 For right now I want to talk about an issue of constitutional design that I personally have been developing in connection with the Free Nation Foundation. I can't promise that anyone else in the Free Nation Foundation assigns on to precisely this vision. But my idea is this, how would you go about designing a constitution for a new libertarian nation? Now as libertarians the first thing we think of is well we want a nice long bill of rights. And we want to make it very detailed and no ambiguities and we want to describe in detail exactly what the rights are. And yes I think a constitution should have that. But what we have to recognize is that a bill of rights isn't enough. Just by itself it's a wish list. You know the old Soviet constitution had a bill of rights, not an ideally libertarian one but still not too bad a one. But the rights were more or less ignored in practice. So it's not enough just to have a list of the government's promises to be nice. What you need is some kind of political structure to ensure that the government will actually behave in the manner that the bill of rights says they ought to. So you need some kind of constitutional limits on power and the stuff that Randy was talking about earlier is along the lines of what we're talking about. But you might say well since Randy's already suggested ways in which having a government that is a central monopoly of power is part of the problem and since they've already come out of the closet as an anarchist you might say why am I talking about designing a constitution for a libertarian country at all? And doesn't that sound like one of the status projects from my old bad days when I just wanted 1% of government instead of zero? Well there are a couple of reasons for it. One is if you're starting up a new libertarian country in some sense you've at least got to have something that looks like a government in order to interact with other governments. If what you've got is a territory that other governments see as just empty and unclaimed it's going to be very easy for other governments to claim the right to go in there and restore order. And in world opinion they'll be able to get away with it because world opinion basically agrees with them that if there's no government there then there isn't any order there and eventually we would hope to persuade them otherwise. But just starting off you've got to initially give the impression that you've got something that other governments will respect or that you can use public opinion and world opinion to get them to respect. Also if you consider the fact that perhaps suppose you are taking out a lease on some land the way the British government did with Hong Kong. Well there's got to be a holder of the lease. There's got to be some organization that is the lease holder for that land. And so there's got to be in some sense that's a monopoly already. So that's one issue is that we might have to have something that's sort of governmental in order to be able to interface with other nations. And part of what this international relations conference is that we're doing in October is to talk about how a government of a free nation would interact with other governments. In a previous conference we've talked about the really creepy issue of national defense. But this is more sort of the ordinary day to day stuff about when they come to deliver mail, who's authorized to pick it up, that kind of thing. International mail. Not a sexy issue as national defense but something that would matter in day to day existence. Another reason for not just going for a purely anarchist system is if we're trying to build a free nation movement we need to get the cooperation of the libertarian community as a whole. And it would be a bad idea to limit it to just the anarchists or just the minarchists. We need the cooperation of everyone. And so I think that there'd be good reason to try and come up with a system that in some sense combines aspects of minarchy that is limited government with aspects of anarchy or polycentric order. You need to combine both in order to be able to present a governmental face to the outside world and in order to get cooperation from libertarians. Because anarchist libertarians will be perhaps reluctant to get involved in a project of a purely minarchist approach to libertarians because they're afraid it won't work. They're afraid that if you've got the centralized monopoly of power pretty soon it'll be acting like Leviathan all over again. On the other hand, minarchists may be reluctant to get too involved in trying to build an anarchist country because they think that won't work. They think it'll break down into warfare among competing protection agencies. So we should have something that in some sense can be something that both sides can get behind even if neither side is completely happy with it. So how would you combine aspects of minimal government and aspects of anarchy into a single system? Well, there are two ways of doing it, not necessarily incompatible ways. I think ideally you should try and do both. One way is simply to divide the territory, to have part of the territory be anarchist and part of the territory be minarchist. And in order to have the minarchist part be the part that faces outward to other governments and looks like a government, in a sense you could have it like a donut ring. The ring on the outside would be the minarchist and then there would be sort of a little area in the middle that would be anarchist. And this would allow a kind of competition between the two systems. It would allow us to test how they work in practice. And each one could in principle serve as a check on the other. If the minarchists are worried that the anarchist thing is going to collapse into chaos, well, they've got the minarchists there to restore order if need be. On the other hand, if the anarchists are worried that the minarchist thing is going to become a swollen leviate, then well, you've got the anarchists in the middle who can go out and put a stop to it if they're hired to do so by the oppressed victims of the minarchist regime. So that's one solution. The other solution is somewhat more complicated, and this is primarily what I want to talk about. And this is something I call a virtual Canton Constitution. And in fact, I've written a fairly lengthy version of this Constitution which is sort of a work in progress. That is on the website already, so if anyone wants to look it up and give me comments on it, I'd be very grateful for it because it's the fifth version or sixth version. I forget which so far, and it's people constantly pointing out some way I've screwed up and so I go and fix it and onward I go. And really this Constitution, you know, it's not sort of... It's not okay. I knocked something over. That doesn't change the past. It was knocked over. Nothing can change that now. Basically, I've humiliated myself in front of this entire group. I might as well go home. But I'm used to humiliating myself. Just wait till talent night anyway. Anyway, what I mean about this Constitution, I'm not actually proposing this Constitution as in let's all sign this Constitution and go off and start living up, although I wouldn't kick if you did that. But it's just sort of to put out ideas on how a Constitution should be organized. And the main idea of this, what I call a virtual Canton Constitution is it has two levels. It has a central or federal government, you can call it that. And then it's got various local governments, you can call them that. However, there is what Randy calls the competition principle at the local level, not at the central level. The central level is just one evil viathan for the whole thing. That's the compromise I've made. But the central government is very limited in its powers and the E really, really limited in the sense that it's limited in even the libertarian things it can do. The purpose of it is to push as much decision making down to the local level as possible. And what the local level is is, I was inspired just some extent by what a lot of libertarian federalist, decentralized thinkers have said about the idea of having little local cantons with a lot of autonomous control. Then I thought, why do they have to be territorial? Why couldn't you just change Canton membership without getting up and physically moving? So you could, if you're a member of Canton A, that means that you and a whole bunch of other people have sort of signed on to A and you have certain local, that is certain laws that you're governed by. But if you don't like the way Canton A is working, then you can simply switch to Canton B and this will determine both your switching your representative in the national legislature if there's one, also switching what local laws you're under. That might come as a package or it might not, it would depend. And the idea there would simply be that you would have free competition, freedom of entry and exit among these various different cantons. And as far as possible, the idea would be that there's disputes among the cantons and disputes about, well, you're my neighbor but you're under Canton A and I'm under Canton B and how do we resolve this. Appealing to the central government to resolve it should be a last resort. It will be there as a kind of backup to keep the monarchists happy. But every attempt to be made to try and make it so that appeals didn't go there but instead would go to independent arbitrators and that kind of thing. And so basically if you take the United States as an example, it would be as if you had the federal government still there although really stripped down. And then you had the various states but you could be living in what's geographically in North Carolina but be a citizen of Alaska if you wanted and live under Alaska laws and if you didn't like them then you could switch to Florida or whatever. And in a way what the system is rather like is something that a lot of you may know if you're familiar with David Friedman's book, The Machinery of Freedom, is the old Icelandic Constitution where there was in some sense a legal system for the whole country but you could pick your individual assembly and there was a general assembly, the all thing for the whole country but then there were these individual assemblies with individual chieftains and you could, in any given area, you could sign up with one chieftain or another without actually having to move and so the chieftain was your representative at the National Assembly. So I was partly inspired by that. Well, why don't I break with tradition and actually stop so we can get a discussion going here and we can have time for more than one question.