 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again. It's Mises Weekends. Our guest is someone many of you are familiar with, Ryan McMakin, editor-in-chief of Mises.org. And today we are talking about one of our favorite subjects, which is decentralization and secession and breaking up these large political subdivisions that plague us, not only in the US, but around the world. But in particular, Ryan, today we're talking about both of our former home state of California, which now has a ballot measure that's going to appear in November to split that up into three states. And of course, the LA Times is posing this as radical, which you might imagine. But I want to start with mentioning that Tim Draper, the gentleman behind this, is not some sort of crank. He's not a left-winger. He is a wealthy, apparently billionaire, Silicon Valley venture capitalist. So this is a serious guy. This isn't the kind of guy you might imagine is proposing it. Well, I don't know why it's portrayed as so radical when you talk to people from California. And of course, even when I was a kid, it seemed kind of odd to many people that Sacramento was just so far away. And Northern California was not seen as the same place as Southern California. So this idea that it's just one place and breaking it up would be this weird thing to do. I don't know who's coming up with that idea. It's true. If you live in Wyoming, for example, I don't think the state capital seems like such a faraway thing, a state with far less than a million people in it. And certainly my own experience living in Alabama, Montgomery and the state capital and your state legislator seems a lot closer to you than it ever did when I lived in California. I want to bring up something that's probably the biggest stumbling block to this scenario before we get into some of the benefits of decentralization. That is, of course, the federal element to article four would require congressional approval to break California into three states. I wonder if this couldn't be technically characterized or implemented as something that simply created an intra-state sort of three big glorified groups of counties that could bypass this because I think a lot of people are not going to want six U.S. senators from the three Californias, for example. That would be a stumbling block. I wonder if there's a lot of things you might imagine you could do technically to get around article four. Yes, well, and of course, ideally, what California does with its representation would be California's business. It strikes me as somewhat odd that Congress should have to vote on something that essentially would not affect anyone else except for the fact that it would create some more senators. But we're talking about four or more senators out of 100. And if anything, then it increases the relative power of other states because it removes this gigantic voting block in the electoral college and in Congress in general, that would help other states. And, but we're, of course, we're gonna have to deal with that even if the voters vote for it in California. But yeah, as to the question of, well, couldn't you do something where there was better representation in the states regionally speaking? And, well, in the past, that would have been a lot easier because the Senate, the state Senate in each case was designed to be more territorially based where you'd have kind of a, more of a federalist sort of system within each state. So each county would have a senator and then certain regions would get a senator. The idea was that you would help increase the representation of underpopulated places and that the less populated places wouldn't just be dominated by the cities. And you could easily, if that was allowed to stand by the federal courts, which it wasn't, that idea of representation was struck down in the 1960s as not conforming to the one man, one vote ideal. And so that's gone. The question is, if states try to do something like that today, would then the federal courts tolerate it? I don't know. I guess we would have to look at some actual proposals where they were doing that, but I agree. There's potentially some in-between measures that you could do. Well, you point out, one of the things that's driving this, an article you wrote on Mises Org this week, is that California's just too big. It doesn't have enough representatives. It's too far away. And I think it's bumping up against about 40 million people which makes it larger than many, many countries across the world. I wonder if there's an ideal size for an administrative unit if you believe in the state and that California's just wildly exceeded it. And that's why in general, not always, but in general places like Switzerland and Norway are happier than places like Russia and Germany and the US. Right, keep in mind that Norway has 5 million people which is the same as Minnesota or Colorado. And that's not even the same league as a place like California. And of course, you would feel that you actually have some stake in the game much more so in a place where you're one of 5 million versus one of 40 million. Especially when your territory is physically smaller too. You people are actually sharing more space in common. It's a totally different ballgame when you're talking about a place like California. Now as a decentralized minded person, the question is, well, is there an ideal size? I'd say, hey, New Hampshire's the ideal size, right? You got, I don't know, is it about a million people I think? And maybe even less than that, maybe 750,000. And Vermont next door is a similar too. And so both of those places have two senators and one representative. They have extremely