 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. I'm joined by my friend Michael Bolden, who runs, of course, the 10th Amendment Center out in Los Angeles. I know he was a guest on the show just a few weeks back when I was visiting out there, but the remarks made earlier this week by Attorney General Jeff Sessions were just so juicy that I had to ask him to come back on the show quickly because Michael is an expert in the area of federalism, secession, nullification, states' rights, for lack of a better term. And Sessions' remarks really go to the core of what we're fighting as decentralizers here in the United States and really in the West. For those of you who aren't familiar, Jeff Sessions was addressing a group of law enforcement officers in California of all things, and he basically said, you know, there is no nullification, there is no secession, this is all settled, and if you don't believe me, go see the tombstones of John C. Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln. This matter has been settled. And Michael, as you know, settled is a shutdown tactic. It's a way to end an argument. It's not an argument in itself. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. And, you know, I've been doing this for a long time, and the first thing that came to mind when I read this was, like, oh, wow, this is the exact same argument that Rachel Maddow used against our work a number of years ago. It just changes. The faces change depending on who's in power in Washington, D.C., and when Obama was in power and our work was primarily focused on trying to nullify Obamacare or gun control or common core, whatever it may be, the argument was if you supported this, then you're on the side of John C. Calhoun, you're racist, and wow, this was settled by the Civil War. Now, Jeff Sessions, now whether you agree with his position on sanctuary cities or not, he's wildly wrong when it comes to the issues of being settled by the Civil War. In fact, that's the most disgusting argument one can make. He doesn't even make an intellectual argument at all. He's basically saying, well, Stalin was right because he killed people, and that to me is it's intellectually weak and it's dangerous. Well, on that particular topic, immigration generally in sanctuary cities in particular, I've heard Judge Napolitano talk about this very question. Is it federalized? In your view, Michael, is it possible to decentralize immigration policy and have it done more or decided, I should say, more at the state and local level? That sounds crazy probably to a lot of people, but give us your thoughts. Well, I think there's some debate on this in the kind of the constitutional scholar world. Mind you, I am not a scholar. I'm not a lawyer. I have blood running through my veins still. So that's not the case. But I do take positions on this. For example, I'm under the view that in the Constitution, they use the word naturalization, but not immigration. And there are a number of respected scholars that hold that it is only a federal view to deal with naturalization, and it's a state-by-state issue to deal with who lets, who come in. But there are many people who disagree with that as well. The Supreme Court disagrees with that, the entire federal apparatus disagrees with that. So that's a huge mountain to overcome, to decentralize just the position of who's allowed to come in. Now, if you really want to get philosophical about it, I would take the standard private property view. But in an era where there is no real private property on the border that becomes a little convoluted, certainly it can be decentralized. And Judge Napolitano has also made the case, not just on immigration, but on the right to keep in bare arms, that the federal government can't what's called commandeer local officials to help enforce or spend resources on enforcing federal acts or regulatory programs. Yeah, it's also interesting that throughout the Constitution, you will see the word persons, you will see the people, and you will see citizens all used differently in different contexts. It's very, very iffy whether we understand exactly what the founders might have had in mind, obviously in a very different time. But more broadly, your organization is named after the 10th Amendment. It's obviously a concept and a doctrine that we as libertarians hold dear, which is decentralization and the attenuation of government power. I'm not so sure that our progressive friends are ever going to come around on the Constitution itself or the 10th Amendment specifically, and our conservative friends have abandoned it. But talk about the concept. Rather than the Constitution itself, what about the localism concept? That seems to me an easier sell in such a divisive era than talking about an actual constitutional amendment. I agree, and in fact, that's most of what our work focuses on. We do some of the kind of the constitutional, the research, the white paper type of work, but the vast majority of what we do is how this plays out in practice. And within 24 hours of Jeff Sessions making his announcement that, quote, there is no nullification and that it has essentially been stopped by the Civil War. Within 24 hours, the state of Mississippi passed a law that bans abortion after 15 weeks. Which would in essence nullify Supreme Court precedent, which says that states can only regulate it up to or after 24 weeks. So within 24 hours, also within 24 hours, New Hampshire expanded their medical marijuana program, which federal law says is illegal in all circumstances. Also within 24 hours, the state, the Missouri State House passed a bill saying that they will not provide material support or resources to warrantless federal surveillance programs. So there are actions being taken on issues across the political spectrum, whether you're left, right, center, or just a pure libertarian and you want government out of all issues. There are things happening right now and we can see how this is playing out. In fact, I would make the case that because the government in Washington, D.C., the central government is larger than any in the history of the world, this