 This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Welcome back once again, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the Human Action Podcast. If you have been following along, you'll know that we've been working our way in three separate shows through Hans Hermann Hoppe's Democracy, The God That Failed. And now I think it's appropriate that we finish this book on Monday. Tomorrow is election day. In the United States, we're going to witness a probably a very ugly mass democratic incident. And so I think it's just good that we're finishing the book this week. And I want to say a couple things about the election tomorrow, just as a precursor to our discussion today. This is actually a solo episode without a guest. I'm going to finish the final chapters nine through the end of the book. But, you know, we talk about a national election. It's not really a national election. It's 50 state elections plus DC. So they're all holding their own individual separate elections. They're just voting for, among other things, the national office of president. So it's not a national election. And we should push back against that language because it isn't really true. The other thing is that when we talk to people who are big advocates of democracy, and that's almost everybody in the West now, almost everybody gives lip service to this concept. And that includes, you know, the Cato reason types. That includes the Wisconsin center types. And it certainly includes most of the left and the right. And they talk about democracy as some sort of sacred ritual in our country. We all have this sacred obligation to vote. I remember Hillary Clinton four years ago talking about our sacred democracy. And she kept using this religious terminology, which I think is telling. Military Godmeses, of course, talked about democracy and he mentions it at some length in the nation-state economy and also liberalism, which were written in the interwar years between World War One and World War Two. But then he again, it doubles down a little bit talking about the benefits of democracy and writing human action in the 40s. But his main point really in all three of those books is one of the big three rationales for democracy. So let's talk about those briefly. One of those rationales, which the point misses makes is that Democratic voting allows for the peaceful transfer of power between political organizations, peaceful transfer of political power in society. And that's mostly been true in the West. I think we should concede that point. I think that is largely the case out of there. But some hiccups certainly since World War Two. But what's interesting is how much rhetoric around this election we're hearing, where both sides are suggesting that the other might not allow for the peaceful transfer of power. In other words, they will dispute the results and not only in court necessarily, but take it to the streets. So it seems to me, from my perspective anyway, if we look at some of the unrest in Europe and if we look at the unrest that's unfolding right now in the United States of America, democracy is not necessarily any longer providing for this peaceful transfer of power. Now, the second reason that's often given is that democracy gives us a sense of the consent of the governed. In other words, the government is us. You voted for it and thereby you gave your consent to the process and to the victor, even if your guy or gal was not the victor. Now, we know that this is abject nonsense. The people who are available to us to vote for are exceedingly narrowed by the parties and by the entire process. We also know that among 330 million people, the idea of having any sort of meaningful participation at the individual level is almost nil, which is why Massessian liberalism, by the way, always stressed the right to secede, the right to break away, the right to create smaller political jurisdictions, which I think is the only rational case that small D Democrats can make. In other words, democracy matters more and more as you get more and more local. But as you get farther and farther away, your individual vote is attenuated at the point of basically meaninglessness. So the third rationale often given for democracy is that, well, Jeff, it creates this compromise down in the middle. You have this far right and this far left, and if they ever got their way, it would be terrible. But democracy tends to weed out some of this rhetoric. And so what we end up with is a bit more of a compromise policy down in the middle where neither side gets everything they want, but both sides get a little bit of what they want. Well, this is troublesome for a few reasons. First of all, the idea of sides. And second of all, this isn't what's happening. What we found across the West in the 20th century and now 21st is that democratic voting systems just create an entrenched oligarchy like any other society, basically in human history. But this one's a little different because it's technocratic. It's based on expertise. It's a managerial super state, we might want to say. But it's no more of a compromise. It doesn't make anybody happy. It doesn't make the people who love Hillary Clinton feel any better about Donald Trump. It doesn't make people who love Donald Trump feel more concessionary or conciliatory towards Hillary Clinton voters. So this idea of a compromise down the middle, I also think is false. So all that said, it's a great week to be challenging this sacred cow of democracy. And Hapa has done that better than anybody could. Now, this book came out in 2001. So there is some language in there that isn't quite as applicable to today. But a lot of it, I shouldn't say a lot of it. From my perspective, anyway, in my opinion, I'm very biased, of course, all of it still rings true in terms of the principles and philosophy underlying Hapa's argument. So, you know, we went through the beginning of the