 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mises Weekends. All right, this is the show we do every weekend. We normally do it on Fridays, but we're doing it live this week at Mises University on Saturday. It'll be out, I suppose, it will be live streaming to our audience, but it'll also be available on YouTube later today. And our guest is someone many of you know, the editor of Mises.org, a big round of applause for Mr. Ryan McMacon. Hello. And I have to say, I think Ryan is one of the most underestimated libertarian voices out there. If you read his stuff on Mises.org, if you follow him on Twitter, which you all should do, you'll find he is really a superb writer and his particular specialty is sort of combining current or topical events with some economic and statistical data or some Austrian theory and putting those two things together in a very readable format. So he's a great writer, also a stern editor, as anyone who's ever submitted something to Mises.org knows. And he's also been my partner in crime over the last couple of years on a topic that is very near and dear to my heart, which is the case for radical decentralization and secession. Now, when we discuss this issue, we're talking about a strategic or practical endeavor. We're not making necessarily a moral or philosophical case. We're making a pragmatic and consequentialist or utilitarian case for these things. And just a year ago, right here at Mises U, I gave a speech lauding breakaway movements and secessionary movements in Catalonia, for example, and saying, well, we should, as libertarians, applaud this. We should applaud the breakup of states and the idea of smaller polities and smaller governments as an overall libertarian good. And recently, Brian Kaplan at George Mason University was also a Mises U graduate. He was here just like all of you are here this week. And he was a huge Rothbard fan. Apparently, he followed Rothbard around and really questioned him extensively. So he's a Rothbardian, although not an Austrian. And Brian Kaplan wrote a rebuttal just recently to some portions of my speech from a year ago. And we published it on Mises.org. So, Ryan, if you could start us off by just explaining a little bit, what was sort of the gist of Kaplan's rebuttal to my talk? Well, it was certainly something we've heard before, which was, Kaplan was pretty fair-minded, I think, in it, and an attempt to define some value in decentralization, but was continued to be troubled by the issue of, well, OK, you can decentralize and create small states, which are more locally controlled. But then what if the person who is controlling that small state is a horrible despot? And he looked at the issue of how decentralization certainly works if you have high mobility of persons and capital. So we've got a bunch of small states. And if rulers can't stop or don't wish to stop or aren't allowed to stop the movement of people and resources from state to state, then they're certainly going to be restricted in just how much they can inflict despotism then on that state. Because if they inflict too much, then people will just leave. But his primary counter example, which I would argue is actually a very rare example of the fact that he used North Korea as the case of, well, that's a pretty small state, and that's a horribly despotic state. Doesn't this then prove that decentralization isn't necessarily a good thing? And so that was the main thing, is that if you have decentralization with high mobility, that's fantastic. But if you have decentralization without that, then that can lead to horribly despotic situations. And then, of course, he also recognized that democracy isn't necessarily a solution to these things either, that the incentive for rulers is to adopt popular policies. But popular policies aren't necessarily good policies, especially when you look in terms of economic policy and so on. So he just covered some of those issues, and he didn't come to some hard conclusion or anything, was just saying, hold your applause was the title about it, until you really evaluate the issue of mobility in people. And if it's possible to keep people from leaving or to keep them from moving the resources out of there, then maybe decentralization is actually worse. Well, I want to speak to his point, which I think is a fair one. We should look at this in terms of consequences. If a small state is actually freer in practice, then that's a good thing. If it's actually less free, then that's a bad thing. And I understand his impulse to view it that way. But you've brought up in some of your articles something that he doesn't discuss. And that is the concept, I don't know if you've heard this term, it's called the rump state. So the breakaway portion is there, the seceding state is the new state, but what's left of the old polity or electorate or state is called the rump state. And so I think he makes one error in only looking at the degree of freedom in the new state and not looking at what happens to the old state. So I think a lot of people in this room, for example, would say, wouldn't it be kind of great if we could jettison the worst 20% of progressive, let's say. And I have progressive friends who are good progressives. I think they're bad progressives. If we could jettison the worst 20% and sort of shove them into Portlandia or something forever and ever, and they wouldn't vote and affect us and that in Portlandia became a country, that would be a good thing. So why don't we ever look at the effect on the rump state? In other words, if the Spaniards got rid of the lefty Catalonians, they might be better off from a libertarian perspective. Well, I think some people in England actually recognize that that would move the parliament significantly in a free market direction if Scotland actually left the United Kingdom, because Scotland is a big source of basically pro-interventionist votes. And so I did hear a few people argue that, but that certainly wasn't the dominant argument. And then of course I argued in terms of letting California leave the US because that would immediately shift the US Congress