 Hey guys, this is Stowe Bishop with Radio Rothbard, and I wanted to let you know about an exciting event we have coming up on September 23rd in Nashville, Tennessee. One of Ron Paul's favorite lines was, truth is treason and the empire of lies. Americans around the country are waking up to this reality, war across the globe, regulating free speech at home, printing trillions of dollars. The regime accepts no limits to its power. Speaking on this topic, we all have brave truth tellers, including Ted Carpenter, Michael Rectonwald, Jonathan Newman, and many more. Again, this is on September 23rd in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee. You can find more about this event and get your tickets at Mises.org slash Nashville 23. Welcome back to Radio Rothbard. I'm Ryan McMakin. I'm executive editor with the Mises Institute. And joining me, of course, is my co-host, Stowe Bishop. And we're going to talk a little bit today in the wake of recent calls for Staten Island, his secede from New York City. We're going to talk about the history and the issues behind municipal secession. Now, often this seems relatively uninteresting compared to a country seceding and doing its own thing. But it's actually an interesting thing to explore because there's so little justification for refusing municipal secessions, except beyond, hey, we're in charge and we want to stay in charge and we want your tax revenue. Since there are no national defense issues, nobody's pretending that Staten Island will institute slavery if it secedes from New York City. So what are these issues? If Staten Island voted two thirds or even 55%, we live in a period where all the social Democrats tell us that majority rules is what matters, that democracy is what matters. And so if the majority does vote to secede, what rationale is there to prevent that city from leaving? And my surmise is that they just want money and want to be in control. I don't see any moral issue here at all. It's just a matter of we want to think centralized because we like it that way. And so we'll look a little bit at some other examples and then as well as the issue of how some of these cities got so big to begin with. And we won't talk just about New York City, but there are numerous other examples and some issues in Colorado that I think are relevant as well. So, though, I mean, you could just start us off. I mean, kind of give us your general impression of the Staten Island thing. And then I know you went in and looked at some other examples, too, that seem relevant. Yeah, I think the Staten Island thing is very interesting because I think it goes to obviously there's an economic issue here, which is tax farming is essentially the argument that is used to oppose all of this. This was also true with a very similar and a very recent example in Georgia, where the community of Buckhead, which is the more affluent part of one of the richer communities within the city of Atlanta, they have sought to separate themselves from Atlanta for a variety of reasons, including just the unrest within the cities there. And that measure was defeated by a coalition of Republicans joining with Democrats in the state Senate. And their argument comes down to, oh, well, if we lose Buckhead, the revenue for Atlanta is going to suffer from it. But of course, the desire that's driving these things are a combination of, for one, taxpayers being upset that their tax dollars are being used in other areas they're not benefiting from, but also you have growing political changes here. And if we see the electoral outcomes in Staten Island relative to the rest of New York City, which is very blue, you've seen some big changes there in just the ideology of Staten Island relative to other parts of that area. And it's natural to want an element of self-determination when these conflicts have arisen. And it's interesting, this is not a new issue by any means, though I think this is something where we're going to see a greater trend too, given this period of polarization. And I think that there's something to be said about the political conversation generally depending on the outcomes of 2024, which if I was a betting man, I would put money on the Democrats in spite of how poorly everything is going just because of the pure sort of power dynamic there. If we get to the point where we get to sort of a post-national America from a political conversation, I think questions about what state governments can do and within that what counties look like, the political makeup of counties is going to be an increasingly important issue there, that COVID has kind of highlighted in many ways. But if anyone out there, if you are living and it doesn't matter what part of the country that you're in, particularly smaller towns, though, this question of city lines lightly played out at some point where I'm at here in Florida, our hub of our county government is in Panama City, not to be confused with Panama City Beach where I'm at. And Panama City was consolidated with a variety of other communities, including the first community in our county, which was the community of St. Andrews. It was consolidated with a backroom deal involving railroad interests and greasing the right palms in Tallahassee with the entire purpose of consolidating where the taxes were going into a government pocket that was easier controlled by special interest groups. So this is a dynamic that's played out throughout American history that has led to