book with my friend, Jayant Bandari. And that was all about those opening chapters on time preference and how society builds up capital. And by saving money, and as opposed to consuming everything we produce, that initiates the process of civilization, as Hapa puts it. So those were, I think, excellent and interesting chapters. And if you recall, Hapa points out that he wanted each of these chapters to stand alone if someone was to read them just individually. I think he's done that. So we went through part one of the book. We went through the middle portion of the book, which was more about immigration and trade with our friend, Stefan Concello, last week. And that was interesting. We got into a lot of the truths and myths about what Hapa says and doesn't say about immigration and trade. And I think we hopefully cleared up some of those for you. And so now we're going to go through the remaining third of the book, which is Bakely chapters nine on. And chapter nine is titled On Cooperation, Tribe, City, and State. This is, I think, a really interesting little chapter where Hapa gets into what he often does sort of almost behavioralism or evolutionary psychology or whatever it might be. But this chapter is all about social cooperation, which is distinctly, it's not entirely, there are some animals which cooperate in hunting, in building structures, obviously, and caring for young. But for the most part, what Hapa's talking about here is the kind of social cooperation which distinguishes human beings from animals. So as Mises points out in this great quote from Human Action at the very beginning of the chapter, you know, what really makes human social cooperation possible is inequality and the division of labor. So not only inequality, and that some people are talented or whatever, than other people, smarter, less smart, but also the way that resources are not spread across the entire geographical scope of the world evenly. There are, you know, some places have lots of oil, some places have farmland, some places have night, et cetera. So it is this very diversity, it is this very inequality which makes us want to cooperate, and it also makes us ultimately want to trade, which produces much, much, much wealthier societies than sort of autarkic or self-sufficient Robinson Crusoe type societies could ever be. So trade is the opposite of isolation. Now, Mises likes to point out, of course, there's a difference here, and Hoppe points out as well, that there's a difference between this international division of labor and political globalism. Those are two separate things. One is something that emerges in the marketplace, and one is something which is imposed by governments. So why do we care about the division of labor? Well, again, higher productivity, that's really the key. So when Hoppe was talking about, you know, tribe, city and state here, as he goes through chapter nine, he talks about how city governments or city-state governments or small governments or regional governments tend to devolve into larger, more centralized governments. And of course, those become oftentimes monopolies. Monopolies in virtually anything are a bad thing. And so what this chapter, I think, gives us in some is that this idea that you have to have a judicial monopoly over a territory, i.e., a state, is actually a very de-civilizing force, that states don't create law, they don't create trade, they don't create family, they don't create wealth, they don't create law and order, they destroy all of it. And this is how Hoppe wraps up this chapter. So I think this was almost kind of a foundational chapter to help us build towards the later parts of the book because he wants to get at some of the points, which sort of both sides make, both the left and right. Left meaning real liberals, good liberals, and the right meaning real conservatives are good conservatives because Hoppe talks a lot about both in this book. So chapter 10 with that segue goes into conservatism and libertarianism. So again, he's saying all this in 2001, so we have to remember that. At this point in history, we had a very different conservative movement. And in libertarian circles, anarcho-capitalism was still very much a fresh concept. Obviously, it has roots. Way back to De Molinari and Murray Rothbard in the 70s, there have been anarchist communities throughout history of a sort. But in terms of a real western political movement, anarcho-capitalism is still edgy and new, as recently as 2001 when Hoppe was writing this. So he goes through this really fascinating discussion of his own experiences with conservatives, in particular those involved back then in the John Randolph Club, which I guess we could characterize as sort of in the Pat Buchanan end of conservatism interested in cultural issues, but also from our perspective bad on economics and particularly trade. So when we think about the conservative landscape, as Hoppe does, we have to look back now and say, well, what's the relationship between conservatism and libertarianism? There was an attempt all the way back in the 50s to produce a form of fusionism, a guy named Frank Meyer writing in the pages of National Review back then, bringing together the best of these two worlds, which a lot of people reject, a lot of libertarians reject, a lot of conservatives reject. But nonetheless, there was an effort made to provide some sort of fusion between the two really for pragmatic political purposes, more than ideological purposes to say, hey, we have some common ground here, and we ought to join together to defeat the communists or whatever it was in 1955. So today, there's a little bit of a remnant of that, not much. I think National Review has badly toddled off into neoconservatism and anti-Trumpism almost for the sake of anti-Trumpism. So on the one hand, we see Trump as an anti-intellectual revolution, but when I look at National Review, which is rare, I