 I know Tom Woods doesn't need an introduction to most of you, but let me just say this, like I said about Judge Napolitano earlier, with Tom's pedigree, with his education, and with just his drive, his work ethic, his productivity, he could very easily have had any number of cushy jobs in either the academic or think tank establishment. But he didn't do that, and he chose to stay true to his own beliefs. And like Judge Napolitano, and frankly lots of other famous libertarians before him, Tom has never moderated or watered down his message even when it might make his own path professionally or financially easier. And I think we've all benefited from that. So Tom Woods. Wow, thank you very much. Thank you very much for that. One of my themes over the years has been that the American political and media classes behave as if there is a 3x5 card of allowable opinion. And if you stray from that 3x5 card, you will be smeared, condemned, written out of polite society. You won't be refuted. That's one thing you can guarantee. You can make all the reasonable arguments you want. But if you're taking a position that is held by neither Mitt Romney nor Hillary Clinton, you are wrong by definition. So there is no need to refute you. All we need to do, as Lou Rockwell says, is just point and say, Eek, a mouse. There's no need to respond to anything we're saying. We peons don't deserve a refutation from our betters. So when I am invariably smeared for talking about themes like this, it's completely expected. That's what the media classes do. You strayed from the 3x5 card. You're not entitled to a refutation. If you get up at an event like this and you say that I do not believe that a system in which 320 million diverse people are ruled infallibly by a single city is the most humane form of political organization, that eminently reasonable statement will not be refuted. You will simply be smeared and condemned. You're obviously crazy. You're crazy. This is the best way to organize society. And it's so obviously the best way that even to question it makes you a heretic. Well, I'm very glad to be a heretic in this bizarro world. Heresy. All right. And I'll tell you something. Secession is nowhere to be found on that 3x5 card. Here's the 3x5 card. You can favor 38% top income tax rate or 37%. That's on the card. You can favor the federal courts telling you to do this or do that. That's on the card. But secession is like, I don't know. It's in some other galaxy that hasn't been discovered. It's not even on nowhere near it. And yet what is secession? When we talk about secession, we are saying that this political line should be drawn here instead of here. Wow. What a terrifying proposition that we might want to propose such a thing as that. Can't have people saying that. That's not acceptable. Let me tell you what is acceptable. Let me tell you what the media classes do consider to be acceptable to the point that they've never ruined anyone's career over it. They've never smeared anyone over it. They've never said, such and such politician associates with this person and this person held this terrible view. Here, let me tell you some things that you can say and you will not be written out of polite society for. You can say, we need to go to war with Iraq on the basis of nothing. No, not nothing. I take that back. Not quite nothing. On the basis of the claim that the Iraqi regime possesses an unmanned drone program that can reach Great Britain within 45 minutes. Now, of course, only a complete imbecile believed that. And it turned out that the entire unmanned drone program that Iraq supposedly had consisted of a single prototype made out of plywood and string. That's okay. Who knows how many people were killed? 50,000, 100,000, a million, two to four million people displaced. Destruction on a scale one can hardly imagine. But who was written out of polite society for that? Oh, I better go write an in-depth article about such and such because such and such is friends with a politician who favored the Iraq war and that really smears him forever. You are not smeared forever for supporting that and yet you should be. That should end your career. Not saying that this line should be drawn here instead of here. But the bizarre moral priorities of the media and political classes in our country are completely the opposite of what anyone with a basic moral sense would think. Or how about the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, trying to prevent necessary items from getting into the country. We all remember Madeline Albright when confronted with the statistic that half a million Iraqi children had died because of the sanctions. We all recall her telling 60 minutes that she thought the price had been worth it. Now you can come back at me and say, that's a United Nations figure and I don't believe it. That's irrelevant because she didn't question the figure. She said half a million children dead we think is worth it. Now, when was the last time a major media outlet condemned her for this? Or said anybody who associates with Madeline Albright should have his name dragged through the mud and be smeared and condemned and have his career destroyed. That has never happened. Never. So that's just a policy difference that we had. Some people favored starving children, other people didn't. You know, it's just a policy difference. But if you want to draw this line here rather than here, now that, that is something you will be dismissed for. Not refuted. Not refuted because all right thinking people know the line belongs here. That's weird. If you think those are bizarre moral priorities that our media classes have, then welcome to the human race. The trouble is Americans have been taught to treat political boundaries with an idolatrous reverence. Like they are sacred things that have come down to us from heaven. They are no such thing. At best, they are merely utilitarian