in a more free market direction significantly so. And it would be a disaster for us left over of Texas left and we were left with California and that would immediately shift things leftward. But yeah, you have to take it on a case-by-case basis and there can be cases where secession then improve the lives of the ordinary people in both countries that result from the separation. Now it would certainly be worse for the people who run the state because states naturally want to increase their geographic size and scope and the amount of resources they have control over. But because the fact that your state has more control over resources doesn't necessarily mean that's good for the ordinary people who live there because now they have two different choices. And this relates back very much so to Kaplan's overall point about mobility is that when you're creating smaller states and more choices in the overwhelming number of cases people then are in fact given more movement. Yes, we can point to a couple of cases like North Korea where the state's been fairly successful at keeping the borders closed and it's not like those borders are totally closed there's still people who leave. Nevertheless, if you had the United States and it just split into two pieces just say at the Mississippi River well then you would immediately have many more choices in terms of escaping while not having to leave your culture. So for example, I live in Ohio and the Eastern US has become too despotic so I just move across the river well I don't have to learn a new language I don't have to move thousands of miles from loved ones the climate is essentially the same in many cases and things like climate and language and culture and distance these are all impediments to movement so the smaller that those changes become yes the more mobility you are in fact able to attain and I keep going back to this to Ralph Raco's work where Raco wrote a long essay on Mises' daughter called The European Miracle and he has, and this is in his lectures too is a fairly sophisticated well-developed case that he makes where he looks at the reason why Europe became the most free economically advanced place and he goes all the way back to late antiquity looking at the conflict between state and church and the ultimate decentralization that resulted during the Middle Ages and he explains that in these places where states became very small so the old German kingdoms and so on were very small and the states tended to be weak during this period as well you could raise taxes if you had some kingdom on the Rhine and you had a lot of wealth there but if you raise your taxes too much people would then move 50 miles down the river to a neighboring kingdom and that would then remove resources and put a lot of pressure on the old tax-raising prince and so he has many examples of this and notes that in reality even though a lot of these princes of course these weren't enlightened monarchs who are oh yes we're we don't want to raise taxes too much because we want the people to prosper and all of that no they had the ability to raise taxes to an extent and they wanted everything they could get so these were despots in many many cases but the fact that their states were small they simply didn't have the ability to keep people in one place and so people would move around and then as Raco pointed out there's also a unifying language and culture to a certain extent with the fact that Latin was spoken so in a widespread manner and that just German culture would have been something you could access through hundreds of small principalities and so on so you didn't have to like move to China or move to North Africa or something to escape a European despot you just had to move down the river slightly or to a neighboring kingdom and well of course that was not convenient in many cases it was nevertheless far more possible in Europe than in other civilizations and you contrast it with China where you basically had to leave China to escape the rule of the emperor and he also contrasted with Russia where Russia was known for its lawlessness and its backwardness he notes and that was a big unified state by what we're told today about states and how you need unity and we need to regulate things in a predictable and even manner Russia did all that and it was a mess and it was a large state with one ruler and he says you're much better off with a bunch of small competing states and history proves that this is the case so he takes an empirical look at it as a historian why is Europe the most free and he says it's because of the seeming chaos of a large number of small states. Right I think the other thing that's missing sometimes in the libertarian universalist analysis is that you know the United States government today 2018 is the Godzilla it is the biggest, strongest, most powerful state that has ever existed in human history now certainly there are more authoritarian states in terms of personal freedoms but just in terms of raw power and what I don't get is why would we ever argue against breaking those up because the scary states are the ones with nukes they're the ones with a sizable population which gives them more resources to tax and thus spend and thus restrict people's activities with this result of it so I've never understood this idea well big or small it doesn't really matter from the libertarian perspective we're just interested in how free it is because I think we see historically as Reiko points out that small really is free I mean how many people worry about Lichtenstein and Monaco and Switzerland but we worry a lot about China and Russia and India we worry about problems in India but you know I wanna bring this a little bit more into the context of this horrifically politically divided country here that we live in you know Mises has this great quote in liberalism where he says you know having to belong to a state of which a government of which you do not approve is no less onerous if it's the result of an election than if it was the result of a military conquest which I think is a pretty strong statement on his part I mean