the counties and the towns that we are familiar with now. But this dynamic of special interest drawing lines in order to better collect and consolidate tax revenues for specific interests, this is what helped shape the map that it exists. And so now that you have, I think, a lot more awareness of, you know, because this is part of a larger conversation, right, with, you know, we could think about different secessionist movements among states, particularly in the West right now. I think this dynamic of recognizing the importance of political boundaries within the country and the political makeup thereof, I think these sort of conversations are only going to grow going forward. And as you mentioned, this is not simply limited to Staten Island. This is not simply limited to Buckhead. There's a similar situation in a metro area of Birmingham, Alabama, a community of Gardendale that was trying to separate, create a separate school system for their residents so it wasn't piling into the county as a whole and having monies distributed from one pocket to the other. There's other examples of this going on right now where, you know, taxpayers and residents are recognizing, okay, well, you know, we need, yeah, I deserve to be represented at the very least at my county government and the way that these lines are drawn are not reflecting the interests of tax-paying voters. And so I think it's a very interesting dynamic in this larger conversation of political decentralization, political lines on a map, that it's also a lot more feasible because, again, it's a lot easier to organize countywide efforts to change these sort of things. But I think this is really where we're going to see kind of where the rubber meets the road more meaningfully in the political sphere as the national circus becomes increasingly just chaotic, lawless, demoralizing whatever word you want to use there. Well, in order to get a sense of, okay, well, what are the arguments being made against these sorts of secessions that occur at the municipal level? And they don't, they're not very creative with it. They don't come up with much, except, hey, you're the heart of our community or you've been part of our community for a long time or if you don't pay taxes into our city, well, city services will suffer. Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated argument. All they're really saying is we want your money. I mean, they know it's not plausible to come out and say, oh, gee, China will invade if you break up New York City into a bunch of pieces. I mean, obviously the foreign policy issues, irrelevant issues of maybe, what are they going to say? It's against the idea of national unity that we won't be as great anymore. I mean, nationalism doesn't extend down that far. So it's easy to say to people that, oh, America won't be the greatest country in the world, which for some reason matters to people. It's a stupid thing to base your life on whether America is the greatest country in the world. But some people value that because they got nothing better going on. And obviously, that doesn't apply at the city level. So those sorts of like patriotic appeals, nationalism's up, doesn't work. So it's just about, let me get your money. So I looked at, okay, who opposed the Staten Island Secession back in 1993? Because I wanted to see, well, what were they saying? And it was a lot of the usual suspects anytime there's discussion of a secession. There were people on fixed incomes who just they don't like any sort of upheaval, you might call it, or change to the status quo because they're just, will they somehow affect my pension? Now if there are people who had some sort of city pension, they were former city workers, certainly they were very concerned about that. Another concern was current city workers who didn't want Staten Island to break off because a lot of city workers worked in Manhattan all day or in Brooklyn, but they lived in Staten Island because it was nicer. And they were afraid that it requires that they live in the city in order to be city employees, that they would then have to move or get a different job or whatever. Of course, deciding these issues based on what city employees think is a terrible idea. But that was certainly one of the groups that opposed the secession. But another big group was simply the school district, the school district employees who were also city employees or state employees, depending on how you want to define them. But it was the teachers union, the teachers union fought mightily hard against secession. They were kind of vague about why that was. They claimed it would lead to tax increases. Kind of funny to hear the teachers union people decrying the possibility of tax increases. But I think they were just grasping at straws, trying to come up with what are these middle-class fools who we despise? What will appeal to them? We'll just say their taxes will go up if they secede. Because a common claim when there are secessions like this is, oh, everything's cheaper for you now because of economics economies of scale. So of course we want to be in a giant city because everything's cheaper that way. As if it was a universal truth that living in a large city made your quality of life better than living in a small city. I would say there's pretty good data suggesting the opposite in that case. And so there were a lot of claims that, well, Staten Island's attacks suck. And so they just benefit from all of our infrastructure