places you choose to be and so on. And it's very, unless you're a billionaire, you're not going to be able to buy a place in a state out in the middle of nowhere, be able to buy your own military for it, put up giant walls and so on, and ensure that you can live in complete and utter freedom. The reality is, is it would be like any other number of things. If you wanted a place to live, it's going to have to be a place where other people wanted a similar product and where economies of scale take over. So that, oh, look, there's enough people who want this sort of neighborhood, this sort of place with this sort of defense, this sort of standard of living, these sorts of rules, and we're all going to agree to live in this place. And that's what it's more likely to look like, is that I just need to find like-minded people who I agree enough with that I can tolerate to be around them. And I hate to break it to you, but probably in most of these places, they're not going to want to watch you walking around naked, like with your, like your bong, basically. Most people will have some limitations on what they're willing to tolerate from other people. Now, a lot of the time, this, then you could be describing it as what Hoppe calls his covenant community. And he describes it like this. So in this idea, 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 certainly the case in some housing developments. The owner may be bound by contractual limitations of what he can do with his property, 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. So we want to live in a place that has no smoking. So I live in the Republic of Southern Auburn and no smoking anywhere in town. Well, your freedom hasn't actually been restricted that much if you already had 50 other choices nearby from which to choose. You ended up choosing the no smoking town. Say, even you signed a little contract when you moved in. You said, okay, I agree with the rules. Well, then you don't get to complain later that I'm not allowed to smoke here. I mean, outrageous. I thought this was free. I thought this was a free place. And of course, you continue to see that today in homeowners associations, right? Some guy moves into homeowners association, he signs the contract, and then he's like a disabled veteran or something. He wants to fly his like 80 foot long American flag like in the front yard. And then the HOA says, you can't do that. And he says, I thought this was America. I thought we were free. And but the reality is he's submitted to those rules. Now, of course, this is an unpopular thing to point out, right? People advocate for an anarchist society. It's probably strategically, it's not great to point out that probably has some things in common with an HOA because everybody hates HOAs. And why you want to live there? They're like tiny dictatorships. The reality, of course, is they're not. I mean, you read the rules, you chose to go there. You could probably even change the rules once you're there. If you get enough other people to agree with you, usually you can't change the rules because other people don't agree with your weird habits or whatever it is you want to do in your front yard. And so that's the problem. But nevertheless, as Hoppe notes here, those places could be restricted in a variety of ways. You can't just build whatever you want. You can't just do whatever you want in your front yard. You can't start selling junk cars on the sidewalk in front of your house and so on. That's not really the definition of freedom. The definition comes from this ability to choose from a variety of different places that are a product of decentralization. Now, if one of those units becomes very untenable, becomes like a true dictatorship and starts to abuse people's rights, then you do need to leave. But there's always going to be a custom post with that. If you end up hating the car that you bought, you got to sell the car and get a different one. That's inconvenient. If you end up hating this place you moved, you got to sell the house and you got to move somewhere else. That's inconvenient. But there's really no other way around that in reality. I mean, we occupy physical space. You got to live somewhere. I know that some people imagine we're all going to like download our brains into computers and zoom around the galaxy and stuff like that. But at least for now, you got to like lay your body down like in a physical place somewhere. And that means you're going to have to submit to other groups of people who are in your general proximity. Now, this illustrates, however, the need to have variety because some issues simply cannot be decided just based on logic or reason. Because, let's see, I got about 10 minutes left. Because there isn't, this isn't something that we can all agree on. For example, I mean, this touches on the issue here. If you move into a neighborhood and you want to sell junk cars out of your front yard, you should be able to just say, oh, well, it's my property and I don't care how much I'm ruining the neighborhood by just putting all my garbage on my front lawn. Now, your neighbors are going to hate that. If you're in an actual HOA, then you'll probably have a lean put on your house, maybe be forced out of the neighborhood. But a lot of times people argue if there's just like a local ordinance that says you can't do this. Well, they complain that this is, you know, the city council is run by like mini-Hittlers and stuff like that and I'm not allowed to do whatever I want in my yard. And we see this in a lot of issues where there is simply not going to, we're not going to arrive at an agreement that whatever you do is your own thing and it doesn't affect me, man. And I'm fine with that. Because look at issues like abortion, right? How do we come to an agreement about abortion? You can probably find that here where you just talk to your anti-bortion, you talk to someone that's pro-abortion. You're not going to like have a conversation and be, oh, yes, I see what you mean. Well, yes, well, I do believe that an unborn baby is a human being and gets natural rights. But, you know, you've convinced me now that it's fine to kill that person. Or at the same time, the other side might say, well, I think it's trespass onto a woman's body to force her to give birth to this baby. But, you know, after our five-minute conversation, I guess that, you know, I was wrong. And so what you're, these are like deep, deep philosophical issues that depend simply on definitions, right? How you define an unborn baby really comes down to maybe religious views or your scientific views. And this isn't something where we can all get together and decide that, oh, well, 51% decided that person isn't a person. Or 51% decided that that non-person is a person. So therefore, now, you 49%, you all have to follow by the rules. Well, this is just a way to sow discord and invite serious problems. The same might be true if we found out what happened with that issue on slavery, for example. It was a very similar issue. And so these are situations, like Mises would point out, where you need to decentralize that situation. Another perfect example, which actually is another timely example, is circumcision, right? You meet these people like, well, that's barbaric. It's unnecessary surgery. The baby can't consent, et cetera, et cetera. What sort of monster would even live in a place where you would allow this sort of thing? We need to outlaw it immediately. Well, of course, that outlaws Judaism, which is potentially problematic. I hear bad things happen when that's been done historically. And so how to account for that? Well, shouldn't you have the choice that at least to live somewhere where you're not supporting a state or a regime or a tax system that protects the right to circumcision? But maybe people who do think that's extremely important should allow to have their own place where they could live as well. Now, of course, we've all been trained to think that's no good. And what about those