don't see much intellectualism. I see kind of really plain, unvarnished Buckleyite takes on 2020, which don't interest me too much. So I guess that still, other than the pure Trump train, I guess that's still the dominant strain of conservatism in the United States today, this kind of watered-down buckliism of a Jeb Bush or someone like that. And National Review may be running on vapors, but it still has a large audience. I would suspect its audience is older, but nonetheless, now there are other modern variants on conservatism. There's the American Conservative Magazine, which of course was founded by Pat Buchanan or co-founded by him. And so that runs less neoconservative, more realistic and pragmatic on foreign policy, also more interested in culture and religious issues, maybe then the American conservatism. There is still the neoconservative wing, which is now mostly strident, never Trumpers, people like David Frum and Bill Crystal. I guess they would still call themselves conservatives in a sense. I can't make out what makes them conservative because they want a huge welfare state and a huge warfare state, so I'm not exactly sure what about any of that is conservative. And of course, now they've got their hooks into Biden. And if Joe Biden wins tomorrow, they plan to make him their guy and to reassert a wholly neoconservative foreign policy, which Trump attempted slightly to work his way out from under. But nonetheless, it never goes away. Neoconservatives are very happy to join any party as long as their underlying goals are advanced by it. So in that sense, they're more pragmatic. But what we've got now is still this, almost this Buckley versus Buchanan argument in conservative circles with Russell Kirk, maybe somewhere in between those two. There's still little threads and little strings. And conservatives, to be fair, I think tend to know their own history and literature, maybe a little better than libertarians do. A lot of young conservatives have actually read a little bit of Buckley or Russell Kirk or whatever it might be. And that's not true across the board, but I think it's largely true. So what's the problem with conservatism? Well, a lot of things. And Hoppe gives it all to us here in chapter 10. There's basically two definitions of conservative that one could promulgate according to Hoppe. One is that somebody who just wants to maintain the status quo, just conserve things the way they are, someone who is resistant to change. And that's obviously not a very helpful or workable definition because there's a lot of terrible things about the status quo today. And a lot of conservatives would feel that they've lost the culture wars and that they're basically also losing the political wars as a result. And so what is there to conserve? And this has been one of the big knocks on conservatives by younger Trump voters, just, hey, what have you guys conserved? I mean, Jeb Bush is going to be the candidate, John Kasich, Scott Walker from Wisconsin. I mean, these people are not interesting or ideological or compelling or anything else. So we basically have transgenderism and issues like that dominating the cultural landscape. So what have conservatives conserved? The answer, of course, is not much. And that's fair enough. But the second definition of conservative that Hoppe offers is a lot more interesting. He says it's somebody who believes in a natural order and that this natural order corresponds with man's human nature, that there are sort of natural hierarchies and natural elites and natural divisions of labor that that will evolve if we just leave them be. And of course, this is a much stronger definition of conservatives, somebody who understands the natural world, someone who understands human nature and doesn't want to make human beings into new man or perfect them somehow or have them overcome their nature, but rather wants to have a political or social order, which is in concert with that nature. Now, a few years ago, I gave a speech called For New Liberty, which got a lot of pushback where I made that same case, but from the libertarian side, saying, you know, we want a libertarianism that actually comports with the way people are. People care about their family. People care about their jobs. People care about their kids and their mortgages. They're not just these intellectual automatons, these sort of pie in the sky lift mention types. And so I feel that and I felt that and I feel today that libertarianism has taken a very elitist turn, a very anti-populist term and in a position that is that is a minority position has no right being elitist. You know, we're looking down on common or average people. I think that's a huge mistake. And I think that's what Rothbard really counseled against later on in his career. And so when we start to look at conservatism by the second definition, things get a lot more interesting. And so Hapa accuses the sort of Western Greco-Christian conservatives of not understanding economics. And so as a result, they support all kinds of things which defeat ultimately their own program of social conservatism. So he uses the term social nationalism, which starts to sound like fascism, of course, social nationalism, to distinguish the Pepe cannons from, let's say, the left, you know, the Hillary Clinton's who are social Democrats. So, you know, the two choices before us are social nationalists or social Democrats. These are not very happy choices, I would suppose. And he says, well, you know, just as he mentions in the introduction of this book that World War I warped so many things, he says World War I warped conservatism. And he turned it from, again, a concept which understood this natural order into something that was anti-egalitarian or something that was anti- egalitarian aristocratic anti-statist into, and I'm quoting him, a movement of culturally conservative status, the right wing of socialists and