and all things like that. But of course they never mention all those tax dollars that flow out and are used for things that don't benefit Staten Island. So it always kind of depends on how you calculate the numbers there. But what was funny is that even after this hysterical attempt to convince everyone that their cost of living would go up if they voted for secession, two-thirds of Staten Islanders voted for secession in 1993 anyway. And then lo and behold, even though a supermajority of voters voted for this thing, the people who said they love democracy said, well, there was a technicality and you didn't fill out this form correctly. So Staten Island doesn't get to secede. And of course they needed approval from the state legislature also, which also strikes me as a bad idea. And so that never happened. Majority rule be damned. And so that's often how a lot of these secession efforts happen. And as you noted, it was the exact same thing in Buckhead. I was reading, you know, just kind of see what was the news that was coming out of Buckhead, the attempted bucket secession. What were the, what was the commentary on that? And it was just straight up, hey, we want your money. And that was it. And but you can imagine the benefits to a place like Buckhead or Staten Island, that would occur from secession in a variety of ways, right? First of all, Staten Island's representation in the city council has been lessened over time. Because of course, population in other parts of the city kept getting bigger. Staten Island wasn't keeping up because they didn't have as dense of development. So they just reduced Staten Island's representation. So now they have even less of a voice on the New York, you know, the New York governing boards, essentially. And and then so then Staten Island founds the victim to a lot of different things and inflicted upon it by the city. Overall, one of them was a huge landfill that went in the late 1940s called the Fresh Kills landfill. It was a great name for a land. I mean, if you're trying to sell a landfill, right? Right now, maybe not call it Fresh Kills. So that was a controversy for decades, for 40 years. Actually, I guess they didn't close it down for 50 years, where it finally went away. But that was a big sore spot for a long time, but there was nothing Staten Island could do about it. But if you could imagine if they were in charge of their own tax dollars, they would have a police force specifically devoted to the city. They could have much more say just and part of what what excited the most recent drive towards the session is the city government in Manhattan just said, hey, we're going to move a bunch of migrants to Staten Island. They didn't ask anyone on Staten Island what they thought they the the local representatives told they didn't they found about it found out about it in the newspaper that the city didn't consult them at all. They had no veto, no saying it whatsoever. The city just shows up and says, hey, we're putting a shelter here for foreign nationals undocumented immigrants. And that's it. There's nothing you could do about it. So even though we're told constantly by the ruling elite that self determination matters, that we need to save democracy everywhere, you having no voice doesn't matter at all, because we're fine with the way things are. So forget about it. So you just have to put up with our homeless shelters that we open, we're going to put landfills on your island if we want. We're going to do whatever we want. And you're going to have like one or two measly votes on the city council. And we just don't care. And we don't have to care because you're a small minority. And just denying that these people have any right then to self government, no matter how large a percentage of the people there vote in favor of it is just a perfect illustration of how democracy just means whatever the elite says it means. It shall not be allowed unless we decide to let you do it. And decentralizing the police force, decentralizing infrastructure, decentralizing services that are more tailor made to your actual community. There are big benefits to that. And that's why even though they were being told repeatedly that their taxes would go up, people in Staten Island voted for self control over their own political system. Anyway, they were willing to risk the higher taxes just so they could have some say in how those taxes were spent. And that seems to be the choice. You can choose between taxes of a certain level with no say over how they're spent, or you could risk having slightly higher taxes and have some control over it. Interestingly, this was an argument made in the American Revolution as well, which Samuel Adams condemned was the British were always saying, hey, look at all the money we give you. We keep the Indian tribes at bay and we defend you from the Spanish. And we do all this great stuff. And you're willing to give up this money and for independence. And of course, Samuel Adams, with his usual sorts of colorful language, basically said, yeah, I mean, if you want to prostitute yourself for a few pennies from the British, then yeah, continue to live under their yoke. And under the impression that you'll save a few bucks. But I am for liberty. And that's basically the same approach that many people have taken throughout history in terms of getting self determination instead of these hysterical claims that your taxes will go up and that the ruling elite should stay