 Welcome to the secession talk. Short titles really. Secession, radical decentralization, breaking large states into small states. Those are the basic themes. We'll be talking about here. And this topic remains controversial among a lot of different groups, right? A lot of conservatives hate decentralization if it means people can smoke marijuana. Social Democrats hate it if it means people can own guns in some places. Certainly, foreign policy interventionists hate it if it prevents the US from being a global hegemon. There's lots of reasons to hate decentralization. One of the reasons I got started on this topic, though, was because there was a surprising number of libertarians and professory market people who were always arguing against secession as well. And the argument seemed to be that you shouldn't break up countries into smaller pieces because the better policy, the better strategy is that at some magical time in the distant future, everyone will be converted to hard core libertarianism. And then the whole world will be this paradise. Whereas the decentralized strategy was always to simply find places where people could act to put into place a haven for liberty and to provide choice and exit and escape for people who maybe wanted to live in a place like that. And we encountered that in the real world, such as Spanish unionists who condemned us for supporting secession because they didn't like the fact that Catalonians wanted to secede from the larger state. But as we'll see today, the reality is that the better strategy, the more practical strategy, the more real world strategy is to take states, large states, especially, and break them up into much smaller states. And that by doing this, you actually create the conditions for more liberty and also for weaker states and for fewer abuses of human rights. And everyone agrees to a certain extent that some decentralization is important. The world is decentralized and always has been. There's no single global world government. The Romans, sure, claimed to be a universal regime, but they never were. They never subdued even all of Europe, let alone sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and so on. And then at the same time, there were other, not states in those days, but certainly other types of governments that existed elsewhere in the world. So human beings have never existed under a single regime. There's always been some degree of decentralization. And this is, of course, clear right now. There's more than 200 independent states in the world. And a lot of those, especially over the last 75 years or so, were created relatively recently through acts of secession. So even though a lot of people speak of secession in terms of the American Revolution or the old Southern Confederacy or something like that, the fact of the matter is that most secession in the world has been taking place in the more recent past. It took place in large numbers in Africa and Asia after World War II, as countries broke away from their colonial masters. And it took place to a slightly lesser extent than after the collapse of the Soviet Union when lots of countries then seceded. Either de jure from the Soviet Union where they were actually legal components of the Soviet Union, like the Baltic states, or they were de facto appendages of the Soviet Union, say, like Poland. And so they asserted there was this really flowering of independence that occurred in the 1990s as that power center collapsed and a lot of independent states rose up. So it's unclear why secession should naturally be an unacceptable tactic. Of course, we've already got lots of different states existing. And I suppose if you want to take the side of Soviet despots and European colonists, you can say that secession is never acceptable. But I have no interest in siding with those people. And we can see quite clearly that in history secession is in fact a way to obtain self-determination, greater freedom and provide people with a way to pursue their own goals separate from what some centralized government far away might want. And of course, those governments also tend to be culturally alien in many cases in that they have a value system quite separate from your own. So I'm certainly not the person who invented a lot of these thoughts. We'll find that Rothbard in many publications and over a long period of time supported decentralization and for a variety of specific reasons. And there's really three main reasons here why we would support decentralization. One is that smaller states allow for more choice and for regular people to exit the current regime that they live under. And we can see this in lots of examples and in the theory it's quite clear as well. The second is that it protects minority rights when democracy fails. So anytime you have a state, especially a large state that contains a lot of cultural, linguistic, religious minorities, ideological minorities, these groups are gonna be outvoted most of the time. And while lots of governments like to pursue ways, checks and balances, independent court system and so on that we can protect minority rights, the reality is that a lot of the time the only real feasible solution to this is to allow those minority groups to create their own independent jurisdictions. And three, this limits the power of aggressive states. Large states are more abusive states, generally in practice they can do what they want more, they can wage larger wars and as Hannah Rent pointed out totalitarian states tend to always be large states because you need a certain amount of resources under your direct control in order to implement that sort of hardcore despotism. So the session has many benefits, but as you might guess it doesn't happen all the time and why, because governments oppose it, they don't like it. The people who control the armies and the navies and the nuclear weapons