 These questions for Jeff, when we're talking about self-saccession and the ability for the peoples in the United States and of course other parts of the world to live peaceful lives with their own values instead of having their values imposed on them, what do you think are the most practical ways in which we can get to that point so that if we cannot even get divorced at least we could live you know an amicable separation until the moment that the divorce is finalized. What do you think about that? Well I think it's happening organically in the U.S. it just requires people to be fed up enough. People in the U.S. move I think more easily and more frequently than most Europeans. I talked to Holtzman about this and he said you know if you have a family home in France you know in the United States it's very common to you know you'll be having dinner with someone to say oh we're moving I got a new job in Dallas you know this is just this is much more common I there's just sort of more of a wanderlust in America so maybe moving isn't as psychologically difficult. Also we have easier better we don't have as much rent control we don't have as much you know it's just it's I think it's a little easier to buy and sell houses or to rent not everywhere but most places so it's just a balance you know do you want to endure what you're enduring in your area do you want to move near more like-minded people it's really happening grassroots I mean we've had school board meetings that's about as local as it gets in the United States I mean most people do not want to spend Tuesday night at a school board meeting to talk about masks but man oh man people are doing it and it's a beautiful thing. Thank you. May I add a question just belonging to that one to Jeff. I did like very much this map you showed with these 11 nations of America 11 11 different populations or however then you understand it and I did like it very much and I think many here did like it very much because if it's true that there is a general tendency of this as you call it soft secession that would be good now is there really let's say a strong tendency to in that direction or is it that's not an objection or is it wishful thinking a bit that would be good if that is that would be the reality there is I think generally worldwide one could say there is a strong tendency toward a world state so just the opposite so more concentration and even global concentration which would be the total disaster so there are maybe two tendencies going on on this world one this general concentration and the opposite would be the one you were presenting now do you believe that it's reality and it's a strong reality I do I do think it's reality and I'm optimistic about it but not necessarily again because of ideology but just because elites have failed us and elites are political social business in the United States whatever whatever form of elite you want to talk about most of them are very globalist in political outlook and when elites fail and they they destroyed medicine they destroyed education they destroyed law they destroyed banking they destroyed money they destroyed war and peace in the 20th century they destroyed diplomacy they destroyed religion they destroyed the family when elites failed populism is entirely justified it's not a dirty word and I think I think that's what's happening and to be fair probably the the likelihood of it depends on how bad things get people will limp along just I'd like to add something on this in my opinion the two tendencies which you refer to towards centralization towards world state and the tendency towards secession are both very strong and they are working together it's like inflationist politics and deflation is reality and the result is very low inflation or not non inflation at all but what I can see is the aggressiveness they are using in pursuing the one-world government and new world order is maybe a sign that the the other movement Jeff was referring to is very strong as well so at least yeah maybe it's wishful thinking but maybe it's it's reality and it's happening at least I can see in Europe it's happening as well you have lots of secessionist movements Catalonia and in Italy we have lots of secessionists and maybe there's hope in this let me add something as well maybe a positive note this year I've taken over as president of the Free Private Cities Foundation so I'm looking at this industry quite closely and I'm surprised I think we're living in a historic phase of a new dynamics of city formation and so it's not in only in the sense of secession movements getting stronger but a lot of people looking into moving where they are treated best and looking into moving into new poll political arrangements and it's not only in the United States of course in Europe moving usually means a cultural change that's much starker change of language and even if you move from Germany to Switzerland or Austria such a cultural change mentality change that's really a lot for many people but still in Europe we see the same dynamics and there's a particular group of people it's the more entrepreneurial people that are looking to get out and we have of course a reaction and counter reaction so the tendency to control and centralize leads to other reactions and is a reaction itself against increasing mobility of even high-income earners that the increasing possibility to do your business from every place on the planet more or less once you have star link even the broadband connection is feasible almost everywhere so we have opportunities like Germany next year making it even harder for entrepreneurs living but that's a reaction