in power forever. And no exceptions made ever. And we'll just make sure the state legislature never lets you go. You can just see how it's built in that the idea of centralization is very, very popular among the elite. And they're always afraid that any sort of movement toward decentralization is going to start off some sort of secession fever that would be splitting up cities, maybe even pieces of the state would be breaking off. And they never want to open that Pandora's box. And so all those considerations are some of why they just refuse to let any successions happen. When, and of course, unfortunately, there's no group in America more eager to prostitute out the people they represent than the majority of Republican elected officials in modern day America. And that this is why the federal government's, you know, the elect was very good at this by placing various requirements and different incentives to various federal grant programs to get even nominally red areas to do whatever their agenda is in exchange for bringing home more bacon back to the district, which enriches special interest groups that finance the Republican politicians while their base ends up getting screwed over on the issues that they very care about, very much care about. And that's kind of the reality here is that one side, you know, the Democrats, this is why I think the issues in Staten Island are only going to continue to get worse as the political trajectory of Staten Island continues to differ from the majority of the New York City political machine and New York City. Generally, you know, you had a great quote in your article from one of the figures pushing for Staten Island's a session talking about how ultimately Staten Island and other overtaxed New Yorkers in this mismanaged sprawling city hate being governed by a Manhattan ruling class that often scorns and misunderstands outer borough residents. I eat those not living in Manhattan. This Manhattan ruling class quietly regards most of us as a bunch of Guido's, Archie bunkers and local babbits. We are the New York City version of deplorables. And of course, historically, right back when we look at 1993, the majority of these Guido's and Archie bunkers types were voting for the Democrats. Now they are voting for the party of the deplorables. And so I think you're going to see that political division between Staten Island and New York only get worse over time because the Democrats have no problem, you know, making lives living hell for people that don't vote for them. In contrast, if you look at the example of Buckhead, again, as I mentioned earlier, it was Republicans lining up to squash their own constituents, right? Buckhead residents are more likely to vote Republican than your average Atlanta voter. They're the ones saying, oh, we can't allow our great city of Atlanta, you know, have its heart ripped out by allowing these Buckhead folks to have more control over their money. They, you know, they want to force them Nobody who visits the city of Atlanta considers it some great city. I can tell you that as a former resident of Marietta there. But again, they are more than happy to subject their voters. And I'm sure some of most of these people don't represent Buckhead, but whatever, right? Republicans in theory, right? They're more than happy to subject Republican voters in Buckhead to the insanity of the Atlanta city government if it means propping up this, the sense of importance that they have to this dear city of Atlanta, Georgia. And of course, if we want to look at looking at this Gardendale example, here's how the federal government handles this. So again, this was this was not squashed by the state government here. It was handled through the court system and a federal judge, a federal judge, basically said that the people of Gardendale were being motivated by racial reasons, therefore ruled against the establishment of their own school districts. This is a full succession. This is mainly dealing with how school money is going, but it's the same concept. And then rewarded the NAACP legal defense fund with close to a million dollars paid for by Gardendale residents, right? Yeah, that tax money is coming anywhere. It's coming from somewhere, right? So they're giving the NAACP legal fund almost a million dollars from these poor people that are just trying to have more control over their money is going. Of course, a big narrative throughout all this played out in Buckhead. It plays out in the Gardendale situation. It plays out in a variety of these situations is this notion of racism, that we can allow this white community to have more control over its money because it might hurt minority communities that are being subsidized by this more affluent part of town. And so you have this dynamic where it's the civil rights administrative state that has so much control over so many aspects ranging from voting maps to everything else that the left clearly recognizes for what it is. They will take from the voters that don't vote for them and reward patron classes that are reliable foot soldiers for their goals. Meanwhile, Republicans can't stand up and do the same thing in a state like Georgia, which might explain its current political trajectory. But from a power political standpoint, just another situation of how the Republican party for the most part. Again, this is at a state level. You can't even blame Mitch McConnell and the ineffectiveness of DC Republicans for this where there's