and so on don't particularly like it when pieces and chunks of their countries suggest that they should break off. And when I say states in here by the way I should note that I mean sovereign states and I'm usually, usually if I use the word state I don't mean like Kentucky, I mean like China or the US or Belgium and states they prefer to be large. They are often prevented from getting bigger for geopolitical reasons by neighboring states but for the most part a state would like to get as big as it can. Much of this stems from the nature of states themselves. States must do very specific things in order to be successful as states in order to maintain their power. So as the historian of the state Charles Tilley describes it states quote, produce distinct organizations that control the chief concentrated means of coercion within well-defined territories and exercise priority in some respects over all other organizations operating within these territories. So according to Tilley these distinct organizations include armies but they also include organizations like police, a bureaucracy for collecting taxes, a prison system and so on. And this is all very costly. So states will tend to seek direct access to reliable sources of wealth and geopolitical power. This can be augmented through growth in either physical size or population or both. And so you can see then that states are gonna want to grow in physical size that is get oil fields, get forests. But often it really means getting cities, getting large populations especially productive citizens and this is historically the case as well. Especially a lot of the genesis of states begins in the 16th century where we're wanting to fold cities especially the most prosperous ones into our domains where we can then tax those people and collect resources, field armies and attack neighboring states and maybe suck some of them into our own state and control that. Also expanding frontiers can be very geopolitically important. The Russians have always been obsessed with this having very large frontiers between our urban core and neighboring states so that if anyone wants to attack us they have to roll across a large open plane maybe some frozen tundra in order to attack our urban core and that strategy has actually worked fairly well for Russia in a couple of cases. Notable cases. Now mega states are the ideal state from the state's perspective. Liberal ideologies kind of to a certain extent suggested that smaller is better in many cases but states don't want to just be big, they want to be super big because the most powerful states tend to be very, very large ones. And as I noted in her book Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Rent concludes that only the largest states are able to actually manage and bring about totalitarian regimes simply because you don't have the critical mass and she even notes that while the Nazis wanted to create a totalitarian regime only if they had succeeded in the war would they have been really able to put it in place. They had never been able to really obtain the level of totalitarianism that the Soviets had obtained in the years before the war simply because the Soviets simply had more human resources with which they could just treat like throwaway garbage and that's tends to be very important in putting a totalitarian regime into place. So small states, they're very limited then in terms of the level of despotism that they can implement according to a rent. Now let's contrast this with the benefits of small states. They're small, you can leave them more easily. They have less control over the individual residents. They also are less able to obtain any sort of self-sufficiency in the sense that since they don't have direct control over endless amounts of crops and resources and persons and rivers, they have to rely on neighboring states then for trade, for working together, for collective action as a group of states in many cases if they want to attain certain ends. And we can see this if we do like a hypothetical world global state. So you can imagine if all the world was one giant state, what would that look like? Well this would be the statiest state that ever existed, right? If it was one state, it would have finally achieved the ultimate full definition of a state, a complete and total monopoly over everything and people couldn't even escape. There would be nowhere to go. And as the number of states increases though, even if the world breaks up into two states, now at least some people can feasibly leave or change the situation under which they live. If it's three, then those choices become even more numerous. Once you get up into hundreds or maybe even thousands, tens of thousands, then your choices multiply with each additional state that is added. And this of course then weakens the state. You just imagine the amount of power held by one state that exists in a world of 500 states versus a single mega state or two global states that might be existing together. And so this helps really see what the real difference is there. Now, the smaller they become, the more practical it means to just simply leave. And we can think about it in terms of is a state even at human scale. Some states are much, much too large, right? In order to, if you live within the bosom of some states like the United States or China or Russia, you have to move hundreds of miles away in order to relocate. Moreover, you might have to move to a place that has a totally different language, that is culturally alien to you. And this is a huge impediment to moving. Moreover, many states basically have a monopoly on the language area in which a person lives. So if you speak only Greek, leaving the Greek state is gonna impose a pretty sizable cost on you. If you speak only Swedish, then that's gonna be a problem for you if you decide you need to get out of there. Because