low crime. And if you look at their representation in the state legislatures, it's wonderful in this respect in that I think there's only about 3000 people per legislative district in New Hampshire which has 400 legislators. No, just 400 members of the house. California for 41 people has 120. So that gives you, and so their district size then per state legislator is about 300,000. So to even call both of these places democracies kind of makes a mockery of the term. But it's interesting, I think Americans, especially libertarians don't think enough about the relative degrees of freedom between the states in the US because everything seems federalized. We pay a lot more in federal taxes than state, but between the states among which you can move without a passport, by the way without anyone's permission. Between the states, there are huge differences in how much they tax and regulate and run your life. You can move today. So why can't we recreate that within an existing state like California? Right, it would make perfect sense. And when you look at the size of some of these states like San Bernardino County, I believe in California is larger than Rhode Island. Sure. So that should be its own state right there. And it has plenty of people, especially by historical standards, especially when people talk about how a state's too small or an area's too small population-wise to be its own state where they're completely forgetting the past where California in its entirety once had 50,000 people or something to that. And of course their legislature size made sense back then. But we're talking about standard practice in America for a state to have a million people or less in many cases. And so you obviously don't need this gigantic place with 10 million people for it historically speaking to count as something that we would consider and recognize to be American government. So yeah, we've talked about this many times on Mises.org. The issue of moving from state to state with ease is that's a good thing that people can do that. But the larger the states get, the more irrelevant that becomes. If the United States was composed of two states and in order to escape the state government in Los Angeles, you had to move to Kentucky, well, I mean, how easy is that? How often is that gonna happen? It's mitigated by the fact, okay, you can move to Phoenix now from Los Angeles and still probably drive to see family and that sort of thing. The human scale matters. And so by making these states smaller, even if it's just three, I would of course argue that three states out of one is far too few. But this would be a huge improvement where now all you gotta do is move from LA County to Orange County or to Riverside County. That's a big deal in terms of making it easier to move around and move your business and your assets around as well. The other thing a lot of people don't understand is that the entire northern half of the state above San Francisco is a lot more like Oregon or Washington than it is what we think of California. The inland parts of the state have country music on the radio, Mexican migrant workers, they're a lot more like Arizona and Nevada than they are like Hollywood. But I wanna bring up one historical example. We can go back to just the early 1990s and look at the former Yugoslavia, which broke up into seven countries. Now in the former Yugoslavia, you have some ethno-national differences, you have some religious differences and even some linguistic differences. But if you fast forward to present day California, you could say, well, there are still distinctions driving this urban versus rural, secular versus religious, even if you don't have all the different religions involved. I mean, there's still cultural divides in the US that are every bit as real, I would argue as those divides in the former Yugoslavia, but they're different and they could help drive what we would argue would be sort of natural political subdivisions. Yeah, people tend to congregate with other people whose cultures they recognize and are like and even though those are fairly minor in the big scheme of things, right? American culture dominates most everybody in America even if they are freshly from some other place. Nevertheless, yeah, Northern California, culturally speaking, is not the same, especially when you look at, say, the Hispanics as their own culture, there's far more of that culture in the South than in the North and they do have a particular way of looking at the world. It's different from the way a Silicon Valley, like Harvard educated person looks at the world as to how someone from San Gabriel looks at the world and there's no reason to assume these people all think the same. I think a lot of outsiders, people have never spent any time in California, have this view where everyone in California is this loony, crazy person who loves Hollywood or works in Silicon Valley or the San Francisco type person and that's just simply not the case, even in the big cities in Southern California. Yeah, if you read Victor Davis Hansen, you can learn a lot about the inland parts of the state versus just four hours away, the Bay Area and just the cultural differences are unbelievably big. I just wonder, you know, we look at Croatia, for example, is one of the survivors of that seven country breakup. There's about 4.5 million people, but apparently it's physically smaller than West Virginia. So when we start to think about scale, you mentioned San Bernardino County. I mean, first, you and I would agree that California could easily be a country with its ports and economy and per capita income and all kinds of things, it's industries. But within that, I'm not