this neutered self-defeating and prostituting out of the voter base from the people that elect these people out of their own nebulous concerns about the glory of a city or something that could threaten a special interest group that finances these campaigns. And so again, average Americans are being screwed over because of just the way that the current political system works in this country. Well, I definitely want to come back to the racism issue in a moment because, yes, they have found ways to turn this into a race issue and not just in southern states either. But first, I want to set up a little bit more historical context here. And I would start off by just saying that always remember that the opposite of secession is annexation. So anytime you're talking about secession, you have to keep in mind what is how did this thing we're looking to break up get to be its current size and shape and makeup. And of course, the United States is its current size from a variety of wars of conquest and machinations over a westward expansion, which by the way, some good research showing that the Civil War would have never happened if the westward expansion hadn't happened, that which would have saved a lot of lives and probably kept Americans more free because it wouldn't have set up this issue of direct control of the territories by the federal government. But that's another issue we can return to later. But the issue of municipal annexation is actually a big deal. And it was really your first wave of annexations happened after the Civil War. You had lots of cases of that where in Atlanta, specifically, there was a lot of annexation going on at those times in the 1870s, 1880s. But you had it throughout the West as well, where a lot of these really tiny towns were buying up essentially essentially buying towns around them. But you had in the more modern context, you had a ton of annexation going on in the 1940s and 1950s. It was very much a post-war phenomenon also. And you especially see it, if you consult the literature on it, a lot of it will talk about Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Houston, Oklahoma, San Antonio. You could include Denver in that as well, and a variety of cities. Los Angeles actually got smaller over time because it started out as a humongous county and then shrunk one of the notable secessions being Orange County, which broke off in the 1880s and then LA County sued it multiple times to try and prevent that from happening because it just wanted Orange County's money, but they failed. So now Orange County is free and, of course, much better off than LA County in general. But let's look to a lot of these cities that started out as just mid-sized or small cities and became much, much larger cities, Houston being a perfect example of that. But what happened over this time period? Well, a lot of these cities, they were surrounded by smaller towns or, in many cases, unincorporated areas of neighboring counties. So what they did was just engage in a variety of situations where they would offer a few local landowners, hey, we'll give you some city services if you agree to join our big city. And back in the mid-20th century, the ideology was very, very different. America was infected by this idea of boosterism. Bigger is better. We want to put this city on the map. I want to live in a huge city that's like New York City. And there was this idea that you wanted to live in a huge city that was urban and sophisticated, and there was no realization that that comes with its own problems. And so it was seen by many people who owned the land surrounded these cities or many of these small cities that just said, hey, go ahead and annex us bigger city. All they saw was them getting sewer lines and water lines out of this new agreement. They didn't foresee that actually their parts of the community would be sucked dry to pay for failing school systems, for old infrastructure, for crime, and the rest of the city would eventually become the reality for those cities. And then a lot of those suburbs would actually regret joining. This is actually the story of Buckhead. His Buckhead wasn't part of Atlanta until 1952, when it was annexed. And it actually took three attempts at elections to get the people in Buckhead to agree to that annexation. And of course, Atlanta looked very different in 1952 in terms of crime and in terms of the money spent and the age of its infrastructure and all of that. But what we're told, of course, is that once you join a city, you're not allowed to secede until the sun burns out. I mean, this is how generally annexations work. We annex you, and it's forever until the end of time. And everybody forget that they're just a few decades ago, you were a separate city. You're not allowed to remember that or mention that. And so that's how it is in Atlanta, of course, which is one of these cities that engage in a lot of expansions during that time. But we can point to many, many cities. And what's notable also is that a lot of these expansions, they occurred without local votes. If you look at the literature on this, you can find that many states do not have any requirements that the residents being annexed into a city be able to vote on it, which is I think would surprise quite a few people. There are a lot of provisions in there where if you just get a few key landowners to approve of the annexation, well, then tough luck. In fact, this happened in Atlanta again recently where the