now you're gonna have to learn an entirely new language. And probably along with linguistic differences, you're going to not understand other cultures as well as you might have, had they been more similar. And obviously the larger the states get, then the more different culturally, economically, perhaps in other ways that a urban core of a state is from a neighboring state. And just in terms of travel time, right? Kirkpatrick's sale uses the term human scale, right? It was his opinion that most states should really be more at the size of a city state. And that even arguably the proper size of a city was really under 500,000 people. So he argued for real localist type of human association and that really humanity would perhaps be better off just as a grouping of independent city states. And part of that was that these would function at human scale in that say you could commute back to see friends and family on the weekend if you lived in a neighboring state. It was only a couple of hours away. And so the bigger and more grandiose it becomes, it becomes more difficult to do regular human things once states become large and begin to put up these sorts of impediments. Now we can see that in history, this was certainly the case, there's lots of empirical evidence to support this idea. We can look around and suggest lots of scenarios around micro states, right? We could do a thought experiment with, say we turned Pasadena, California into an independent republic, right? And it was surrounded by similarly sized republics. We could see how easy it would be then to move around. Moreover, any government that size, as also the empirical evidence shows, small governments like that, they tend to be more open to free migration of labor. They tend to be more open to trade because of course they can't do everything on their own. So any sort of scenario where you had these micro republics of 100,000 people and so on, it's very hard to control the movement of people and maintain any sort of prosperity for your state. But this isn't just some invented idea that we have, this sort of idea of this tiny principality reflects to a certain extent the reality in much of Europe prior to the rise of the state in the 16th century, certainly in the high Middle Ages and the early Middle Ages as well, the U.S. was or rather Europe was divided into a very small independent little principalities. Now as we'll see in my Saturday talk, they weren't like independent in the sense that we know them and that they weren't sovereign. They were actually competing sovereignty's between them. Nevertheless, for the most part, they functioned as independent entities and people would move around if you tried to oppress them so much. Now we see this in the research of Ralph Raco who wrote an article once and you can find it on mises.org called The European Miracle. And Raco notes that in lots of economic history research that was conducted on pre-modern Europe, what they found was that it was really this age of decentralization that set the stage for Europe's ascent to become the preeminent economic power in the world because the question has always been why Europe, why did Europe become wealthy? Why did Europe become more powerful, have such a higher standard of living than say China or the Islamic world? Because if you were a space alien who came to Earth 1,000 years ago and you looked around and you saw Europe who was kind of this backwater and then you saw the grandeur of the Eastern Mediterranean or China or parts of Arabia, you would say, well, these people are much more wealthy. This is clearly where all the action is here on Earth. But then if you came back 600 years after that or especially say 800 years after that, you would look around and you say, oh, I guess Europe was the place to be after all. It surpassed all these other places and it's become much more wealthy. So why is that? And as Raco points out, but lots of other historians as well, like Jean Bechler who notes that the real key behind Europe's success was the fact that it had quote unquote political anarchy. And the issue here was that Europe had never, Western Europe, Eastern Europe was still under much, mostly under the, what they called the Roman Empire was really the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire. And they still call themselves Romans. But Rome itself and Western Europe was highly fractured. And yes, there was the Holy Roman Empire, but that consisted of 1800 semi-independent states where people could move around and they had completely different policies for the most part. So what Bechler looks at is he says, look, Europe did not have a unified political system at any point, unlike China, unlike much of the Islamic world, which was under the Caliphate. And so this then created a Europe where no state could get away with a high level of oppression over the long term. And so sure, you could raise taxes on some merchant on the Rhine River in your principality, but then he might just move down the road and or rather down the river. The roads were terrible, so he would probably perhaps move up or down the river to a different principality. And this had a significant effects. And also, it's worth noting that this wasn't a, we can guess reasons as to why this occurred. It wasn't because each of these principalities all agreed that we'll all be independent and respect each other's sovereignty and so on. It wasn't nearly, of course, that well organized. What you had was in the Western, the old Western Empire, and then in Western Europe, you had a situation arise where no organization really became powerful enough to impose its will over a large period. And also there was the added problem from the secular ruler's perspective, the problem of the fact that the church was powerful and an independent entity of its own. In the East, you had Cezaro Papism where the