social Democrats. So just the right side of the same bird of prey. And so in the Buchanan camp, which Hopper wrestled with a little bit, again, in the John Randolph Club years back in the 80s and 90s, there was all the support for bad programs. And all these programs, of course, undermine, if not destroy, the natural order which conservatives, at least thoughtful conservatives, used to claim to understand. So what am I talking about here? Well, Hopper lays out, we're talking about things like social security and Medicaid and Medicare and tariffs, which are, of course, worker protection, in effect, and public education. And we have these calls amongst conservatives, even people at the American conservative for things like family leave, extended family leaves that people can have more babies in this and that. And so Hopper says, you know, when you start to embrace all these economic fallacies, you're undermining your own program. Because what you're going to get is a civilization or society that's, one, poorer because of the misallocation of resources that the market would correct absent these programs. And two, you set the stage for dependency. You are introducing the state as the arbiter in society rather than the natural order of families and intermediary institutions and natural leaders and all these other things. All the, you know, and people hate it when Hopper says natural, he says, well, nothing's natural. And he's intimating something. Well, yeah, he's intimating that some people are better at some things than other people. You know, I don't need, I don't know why he needs to intimate that if we can't accept that. I'm not exactly sure what to tell you. So he has this excellent quote. Let me find it here at page 207, if you're reading along. Rebasic says, private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are as unlikely a combination as socialism and cultural conservatism. And I think that's true. I think what we find amongst today's conservatives, which has only gotten worse in the 20, almost 20 years since Hopper wrote this, is a willingness to cede terms. It's a willingness to accept the argument as framed by the left and to respond on their terms. And of course, when you're explaining, you're losing in politics or ideological combat. So once you start to say that, well, you know, of course, we ought to, you know, seek out a more equal society, well, then you seed it a lot of ground because that's not what government is all about. If you're going to have government, it ought to exist to protect rights. And that's all. So we have a lot of problems with modern conservatism that really makes them incompatible. And so, you know, Hopper basically calls them socialists. He calls modern conservative socialists. And so he says this is too bad, because as Frank Meyer pointed out, there actually are some complementary areas of agreement or ought to be between conservatives and libertarians. But until you get rid of this. And this last point that there is some compatibility between conservatism and libertarianism is one that Russell Kirk, whom I mentioned earlier, actually fought against. And he characterized these two as completely antagonistic ideologies. So Hopper's not buying that per se. But what he is saying is that conservatives have basically given up their understanding, their natural understanding of any kind of natural order, which arises in human societies without needing a state to sort of, you know, badger everyone into accepting it. So that's the big problem with conservatives that Hopper points out. And I think chapter 10 is really, first of all, an excellent one because you'll get a great sense of where Hopper is not a conservative, where he remains a radical in the sense of his political and ideological prescriptions. And I also think it dovetails nicely with his speech a couple of years ago at his property and freedom society on the alt-right, where he again lays out what's the problem. We might say that the alt-right, as small as it is, is a sort of a descendant of the Buchananite impulses, which were animating conservatives more, you know, in the early 2000s, before neo-conservatives completely took everything over. So, you know, Hopper's not a conservative. He's not a right-winger. And if you read chapter 10, even as a standalone, I think it will disabuse you of that. But he's not just going after conservatives, he's going after liberals too. And by liberals, we mean the real kind. He titles chapter 11 on the errors of classical liberalism and the future of liberty. So he's using the term classical liberal, but he's using it a bit grudgingly. Many of you may be familiar with the name Ralph Freco, the great historian who was a dear, dear friend and fellow at the Mises Institute for many years. He always said that that was a phony, made-up term. There's no such thing as classical liberalism. There's just liberalism. You know, and we all understand what that means in the real sense of the term. Okay, we don't need to have, we don't need to say, oh, I'm a classical liberal to make people understand that you're not a Bernie Sanders type, but that you think government ought to be put into a box. It really is weak tea, I think, to call yourself or use the term classical liberal in this day and age. You're either a liberal or you're not. And it's not a euphemism for libertarian. Liberalism and libertarianism are certainly related, but they're also very, very different. And I think it's time to put this term classical liberalism into the dustbin, and it may soon be time to put the term libertarian into the dustbin as well. So what's the big error of liberalism? I mean, after all, he is a thoroughgoing messessian, owes a huge debt of gratitude to Mises, and Mises wrote the book literally on liberalism in 1927. The problem is, is that Mises' liberalism is very different from what passes as liberalism today because it was rooted