 If you are a big fan of debates, give us some enthusiastic applause. Yeah? Good, good. That's what I like to hear. Then let's get ready to rumble intellectually. No fisticuffs, please. No fisticuffs. Thank you for that kind introduction. I am Jason Russell. I'm the managing editor of Reason Magazine. And Reason loves debate. Last year around this time, we did a whole issue about debates that we had more than 10 really interesting debates that are within the libertarian movement and very hard questions. Some of those debates are about Ukraine, Brexit. One of them was about the very thing we're about to debate here. One of the more fun debates, and I think the easier question to answer, was, are cats or dogs more libertarian? And I'm a little biased because I wrote one of the answers, but you should definitely check that out so you can go see a picture of my cat. So please look up Reason's debate issue from last year. Reason also sponsors the Soho Forum series of debates, which is a monthly event in New York City, but the videos are always online. I think they're streamed live. They're always available on Reason's website and our YouTube page as well. And of course, wherever you get your podcasts. Now, our topic for today is, will a national divorce lead to more individual liberty? Would we be better off remaining as the United States, or might we be better off if the United States weren't so united? Arguing for the affirmative is Ryan McMakin. He is the executive editor of the Mises Institute, and he's written a book about this very subject called Breaking Away. You can read that for free on the Mises Institute website. Arguing for the negative, we have Jonathan Casey. He is the founder and chair of the libertarian party's classical liberal caucus. And last year around this time, he participated in a Soho Forum about this very issue. So again, if you're interested in that, look it up on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. So I'm gonna give each gentleman five minute opening statements to start. You have your clock right there, so you'll know when you're done, but we'll start with Ryan. All right, thank you very much. They don't reset the clock, so I have to do my own math to figure out five minutes. Yes, thank you very much. I'm with the Mises Institute. Thanks to the Congress for inviting me to come and talk about this topic, which I did write this book on, Breaking Away. You can read it for free on Mises.org or you can buy a copy on Amazon or through the Mises bookstore. And so just to be clear, basically everything I say here has, if you are interested further, you wanna know the source. It's in the book with footnotes or it's on our site if I wrote about it after the book came out. So plenty of sourcing on all of this. And I like that. I like to go back to my sources on these materials. I will not even assert that George Washington was the first president without providing some sort of backing material for that. So looking at why would national divorce be a good idea? Well, first of all, I just wanna know and I take exception to the very term national divorce. I know I get it. It's like it's shorthand, it's convenience use term, but it creates this lame analogy that the United States is some sort of family and that we're married and that I've seen of course people say, oh, we don't need a divorce. We need a marriage counselor, which is just very, very dumb. The United States, if we're gonna talk about breaking it up, this is a contract renegotiation, if anything. It's not a family. We're not, we're not united in some sort of mystical bond with each other. And so I just wanna dispense with that idea that I subscribe to any of that stuff. I reject all that out of hand that there's some sort of supernatural union or any kind of genetic or ethnic unity we all enjoy. I don't think that at all. But in terms of ideology as radical classical liberals, which is of course what Mises Stubb mostly represents, people like Mises, Gustav de Molinari, Rothbard, these are all people in the tradition of hardcore radical classical liberalism. We're gonna draw upon their values in really looking at why is national divorce a good thing, and also look at some of the empirical evidence about what happens when countries break up into smaller pieces. So first of all, we just need to keep in mind the fact that self-determination is an individual right. It is a right that is recognized and has been recognized since the days of the Declaration of Independence. And if you look at the research and at the literature on the topic, basically the Declaration of Independence is recognized as the origin document of the right of self-determination. And as a secession movement, and this is hardly some sort of unique theory of mine, we could consult David Armitage, the Harvard historian on this, not exactly a Rothbardian who notes simply, I mean it's obvious that the American Revolution was a secession movement and that the Declaration of Independence and the philosophy involved there is a matter of secession and self-determination. And we see this issue then come up increasingly in the late 18th century throughout the 19th century as countries throughout Poland, the Hungarians in Austria-Hungary, the Poles attempting to secede from Russia and the Austrian Empire. We see it anywhere that countries are asserting their right to break free from some larger domineering state where they feel that they are not being appropriately represented. And we note also that we find many examples of secession throughout history that are justified on the grounds of self-determination. We should note that the number of countries in the world has nearly tripled since 1945. There are only about 80 countries at the end of the Second World War. Well, where did all those other countries come from? They came into existence through secession movements, all justified on self-determination. And then, of course, after the end of the Soviet Union, we had another 16 countries that came into existence, all based on and justified by