against a very positive trend which has been going on for quite a while but there's a lot of pressure of capital of intelligent people putting their weight behind seeking other destinations other forms either as perpetual travelers or even creating cities and we now have entrepreneurs in the US creating new cities buying land and really trying to get a new legal status and we have the same happening in Latin America in Africa and pretty soon we'll have that in Europe as well so there are a lot of projects leading in that direction and I predict that the next decade will be a decade not so much of succeeding from someplace but moving someplace and creating something and you and have a new pioneering phase of history so I'm pretty optimistic that we won't end up with the one central state government if we look back at the history of Europe in the last 30 years we can see that there are two phases in which decision is movements grew the first one started after 89 1991 and the effect was the reason was that the outer threat that came in the Cold War vanished so that people don't at least in Western Europe they don't feel threatened by the Soviet Union of a Russia and they don't feel threatened still the less by China if they are right or not is another question it's different in in the Eastern European countries particularly in Poland and the Baltic Republics where let's say that the the memories on how it was inside the Empire inside the Soviet Empire is too strong that to forget it's what they have another approach to that but the session is movements we have now in particularly also in the Western part of Europe are an effect of the inner threats that came with migration also session is movements in Italy as well as in as in Spain for instance no they are they refer to this movement of people inside they come inside they don't share their culture they have other interests and they are much more prone to accept the central government because they have no links to the local population I don't know the United States but I imagine that similar problems occur in the United States as well no if it's true that they have on every month I think 200,000 new migrants coming from the south that is an explosive development I'd like to preface my question by reading a quote from his serene Highness Prince handsome the second the ruling Prince of Lichtenstein he says democracy and self-determination are closely linked and difficult to separate either one believes that the state is a divine entity to be served by the people and whose borders are never to be questioned or one believes in the principle of democracy and that the state is created by the people to serve the people if one says yes to the principle of democracy one cannot say no to the right of self-determination a number of states have tried to separate democracy and the right of self-determination but they never successfully put forward a credible argument so I'd like to ask if you could say a few words about the potential for popularizing the right of self-determination and such a session by appealing to the inconsistency of a definition of democracy that isn't based on it well I think that's a bit of a tactical question do you use the positive connotation of democracy or do you go against it and I'm not sure it's a tactical political question I'd say to go to the basis of Lichtenstein and the regime I think it's a model that they have this session right it will not be executed because it's already very homogeneous and society and it's considered by most of its inhabitants quite functional arrangement so and to add that's a bit of the problem of the cessation view it looks at an already homogeneous group that separates its way because it's forced to live with another group but usually I mean our modern situation of life leads to different groups of people with different interests living closely to next to each other so in even in Lichtenstein you have more or less the same nonsense among the political elite so they are not very different and Hans Adam of course is a relic and the family is a relic and the villages are very rural and they want to remain that way so because being so small and still I mean the city is tiny compared to other cities the discrepancies are not that large in Austria it's worse but not as bad as in Germany which is a highly urbanized society so you have a lot of urban centers and then you have the rural population around and very different mindsets realities of life and so on and if you look at the maps even in the US a lot of election results are just showing you the difference between urban area and rural areas so it's hard I mean and it of course made it difficult to solve the problems we had in Europe when modernity showed that there's more heterogeneity than the the common basis could bear we had a lot of ethnic cleansing that made it possible for nations to go their own way more or less and this pattern we had before if you look at it made it very difficult to see so almost every cessation movement in itself and that would be the danger will have some ethnic cleansing and in the best case it's a voluntary rearrangement resettling of if let's say one village in Liechtenstein decides that Liechtenstein in itself is becoming too modern and they start constructing high-rises in Waduz who knows whatever yeah then of course some of the people living in the village would most of them would have chops there or move to Waduz or elsewhere have people living there so you need another rearrangement of people to allow for that village really to express that intent and that's a bit the problem of democracy here that assumes