first and foremost in property. Mises says if he could distill his entire political program down into a single word, it would be property. Well, okay, that's very different from what we think of as liberalism today. It's also very different from most libertarians who don't want to root anything in property because property necessarily implies discrimination and exclusion, and those are bad, bad words today. So the big error of liberalism from Hoppe's perspective is that while they understood, you know, human, there's a human problem of security in every civilization, every society, there are bad guys who will come along and defraud and aggress. That's just the nature of the world. Man is fallen, and so there are going to be bad people, and you're going to need some sort of provision of security. So he says, well, you know, liberalism got confused because it understood it's necessary to protect life, liberty, and property to provide law and order. But the mistake in liberalism is to assume that it was necessary to employ a state to do so, and by state we mean an organization with a territorial monopoly and a compulsory monopoly over the provision of judicial services and police services and defense. And so because liberalism couldn't get out from underneath its own statism, although it enjoyed some moments in the sun, it was always going to have difficulty managing this contradiction. You know, true liberalism starts with a small, very, very localized states, and this is the city-state that Mises talks about in not necessarily medieval Europe, but pre-enlightenment in Europe, coming out of that second half of that millennium. And so the smaller city-states, the more decentralized jurisdiction, the lack of overarching national governments allowed Europe to flourish and made for a much better government than you might have otherwise with, you know, hugely centralizing impulses. The problem comes along is that all government tends towards centralization. So you've got this idea of a territorial monopoly jurisdiction, and then it wants to expand, it wants to spread. This is the nature of government. We all understand this. So how does this comport with the liberal doctrine of property rights, which precede government? Well, if there's only one monopoly provider over a particular territory and it wants to use some of your property, then you've got a problem. And so, you know, how do we define this state? Well, first of all, the monopoly jurisdiction over territory, and second of all, the right to tax. Okay, if it has those abilities and rights and you have private property and it wants to tax or assert jurisdiction over them against your will, then what? How is that liberal? How does the liberal argue around that? Well, it's very, very tough. You know, there's a couple ways. You can say, you know, Locke and others have tried to argue that there's an implicit contract because you stay put and you participate. But we all know that that isn't true. I mean, that goes back to the schoolyard bully analogy. Why doesn't the bully leave? Why does the kid getting bullied have to leave? I mean, it's not, there's no meaningful consent in mass democracy. There is no implied contract in one's conduct with one's property, we would certainly argue. So, it's very, very tough to defend the state on liberal grounds because there are inherent contradictions here. And furthermore, this centralizing tendency, this tendency to grow always raises the question, well, you know, what's, what is permissible and what is impermissible anarchy? If two people hop a points out A and B can't have competing defense providers, let's say, then, then they have to all be under the jurisdiction of one government. Then how about C over here? How about D? In other words, you know, do we have anarchy without world government? Because, as Murray Rothbard pointed out, why isn't the United States deemed to be operating, you know, in an unacceptable level of anarchy with regard to Canada? Does anybody argue that we need to have one government for the United States in Canada? Well, maybe someday. But at the moment, we still understand slightly the concept of those being separate and sovereign entities. So, if Canada and the United States are not in some impermissible state of conflict because they're separate governments, why couldn't that work on a smaller scale in your town or your village or whatever? So, some of these problems are really what hop is getting at in, in chapter 11 on the errors of classical liberalism. And one of the great points that hopa makes with respect to the 20th century, you'll find actually on page 224, so he says, you know, yes, communism collapsed in the former Soviet Union. They knew it had to collapse. But when it did, did it bring in some new liberal renaissance in the former Soviet Union in Russia? No, it did not. It just brought about a more social democracy. So, this, there's no reason to believe that what hopa considers the future breakdown of our own society because of the problems of social democracy is going to lead to a new revolution in liberalism or laissez-faire. So, we didn't see that in the Soviet Union. So, why should we necessarily imagine it's going to happen in the West as well? Because liberalism, central and momentous error, I'm quoting him here, lies in its theory of government. And I think that's probably true. So, we never know, even in a liberal society, once you accept some level of government, how can there be peace between governments? Well, how can, you know, how can there be peace between you and your neighbor? You know, does that require a government? And how much to tax? How much security to provide? We can never really know. And so, as a result of that, the primary error of liberalism is that it assumes government is going to stay small and is going to stick to its main functions of providing courts and defense and property protections. And