archbishops and so on often worked hand in hand with the emperors and with the secular authorities. And that helped keep things politically united. And of course, in the farther East, you had all the oriental despotisms of old, right? Where the ruler was some sort of God king. In Western Europe, there was nothing like that. No one regarded their king in this period as any sort of divine personage and certainly not ruling with divine authority. People were very pragmatic about it. And on top of that, because of the influence of the church and this unifying larger legacy of Rome that had existed in terms of culture, fortunately the political legacy of Rome had been largely wiped out, was that there was a common culture of sorts. So if you spoke Latin, or at least were able to read it and use it to some extent, you could move to another country somewhere else in Europe and still be in a fairly culturally similar area. So it was relatively easy to move around, especially if you were in the merchant class and you were the most productive people. And of course, that's who would tend to leave if you were one of these small principalities that attempted to raise taxes so much. A lot of the unproductive people, they had no reason to leave because higher taxes didn't affect them very much. But the people who were producing real wealth, higher taxes would be a problem for them. They would move somewhere else and then the prince was left in trouble because he didn't have that revenue anymore. And you see similar situation today, right? We've seen Janet Yellen out there trying to create this global minimum corporate tax. This is a problem for rulers. There's lots of countries out there in the world and they tend to compete with each other for lower taxes. Notable in this has been Ireland and Malta in this fight. Ireland especially doesn't want higher taxes, but also it's been the case in some small countries of Eastern Europe where they recognize that they can use lower tax rates to attract capital to their countries. And this is a threat to larger states like Germany and the US. They don't like the fact that there's these small countries out there that can lower their taxes at will because they're essentially sovereign states. So the larger states try to bully them and convince them and force them to raise their taxes up to match the tax levels of large states. But this phenomenon is as old as the hills, right? States have been trying this for a long, long time and it works to the advantage of regular people. But this is most widespread by far in Europe where there's a history of smaller independent states that has allowed for regular people to move around and take advantage of that and play states off against each other. Now Rothbard of course was very well aware of this and we can find in his writings in libertarian forum, going back to really the 60s, a lot of articles supporting secession in a wide variety of cases. He supported secession and decolonization in various parts of Africa. He supported secession in terms of Cyprus being split up between Turks and Greeks. He's anywhere he could find a little separatist movement. He would usually support it. And he of course not surprisingly supported efforts at breaking up Canada for example. And here's what he had to say about the Canadian attempt. This was actually prior to the attempt around 2000. This was the 1977 case where he supported secession of Quebec from Canada writing, there are two positive reasons for the libertarian to cheer at the imminent achievement of Quebec independence, alas it was not to be. In the first place secession, the breaking up of a state from within is a great good in itself for any libertarian. It means that a giant central state is being broken up into constituent parts. It means greater competition between governments of different geographical areas, enabling people of one state to zip across the border to relatively greater freedom more easily. And it exalts the mighty libertarian principle of secession which we hope to extend on down from the region to the city to the block of the individual. And he wanted to take it much farther than that. He goes on saying, if Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as being in a case of impermissible anarchy, so he's noting the obvious here, right, is that? We're told that if you break up the United States into smaller pieces, they will immediately go to war with each other and all will be anarchy and darkness forever. Of course the question is, well, why haven't the US and Canada been constantly at war for the last 200 years? Somehow they managed to get along. Somehow most countries managed to get along, especially those countries that have somewhat similar cultures and they have a lot of trade relations. And, but for some reason, if Texas breaks off from the United States, the nukes will fly immediately and there will be global war. But for some reason the US has never nuked Canada and it's never, I guess it's not clear why. And so he notes, well, the US and Canada are in a state of anarchy. And so if that's permissible, why may not the South secede from the US, New York State from the Union, New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede each neighborhood, each block, each house, each person? So he's kind of going down this road of, all right, well, if we keep breaking off the state into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually we approach closer and closer to this idea of even individuals breaking off and creating essentially this totally anarchic state. Now that strikes a lot of people as fairly impractical. But what's interesting is that Mises took a very similar position as well. Back in liberalism in 1927, Mises writes, the right of self-determination, he goes into a section about how self-determination, how little groups of people, villages, linguistic