a kind of collective interest which sometimes if you have very homogeneous society is working out great and then democracy seems to be something great but it just expresses that homogeneity and of course that's the democracy we see and in some Swiss valleys where everyone stands up and raises hand and the great thing is they almost always raise the hands the same way as everyone else because they are very homogeneous and so they go along and they believe that they have common interests and that's why democracy seems to work that well but once it becomes like a stage behind which interest groups try to get their interest it really becomes complicated and then I think that the nice sounding word of democracy doesn't solve much of that problem yeah my question is for Jeff when I see this map I I have to think of the enemy who was also also making maps and I think they call it gerrymandering is that right that they that they think like oh we have to arrange this a little bit different the election district so maybe the people move and the the rulers just start to redraw the map and throw some sane people in with some insane people and then you're back where you started is that a threat yes but by concentrating people together somewhat there's more resistance to the federal edicts you know soft secession sometimes means just ignoring the federal government and it appears that at least a few governors are prepared to do that on currently with respect to this vaccine mandate so I think getting people together is is a good idea because you the goal here is to and I would suppose that there's more than two sides but let's just say there's two sides I think both sides would would argue that you need to remove the cancer and and this this is how you do it I mean imperfect certainly but better than what we've got I see a parallel between Italy and Poland in the 19th century Poland didn't exist in the 19th century it was partitioned between Russia Austria and and and Prussia and the most famous Polish romantic poet Adam Mitskevic who actually died in in Istanbul in 1855 is known for propagating the and all out a universal war and he's famous from for saying let me just quote you Lord we beg you for a universal war for the freedom of peoples and I believe him and definitely he meant nation nation states actually he was in Istanbul to organize an army to liberate to liberate Poland so Polish elites kept praying for this all out war till 1914 and Poland was born out of World War one and is I remember my schooling World War one is praised for raising for as an event thanks to this even Poland was on the map on the map again so on the other hand I also vividly remember my grandmother born in the 19th at the end of the 19th century in southern part of Poland now southern part of Poland then it was Austria and she told me many many years ago I definitely preferred life under Austria then under the Polish Second Republic before World War two so that's basically the same situation as you described thank you for the question which is very interesting and which bring us back to some comments Jeff made before in fact Poland as well as Italy as Hungary and other countries and Germany there was this nationalistic idea that nations could be forged only in violence and blood and fire and that you needed coming back to Rahim an education system that was apt to form perfect soldiers who would love their country who would be willing to die for their country who would be willing to be obedient to any order coming from above and interestingly Italians weren't really along these lines one of the most common features of the history of Italy during the 19th and 20th century where the complaints of the officers and generals of the army about their soldiers being cowards because the Italians didn't really seem see the the rationale behind all this why should they shoot Austrian soldiers in fact there were many stories during the war about Italian and Austrian soldiers exchanging cigarettes or organizing football games or or even trying to avoid killing each other which was a wonderful thing in my opinion of course as especially as an Italian you would risk the firing squad for something like that if you didn't aim for your Austrian you could be killed by your officer or your general but yes you have this idea of the of war as the great cradle of peoples which is an idea of the 18th century but on the other side you have the liberal universalistic idea that rules which are human which belong to human nature are good for all humans and we have in Italy we have the same attitude about about the Austrian Empire there are there still are people who are nostalgic of the Austrian Empire I would like to see the Austrian Empire in northeastern Italy nowadays it would be much better than the Italian Republic and there for example every year there's a gathering of Italians, Austrians and Slovenians and they on a spot where the the borders are very close and they celebrate their old country which was the the Austrian Empire many Italians kept singing the Austrian hymn which was Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser in German in but it had it's different versions in in different languages and so in Italian it was Servidio l'Austriaco Imperador which means may God keep the health of our Austrian Emperor and it was called la Servidiola because it began Servidio l'Austriaco and in some regions of Italy after unification it was a criminal offense to sing the Austrian hymn and so I'm nostalgic of this idea not so much of war but of fraternity between between the peoples and another thing about secession maybe it's an idea