things. If they work at whatever their function is supposed to be, then they work. If they don't, they don't. That was Thomas Jefferson's view. He wasn't going to worship an idol. Jefferson said, well, you know, this Confederacy could split into two or three smaller units and, you know, maybe that would work. You know, it's just a utilitarian thing. We'll have to wait and see. So he, again, he went off the three by five card, because on the three by five card it says that the current boundaries of the United States are holy and sacred. And if you say that they are merely a utilitarian thing that might have to be adjusted according to how well they work, there's something wrong with you. We don't need to refute you. You refute yourself by questioning these holy and sacred boundary lines. As Clyde Wilson once put it, large centralized states have become mystical, self-justifying goals. They need no further rationale. Moreover, people who claim to favor diversity, but who favor political centralization are, shall we say, confused. Because what institution, when we look at the process of political centralization, and I know it's a lot to ask our political and media classes to know anything about the history of Europe, but let's suppose that they might. If we look at the history of political centralization in the 19th century, what effect did that have on ethnic and cultural differences? I leave that to the student as an exercise. To the contrary, centralized states have imposed a crushing uniformity on society. They are the very opposite and indeed enemies of diversity in any meaningful sense of that word. But simply to ask, might the United States be too large? By the way, that is a tame question compared to the questions we normally want to ask. I think we're being on pretty good behavior today, if you ask me. But simply to say, is it maybe too much to have 320 million people of diverse backgrounds, with diverse interests, with diverse value systems all governed under one city? Just to ask that question, why should you be a heretic because of that? So what I've done, what I did last year, I released my first book that I've released in just about four years. It's this one, it's called Real Descent. And the subtitle is, A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion. There's a handful of them out there, but if they're gone, I set up a website, realdescent.com, with information about it. By the way, I decided for this book of my 12, this is the only one that I read the audiobook myself. I narrated the audiobook version. Because in my experience, when the publisher assigns a narrator to your book, the publisher assigns someone who reads your book like it's the instruction manual to a microwave oven. So it was much more fun to read it myself. But that's really what my whole career has been about, and that's what the Mises Institute has been about. We don't care what the three by five card says. It is stultifying and anti-intellectual to confine yourself to it. So as you can see with this little thing on your table, which I hope you'll take home with you, what I've also been doing is every single day, or every weekday I have a show, the Tom Wood Show. It's a podcast you can get on iTunes. And what I'm doing is the tagline of the show is shredding the three by five card of allowable opinion. And the reason I point this out to you is that it's incredibly liberating to live in a world where I can easily do this. Every single day I can drive the bad guys crazy. Every single day. And they're still, you know, they're still around. The major media outlets, they're still around. They'll be around for a while. But they can see the writing on the wall. They know the future is decentralized information. They know the future is podcasting, is people relying on trustworthy individuals, not just people who happen to be with an influential media institution. Well, let's talk about some practical considerations that come up when we think about secession. Let's think about history. We look at the history of political consolidation. We go in Europe from thousands of independent territorial units to just a few dozen today. As Hans Hoppe has pointed out, in the second half of the 17th century, Germany was made up of 234 countries, 51 free cities, and 1,500 independent nightly manors. By the early 19th century, all three had fallen below 50. And then, of course, by 1871 we get German unification. What might the world have been like in the absence of German unification is the kind of question that is not raised because it is not on the card. The card says that centralization is a progressive force. So you don't think about contrary to fact scenarios that deny centralization occurred. But it might be interesting to see how the 20th century might have turned out had Hitler simply been a good postmaster general, which was how one German official put it. He would make a good postmaster general. We never got to test out that theory because the progressives and the conservatives in their typical, not at all unusual, unholy alliance gave us the unified Germany. Similar situation, of course, occurred in Italy with the consolidation there. What are the economic effects of centralization? We're sometimes told that, well, great big countries make you richer. We have to have great big countries to be rich. Well, the Soviet Union was a great big country. Nobody really was rich unless he was politically well connected there. China is a great big country. People are becoming somewhat wealthier there. But throughout most of the 20th century, I wouldn't have held it up as a model. And yet little Singapore, little Hong Kong are flourishing. There is no connection between size and economic prosperity. It has to do with the policies pursued by the governments of those areas. And the more territorial units you have, the more pressure there is on the political leaders of these places