of course, safeguarding liberty and property. But as Hoppe points out, every minimal government has inherent tendency to become a maximal government. So, this is basically what's wrong with liberalism. And of course, that's been proven true. We've seen that liberalism hasn't held. It hasn't held across the West. And it's not in good shape, really, in virtually any country you can name on Earth today. Maybe it's working reasonably well in a few small countries here and there, places like Liechtenstein and Switzerland, which are exceedingly decentralized and where most decision making happens at the very local communal or city level. And at the national or federal level, only the most overarching decisions may be about the military or about the currency you're made. But apart from that, from the perspective of someone who believes in political liberty, it's hard to point out very many countries in the West or otherwise, where liberalism is really working out. So, Chapter 12 switches gears a little bit. He goes into the private production of defense. I'm going to just sort of skim over this because we've talked a lot about this on previous podcasts with Bob Murphy. We talked about this when we went through the addendum to man economy and state power and market. Murray Rothbard's great book when I had Patrick Newman on. So, I think a lot of our audience is already familiar. And this really goes in sort of a different direction than the rest of the book. I mean, I'm interested in talking about democracy per se, especially this week. And so, let me just suffice to say that Hapa obviously makes arguments that defense is no different than any other good or service. And so, just as you would say, well, if government has to provide courts and law and defense, why doesn't it also then provide shoes and railways and automobiles and all these other goods and services we need, you know, you can argue the other way back. If we don't need government to provide shoes and railways, then why do we imagine it couldn't provide defense? And of course, what he says is that it very well could, and that we need to rethink the whole concept of standing military, which I think is, you know, obviously a whole different argument right for discussion. There are plenty of libertarians who do believe that we need to have a national or federal military. And I'm just going to leave that chapter for your own perusal because it's a really big topic. It's an enormous topic and you could spend a week just reading it and talking about it and thinking about it and reading some of the source material for that. But I'd rather get on to the final chapter of the book 13 on the impossibility of living the government and the prospect for revolution. Now, this is not only a fun chapter from Hapa, it's pretty spicy too. And this is really, you know, if you like Hapa, this is really the kind of stuff you want from him. I mean, this is Hapa giving you the kind of red meat for which he is known because he doesn't shy away from laying out the case for a purely private, covenant-based society that is underpinned by competing agencies. They would be a defense agency of sorts, but they would also more importantly be an insurance agency. And I love this model. I think it's fascinating to think about and talk about. But interestingly enough, before he gets into that, he gets into U.S. history. And as most of you know, Hapa is a German, didn't come to the United States until he was, yeah, I guess into his 30s, late 30s. But nonetheless, you can tell as you read these opening pages about colonial American history, the U.S. Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, he has a fair amount of fondness for the United States in its experiment. He says, you know, it makes sense for us to have pride in the American Revolution because this was an attempt to take us out of European feudalism and, you know, royal absolutism to this constitutional form of limited government with separation of powers and all that. Now it didn't work and Hapa makes that very clear. But nonetheless, he spent several pages going through the American Revolution and why it was noble and that it represents one of the truly few decentralized anarcho-capitalist revolutions in human history and therefore something to be cheered and studied. And the fact that we sort of screwed things up is not necessarily on the founders. But nonetheless, he of course takes issue with the Constitution itself and says, you know, the problem is that you created this constitutionally limited government, which was bound to implode upon itself and start growing. So some of the critiques here mirror those he made in the early chapter about liberalism itself. But nonetheless, there was a try there. So why do we think that we should be optimistic about the prospects of overcoming this sort of managerial super-state in which we find ourselves? Well, he says there's a lot of reasons. He says, you know, if you read about the colonial period in America, if you read about the Revolutionary War, and if you read about the drafting of the Constitution itself, he says, all of these were minority movements. The Constitution never had majority support. The Revolutionary War against the English never had majority support. These were led by minorities who felt strongly about things. So we don't necessarily require a majority to do these things. What we require is a strong minority that's willing to have some skin in the game and make these changes. There's a great quote here, page 291, where he's talking about, you know, we don't need to look at the American Revolution as our model because it turned out that that created some problems with the Constitution itself, which was a probably lesser document to the Articles of Confederation. And he says, we also don't have to look at the Civil War period as our model for breaking away because that ended badly for the South. It