groups, cultural minorities and so on should be able to have their own independent area, at least a autonomous region if not an independent state. But he says the self-determination isn't, the self-determination of nations, which is a buzzword that a lot of nationalists would use in order to actually increase government power. But he's rather concerned with the right of self-determination and the habitants of every territory large enough to form an independent administrative unit. He says if it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done. And so that's basically what Rothbard is saying. But how would this be done? Mises goes on. Whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, makes it known by freely conducted plebiscite that they no longer wish to remain united to the states to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themself to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. Now for his part, Mises thought it was really impractical and too difficult really once you got down to the household level. And I don't think Rothbard would have disagreed with this idea there are certain logistical problems that come into place with very, very small units. But what Rothbard understood and Mises as well is that if your goal is really to create weaker states, more freedom, more self-determination, more people doing what suits them best away from some sort of centralized state, that succession really provides that opportunity and really should go down to as localized a level, as really feasible or practical or possible under the conditions. And so it's really the way to get from A to B if you're in favor of really breaking down the power of states and providing more opportunity to people. It's this idea of really in a sense of creating a marketplace of states. Now a lot of economists get angry when you use the word marketplace improperly and of course this wouldn't be a marketplace in the pure sense. But you could see immediately just looking at it in broad terms how if you had a marketplace that consisted of two products, that's not real great from the consumer's perspective. If you have a marketplace of a hundred or a thousand or 2,000, that's much better. If you had 2,000 different affordable automobiles from which to choose from, that would be amazing. You're probably gonna be able to find an automobile that pretty closely matches up with exactly the sort of automobile you want. Moreover, all that competition is gonna drive down these prices and be a motivation for the producers of automobiles to make it as easy as possible for you to obtain that automobile and like it. Now at the same time, you'll hear complaints from people, especially the more hardcore libertarian types who are like, well, hey, MacMacon, you wanted to split this country up into a bunch of pieces but what if I like to walk around naked all the time no matter what and I can't find one of these even microstates that's gonna let me do that. Every single microstate, I can even, I've polled everyone I know and I said, would you like to live in a country where people walk around naked, especially people who look like me and I don't mean me personally, I mean this sort of person, you know, like that guy who took off all his clothes at the libertarian party event, right? Imagine a guy who looks like that and so do you want people like that walking around without clothes on all the time and of course most people would say no, that sounds horrible and so they'll say, well, look, obviously your scheme fails because I couldn't find a place that exactly matched my preferences. The reality of course is that even in a real totally private marketplace you can't find products that exactly match your preferences in every way. It's next to impossible to find a car that has exactly every little thing you like in every little way and is at the price you want, right? Now if you're fabulously wealthy you could perhaps build a car completely from scratch that suited your desires in every conceivable way but most people really just have to buy products that are out there which other people like too and that would just be the reality in a world of even thousands of states. You can't always get what you want, the world's an imperfect place but if we can move toward the goal of having a wide variety of choices which we can choose from the situation is completely different and better. Now, so what does this mean for some of the other objections that we could encounter? For example, foreign policy is something that you're probably gonna hear a lot about in terms of secession and this is something that you'll encounter from mostly conservatives for the most part or for anyone who's in favor of the US continuing as a global hegemon forever and this is when you get into real practical discussions as well because they'll say yes in theory secession might sound good but China's out there and if you break up the US or any of these other larger Western states well China's just gonna roll in and take over all of those countries and as one headline put it in a conservative news site a couple of months ago quote secession, a gift to the Chinese communists and it came out saying you know all these crazy libertarian secessionists don't listen to them they want to hand America over to the CCP and to that there's a couple of issues issues that has to be raised one especially in relation to China but more broadly true is that rich countries are more effective in terms of military defense and smaller countries are richer countries this is something that we've seen in the empirical data that small countries on average are considerably more wealthy than large countries and we see this in a lot of cases we can look at small countries like Switzerland for example or of course Luxembourg but in the larger sense of course the smaller states of Europe tend to be wealthier