military conquest is a very serious thing not to be and he wasn't saying this lightly as someone who had fought in World War I in I think artillery so he's saying this in the interwar period as a World War I veteran so he's not somebody who uses combat analogies lightly but let's talk about this because I think a significant portion of the country today feels like they're living in an occupied U.S. in other words Hillary voters do not accept the legitimacy of Trump and this idea that we have to have one big state is exceedingly damaging both psychologically socially, culturally, et cetera. Well it really raises the stakes right because we've got this one big state that we're fighting over control of and you have really no escape so it's really hard to leave the U.S. you have to move thousands of miles away from family so if the control of this one state falls in the hands of someone you really despise or who despises you, what do you do? You have no other recourse and it's really hard to leave and so it would seem that there's less potential for serious conflict if you had much more decentralization at this point we're not even talking about splitting it up into totally different competing sovereign states but the fact that people have to worry about the next appointment to the Supreme Court as to whether they'll be allowed to have certain types of health care or buy certain types of health care you know I'm thinking of the Hobby Lobby case right so well the Supreme Court agrees on this Obamacare thing well then I'm gonna have to pay for certain types of health care and so on it's just so unnecessary that you have this one gigantic super state regulating everything right down to the amount of health care that you have or issues like of course abortion are big issues which we noted in a recent article at Mises.org was always decentralized before Roe v. Wade and it was legal some places illegal some some other places and it was never it was never even mentioned in federal elections right you didn't worry about what the next president's opinion was on abortion because it was decided at the state or even local level in some cases but now we have to worry about every little thing for every federal election because ultimately they control everything and Mises understood this really well right you can never accuse Mises of being some pie-in-the-sky theorist who would weave complex theories divorced from reality here's a guy who grew up in Austria-Hungary who understood multinational states or like states lots of different religious and cultural minorities that are prone to conflict and the Austrian Austria-Hungary dealt with that through decentralization in many ways right they became the dual kingdom lots there's lots of regional autonomy because they knew that in some cases the majority were Hungarians and some other places they're Ruthenians whatever and Mises knew that you had to decentralize in order to keep the peace and he has a and it doesn't read very Rothbardian he has he has an article that I that I dug up and reprinted recently on creating this Eastern European Federation where you would in or for defense purposes you would put together in one confederation a bunch of Eastern European states but he noted that very important if you were going to do this it had to be it had to have a ton of autonomy at the local level where wherever your linguistic majorities were your religious majorities you had to allow people to do whatever they wanted at the local level and just that some functions like defense against the Russians would then be outsourced to this higher federal level so we recognized that if you're trying to force a bunch of Christians and Jews or Eastern Orthodox and Germans and Hungarians to all get along on everything with under one unified state that's just a recipe for war and disaster and so decentralization just serves this extremely important function of creating peace and allowing people those choices to go around and live amongst a majority where they actually agree with it because otherwise you've got to defend yourself constantly from some other majority getting the upper hand that's very stressful and prone to conflict Yes, and it's interesting to me that we don't think of decentralization or secession as one immediate answer to the culture wars the actually the Swiss Federation website talks about that they talk about the subsidiary principle something designed to increase social cohesion but Mises has several passages big lengthy passages throughout human action where he talks about universalism and he rejects it he says well by whose authority who's the who's the correct apostle who's got the true law who's legitimate authority that everyone will recognize between different religions for example different political viewpoints so he uses that he consistently uses the term self-determination which almost sounds cranky today it almost sounds like a Reagan era term where we're trying to provide for self-determination for the Eastern Bloc or something like that that they're under the yoke of the Communists but for Mises it was it wasn't the self-determination of governments it was the self-determination of people to choose the government to which they belong but there's there's a lot of tension because a lot of libertarians would say oh come on we're Rothbardian universalists we believe in self-ownership and property rights we don't believe in these silly lines these things called nation-states and they should apply across the world and we don't care why should we care about self-determination Mises wrote a lot on that if you look at socialism and liberalism and just the necessity of people being able to live in a place where they were able to affect the outcome and live among people that they agreed with this idea that well you just got to live in this place so you speak you're a Jew and you live in a place that's 95% Christian you know just try to change people's ideas and make them more tolerant well I mean that was that's a good goal but he recognized in the meantime he probably should let minorities have some control over maybe