cost a lot of dead and trying to break away from the tyranny of the central government is not necessarily something that a small minority wants to do because of the physical peril involved, let's just say. But he says, a modern liberal libertarian strategy of secession should take excuse from the European Middle Ages, went from about the 12th until well into the 17th century, with the emergence of the modern central state. Europe was characterized by the existence of hundreds of free and inter independent cities interspersed into a predominantly feudal social structure. So even within this somewhat oppressive social structure, there were hundreds and hundreds of de facto experiments going on in Europe. And so from a purely political perspective, you could say that Europeans in those centuries were freer than we are today. Now, that doesn't mean they had better lives or anything. I mean, obviously, things were very, very tough and things were more about subsistence and just getting by. But imagine that kind of experiment with today's technology. Imagine all the jurisdictions and political organizations and NEs which could exist across the world today if we had a little bit more creativity, a little bit more thought, a little bit more moxie. And I would certainly argue that if somehow Donald Trump manages to win this election tomorrow, we're going to find our blue state friends and we're going to find social Democrats across the West bemoaning this and decrying this like you have never seen before and actually suggesting different alternative political arrangements saying, you know, we're not going to follow these federal Trumpian edicts. We're going to go our own way. California is going to be its own country. That doesn't mean they're going to call for outright secession, but it means they're going to be moving towards that direction. That's a good thing. That's a healthy thing. It's something we ought to be encouraging. But in terms of how you actually operate these smaller or more independent city states which Hapa envisions, he really turns to a great discussion at the end of this book about the insurance model. And if you think about it, you know, what are insurance companies all about? Well, first of all, when you purchase a homeless insurance policy, let's say your house is insured, you and the insurer are immediately, your interests are immediately aligned, right? You don't want to have any claims because your premium is going to go up. They don't want you to have any claims because they're going to have to pay out and indemnify you. So, you know, neither of you wants anything to happen. And the less that happens, the lower potentially your premium will be. And then that applies to your neighbors as well. So you immediately get into this model where unlike modern states today, you, the consumer, your interests are aligned with your security provider's interests. So this is very, very different than what we see today. I mean, the whole purpose of insurance companies is never to pay a claim. So they want to work with you to make your home more secure, to prevent auto theft, to keep you healthy if they're providing you with medical insurance. Whatever it might be, all of these are salutary benefits which arise in the market because, you know, you are a customer of an insurance company which wants to make money. And it's a beautiful thing when your insurance company says, you know, here's all these things you can do to avoid cancer and heart disease and diabetes and stroke. Well, of course you want to avoid those things, but they want to avoid them too because that's where they're going to be paying 100 grand a day or 200 grand a day for you to be in a hospital when those things happen. So we need to align interests and under the current sort of managerial super state, our interests aren't aligned. Your local police get a bigger budget when crime goes up. They don't get fired. You don't switch to an alternative provider. They say, oh my gosh, they go to city council and say, we need more money. Crime's going up. No one says, well, why are you failing to reduce or at least keep crime at the same level? That's not even the conversation. So you and your local police force run by the state are not on the same page. You're not aligned. They're not as interested in you. So not only do you have competition among private competing defense agencies, but you also have the whole concept of indemnification and recovery. So they have to pay you if you make a claim and it's deemed valid. You know, a hurricane comes along, tears your roof off. Well, provided you have that kind of hurricane rider in your policy, the insurance company cuts you a check. Whether it's replacement value, whether it makes you happy or something, of course, we can argue that insurance companies aren't angels. I get that. But nonetheless, you know, you get a check and you replace your roof, hopefully. Okay. Now, in a hurricane, there's nobody against whom they might go seek their own recovery, right? You can't sue God. But in the case of some sort of criminal malfeasance, a network of insurance companies might well try to track down criminals and might well try to obtain restitution. And a restitutionary model is what we need rather than an incarceration model when it comes to criminal acts, when it comes to force and fraud and aggression. There's no question about that. I mean, we can all see that with what's been going on this year with all the anti-police protests. I mean, I think the BLM and ATifa people are bad and wrong. But nonetheless, that the notion that policing in the United States isn't really working, I think is fundamentally correct. And so we need to have a system where not only do you have an insurance company trying to deter theft or assault or bad things from happening to you, but when it does, they're trying to actually seek restitution from the perpetrator, rather