city annexed a new portion of town that I believe was mostly owned by Emory University. However, there were 6,000 people living in that area. And this changed their school district. It changed where their taxes went and it made them part of Atlanta. They had no say in the matter because a large portion of the property owners there, by which they mean land owning property, said, okay, it's fine. Now, I know that there's maybe some debate among libertarians. Well, I mean, they're owners, so they should get to decide what to do. Yeah, except land ownership is in the only time of type of ownership. What about the businesses that were leasing their space and the people who were renting there? I mean, renters pay taxes. They pay property taxes indirectly. They pay sales taxes. And they're subject to, of course, all the regulations that occur in these places. And so they just have no say in the matter. As long as the city does some backroom agreement with some little community that has decided to join that city. And so that was very, very common throughout much of the 20th century. Hey, guess what? You're part of this huge city now and you don't get to vote on it or have any say in it. And I suppose one could make the claim that only the richest elites get to determine where city's borders are. But even though we're being told constantly that democracy should have a part in it, that's still not actually a requirement in a lot of these annexation issues. And it's notable that in Colorado, they needed to amend the Constitution to keep Denver from continuing to buy up all the surrounding communities. Because what the cities would do is you would get a successful community that would pull in a lot of jobs and offer a lot of wealth and jobs and good new homes and stuff. And then the city would say, hey, let's just annex that because we're losing tax revenue and jobs to this new community outside our borders. So let's just make some shady deal and we'll annex it. And so in the 1970s they introduced what was called the Poundstone Amendment, which required actual voting on these issues and really limited the ability of the city to expand. So annexation could be a very shady business and it was very much a strategy of cities throughout the mid 20th century to simply deal with any issues of their taxes being too high, of their infrastructure being too crappy, where people were moving out of the city and they're like, oh, you moved out of the city to a neighboring community, we'll just suck you back into the city again. So cities were doing that. And in places though where they limited that, then suddenly these cities had to realize that, oh, maybe our taxes are too high. Maybe crime is out of control and they actually had to start improving their city rather than just buying up nicer parts of the state through whatever means they could come up with. And so that's really kind of the story of how a lot of these cities got big. It's that whole annexation story and it's often a very unflattering tale of a lot of these city governments. And we need to be aware of that before we talk about secession and how apparently I guess people don't have a right to do that because I guess wherever your current cities' borders are, they can only get larger, they can never get smaller for some reason. And I think that's something that is, I think every one of our listeners can take from this conversation is that a lot of these dynamics to how the state works, the cronyism involved in economic decisions, this is happening in our day-to-day life within your own community. And it's a lot harder to pay attention to. It's a lot harder to see this. You don't get the same sort of news coverage. You don't get all the social media exposure. You don't have Tucker Carlson interviewing the opposition to your county commission, railing against these corrupt deals that they're doing, some sort of developer and the like. This dynamics of the way that politics really works, the lack of the way that democracy only really goes one way when it helps consolidate power and elevate certain sort of people. This is the way that this playbook works at various levels of the government. The basic operations of a governing body, more or less say the same, you don't have to worry about the military industrial complex in your community, but you might have to worry about a contractor developer industrial complex where you have the same big wig contractors that end up doing all the major work within the county that end up getting your sweetheart deals. Often there's even a kind of a tariff, if you will, that subsidizes local contractors from competition from outside the area that allows them sort of cartilize their prices and drive it all up. And then all the developers will have nice boats and trucks and things like that. And they'll host all these nice fundraisers for the politicians, kind of keep that machine going and the like. These things play out at lower levels the same way they do it in DC. The difference is that it's a lot easier to actually wrangle up enough people to vote people out of office. Now, again, the problem comes in where the decisions on how a county can organize itself, how a school district can organize itself is then restricted not by the voters of this area, but by the court system, by the state senate, by these foreign powers that come in and interject in any sort of notion of political self-determination that a community might have for itself. But