self-determination. They went to votes, they voted to secede, or sometimes they didn't even have a national referendum as in the case of the Baltics. And they broke off and they didn't think, oh, gee, do we have a consensus with the Politburo here? Are they gonna be upset if we move away? Are we breaking our mystical bond with the Russians by breaking off and forming an independent Estonia? No, no, no, the reality is that minorities within a larger union have a right to break off. It's basic self-determination. And then the other main issue here is the issue of what happens when countries get smaller and break off. And as we'll find in a lot of the data here in the books, the empirical evidence shows that as states get smaller, as they break off from other states, as small states compete, and as they face the threat of further secession and being broken up into smaller pieces, they're actually more open to trade, to the migration of workers, to economic development. As we see going back in work done by non-libertarian historians, going back at least 500 years. So this is a basic concept here where we're opposed to state building and centralization of power because it leads to a flowering of freedom. And fundamentally it's the right thing to do because the right of self-determination is essential. Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead. Thank you guys for having me. Thank you for showing up early in the morning. I know most of you were probably out late last night and so I appreciate you showing up. And I think this is an important topic. We hear in the news all the time, we hear about Texas, we hear about different states, New Hampshire wanting to start its own nation. I think it's an important topic to discuss exactly what would happen and how it applies in the real world. The true measure of whether or not national divorce leads to more individual liberties is what results from national divorce. Not whether our intentions are good or not. It's about what would actually happen in the real world and the political sphere that we have created in the United States. What would it lead to? So whether or not national divorce would lead to individual liberty is really a question of, well, what do we mean by individual liberty? I know most of us will probably answer the question along the lines of, well, you're allowed to do what you want without as long as you don't harm anybody else. But individual liberty is more than just that. It's also the ability to communicate, to collaborate and to work with other people. And so when you're talking about a national divorce, you're also talking about putting massive barriers and borders in between people. Ryan talked about how states, smaller states, tend to have a more open border system. But the problem is, Ryan, in the United States between states, we have a perfect open border system. We have no trade, tariffs, we have no customs. We don't have to get a visa from going one state to another. These borders that would be imposed by a national divorce would be a net negative to individual liberty. So the right off the bat were behind the eight ball on national divorce as far as achieving more individual liberty. The differences, I can't read my notes here, sorry. Jotted them down. The differences between, excuse me, one of the problems with national divorce is that it often conflates the idea of geographic decentralization with political decentralization. None of us here would say, well, North Korea is more decentralized than the United States. Of course not. It's much smaller than the United States. So inherently smaller nations are not necessarily more free just because somebody might be able to leave them. One of the problems that I hear a lot with national divorce advocates is they often say, well, if you don't like where you're living now, you can simply move to another state. And I'm sorry, freedom is not being forced to leave your family, they forced to leave your job, forced to leave your home. Freedom is being able to live where you want to live wherever that may be as long as you aren't harming anybody else as long as you aren't imposing on anyone else. And I lost track of the time. So I think I've got a few minutes here. Yeah, two and a half. Two and a half, thank you. Where would these borders be? A lot of national divorce advocates asked was our state that cultural divides in this nation, that cultural divides in this nation are beyond repair or we need to divide down smaller. There'll be, it'll solve our problems people will be able to choose their preferred form of government. The reality is where are you gonna divide these lines up? Because the real cultural divide in America is not between right and left, or excuse me, they're not between red states and blue states. The real cultural divide in this country is between rural areas and urban areas. And so wherever you're going to divide the lines up, where no state doesn't have rural areas or they both have urban and rural areas. So where are you going to divide this country up along the lines that is actually going to improve individual liberty and improve the cooperation and social cohesion of the United States? Because that's the ultimate, a lot of national divorce advocates say that social discord in the United States will be solved by breaking us up. But again, where are you going to draw the line? Even if you draw the line at the state border, you're gonna end up with states with a large percentage of Republicans being dominated by Democrats or vice versa in red states. So ultimately, I think we have to get down to the answer and I'm hoping Ryan sends a little bit more time on how and why national divorce in the United States will lead to more individual liberty. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm gonna start by asking Ryan, you know, what exactly are you advocating for here? What does this, you know, in your perfect world, does this look like 50 independent state governments? Does it go even more local than that? Does it be less local than that with regional governments? What exactly do you want to see in your perfect world? Well, let's be clear that I'm not talking. I don't think there's something magical about the state level of government that, oh, you have a right to self-determination as long as you're one of the original American states or you have statehood or something like that. Certainly if we look at, we got Locke, we got Molinari, we got Charles Dunoye, all of these serious liberals would say, no, of course there isn't some magical level of government. Any group of people that can put together Locke's position was any group of people that can put together some sort of legislative body gets to have self-determination. And this is in direct contradiction to John C. Calhoun who did believe there was something magical about the state level. Obviously he wasn't in favor of groups smaller than the state declaring their own independence because that would have been problematic for the secession issue. Or for just anti-slavery people in general. He didn't think they should get their own governments. And so we're talking about a very specific issue where I'm not telling other people how to do things. And just in general, I don't have some national plan for, oh, these people should declare independence and those people should do this. In fact, the essence of my position is the opposite of the anti-national divorce position in that I'm not telling other people what they should want or how they should govern themselves or what they should do. Because fundamentally saying, oh, you don't get to declare independence because you might govern in a way I don't agree with. This is of course a colonialist view. This is the idea that, and has always been used by central governments to say, well, we can't let those Algerians break off and self-govern because they're barbarians. We can't let those Apaches govern themselves because, well, we all just don't know they're incapable of civilization. And we hear a lot of the same stuff here now as, oh, well, the only reason those people want us to see is so they can reinstate slavery, which is basically a laughable position, although I've seen many on the left make this claim. And so I'm not saying, oh, this state, that state, this region, that region, I don't have a map in my head of what's supposed to happen. I'm simply saying that if there are groups of people that, like Mises says, if a group of people get together and they have a plebiscite that says, hey, we wish to secede and form our own government, that group should be taken seriously and that you should enter into negotiations for how to accomplish that end. So yeah, I don't have a specific plan. Do you have a response to that? I think you have to have a plan. If you're spitting forward a proposition saying we should break up the country, wishful thinking and hoping things work out isn't gonna work out. One of the ironies of liberty is that liberty requires a government to protect it. I'm not an anarchist, never will say I am, but I think you have to make sure that you have plans in place for that when you've moved forward towards a system if you want actual true political decentralization that has to be planned out. You simply can't remove restrictions on local governments. Ryan, you stated that we can't tell people how to govern. Absolutely we can tell states not how to govern. I'm sorry, but yes, we should tell states, no, you can't discriminate against blacks. No, you can't ban gay marriage. Yes, absolutely, because we believe in liberty. We believe that no, government doesn't have any rights. We have all the rights. And so we absolutely have the right to tell government, no, you can't do that. So John, you wrote in a Learn Liberty blog post and I quote here, some say that people have a right to live with whatever gun taxes slash immigration laws they want and a national divorce would reduce forced associations. And then you kept writing, but this is a wholesale rejection of libertarianism which believes human rights are universal and must be protected. But there's always going to be some people who disagree with perfect libertarianism. So in that sense, is a national divorce a more realistic argument for political harmony because we will have places that presumably do agree on these issues? Well, I often hear the argument that we'll end up with a thousand, we're the hope that we'll end up with a thousand Lichtensteins. And that always to me, to me that always sounds like Oprah, you get a Lichtenstein, everybody gets a Lichtenstein and I'm sorry, that's not how it's gonna work out. It hasn't worked out even with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We didn't see further and further decentralization. We haven't seen that at all. In fact, we've seen the exact opposite where countries are joining NATO, they're joining the European Union. So instead of actually, instead of this further and further decentralization that national divorce advocates often claim would happen, the exact opposite is what happens in the real world. So as far as political discord goes, sure, in some theoretical sense, allowing people to move to the little local tyranny that they want to, fine, I don't care. I'm not in charge of those local tyrannies. What I can do is I can influence what my country is doing and what other governments, what other state governments, what other local governments can or can't do. And I think that that is the fundamental principle of liberalism is to prevent the state from any state within our, as peacefully as we can, prevent them from infringing on rights. Can you respond there? Well, I can't believe my opponent is implying that the breakup of the Soviet Union was a bad thing because it allows governments to go off and found their own local tyranny. This was an obviously good thing, this breakup of a large state into a bunch of small states. I don't see the downside in any way of this happening. And the one irony, of course, is that a lot of people who are very much vehemently in favor of Ukraine asserting its