than this amorphous concept of sending someone to jail and then society pays and guys in prison, state prison, there's a whole bunch of jobs connected with that prison guards and prison builders, et cetera. And then taxpayers are paying $50,000 a year for an inmate to be in there. Well, of course, no one's being made a whole by any of this. There's no restitution. There's just a cost to society. So it's a bad model, and it's a dumb model. And I think what Hoffa is discussing here is really fascinating. Now, a third point about insurance providers is that they're property based, right? I mean, at the end of the day, nobody can ever make you whole, let's say for the loss of a loved one when they die and they have life insurance, you can't bring that person back, you just get money. Money is our substitute. When you lose a limb in a car accident, you'd rather have a limb, but money is a substitute to try to make you whole, whatever it might be. So property is really at the fore of what insurance companies are all about. So by definition, insurance gives a primacy to property which makes for a much better society. And if you had a network of competing and overlapping insurance companies, what Hoffa posits is that you would probably quickly find that there would be mechanisms for arbitrating disputes between these different agencies. You know, you were represented by one agency, someone else was represented by another, and we already see that with insurance contracts now. There's private arbitration, private dispute resolution. It doesn't always work. Sometimes you end up in the government's courts anyway, but it certainly works in many cases and it's oftentimes in the party's interest to make that work to avoid the costs of litigation. But another thing Hoffa points out is that because property is at the root of what insurance ensures, there's a tendency towards more universal laws and understanding amongst these different competing agencies to accord certain rules, to accord certain values, to certain types of property, etc. And these universalities actually arise in the private market, as opposed to positive law, which attempts to come along and allow a bunch of legislatures to say, well, this is what the law is, and we don't always agree with that. So it's very, very difficult to legislate universal concepts or precepts, but when they arise naturally in the marketplace, it's a very different thing. And we can see that one example of that is the evolution of maritime law over the centuries, because while different governments on land were busy promulgating and forming their own common law and later on their own enacted law, you know, when it came to the law of the sea, that sort of developed commercially. There were insurance companies ensuring their ships against loss. That could be anything from rough seas to piracies. There were insurance companies coming up with ways to prevent loss, to go after pirates. There were insurance companies paying each other settlements. And yes, international law came along and tried to preempt and overtake what had been longstanding common law developments. But nonetheless, those developments existed and happened largely outside the scope of landlocked governments. So I think it's a really fascinating thing to think about how the kind of universal rules which arise spontaneously versus those which are attempted to be imposed by some kind of supranational governmental agencies are two very, very different things. So all that said, that is 300 odd pages of democracy, the God that failed. It is definitely Hoppe's most famous book. It may be his most provocative, and it's certainly his most discussed and probably most widely read. You know, if we own this book at the Mises Institute, the rights to it, we would produce a great little five or $6 paperback. Unfortunately, we don't. It's owned by a company called Transaction Publishers, which has since changed its name. But you can get it from them via Amazon. You can get it from Mises.org via our website store. And I'm happy to say that we have a new audiobook version coming out of this. We licensed the right to that from the company, from the publisher, and we have a great narrator. And it should be available here in the next couple of months. So you're going to enjoy that if you haven't read this book or even if you already have. So I'd love to get your thoughts. Follow me on Twitter at Jeff Deist. Email me JeffDeist at Mises.org if you have any thoughts about this book, have any questions about it, or have any thoughts or suggestions about upcoming books and guests to have. But we hope you enjoyed it. It's going to be a really interesting week this week. And I think there's no one better than Hapa to sort of take it all apart and help us understand what's underlying all of it, because there really is nothing new in political theory. There really is nothing new in economics or politics. All of this is just a version of things that have happened before. They're a version of the same old questions of who decides. Is it state or market? And so that's always the choice before us, even as these third way types try to tell us otherwise. And I think we're going to find out not so much about the political or ideological inclinations of Americans. Maybe tomorrow, maybe it'll take several weeks to find out who won. But we're going to find out a lot about their cultural perception, I think. I think this is a cultural election more than anything. So buckle up. It's going to be a hell of a week. And I'm really going to encourage all of you to pick up democracy, the God that failed and give it a read, because it's going to open your eyes and every page just jumps out at you. Really a fantastic, fantastic book in my opinion. So all that said, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening and have a great week. And don't forget to find more content like this on Mises.org.