their own region or state or something like that and so that was always just a good measure in the meantime until he could change ideologies but he was right to the extent of course that ideology is extremely important in keeping problems to a minimum here also and I go back to the issue of what Kaplan was saying it's like well you can have these small states but what if the ruler there is a horrible despot then what well you can never really get away from the issue of the importance of ideology right if you have a country where there is no respect for individual rights and liberalism has never had any sway whatsoever that's probably going to be a worse place even if it's a really small state and so you can't ignore the role of that because that essentially will help people have more self-determination we're probably just have more respect for people to do what they want to do even in a larger unified state and that's and I think that's where then the other side kind of runs into the rocks is that well if you have good ideology and you have a like a court system that subscribes to that ideology then they'll protect all the minority rights and in some cases that's true but it's probably better to have some safeguards too where there's an actually decentralized political system where you have other choices just in case your court system becomes despotic or just in case the majority's ideology takes a bad turn yeah I mean you can just imagine if Germany was more decentralized in the run-ups of World War II it would have been a lot harder for Hitler to gain control of such a large state and we looked at this a little bit in a recent article we did on how the U.S. can now prevent you from leaving the country if you owe taxes or rather if they suspect you owe taxes there's no like actual due process the R.S. says you owe taxes then they can revoke your passport and you can't go anywhere now in the research on this they noted that of course in the 19th century countries and rulers this included Austria-Hungary but most other European countries as well and also Russia they didn't want you to leave the ideology among states was quite different back then that they wanted before you were allowed to leave they wanted to make sure that they extracted military service from you and they extracted some taxes and they would make you pay huge fees to get a visa to leave the country and that's a case right there of smaller states and regions exercising a despotic knee-jerk reaction to people wanting to leave and so the authors that discuss this topic note that the only reason why the states didn't really ever clamp down and really close their borders to people leaving was because liberalism had really taken over Europe at that point that it had by the late 19th century become much more influential and people simply weren't willing to tolerate this idea that I just simply can't leave your country now of that totally conflicted with liberal ideas of self-determination and so that became very helpful and that of course changed the whole history of the world people went in large numbers to America because the states let them leave because the liberal ideology said you can't really stop people from going but they of course nevertheless tried to get you to pay more money and stuff is just people drew the line at totally closing the border but yeah you still got to pay a fee or we're going to regulate like the ports to only let people leave through certain exits to the country and things like that so you can't forget about ideology but clearly people do vote with their feet and did a huge amount in the 19th century so we've got to I think if we want to build a free society focus on both those issues right you want small states that are responsive and where people have a lot of variety but the same time you want to as much as possible affect the ideologies within those systems so that the court systems and the people who are elected officials and so on and the population overall will demand that there be something other than a totally despotic state that some freedoms even be allowed within a small state and that it's not really acceptable although you hear it in America all the time it's not really acceptable to say well this is a small state and we do what we want here and if you're just in the unlucky minority well you can just leave that's never that's never been a very good argument it's the reality it's easier to leave in a small state so it's all it's an even worse argument in a huge state like the U.S where you know you don't like the way we do things you can just leave you can just move a thousand miles from all your friends and family if you don't like it if you stay here then that then that's that's your tacit consent to every tax and every regulation I mean some people buy that argument I don't find that particularly good but what if the not what if both the impulse to create the breakaway smaller state and the actual effects what if we could objectively determine somehow that they were ill libertarian let's take Scotland for example Scotland is to the UK it's more it's more statused in other words Scotland is to the UK sort of as Quebec is to Canada so what if what if Scotland breaking away and becoming independent and the Scottish independence thing is not going away by the way it's going to come back around us because the younger generations in Scotland were voted very strongly in favor of what if if we grant Scotland the self-determination we meaning the international community accepts a vote and recognize that Scotland is an independent state apart from the UK and as a result of that taxes go up regulatory state rises personal freedoms go down and so should so should libertarians be against Scotland's independence because I say no but I'd like to hear what you say well my of course the cop out answer be well I'm an American so some of my business what what they do but increasingly libertarians don't say that yes I agree with that 110% by the way yeah I'm not a voter there and and of course we hope you're not a voter here I vote in local elections the especially