independence from Moscow are also anti-succession. Well, the only reason Ukraine exists is because of a plebiscite where it voted to declare secession from the Soviet Union in 1993. And so obviously a good thing. And gee, did all these countries that broke off from the Soviet Union found a bunch of tyrannical local governments that were somehow worse than the Soviet Union? Obviously not. In fact, the Baltic states of Europe are among some of the wealthiest and have seen huge increases in growth in terms of GDP per capita and wealth in those countries. And some joined NATO, some didn't, so? I mean, these countries decided to do different things in different ways. It's called having independence and it's called self-determination. And this assertion that, yes, of course, we need to have some people telling other people in other countries how to live because they shouldn't discriminate against each other. Well, how come that only, we're assuming that the United States then is the correct level of government? How can the, I can certainly make the case then that, gee, the United States is too independent as is. We should give the United Nations more power to assert that the United States violates human rights on its own. And we should give international organizations more power. The International Criminal Court should be trying Americans and putting them on trial for discrimination and racism. And it can go up the ladder just as much as you can go down the ladder in terms of telling people how to live. And this is why the liberals consistently from Jefferson on have said, we need more local self-determination, especially in the United States, where each state is a republic with a legislature, with a Supreme Court, reacting like this is some sort of tribal government where there's no rule of law. But that's of course not the reality at all. So one minute we're told that democracy and republics work very, very well, but the next minute, as soon as one of those republics wants to be a republic that's not directly under the US federal government, well then suddenly republics don't work anymore and we need some Supreme Court people in Washington to tell them how to do everything. So I often hear people advocating for a national divorce. They talk about how our politics is so angry and vitriolic and that if we had these smaller states that we would have more political harmony. But even in deep red states like Alabama, 30% of that state is still republicans. And even in deep blue New York city, 30% are still republicans. I meant 30% of Alabama's democrats, obviously, but so even with a national divorce, won't those 30% of people in those smaller places, there's still gonna be political discord from those 30%, right? Yes, there will always be minorities within every group that seeks to declare independence. And of course this applied to the United States as well when it declared independence from the British Empire. The question is, should the presence of the loyalists have invalidated the American independence movement because this was a significant part of the population? And so if the answer is, well, at any time there's some minorities who don't want us to see, well, it's off the table. Well, then of course the United States would not exist as an independent country because the loyalists were no small insignificant part of the United States at that time. Most people agree, well, they had to go. They had to move to Canada. Many went back. And it is unfortunate the way many of them were treated in terms of the day-to-day treatment that many loyalists received. However, that just wasn't sufficient to invalidate the fact that Americans had a right to self-determination in that way. The answer to that though is to simply allow further break up of these jurisdictions after they secede. And this is why Gustav de Molinari talked about the right of double secession. And this is, okay, you can have a region break off from the central government but then you can have a municipality break off from that. And this is the reality of course in Europe and what historians have shown has been the great contributor to a lot of the capitalist growth that occurred over the last 500 years is that there was a lot of fluidity in the borders. There was a lot of ability to break off, to form different pieces, to form different alliances. And this in the aggregate, and you can see this in the work of Douglas North, Hayek actually says this, that he says, oh gee, I think that most of Europe's growth in capitalism was due to its quote unquote political anarchy by which he meant rapid and massive decentralization during that period. And we find in the work of Ralph Raco in his lengthy essay on the European Miracle is where did all of this economic growth come from? How did Europe get so rich? It's because of constant movements toward breaking up pieces of Europe into smaller pieces. And it was not some fate of complete where, okay, that's enough decentralization now, we got enough, let's get everything under control. No, no, it was much more dynamic than that. And it led to a great flowering of economic growth and freedom. I wanna remind a little bit to the previous question where you stated that I implied that the Soviet Union breakup was a bad thing. No, what I am stating is that if you're going to have secession, you need to have a plan in place for how individual liberty will be protected. Because when a country breaks away, for example, in the state of Texas right now, we have a situation going on in the border where our state government is trying to enforce draconian laws against immigrants. For example, our state governor Abbott stated that police are allowed to arrest any illegal immigrant that they pull over. Well, let me ask you something. How do you think they're going to determine who's an illegal immigrant who's driving around? And so you're telling me that it'd be better for Texans to break away and not have the fourth amendment protecting people in my state. No, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna support a secession unless I know how individual liberties will be protected. And so in situations like the Soviet Union, where you have these breakups, you can understand, okay, what laws are going to be in place, what restrictions on government are gonna be placed, then you can make a call in determination on whether secession is appropriate. Because again, there are cases, even Ryan, you'll admit, there are cases that where secession has led to less individual liberty. That's the real world. Sometimes things work out in one direction, sometimes they work out in another. So I think, and as far as geographic decentralization, always leading to political decentralization, when you look at the numbers, when you take a look at the Cato Health or Human Freedom Index, and you compare it to the size of a nation, what you find is that it's only responsible for about 2% of the variation between the countries. So the country's size is only responsible for about 2% of its human freedom index score. Why are we focusing on the 2% when there's 98% to be talked about? I think what's interesting about this issue is that it seems like the case for a national divorce is basically a case for localism. And it seems like there are good arguments for that, right? Like if my job is trying to be a florist in Louisiana, but because of occupational licensing, I can't do that. It's good that I can move to another state and do that. Now, obviously I'm talking about the state level there, but in theory, the federal government, which has the constitutional protections of liberty, but it can also take away those protections as well. So isn't there a good pro-liberty case for the kind of localism that is engendered by a national divorce? You can have localism without national divorce. You can pass a law that says, okay, states are responsible for this now. You can end federal laws and stop them. So this idea that you have to have national divorce to achieve political decentralization is just wrong. But back to your point about whether licensing and being a florist, and you can move from one place to another. Again, true freedom is not being able to move away from your home and your job and your family to someplace better. That's not freedom. Freedom is where you choose to live. As long as you're not harming anybody else, that's freedom. And I get that, yes, we should absolutely have the ability for people to move from one place to the other. But again, most people don't move from one place to the other simply for political reasons. There are many more motivations for it. And the level of burden on them from government needs to be pretty high to force somebody to move away from those things I've mentioned. Brian, your response there? Well, again, it just comes back to me not telling these people if they have enough freedom. Oh, you over there, you have enough freedom now and you have a vote in the legislature so you're not allowed to break off and have self-determination. I mean, even Mises noted this in liberalism when he says he's writing in 1927 and talking about these groups within Russia, the Soviet Union that want to break off. He's saying, look, even if Russia converted over to some sort of constitutional republic with a national legislature, that still would not be sufficient reason to prevent any of these groups from within the Soviet Union from wanting to declare independence. This is just a right that they have regardless of the system of government in place and whether they have some representation in the national government. Plus, as he also notes in another place, if you're in a permanent minority situation, the fact is you don't really have much ability to make your will known as a minority group. So if you're in a permanent minority and you see yourself as, okay, well, we're always gonna lose elections from now on. We have really no hope of getting a president we like, of appointing people to the Supreme Court that we like, which is accepted, right? Over the long term, it doesn't manifest itself immediately, but when you are in a minority status over time, this essentially means that you get ignored. That's just the way democratic systems work. As well as all republics, because even republics then, even though they're supposed to have some minority protective systems in place, over time, all of your appointments, all of your elected officials, they favor the majority group. And so what means do you have then of asserting any sort of self-determination in that situation than to break off and have some sort of self-government in that case? And so again, shouldn't be in the position of saying, oh, I can't let you go until I know what sort of government you're going to have in place. This is, of course, what the British said all the time about Africans and their Asian colonies is, well, you colonies, you can't break off until we know that you're sufficiently enlightened to govern yourself. But I deny that the British were in a position to really dictate to people in other parts of the world how they were allowed to govern themselves. So I had a great economics professor at the University of Rochester who said that the Constitution was the world's greatest free trade agreement. And it's great that Washington State can't put a tariff or an import ban on goods from the state of Florida. And you basically are saying that you want to, not throw away the Constitution, but that you want to break up that great free trade agreement. What is your argument for saying that once we have all these small states, they're necessarily, are we going to lose that free trade? Are we going to lose this free movement of people across the country, across the United States, if we do break up into these smaller states? Well, if the United States were a compact that only had free trade among all the states, I wouldn't have any problem with it at all. I mean, it would be a great document. Heck, you could even have it where the United States functioned essentially as some sort of military defense league. But the fact of the