not to oppress the public. Because the power of exit is very easy when there's another political unit right next door. It's easy to go there. And these leaders will lose their tax, well, suckers, if they impose too many unjust burdens on the people. So they are restrained by the presence of competition. It is impossible, as it's been said, to imagine the horrors of the Soviet Union being inflicted by the mayor of a small village. Now how is it that Western Europe came to have such prosperity and success? And one important ingredient was precisely, as Lou Rockwell mentioned earlier today, that there was no single European political unit. But to the contrary, you had a highly decentralized structure. That is indeed what helped to make this all possible. Also, secession, breaking away, far from being backward, secession actually increases the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity of the world. Centralization is usually meant to stamp these things out. Think of almost any country in the world where there was forcible centralization and then compare before and after in terms of diversity. The question answers itself. But do we ever get a chance to evaluate this, all these questions rationally? No, because it's not on the card. You raise the issue, you're smeared, you are not refuted. Well, don't we need large centralized states for the cultivation of human excellence, right? Great cultures come out of large states. Or for human flourishing, we need this. Renaissance Florence had a citizen population of about 40,000. And it produced one of the most extraordinary cultures in world history. One need only be reminded of the case of classical Athens, which yielded renaissance after renaissance. At least three renaissances in western civilization inspired at least in part by classical Athens. And because these small states are small, they can't be self-sufficient, and it would be preposterous for them to try. So therefore they will tend to have a libertarian free market approach to international trade and commerce. What about security? Do we need large states for security? We can come up with many contrary examples of small states defeating large ones. Large ones getting bogged down in small states. Tribes in Afghanistan defeating the Soviet Union or the Greek city-states defeating the Persian Empire. We have the city-state of Venice for 1,200 years. We have the case of Switzerland. But yet, as Professor Livingston would note, think of the major centralized states of the West in the 20th century and how safe were they to live in? How safe a place was France to live in in the 20th century? How safe was Britain? How safe was Germany to live in? How safe were the Soviet Union or Italy or Japan? What about minorities? Those people who will condemn us for favoring the obvious and morally compelling case for decentralization will say it's probably some secret plot to oppress people. Because if I wanted to oppress people, I would try to resurrect an idea that's been toxified for the whole American public and somehow on my own revive the concept. I mean, if I wanted to oppress people, I'm sure I could think of something a little easier than that. So probably that's not it, but that is the claim. But think about what the history of minorities has been in the world under large centralized states. I'll think about a case that's dear to me because I'm half Armenian. How did the Armenians do under the Ottoman Empire? Was that just a wonderful bastion of diversity for them? Possibly a million and a half of them were killed. How about the Asians in Uganda who were thrown out of the country and worse? How about the Ukrainians in the Soviet Union? Were they enjoying diversity there, the Ukrainians? Those of them who survived that is the attempt to starve them. Five to six million of them did not survive that attempt. And of course, the case of Hitler's Germany is too obvious even to need mentioning. How about some other practical considerations? Lou made reference in the panel discussion to the ratio of representation that exists. In the first Congress in 1790, there was one representative for every 30,000 Americans. Then in 1910, Congress capped the number of members of the House of Representatives permanently at 435. Well, as of 2014, we now have one representative for about every 713,000 Americans. Now, if you think that that makes representation even more meaningless than it was before, you have strayed from the card. They're not going to refute that point or say, hey, you know, you just raised an interesting argument. I never thought of that. You can't raise it. Now, if this ratio of representatives to Americans had held in 1790, there would have been about four members of the House of Representatives. Conversely, if the older ratio held today, there would be well over, in fact, 10,000 members of the House of Representatives. As of 2014, Congress and the President spend about $3 trillion a year. That's 435 representatives, 100 senators, and one president having that much financial power. Well, then think about, and again, Professor Livingston urges us to think about questions like this. Think about the United States. Think about California. If California were a separate country, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world. So there's nothing crazy about saying maybe this line should be drawn this way instead of that. There's nothing crazy about that at all. Again, it's just a practical question. That's all it is. It's just a practical question. Texas would have a larger GDP than Brazil. Florida's would be larger than Australia's. If you combine Illinois and Ohio, it's would be larger than Canada's. But we're not even allowed to think that maybe this might be, living on a smaller political scale, might be a more humane way to live. Now, there is a tradition among people on the left who do believe in that. Like Kirkpatrick's sale. I've had