if there's a ballot issue where I'm asked if we should raise taxes Pat can you Pat can you put that in Ryan's file Ryan voted against a tax increase in the Denver election in 2016 I know it's a slippery slope and well and of course also the other practical issue is how much do I know about what's going on in the ground in Scotland and the United Kingdom never lived there I don't know anything about the local realities and so on I don't know the people and so that should be enough right now or right there to invalidate your strong strong opinion about what the UK could do if you've always lived thousands of miles from the UK but but let's say a let's well let's say California right I used to live in California I know a few things about California and if California left they would of course do all those things you just talked about about Scotland right they would raise taxes and they would do all these presumably we can't actually know because so first of all opposing it just blanketly assumes you know what's going to happen in the future you know for sure that Scotland is going to raise taxes and then all these things are going to endure into the long term Rothbard I think and has made this argument and not applied at these specific situations of course but Rothbard would make the argument of course that a smaller state is going to find a much harder time of raising taxes and a much harder time of regulating a much harder time of imposing capital controls simply because the smaller the state the more mobile the capital will be and will California then turn into a despotic state where we're not going to let people leave now and you can't take your business and go away they might try that to a certain extent but you only got to do that for a few years before global people who control global capital say well the last thing you want to do is move anything to California because then you'll never be able to leave and they'll just extract all your wealth from you it would like it would be like how do people feel about Venezuela now do we have a lot of like major international corporations just waiting to move to Venezuela I mean you know that once your property goes there it'll never come out it'll just be completely destroyed and so Rothbard I think would point out that there's a lot of built-in impediments then to just becoming some sort of despotic social estate as soon as you break away and be small so he would I think he would forward that as an argument of well no you have to consider the fact that your predictions of doom may very well not come to pass and especially if you're advocating it depends also what your advocated solution is right oh we don't want Scotland to move away okay well that's fine well what's your proposed solution then what are you going to do to prevent Scotland from moving away or what are you going to do to prevent California from leaving obviously Rothbard would oppose anything vehemently that involved like sending troops there to go shoot people or something so it's also somewhat tied to the proposed solution I suppose but you can't know for sure what will happen and that's something you have to admit admit before you start taking this strong stance about opposing Scottish independence but let's say short of actual secession we have some deep divisions in America let's say that there are certain intractable problems with secession like Texas or California in the United States you've got vast amounts of federal land and military bases and I think all 50 states you have things like Social Security and Medicare that would be very difficult to sort of divvy up or break up you have the national debt or the government's national debt but so let's say short of that let's say we applied some real hardcore federalism I don't love that term because it conjures up the constitution so let's just say we had a form of radical subsidiarity like Switzerland applies which is pushing everything possible down to the most local level in terms of decision making and the only things that are really truly federal and Switzerland are unfortunately the Swiss National Bank and money which is the SNB is getting pretty Euro pro Euro unfortunately and also the military but let's say let's say you could take a particular state or group of states or even a big city in counties somewhere in the United States because this is a thought experiment and say look what if we're wrong as libertarians what if we're wrong you know we think we're right but part of being libertarians saying we don't know for sure that's exactly why we're against government because the government doesn't know either but let's say we're wrong let's say single payer healthcare is a good thing for example and would actually work of course we know we're right on that one but could we abide as American citizens let's take a critical mass of people five six or eight million people in a particular state or big city or a group of counties and that's as big as some European countries I think Switzerland was only about eight million Norway I think is maybe six and said okay within this grouping we're going to allow the entire panoply a progressive wants and desires right here right now they can have deeply progressive taxation up to 90% rates they can have prohibitions on income over a certain amount they can have all the gun control they want they can have very lax abortion laws they can have a single payer health system within that that grouping they can have again you know any sort of regulatory state they want they could have free education for example if you consider the bay area counties UC Berkeley could be free we give them everything they want right here now okay and be be a progressive utopia now we we think that that would fail because it's got the wrong incentives and the taxes would be so high and people would flee but let's let's just give them that experiment now within that group of counties there would be some libertarian minded people who would be made worse off there's no question about that now would anyone in this room protest to trying that or permitting them to go that way