matter is is that members should have some mechanism for leaving. And that's the only, that's your primary means of actually instilling discipline upon that group as well, is that, oh, you cannot start coming up with new powers for yourself. You can't start telling the member states how to do things. But as long as people want to be a member of this union, then they get free trade with all the other members. I don't see a downside with that sort of thing at all. I'm talking about situations where you have one large central government that's telling all parts of the entire union, the entire region, how they get to conduct themselves internally. And I think a lot of British, say in the British empire, would have been perfectly fine with some sort of free trade agreement among within the Commonwealth as well. But that's very different from having a situation where you get to meddle in the constant internal affairs of every corner of the empire. Johnny, you skeptical of that? Yes. I think that you have to look at, again, I think you have to look at the political environment we're in. The right and the left are both going very illiberal directions. And you're telling me that you're hoping, essentially, you're hoping that eventually that they lead to this free trade agreement. But have you looked at what Republicans wanna do? Have you looked at what Democrats wanna do? And at the end of the day, who's gonna be running these local governments? The very same people who are already in power. And I'm sorry, but giving the power to Republicans and Democrats to rewrite the Constitution in their own image is simply not going to work out for individual liberty. So my question is, why wouldn't a national divorce advance individual liberty? Wouldn't, you know, if there are a few, you know, libertarian enclaves spread throughout the country, dotted around, wouldn't that be better than having no libertarian enclaves? Well, first of all, I think, again, most people don't move to go be in a political, I don't wanna say cult, but a political compound that is not the role that is not, liberty is not supposed to be restricted to a few little dotted space. We're supposed to spread it. In fact, the best defense of our liberty is to spread our ideas. Sure, if there was a place that, you know, a utopia we could all go to, sure, maybe we would be better off. And if somebody presented me with a plan, say, here's New Hampshire, here's our new constitution, here's what the individual liberties can be going to be protected, here's how we're gonna do it. And they presented that plan to me. I would start to consider it. But again, no one is presenting a plan for national divorce or secession that increases individual liberty. Response there? Well, we can speculate about what other countries might do if they had more self-determination. If we actually look at the quantitative analysis that's been done, the empirical data that's come out over the last 30 or 40 years, and there was a great flowering of literature on this that came out after the end of the Cold War, after you had a lot of these countries breaking off, is they looked. What happens in these countries? Well, what they found is that what really happens is that these smaller countries especially, what they do is they compete with each other in terms of lowering taxes and advancing more free trade. And part of the reason is just simply it's a matter of survival. So it doesn't even matter really what the ideology, the stated ideology of this regime is in many cases, in order to maintain their standard of living, in order to have any success as a country, they have to be open to free trade. They have to be open to low taxation. And this is why small countries are usually the ones that object to this idea of a standard tax rate. You've seen this, Janet Yellen loves to talk about it, and the EU loves to talk about it. So there's too many different tax rates in the world. And we've got these countries, they keep undercutting us. Countries like Ireland and Hungary, they adopt low tax rates and then they suck capital investment into those countries. And that's just wrong. What we need to do is develop a one global minimum tax. And this will of course make the world much more efficient and everyone will have similar tax rates. This of course, what they're really saying is, taxes are too low in parts of the world and we need to make sure and bring those tax rates up. And so when you do see all of these efforts to actually go out and assert more self-determination in terms of tax rates, in terms of trade, because these small countries want it the most. They know that the only way they can actually compete is by opening themselves up to additional trade. And it's just essential. So they end up doing that, regardless of what their constitutions might say and so on. If they wanna stay rich, if they want to increase their standard of living in order to get of course, get re-elected in most cases, they have to embrace more openness. And this is just what the empirical data shows over the last 30 years and it really doesn't depend all that much on what someone has to say about it in Congress or some local legislature. It's just simply an imperative and especially if we look at the larger historical situation in Europe, it's that decentralization that has driven most of that. So we're gonna get to two minute closing statements in a second here, but before we get to that, my last question for both of you, perhaps my hardest question, is what is something that your opponent said here today that you agreed with or thought was a good point? He should go first. That's funny, because that was my exact statement that I was gonna say. Yeah, I think that it is important to have these discussions. I think it's important to look at what the other side is saying and I think that there are things we need to learn from the data that shows the decentralization that geographic decentralization can affect political decentralization, but we have to make sure that we have to understand that they