him on my show. Who do think that, yeah, of course it would be, that's what we were supposed to be all about was humane communities, face to face interactions. Not one representative for 713,000 people. This is preposterous. But the mainstream left, of course, is on the card. So they're not even going to entertain this. So to me, these are relevant considerations. But beyond that, we can follow Brian McClanahan and look at the American tradition. Decentralization is deeply embedded within that tradition. The Declaration of Independence speaks of free and independent states. And by states, it means places like Spain, France. That's what they mean by state in that diplomatic language. These states have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may have right do. When the British acknowledged the independence of the colonies, which were then states, it acknowledged not the independence of the United States as a single blob, but as a group of states which they listed one by one. Even before they were independent states, or at least had been acknowledged by the world that they were, they were already exercising powers we associate with sovereignty. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and South Carolina outfitted ships from the British. It was the troops of Connecticut that took Ticonderoga. In New Hampshire, the executive was authorized to issue letters of mark and reprisal. In 1776, it was declared that the crime of treason would be thought of as being perpetrated not against the states united into an indivisible blob, but against the states individually. Article two of the Articles of Confederation says that the states, quote, have been their sovereignty, freedom, and independence. And of course, you can't retain something if you don't have it in the first place. The ratification of the Constitution was carried out not by a single national vote of a mythical American people. It was carried out one state at a time because that's what the United States was, a collection of societies. That's why the Constitution refers to the United States consistently in the plural. Emmerich de Vitelle, who of course was one of the major international law theorists of the 18th century, said in his work The Law of Nations from 1758 that if a smaller body delegates a power to a larger, this does not make that smaller body any less sovereign than it was before. So this plus many, many other pieces of evidence besides show that the issue of secession and decentralization, it's not a matter of, well, people who disagree with us have some arguments and we have some arguments, so I guess it's just a wash, no one's ever going to know who's right. The arguments are entirely on our side, which is precisely why the enforcers of approved opinion or thought controllers never want to meet us on the ground of facts, never. Good luck, I would say. Come on up here, and we'll talk about it. Good luck because you don't have the evidence. It does not exist. Well, as I wrap up, I want to think about, well, actually before I wrap up, let me tell you one other thing that I like. I like that Europeans of great stature agreed on the American right of secession. Alexis de Tocqueville, the most astute foreign observer of the United States, said in Democracy in America, the union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states, and in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to one and the same people. If one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so, and the federal government would have no means of maintaining its claims either by force or by right. And it's worth noting that Richard Cobden, who again is probably not well known today, but he should be, Richard Cobden was a great statesman of the 19th century, helped to get the corn laws repealed, which were making food more expensive for everybody in British society, except, you know, it benefited the large landowners. He helped to get that repealed. Cobden said that, look, he said, our highest European authority, namely Tocqueville, has spoken to us on the right of secession. He says it's a little unreasonable in the New York politicians to require us to treat the South as rebels in the face of the opinion of our highest European authority as to the right of secession. Anybody going to be blockheaded enough to pretend Richard Cobden was a supporter of slavery? I mean, really? Are we to be subject to that? Lord Acton, one of the great libertarians of the 19th century, said that the prospect of secession filled him with hope because of the importance of decentralization to the tradition of liberty. But ultimately, it is perverse that this very discussion is off the table. We can't even raise the question. And meanwhile, mainstream left and right are determined to make sure that our political discussion is confined to inconsequential inanities. But the enforcers of approved opinion better enjoy it while it lasts. Because it's true that the gatekeepers still have their gates, but the walls have come down. Let's each of us in our own way set fire to that index card of allowable opinion. I'm doing it with my show every weekday, tomwoods.com. I'm doing it with, so far, I've made 360 videos on history, government, and economics for ronpaulhomeschool.com. And there's nothing the media and political classes can do about that. A new generation will be educated and will not have these ideas ridiculed, not mentioned, smeared, but will engage with them. But most importantly, look at what the Mises Institute is doing. I had the benefit of an elite education at Harvard and Columbia. But there was no academic experience in my life that can match the week I spent at the Mises University summer program in 1993 that changed me forever. Help the Mises Institute by becoming a member and joining us in this great fight to educate the next generation and to rip that 3x5 card to shreds. Thank you very much.