comes from history the late Roman Empire and the first barbarian kingdoms they saw communities where different people here people said different laws we are used to see territory state and laws as a unity so we speak about secession and usually it's physical secession maybe we could also start thinking as a way of soft secession a secession which is different set of rules for different peoples maybe with these new cities which are starting to be built in Italy we have also initiatives along these lines and maybe this could be another way of separating communities which don't agree on on the same laws I think we can all agree that centralized governments fine if it means the return of the Austro-Hungarian Empire across Europe will accept that it has to extend to Bodrum well I not sure I totally agree and let me explain some of the difficulties and it tells you a bit about why Mises may have his issues with this kind of national the territorial self-determination because really the Polish case is a very complicated one I think a part of the process of becoming a Polish nation was pushed on by the Prussians trying to terminize Eastern Prussia and that was really one of the impacts to have for Polish intelligentsia emerge and I think that was very important for Europe I mean the contributions that are intellectual and scientific contributions by Poles are immense so I think there is some good in that process of nation-building it's just that we didn't have a political regime that was fitting and it's hard to tell if the old structure of the Ottoman Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have worked out with increased nationalism because the situation really is really complicated let me give you give you the example of Mises hometown Lemberg or leave which is settled almost entirely by Poles and German speaking to us but everyone on the countryside is rotating and still it all belongs to historically Polish Galicia which is part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire so it's such a super imposition of different political structures coming from a very different history and very different ordering structures of policies it makes it almost impossible to find a constructive answer and I think only in the way that that Alessandro has like a kind of polycentric how do you call it polycentric or the maybe super positive different regimes for the more urban area the rules depending on on different interest groups and so on but just to tell you a bit about the complications just looking at the territorial cessation problem we have in Austrian history a very interesting example attempted a soft cessation and it was the case of Moravia actually part of the Czech Republic in 1905 there was this movement the conflicts between the German population the Czech population were growing and there were a lot of conflicts at the universities and wherever so every group tried to make their own associations their own schools their own thing everything has been had to be organized in a national way now there was Karl Renner who happened to be an Austrian social democratic politician he was then after 45 he was installed by Stalin as the president of the Austrian Republic after 45 but before he was also favorable to the unification of Austria with Germany which was not very popular after 45 but he said well this was the best idea and unfortunately Hitler took it and he destroyed everything but it would have been perfect if it would have worked it did not work in any case what what happened in Moravia was that Renner thought out a highly complicated I don't remember the details but a highly complicated system of organizing Czechs and and Germans on the same territory with different institutions no so they had their own schools and they could decide on this but they voted also in different chambers so the idea was to have a Czech chamber and a German chamber well okay shortly it did not work and it could not work because you need a consensus building for such things the people must be behind these ideas you cannot plan it from from above and then think that the people will fall you that will never work well Alessandro please explain again we have a Roman Empire and then we have Italy and I never succeeded in bringing these two phenomenons together and you kind of hint made some hints about it but how could it be that such an organized and you know military and Empire thinking and building then ended up in in what we have today so where is the connection of let's say these two thousand years ago and today of course that's a big question it's a huge bridge but I I never happened to understand it really and and you have the talent to do it Alessandro per favore thank you it's a big big question but maybe we should concentrate on one particular century of our history which is the third century after Christ it is the century of of the they call it the anarchical century because there are lots of emperors there are lots of civil wars and what is most interesting is the monetary history of the third century if you look at the curve of the loss of value of the dollar and the curve of the loss of silver content of the Roman denarius during the third century they are exactly the same so you have two events when the emperor Septimius Severus died he said to his sons Jetta and Carcalla the important thing is you make the soldiers happy so just pay them and during the third century after Christ the Roman army developed into a huge bureaucracy and machine which was eating money continuously further there weren't any peoples more to conquer and so the usual solution of the Romans I go to some some country