I think starting off with just this consciousness that your community has the ability to out sheisters and corrupt entities so long as they're aware of this aspect can be an example where awareness, understanding, applying, again, all this great Austrian theory that we pontificate about in terms of federal issues or international issues, it's all relevant here in the home. And this is a way of providing the information and the knowledge and the lens that you get from readingmesus.org. It's going to require doing the legwork of following the county commission meetings or your city council meetings and all these sort of dynamics. But you can see exactly the same sort of conflict of liberty versus power that lens that Rothbard has for history. It very much applies at this local level as much as anything else. And you have some more opportunities on dealing with it, exposing in it, and perhaps organizing a secessionist sort of march, because even though we're bringing up examples of where this is not working, it also can work. It also has worked. There are communities that have been able to break away from larger jurisdictions. In fact, one of my favorite examples is another local one. There's a guy who's a good libertarian, James Morris. He used to be actually the treasurer for the Florida Libertarian Party. He had an auto shop, and he would wave the Dixie or the Blue Bonnet flag in his auto shop, and he decided to secede his auto shop from the city into the county that had lesser taxes and the like. And he succeeded in doing that. So he was able to secede his piece of property away from one jurisdiction to the other within the county and because of tax reasons. And so this is not always a self-defeating measure here. The big ones, the big cities, the big pockets of money, you're going to have special interest trying to combat at it. But there have been ways, there have been success stories here. Again, you brought up Orange County, and it's able to break away from Los Angeles. There are examples of success here as well. And so if you're looking for a white pill and something that is not as depressing as some of the other political topics we could talk about, there are patterns of success for these sort of self-determinist movements at the county and local level. And that's why I'm very interested to see, and given this unique sort of period we are with political tensions, how things like the greater Idaho project, the state level, house, you know, seeing how the Staten Island movement continues over time, again, with the prediction that there's going to be more hostility from New York City facing those residents in the future. I think these are areas where you can win, even though the stakes and special interests and the powers that be, they're going to fight back. But these are areas where we have been able to win along these self-deterministic lines in the past. Yeah. And it's also important to keep in mind that these things can take a very long time. It took 20 years for Orange County to get through its secession back in the 19th century when they wanted to do that. It was just a small handful of people that pushed it again and again. It took a very long time. I think a lot of conservatives just give up immediately if they fail something after two years and they're like, eh, it'll never happen, so forget it. But, you know- I'm preference matters. Yes, it does. An actual effort must be expended to fight the bad guys in terms of political things. So, of course it can be done, and I think it's probably helpful just to make it harder for cities to annex places, require local votes, that sort of thing, because if city elites are just kind of determining how big their city's going to be, that puts the regular taxpayers at a very significant disadvantage. But before we leave, let's look at the racial issue. There was one thing I wanted to make sure and bring up, because yes, they have found ways to cast any attempt at limiting annexation or promoting secession as a racial issue. And at least the way that that manifested itself out west was on the matter of forced busing. This was, oh, we need to make the city larger so we can incorporate more suburbanites into our school districts and then we'll do a bunch of forced busing. Let me back up one step. If you're under the age of 40, you might not know that forced busing used to be this big thing back in the 70s especially, and it persisted into the 80s a bit, where the courts, the federal courts demanded that cities desegregate their school districts. So what this meant then was that you take the school district as a whole and you force students in one neighborhood to get on a bus and then, so you got a white student in one part of the neighborhood, they have to get on a bus and then ride 45 minutes to the other side of town to somebody else's neighborhood and go to school in that neighborhood and then they pick up a black student or in the case of LA in some other areas that were segregated on Hispanic lines, pick up a Hispanic student and move them to the other side of that town. So you had children sitting on buses for hours a day so that the school district could be desegregated and it was to completely destroy the idea of the neighborhood school because what mattered then was desegregation, not the fact that you got to go to school with people you lived near or and of course this made it far more difficult for parents to have any oversight over what was going on in