is happening more than any time in history just by default. Because there's no way for the federal government to enforce all its acts and regulatory programs. And when you try to have a one-size-fits-all solution in a country as large as the United States with over 300 million people, you're going to run into a lot of resistance. And people are learning that the best form of resistance is simply non-compliance. Yeah, it's a bit of Irish democracy. Just sort of shrugging and walking away from Uncle Sam rather than trying to have some big standoff. Here's the interesting thing, Michael, is as difficult as this issue can be when the rights in power, they tend to ignore the Constitution when the lefts in power are the same. So even if we have the Rachel Matos of the world and the Jeff Sessions of the world both aping the same what we would consider false doctrines about the Constitution, I mean, what's the alternative? The alternative available to us to localism and decentralization is to try to win about 70 million people to win a national presidential election, let's say, for a libertarian-ish candidate. That surely is more daunting from a tactical perspective than trying to do what we can, where we can. It seems to me anyway. I would also make the case that that is impossible until you show those 70 million people that the world doesn't come to an end if all power is not centralized in Washington, D.C. So even, I don't think in our lifetime, a pure libertarian, an anti-president president is ever going to win the office of the President of the United States. But we can lay the groundwork if something like that were ever to happen in the future before a total breakup of the country. Let's say, just theoretically, the only way that that could ever happen is by proving to people in practice that these things work. Okay, 10, 15 years ago, when you would, for me a little bit over 10 years ago, if I would talk to a right-wing group about medical marijuana or marijuana in a state level, they would, you know, they would want to run me out. Shoot them up, man. Get them out of here. He's evil. He's going to bring down the world. Now they're seeing, oh, wow, I've got a friend who's invested in a business. They're making some profit. I've got a friend whose life was saved or whose pain was reduced. And it takes examples in practice for people to learn how this plays out. We can do this on marijuana. I think we can show the left the same thing on guns. Instead of trying to force gun rights on the full country, I think we should focus our efforts locally or on a state level and show that when you have more people defending themselves or an uncertainty over who might be defending themselves, the odds of violence, aggressive violence go way down. Yeah, isn't it interesting how neither side wants to let go. They want everything done at the federal level. They want an overarching abortion rule. They want an overarching gun rights rule. They want overarching drug rules. And it really doesn't make any sense in a country of 300 million, 320 million people. But I want to bring up a point Bob Murphy made a few months back when I was with him at an event in Orlando, and he said, look, you think things are divisive now. Imagine if we had the crash of 2008 in the current Trump versus anti-Trump environment. Imagine if entitlements like Social Security Medicare started to run out of money as they are projected to do sooner rather than later in the current political environment. I'm not sure, Michael, that people get how this isn't an academic exercise. This is fundamental to the peaceful coexistence of this big hunk of geography we call the United States going forward. Well, you just stole my thunder there. But absolutely correct. I agree with you 100%. This whole system, this 10th Amendment system, whatever we want to call it, decentralization, distributed network for the technology geeks out there, this is the way that you can have a large political society with a widely varying political, economic and religious viewpoints living together under a big umbrella, maybe a trade or a defense umbrella in peace. If you try to do what's happening right now, what's right for California, obviously is not going to be right in many situations for people in South Dakota and vice versa. And if you try to force that way on each other, again, you run into resistance, you run into conflict, you run into hate, political divisiveness. And instead of just letting people live their way and trying to prove that they're right or wrong by how it plays out in practice, the force everyone else into my way of thinking is causing way more problems than I think people are recognizing. But hopefully we'll begin to turn that around by providing these positive examples of how people can take actions that are different than the national political view in their own state or in their local communities. And I think the sanctuary city's thing is a powerful example. Now, for those that oppose illegal immigration or mass immigration, you don't have to support the sanctuary cities for how they're affecting the immigration debate or the immigration laws, but you can certainly learn from them. And if you support the right to keep and bear arms or healthcare freedom, why not create a sanctuary city for gun rights or a sanctuary state for health freedom? I know Ryan McMakin had an article. Let's create sanctuary cities for everything. How long ago, maybe in the last couple of months, he basically wrote this. And that's the concept that we're talking about here, putting this into practice on issues that are important to you in your area. Get it done, learn how it works, because certainly the immigration sanctuary cities are working. If they weren't, Jeff Sessions wasn't going to give that speech. There's no point in him wasting that time. So certainly we know what works. We know what defeats federal acts. Now, let's put it into practice on everything else. Yeah, if he was settled, he wouldn't be saying it, I think is the lesson here. Nice. But I want to mention, if you want to read about some grudging respect for the concept of