like Gaul which was conquered by Caesar and I get all their money wasn't working anymore because it was too far away the line of supply wouldn't work and so they couldn't do anything else then start taxing their own citizens in 212 Carcalla passed a law which is called the Constituzio Antoniniana that made everyone a citizen of the Roman Empire so the Empire became a nation more or less starting from that time Rome stopped to be what I could call a giant and enterprise of collective predators so first it was a collection of families then it was a huge organization but it never stopped being sort of a company like you could compare it with the West India Company or something like that there were some families controlling this huge enterprise which had in military conquest its main issue that's why I talked about Roman militarism and imperialism starting from this point Rome had to transform into what we would call a modern state or something more similar to a modern state and they had the huge problem of taxes because the bureaucracy wasn't affordable anymore with deoclation you had two huge problems inflation runaway inflation because of the printing of coins without any silver content anymore he tried he was one of the first rulers who tried to stop inflation by making price controls he failed miserably although there were even death penalty for for selling goods above the officially accepted price he was forced at the end to relieve his throne and to abdicate but during the third century and especially the end of the third century this is where Rome collapses and it collapses on fiscal reasons because it established a cleft between the people and the state what was called the state or the republic there the rest publica during the same period the same things happened as are happening today which is very interesting the third century is very close to what we are living today for example people abandoned the cities and they established rural communities which were the beginning of medieval feudalism at least in my opinion and once the emperor Constantine tried again to unify the Roman Empire not surprisingly together with a monetary reform he introduced the solidus which is a pure gold coin it's it's impressive if you if you get to see a solidus it's it's a small coin but quite heavy because it's thick it has the the profile of Constantine with his big jaw and his warrior profile on it and it gives you the idea that gold is something valuable it always have been and it still will be but it was too late the empire didn't exist anymore you had Constantine you had Emperor Julian who tried to reinstate the official religion against Christianity which was getting its way it was too late and the Western Empire was lost at that point it survived as as the Eastern Empire which was mainly a Greek Empire in my opinion but as I told Italy was born during these years and during these centuries it is a country which is based on at least this is my opinion of course on distrust for government and this is the good part of Italians we never trusted governments because we have a tradition of being cheated by our governors by starting from Diocletian who destroyed the currency so this is the good part of Italy that they would like to to preserve because we are backwards but at the same time very very much in advance of other peoples because we don't believe in governments we don't believe in regulations we don't believe in government money for example during these years we had a stealth bank run and lots of Italians took their money away from the banks this is one of the reasons why they printed so many euros because otherwise the Italian banking system would have collapsed so this is the the future the hope for the future that the Italian spirit and the natural energy of the Italians could be an example for the others have a question for Alessandro no just kidding for you Rahim do you think that one of the reasons why a state education could disappear little by little is because of the nature of public institutions and organizations that they cannot cope with the with the how would I say with the rhythm of innovation that is needed in education yes yes totally I because I mean we see that with the Asian example where parents are hyper competitive usually and the state has a higher capacity than Western states it means they are more like the Prussians of course at their time and in their context willing and able to concentrate more intelligence which is most important and then resources for state purposes so if education really was in the sense if it's possible to have an apparatus to roll out schooling then the Asians would advance there and and could replace us if it was possible to build up human capital and capacity this and we already see the science that when you have for example Chinese exchange students coming to German and Austrian universities you see that they tend to be more hardworking more trained and analytical stuff but much less creative and innovative and thus performing not as well as you would expect because if you look at the testing results that a trend is obvious I mean Europe is going down tremendously in all the natural sciences mathematics the Olympics natural sciences that's a tremendous decline where as Asian countries are going up so but on reality it's not as bad as it looks because mostly what you get with testing like the schooling results and what really counts is the application for real life problems and there is a kind of mismatch so I still believe in the case for for innovation and I don't think that innovation can be schooled or trained I don't think that you can school