than the larger states and this is true in Asia as well I mean look at Singapore versus some of the surrounding larger states and we can find many examples and this is important because richer states are better to use defense capability more efficiently and more freely than a more backward country so this has been a cornerstone of research done by a political scientist named Michael Beckley and he's got a book out called Unrivaled and his main point is to point out that look China is not about to take over the United States China does not have military capability of the US China borders 18 countries it's in border disputes with a dozen of them China has to keep 300,000 soldiers on its border just to deal with military problems on its borders and he looks at also the issue of GDP and that this is not a proxy for the military capability of a country so when you're taking the simplistic view that big countries will always just roll over smaller countries so we can't let any big country ever get any smaller ever or else some other large country will arise he says GDP doesn't tell us very much because you can have a country that has a lot of poor people in it and still have a high GDP so if you take a country like China that has a billion people in it you're gonna have a large GDP this just it's easy to do with those sorts of people but what he notes is that having big GDP doesn't mean you've got a lot of resources freed up with which to enter into any sort of warfare type activity because what have you got to do with that GDP? You've got all this GDP but you've also got to feed all the people in this country you've got to house all of these people so that just eats up huge amounts of the wealth that's being produced and sure in wartime you can cut back a standard of living of all of those people you can even maybe try to starve them for a while but that tends to backfire over anything more than the short term starving population tends to revolt against the state also starving people don't make great soldiers and they're not notable for producing great military hardware and just productivity in general is bad when people have an extremely low standard of living and contrast that with a wealthy country where their GDP per capita is much much higher and they have the ability then to muster all sorts of resources without ever having to reduce the standard of living of regular people to the point where they would be starving because there's so much net wealth that's being produced so a wealthy country is just at a natural advantage and Beckley points out how there are many cases where small countries have defeated larger countries we can especially look at the 19th century this is especially clear after industrialization right where we've got cases during the opium wars in the 19th century Britain repeatedly humiliated China in a series of wars also Britain's GDP has never exceeded that of China not even today and at no point in the 19th century and yet Britain won hands down in those conflicts China was large it had lots of resources lots of people failed also was beaten repeatedly by Japan in that case even though Japan was considerably smaller and had much fewer people fewer resources certainly didn't have the natural resources that China had and then you and it's not just China we can point to how Germany did considerably better against Russia during World War I that even though Germany lost the war overall the Russians did a terrible job in the war and were really no match for the Germans in that case and he also notes that if you were to use these traditional measures of military power that is the GDP centered measure and then also based on population the number of tanks people having all this stuff a lot of foreign policy people love to obsess over this he says the predictions they make have long been disproven he says during the Cold War if you use those sorts of traditional measures the Soviet Union was many times more powerful than the United States which it clearly never was and if you use those measures today you would still come to the conclusion using that method that Israel is the weakest state in the Middle East which clearly not the case and so he says what you need to then look at is per capita GDP and that is really what helps you understand then which countries have the ability to really address military needs and I did an exercise on Mises.org on this where I said okay let's just split all the blue states and the red states into two different countries and I listed out all the states kind of just like feasibly based on which countries would be in red state America RSA and which were blue state America the BSA and the BSA was a little richer because of course it has like all these big cities and tech people and all of that but they were fairly evenly matched even in that case both of them using the Beckley measure which incorporated in GDP per capita both of them still had a higher military defense capability index than China even splitting the US up into two pieces but you could split of course the US into many smaller pieces as well and there's no reason to assume that suddenly these countries would start fighting each other or welcome in the Chinese to overrun North America the general idea here is that oh if America splits into two countries the RSA and the BSA well then just despite the red states the blue states will invite the Chinese to land an invasion at Tampa Bay and take over Florida and then just run across the Southern US sewing chaos wherever they go it's hard to imagine how this would benefit the blue states in any way it would be disastrous of course and it's no more likely than Canada inviting the Chinese to invade Boston Harbor and just as that's never happened there's no reason to assume this even conservatives admit oh yeah I guess if you split America into a bunch of independent