are not one-to-one. There is absolutely a case to be made that we should localize more government, but the fact is we can do that now. We have a system of government where we can pass responsibilities down to lower levels. If we wanna do that, why have a national voice? Why not just pass some bills, pass some laws? So of course I agree with my opponent that I'm concerned about things of, well, there are people in other parts of the world that are doing things that I find abhorrent. Now, of course, I think it's been greatly overstated that if some portion of the United States breaks off, it's gonna turn into some sort of third-world hellhole, which is, by the way, what Joy Reid said recently is that if any of these states break off, it's gonna become this hellhole. And, well, okay, I guess you can assert that. But the fact of the matter is the world is full of places that do things that I disagree with. But the answer to them is not what the US regime has been telling us needs to be done for the last 25, 30, actually forever, which is that, oh, there's this other part of the world, Iraq, Syria, you name it, they're doing stuff that we find objectionable. So you know what the answer is, send in an army, do some humanitarian intervention. And that's essentially where the argument leads is that, oh, these other parts of the world might do things that we don't like so. We need humanitarian intervention even better to have it really statutorily put in place at some constitutional level rather than just recognizing that country is foreign. But I get the impulse, of course. So I am concerned about these things too. I just recognize that the answer to it is not to intervene in some way using coercion to ensure that other people do these sorts of things. There are other methods that can be employed and have been employed historically. Okay, two minute closing statements. We're gonna start with Ryan so that Jonathan gets the last word. All right, just simply that this is the sort of thing where you do it because it's the right thing to do, that we shouldn't be in the business really of determining how the rest of the world should be doing things. And this has always been one fundamental problem of Congress is that Alaska decides they wanna do something and then you get 535 members of Congress minus the three people from Alaska determining what happens in Alaska. And that doesn't strike me as particularly democratic or really cognizant of what's going on in one of these particular states. These places need to have some ability in order to, some means to which assert themselves more independently. And some degree of self-determination is that. It might be full independence or maybe it could be a rewriting of the current union so that it's just a free trade agreement. But I would say if we really wanted to see what the situation was, if we really wanted to develop a roadmap of how would this independence look, do something that is written into the Swiss constitution, which is that unless you reapprove the constitution every 20 years, let's say, and of course, Jefferson wanted a new constitution every 19 years, let's throw it out to the states and have everyone affirmatively vote whether or not they wish to remain in the United States. Why is the burden always on people to withdraw? Why don't we get everyone to opt back in? And then we'll know who really wants to be in, the people who opt in and the people who opt out. And if some people decide not to opt in, then we'll have to see where we go from there. But rather than saying, hey, you need to organize something so you can opt out, how about we just ask, since we know everybody loves America so much and everyone fears national divorce so much, let's ask them to opt in and then we'll know more about where we stand. And then we'll see a lot more in terms of how people view their own self-determination rights. Thank you very much. God bless. I spent a little time this past week thinking about what I wanted to leave you with. I thought about, Ryan would accuse this of being me of being sentimental, but I thought about talking about how I didn't think the American experiment, the greatest political experiment we've ever seen was over. I think that's true, but I don't think that's what I wanna leave you with. I thought about talking about whether or not, about checks and balances, that it's good to have different levels of government that restrict the ones below them. That's right, but I don't necessarily want that to be what I leave you with. Ultimately as individuals, we have to make determinations about the real political world around us and we have to look at what's actually going to happen. And for me, the reason why I oppose national divorce is because I see a path forward that is extremely dangerous in our current political climate. What we have to do before anything else, regardless of how geographically small or large our government is, we have to influence our political culture and we have to get out there and spread our message. That's the answer, because regardless of how big or small a government is, if our political culture says we want to rule over other people, you're not gonna protect individual liberty. That's great. Well, I think often I watch debates and I see the debaters talking past each other or they spend the whole time arguing about definitions and that gets really boring and technical. So thank you both. That was been very fantastic and I appreciate the substance of both of your debates. It was a great argument. Again, if you wanna read more about this, there is more on Reason Magazine and Reason.com about a national divorce, the arguments for and against. If you're interested, you can read Ryan's book Breaking Away for free again on the Mises Institute website. And again, Jonathan was at a SOHO forum debate about this very topic about a year ago. You can see that on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts, just search for the SOHO forum. Let's hear it again for both our debaters. Thank you. Well done. Well done.