people in entrepreneurship and stuff like that even though there are now degrees in entrepreneurship so and that makes me hopeful in the sense that we are already seeing with the change of the productive structure and so on that this kind of schooling becomes less and less relevant and even those who are maybe having good test results but are losing out in the real game of schooling which is the status games I mentioned who are the nerds are doing pretty well and that's actually a good sign because who's a nerd someone who just doesn't care about the status game this way he's not good at the status game Paul Graham has written about that and I think he captured this this argument quite well that fortunately I mean it's technology that enables the skill of the nerd who doesn't care for the status games and who's and a little capacity is not really linked to schooling there's no way empirically to really show that there's any real world success correlated with with the testing results that you have so I think those are positive signs and showing that even in Asia there will be a tendency either I mean either this trend stops somewhere or there'll be a tendency in more variety in education and I think in most case it means less education and more trial and error yeah and more the way innovation really happens but there's a crackdown now in China all private education happening and I'm not sure what to make of that it's really hard to tell I think there's some reasons so the communist party is quite competent I have to say it's all that the structure the apparatus still I think what they are seeing is that in the private sector a lot of it is also status games and they think it's prestigious consumption is the term is like parents because they can't show wealth and so on they invest in a hyper competitive way in tutoring and so on and I think it's true that a lot of that is a social loss but of course what the Chinese government doesn't see and can't understand is that it's a tiny small differences that are most important and that's how I think the crackdown on private schooling and the cracking down on peer to peer finance and and so on will not turn out as good as they hope for even though I think I agree with the Chinese government that now it is most of this private education expansion and most of the private investing and peer to peer lending is a social loss still the important small part where innovation happens of course you turn that off as well with trying to track down on what's a social loss because you can't know in advance so I I'm pretty optimistic there as well just a note on that it is one of the countries where homeschooling is allowed in in Europe and it's pretty easy and it is gaining lots of momentum right now not only individual parents who homeschool their children but there are lots of parents who are beginning to organize themselves I I'm trying to help them I on my website I have a an internet tool to get people together to homeschool their children and in fact usually homeschool children in Italy have better results than than non-home than public or privately school children and I see a big hope also in homeschooling in fact technology as you mentioned makes schools not so important anymore you can organize yourself you can hire teachers you can use online tutorials there are lots of tools that you can use as as a parent to school your children and which work perfectly well the the model of the of the frontal school with the teacher and the classroom is in my opinion is not modern anymore we have technological tools which can can help us do something different just a little thing because I'm organizing as well parents and there's a lot of pressure from Germany coming a lot of Germans with but in particular the past two years and the same happening in Austria that the amount of people homeschooling is increasing fast so only in Austria thousands of thousands of people each year and in Germany we have lots of Germans wanting to leave Germany for the reason and in the past they wanted to come to Austria because in Austria it's it's allowed to do homeschooling but you need to do the annual exam and right now I'm I'm helping organize a group who will get the permanent traveler status by leaving Germany and then move from location to location and thus escape the the German totalitarian schooling apparatus by still remaining close to the German speaking area and Europe and that that's quite feasible and there's a lot of interest in traction going in that direction I would just add homeschooling is exploding in the United States the beautiful thing about COVID was that what had been previously viewed as sort of a religious right-wing movement is now being understood by more people on the left and maybe a lot of them wanted to keep their kids home just because they were concerned about COVID but once they had them home and saw the online options they start to question and while he mentions sort of the low mental capabilities of a lot of school teachers this is egregiously true in the United States with a very powerful public school teachers union in most places so when you begin to take courses online from anywhere and it turns out if you're doing something like first course in algebra you can have the best algebra teacher in the world you don't have to online you don't have to have the crappy algebra teacher who happens to be at your kid's public school so so the number one fastest growing segment of homeschoolers in the United States is black folks because they have the worst urban school scenarios and they're starting to realize it so I think this bothers the left a lot