babies that are living in that place where that are still getting circumcised? Shouldn't we get together an army and kill a certain portion of that population over there until they submit to our anti-circumcision views? Mises would say, I don't think that's a great idea. Maybe you guys should just be allowed to have two different political groups. And yet again, we see then how this contributes to the notion of a more free society of self-determination. And finally, number seven, borders are nice and decentralization is nice because it actually places limitations on state power in the international system. And what we note here is that we badmouth borders a lot among free market people. Oh, let's look at these arbitrary lines and so on. And they keep other people out and they keep goods in and so on. But the nice thing about borders also is that they keep state power limited to a certain place. And this is especially important for small states which are very concerned about maintaining their sovereignty. You hear a lot in the United States about maintaining American sovereignty and stuff, but that's not even a real issue. The United States has sovereignty in spades, right? It's got thousands of nuclear missiles, it's a gigantic conventional army and stuff. Nobody's actually threatening American sovereignty. However, if you're a small country that can more easily be invaded by a larger country and so on, well, sovereignty actually is an important thing. And sovereignty is a recognized issue in international law benefits you immensely by recognizing that states can't just do whatever they want outside their own borders, that there actually are limitations. And those limitations are usually those borders, at least in theory. Some states are so big, i.e. the United States, that they just do whatever they want outside their borders, although that situation can't continue forever. And so you can see then that all of these benefits that accrue over time by creating more and more limitations on states, by breaking them up into smaller pieces, by maybe breaking off parts of a large state, just thus constraining it ever more with smaller and smaller frontiers that form around it. And that over time, this gives us more choice. It provides greater incentives for free trade. And that in the long run, as happened in Europe throughout much of history, it makes states and regimes and princes compete with each other for people as they are able to more easily move from place to place. And so this isn't just some pie in the sky thing that we're talking about. This is something that we can see historically that has had real effects. And it's the sort of thing that we can take steps toward now. Peace meal, bit by bit, to actually move forward in terms of just saying to everybody, well, I know there's a lot of stuff going on in the world that's bad right now, but once we achieve a perfect anarcho-capitalist society, then we'll solve those problems. The next question, of course, is which, okay, well, how do you achieve this perfect anarcho-capitalist society? Well, I'll just convince everyone that anarcho-capitalism is the way to go. Well, you're gonna have probably a much easier time convincing people that maybe they would benefit from simply self-determination at the local level and simply be able to form a society that they find more suitable to them, that reflects their values, and so on. That sort of thing has a long and venerable history of actually working and actually being pursued. And we can see historically that it has actually worked. Now, we're about out of time, but I would just simply note that on the issue of national defense, this even works, because a lot of the time the objection you'll find is, well, you can't have small states then because you'll just get invaded immediately. Now, this isn't true. We can see because even small states that are physically small, but nevertheless are wealthy, are often capable of rather effective national defense, and Mises would point out, also, that wealthier countries are better at national defense, and so you wouldn't want a country that is geared around controlling its economy and impoverishing its people because that would actually affect its ability to defend itself. And we can see this in some large states like Russia, which if Russia were actually a free and open economy, it would be much, much better at defense than it is. It's actually a pretty small, weak economy. I know we talk all the time, like Russia is some sort of big international powerhouse, but it's not. I mean, Germany has a much larger economy, much greater military capability potentially than the Russians certainly have, and that's a much smaller country. And so you have a place then, like Switzerland or even smaller countries, that they have outsized ability to defend themselves based on the fact that they've become very wealthy. And Mises just points out the obvious fact that if you've got a lot of money, if you've got a rich population, you're able to draw upon that population to purchase better armaments, more efficient armaments, and to simply engage in defense that way. The other issue, of course, that we might touch on is the fact that having a large number of independent states in no way precludes the ability for states to come together into confederations and into alliances to protect themselves. So countries that are very similar in culture, there's no reason, especially if they're significant trading partners, there's no reason they can't come together and form blocks to defend themselves. And this, of course, is what happened throughout history, because you had countries that were similar and had similar interests, they would often enter into alliances to offer self-protection. The United States was no different. The United States originally was sold as a customs union, where there'd be free trade between the different colonies, and it would offer self-defense by all of these different states, simply being able to offer large numbers of troops and munitions and so on to defend themselves from any foreign powers. Now, of course, things got out of hand then. People then, oh, yeah, this new constitution sounds great, but it turned out there was all that other stuff in there about taxes and regulation and everything. And it ended up forming all of what should have been a variety of independent countries that merely was, that merely had come together for a defense compact and a customs union, ended up forging into essentially one giant state. However, it would have been just as effective, arguably, at defending itself had it never actually formed into a single political jurisdiction, had it simply had a variety of states, which of course were all shared a common culture to a certain extent and would have responded similarly in case of actual invasion. So it's not necessarily the case at all that you need one large consolidated nation state and one large regime in order to mount an effective national defense. That can be done through a variety of small states as well, especially since the effect of having a small state is that you have a wealthier population, a more efficient population, and a regime that is more open to actual free trade, freedom and friendly relations with the states around it so that you're just simply less likely to have common and large scale warfare in a case where you have a variety of small states that are dependent upon each other. But I encourage you to read Ray Coase, the European miracle for the basic theoretical background here and just to explore some of the issues here in the history of states that he links to and provides some more information on and then just thinking about how in terms of in modern times we can apply those lessons to today to really provide people with more choice in which regime they can live under while accepting also that this isn't a utopian solution but it certainly provides us with a lot of choices that we might not have had otherwise. So thank you very much.