states they would pretty much work together as a unit in terms of foreign policy because they're common language, common history extremely close trade ties and so on so we need to dispense with this idea that any sort of splitting up of a nation immediately creates chaos that's not the reality historically it's not the reality in recent history as well but there's one final issue on this and that's the case of course of nuclear weapons and that shouldn't be ignored and even on this issue we can point to a variety of reasons why this is no Trump card in the pocket of the people who oppose secession in fact if we look at the research of Kenneth Waltz a very influential foreign policy theorist we find that he's for quite a long time favored the idea that you don't actually need large military stockpiles or large nuclear stockpiles in order to mount a credible deterrent nuclear effect so if you're worried about gee what if the US became smaller would never be able to manage a nuclear deterrent against a nuclear armed country China would show up with its nukes with its 300 nukes and immediately subdue any American country that came out of a secession move now of course the reality right off the bat that's not gonna happen because America right now the US state has 5,000 nuclear warheads what's gonna happen to all of those we can actually look at what happened with the Soviets and the Ukrainians as kind of a bad case scenario what happened with that the US would almost certainly be able to resolve that issue more peacefully than the Russians and the Ukrainians did after the end of the Cold War but also the fact that these countries would be so wealthy would mean that most of them would easily be able to field a small nuclear arsenal and if we look at the research of Waltz and some other writers as well and also there's a good article on that in this book if you're interested in foreign policy stuff and national defense topics there's a great article in here called Nuclear Weapons Proliferation or Monopoly by Bertrand Le Manessier and I would recommend that if you're interested in the nuclear topic for that he talks about how proliferation is not actually the problem that the elites would have you believe and then we can combine that reality with the fact that the thinking among the minimum deterrent theorists is that deterrence really only requires about maybe 50 usable nuclear warheads certainly it's worked for Israel in this respect and it would in the thinking because of the nature of second strike capability mean that even if you had 300 warheads that doesn't mean anything in terms of an advantage against a country that has a small nuclear arsenal because you have to be able to take out and destroy every single warhead in case in your first strike in order to ensure that a second strike could never happen back on your country if you miss one that could be politically disastrous for your regime now there's a lot more information on this admesis.org if you're interested in a little bit more but don't be cowed by people who just bring up foreign policy as if the United States must remain with its current borders until the end of time because if that ever changes China or some other country will conquer the world and destroy humanity. This is not really a realistic scenario and at the same time you got to balance that with other issues too as the empirical evidence shows smaller countries they're more open to trade they're more open to migration in the long term they create wealthier more free societies and create immense benefits it is what made Europe the wealthy place that it became in world history and then at the same time just on the individual level ordinary people should be able to escape the regime under which they live they shouldn't have to move a thousand miles away to some other place that has a different legal system a different cultural mix a different sorts of people that are in the voting majority because not everything can be fixed by voting right you live in a country where some people are in favor of circumcision and some people aren't well somebody's gonna win in that debate and if the Jews who practice circumcision are in a tiny minority and the majority says no we're making circumcision illegal well what does that then mean for that minority group it could be of course obviously culturally disastrous for them and essentially eliminate their culture and we can find many other cases of this as well it's not like oh we will have a meeting and we'll all decide that half circumcision works and we'll meet in the middle there's no such thing right the same thing is with abortion or a variety of other factors like this there's no like compromise position either one thing is the policy or it's not and so the only real solution to that then is to break up into smaller pieces and this is why Mises was so concerned with voting majorities and with the ability of the majority to destroy a culturally outnumbered minority is that unless you provide some out for that group to obtain some sort of independence that they will be crushed and so when we consider all those sorts of benefits and the necessity of really engaging minority rights and appreciating that decentralization is really the only way to address that in many cases the benefits are substantial and we can't really let the foreign policy tail wag the dog on that as well and we really need to start looking at the ways that common defense that leagues of independent states could come together and provide the sort of defense necessary the old model of just gigantic nation states really is not the way to protect human rights and freedom and I think that both history and just pragmatism shows that something needs to be done and the large states of the world need to be done away with and broken down into smaller pieces as soon as possible so thank you very much.