sure people understand the scale. I mean, San Berdu, as they say, is probably more of a thing than Rhode Island easily. I think Americans have no sense of the scale, the size of the US with 320 million people, the size of California with 40 million people, that makes it larger than every European country except Germany, UK, France and Italy. I mean, that's the size of Spain in terms of its population. But people think that things can never happen until they do. People thought the former Soviet Union can never break up. And I would just add when we look at California, you know, we think of Europe and European countries as being much older than the US, but the actual geopolitical map of the current Western Europe is much younger than the US. A lot of that is post-World War I, even post-World War II. So the idea that these lines are forever and ever isn't true, it's historically naive to think so. Well, it's amazing how short the memories are of people who talk about how, oh, well, if you break up California, well, that's gonna be permanent democratic seats for California forever. And this is part of the reason I think why the pro-liberty party keeps losing. They can't think beyond like four or five years from now. We gotta think, we're talking about big important issues like decentralization, but nope, it might add a couple of Dems to the Dem column in the Senate, so forget it. We'll just keep the status quo forever. And then, oh, California will always be a Democrat state and will always be one piece. Well, that's certainly not what we were being told in the days of Pete Wilson. We were being told how California, the Republicans had this death grip on the governor's mansion and things like that. Or in the 1990, the early 90s, we were being told the Democrats have a permanent majority in the US Congress. You don't have to be particularly old to remember that sort of thing. It was just 20, 25 years ago and then things changed drastically overnight. And of course, bigger changes than that can happen when you look at Europe, as you know. But also, people in California could be far better represented, I think, if the country split up. You could easily see a Green Party or Libertarian Party or Peace and Freedom Party or all kinds of third party people in some sort of broken up version of Sacramento, maybe a tripartite Sacramento, even. Because as it currently stands, California mirrors the US federal government and there's a winner-take-all system. There's two parties. And soon to be a super majority of Democrats in the Assembly in Sacramento, well, they're just going to find divisions between Democrats, which would naturally lead to parties. So if you believe in third parties, if you believe the two party duopoly is a bad thing, surely this is something that could help. Right, the fact that the US is part of a much, or the fact that California is part of a much larger entity somewhat negates those regional differences in the state. And a lot of political differences tend to be geographically regionally separated, but could also exist even within a single city. But it's hard for any of those entities to exist when they're dealing with something so huge as the United States overall. And yeah, I would say experience shows that if you want to increase better local representation and to really highlight the differences between some of these different groups, you got to be dealing with a smaller political entity. Because everything just gets washed out and dominated by huge national parties and huge national interest groups when everything is done and dominated by the national level. Right, but you notice that the powers that be really resist that. And it's not so much a left and right thing. I mentioned that the LA Times article called it a radical plan. They didn't quote someone saying it's radical. They termed it radical in their headline. There's so much resistance in this in almost every facet of life is becoming decentralized other than governance. Right. And even in the libertarian sphere, a lot of people argue for universal political arrangements and that we should be going the other direction. We should be consolidating governance and politics across into into supranational organizations, not breaking up into a bunch of little city states, which you and I might prefer. It's interesting that the trend among the cognizantie seems to be the other direction. Well, that's what we're told in Europe, right? With Brexit was weirdly, we were being told that the democratic thing to do was to remove political control from a democratically elected parliament in the UK and give it over to a bunch of unelected guys in the European commission and groups like that, faceless, nameless bureaucrats who weren't really elected in any meaningful way. And that's what we're now being told as democracy. Yeah. I mean, ladies and gentlemen, if you look at it and you think this can't happen, that California can't break up, a lot of things couldn't happen five years ago that have happened. And it seems like the pace of these changes is accelerating. So I'm gonna stay tuned. It almost makes me wanna go back to California and illegally vote for this thing in November, just to see what happens. But we'll keep abreast of it. And as always, I think we'll keep abreast of decentralization trends throughout Europe, throughout anywhere in the world because we, the Mises Institute, most of us are certainly big believers as Mises was, that self-determination is the highest political end, not end in life, but the highest political end to be achieved. So with that, Ryan McMankin, thanks so much for your time. And ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.