sanctuary cities, you might check out Angelo Codavilla, who's a bonafide right-winger, not a hack, more of an intellectual. He writes for Claremont Review of Books, which is a Lincoln idolatry outfit. And he had an article called The Cold Civil War not too long ago. It's available online. And in that article, he says, look, why couldn't we have a right-wing-ish type of sanctuary cities in Texas, some small town in Texas where Friday Night Football is the Beall Endall, and it's a public school, and they decide that they're going to pray in mass before the football game, presumably to a Christian god. And this is deemed illegal if you want to use that term by the Supreme Court of the United States, and they just shrug and say, what are you going to do? Send in the federalese because we had a pregame prayer. In other words, so much of what we're talking about, Michael, comes down to pragmatic enforcement and the viability of that rather than law or consensus. Would you agree? Yes, and it is also about individual action, because if we're talking about advancing individual liberty. A state can take where a locality can take whatever position they want on paper, but without people who believe in that and actually put that into practice, nothing ever happens. A great example is state-level resistance to the Federal Real ID Act, which was only basically implemented by state laws. But if people aren't refusing to get the national ID cards, those state laws mean nothing if people continue to participate. So whether a state does something positive or a local community does something positive in law on paper or not, it really gets down to human action, right? Whether or not people decide they want to abide by these dictots that come down from thousands of miles away or hundreds of miles away or dozens of miles away. It really is human action that changes things. And whether we want a sanctuary state for the right to keep bear arms or if Mississippi is slowly chipping away and creating a pro-life sanctuary state, the choice is up to the people in that area and they can actually do it. What astonishes me is this idea that we're going to vanquish vast segments of American society. We're going to vanquish them politically, if not worse. Let's say 20% of the country are probably aggressive, died in the left progressives. Probably 20% of the country are aggressive conservatives. Maybe 40% of the country fall more loosely into those two categories. So when people, libertarians included, are dismissive towards the idea of decentralization. They insist on not only on universal principles and values, but also on universal enforcement of them. I always come back to say, what would you do to those 40% who disagreed you? And they tend to be stubborn. They don't just go away over time. There are old people in the former Soviet Union who still pine for the communist system who are alive today. So this idea that we're going to steamroll people politically or have a war with them even worse, that strikes me as the naive or utopian perspective. Well, that's why the only quote I have on my Twitter profile is a Menken one that says, basically, it's, I don't believe in liberty. The only thing I believe in is liberty, but I don't believe in it enough to force it on anyone. So I believe in universal principles. I believe that there are universal natural rights, but I'm not going to try to force people. I want to live by example, at least the best that I can as a flawed human being and try to show people what I think is best. And in fact, I think the market will also learn over time, provided we can find ways creatively to get government out of the way of various things, basically everything, I think the market will learn over time that will be more prosperous, more free, more peaceful as long as we follow these principles. Yeah, it's going to be fascinating, or it would be fascinating to see a true laboratory of states whereby a Mississippi can 10 years hence take a look at Colorado and decide for itself empirically what happened with its relaxation of marijuana laws, for example. That said, I want to lead people towards a couple of primary sources on this. First of all, we'll post a link to Murray Rothbard's Nations by Consent article, which he wrote later in life, one of the last things he wrote, where he really talks about secession and decentralization in some very frank terms with respect to the former Soviet Union. I think you'll find it very, very helpful. And of course, for those of you who haven't read Liberalism by Mises, this is a fantastic book. He wrote in the 20s after having come home from serving in World War I as a soldier, but before World War II, it's only about a 200-page book. If you go to Mises.org, you can find it just Google Liberalism in our search engine box. There's a little tiny two-and-a-half page section in his foreign policy chapter titled The Right of Self-Determination. And I would say in those two-and-a-half pages, he lays out more wisdom and truth on this issue than you will find anywhere else, including giving the right of the self-determination all the way down to the individual if that were technically possible. But if it's not possible, bringing it down to what he calls the smallest administrative unit. So it's really fascinating to hear someone talking about this 100 years ago, not yet having seen the conflagration of World War II and all of the sort of globalist trend afterwards. If you're not following Michael Bolden, B-O-L-D-I-N on Twitter, you should be if you're not following the 10th Amendment Center, spelled out T-E-N-T-H Amendment Center on Twitter. And otherwise, you should be. Michael is really the tip of the spear in terms of the more activist end of things, whereas the Mises Institute involves itself more in the educational end of things. But we need both. That's something Rothbard stressed. And there's nobody I can recommend to you higher than Michael Bolden and the 10th Amendment Center. We're out of time. Michael, great to talk to you. And ladies and gentlemen, have an excellent weekend. SoundCloud or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.