their children's school, destroyed communities, it was just absurd, made huge time demands on small children's lives and anyone with the ability to move out of a city would of course do so because those are bonkers conditions to force your children to live under but of course they portrayed it all as racism to not want to participate in this insane system that the federal courts had imposed on the cities so people would move out of the city and then the city would come back and annex those neighborhoods back into the city so that they could continue so it would make it easier for them to desegregate by busing those students all over the place so of course when the woman after whom the Poundstone amendment is named Frida Poundstone who was a Republican from a suburb and wanted to prevent the city from buying up all of the office parks and all of the prosperous areas around around the borderlands of the city of Denver they of course labeled her a racist because she didn't want her children to be bussed 20 miles away to northern Denver and she also didn't want the city just buying up all of the prosperous neighborhoods around her seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do but as is so often it was just cast along racial lines specifically and so that of course has been used and then of course there's just the general idea of how dare anyone want not want to live inside the city or how dare those people in Buckhead want to leave Atlanta overall their only motivation must be that they're racist and they don't want to live with people they regard as their lessors and again they're just they're just grasping at straws to deny people self-determination so that the people in Atlanta City Hall can maintain control over a larger area an area by the way that they did not have control over just a few decades ago or in some areas of the city just a few years ago and that's just their general thinking is that hey we're in control now we should stay in control forever and if you don't like it you're a racist you're greedy and you're a racist and and that's just basically they'll come up with anything they can say in order to denounce you and so even though forced busing is gone they'll still use a lot of the same arguments against you for not wanting to essentially sacrifice your own family's time and money to prop up some badly run part of a neighboring city many miles away and it's the same arguments that they're using now over school choice matters and we have a larger conversation about you know the libertarian perspective on some of the more aggressive school choice matters I understand that but this is a very different argument they're making and you know this this dynamic has just become part of just the standard playbook for for anything the left doesn't like they are going to to make it into a a racial issue to to try to get all of the you know their specific interest groups in a tizzy to provide you know backup and again you know whether it's using the NAACP with the situation with school districts in the Birmingham area you know anything else you know they bring in these forces by able to try to utilize this sort of racial narrative to go against any sort of means of greater political decentralization this is why you know you're trying to give way and trying to play nice on this issue when it comes from a political perspective you know they they're they're underlying agenda is always greater control more control the tax money making sure it goes to their pockets you know their their interest is not the well-being of taxpayers it's it's not about political self-determination it's not about you know any of the values that we would have respect you know out of desiring from any sort of political body and that's just the the nature of modern american politics and then again I think this is why battles like this are worth fighting because I think increasingly given the political situation it's going to be the quality of your county level governance is going to have the biggest impact on the quality of life of you your family or your friends your neighbors you know if you happen to be be fortunate enough to be you know able to to be in the community that you grew up with that you have a particular particular emotional tie to a place that you found later in life even you know being able to preserve what is you like about your community is going to come from having a county that is willing to stand up to the next level of federal oversight the next state imposed you know governors doing crazy stuff and the more that you can have control over where your tax dollars go at your county level you know can can have control over again the nuts and bolts public services that you know kind of make up community government the better off you're going to be with everything coming forward because again we were in very serious political ties uh political times I think the again that the state of national politics is is something that everyone should be very concerned about local action and and local organization I think really does matter and again the value of it is that again the perspective that we have the understanding that the nature of the state in its interest get just as applicable to your your your county commission as it is uh washington dc well with that we'll wrap up this episode of radio Rothbard thank you for tuning in and we'll be back next week again with another installment and so we'll see you next time