if you weren't forced into it yourself I just in other words if we took the 17 counties or the counties that surround the San Francisco Bay Area and let them do this would anyone in this room protest but but yet there are some there's you know there are some libertarians in San Francisco now it's easier to leave San Francisco for another part of California another part of the U.S. and it is to leave China so so I just wonder why aren't we doing this why aren't we trying these kind of experiments what what created this fetish in this country for federalization and nationalization of everything and and as our friends on the left are finding it comes around to bite you doesn't it because you never thought Trump would be president you never thought Jeff Sessions would be AG you know the this is a two-way street and and and what's going to be incredible is if Trump manages to win again in 2020 I think you're going to see some incredible proposals about breaking away and saying you know in these blue states we are simply not going to abide by Trump's x y and z so I I think that's going to be fascinating and of course then you do have to admit the unfortunate reality of the minorities right left over if you did have a state break away because there's a sizable number of people in California some of them are family members who would rather live under a more market oriented system and and well I definitely opposed the idea of just saying oh if you don't like it you can leave that's never an ideal solution but it's a good solution to have if you can have it and also to facilitate that movement as much as possible so yes as we've discussed if California did really break away I think you would just see a stream of people moving to like Reno and Phoenix and that would then accelerate of course the political transition in California but it would also benefit Nevada I would benefit Texas and Arizona because a lot of the most productive people would then move into those states so there is an upside to that to the neighboring states and then those people while it was certainly not their number one choice to leave the state they at least have that choice without totally uprooting their families and as you point out until it became like totally settled and they started erecting like border controls which may or may not of course even happen anybody can move from place to place freely now from state to state in the U.S. so you can imagine how great that would be in the U.S. since there's total frame of movement if you had real true decentralization from state to state that how easy it would be to pick a place you like more because you don't have to pay taxes either they don't check to see whether you've got gold coins at the border and then confiscate it and that sort of stuff happens if you try to move to another nation state and so you really can move your capital around really easily the problem is just the policies become far too decentralized now and the states remain much too big and that's something I've tried to drive home is that I did an article on how if you had if U.S. states were held to something about the size and scope of a canton in Switzerland so a Swiss canton have like a million a million and a half people I did the math and I think we decided the U.S. would have 1,300 states or something like that so you would have that many units of about a million a million and a half people you can just imagine how much decentralization you'd have then it would probably be broken down to just these metropolitan areas where okay well we've got this metro area of Canton Cleveland or something like that and then if you don't like that then you can move down to some other neighboring area then you've got tons of choice and you can think how much then that would limit the ability of those governments to really hike taxes and regulate things and in a sense this feels like a strange conversation between a couple of anarchists that we're talking about how governance might work on a local level but nonetheless if you go back to colonial times when the House of Representatives was created and then you extrapolate the number of representatives of the time to the today's population it comes out just some number like five or six thousand U.S. reps and what that would mean in practical terms is that unless you were really in a rural area in the middle of Alaska or something if you live in kind of normal America you would probably be within a mile or two of your U.S. rep and one thing that's happened to me and my family has resulted in moving to a small Auburn a small place my particular city councilwoman lives just a few blocks from me and I know who she is and I've actually called her one time about my dissatisfaction with something going on in a strip mall and you know it wouldn't it be something if your U.S. rep had kind of fear bumping into you from time to time that you could know him or her and that would really be a radically different system and I guess despite the political nature of this our fallback position is while we're moving closer to the idea of everyone being self-governing but I'd just like to see if we have any questions from the audience I guess first and foremost there are any hands would anyone disagree you know in principle with decentralization and secession as something that moves us closer towards freedom that it's an unqualified good but rather it's a qualified good that we have to look at okay we have a question in the back from James so with regards to your question I think the common a common response is that when we look at large-scale organizations right among international organizations that they're sort of inherently a mixed bag very often there are restrictions that are imposed that those organizations impose but also they often free up things like movement of capital over international borders or free movement of labor and so I don't know really how I feel like how I feel about that myself but if you could address that within the within the context of your thesis well the question is would large states naturally arise now I won't say in a marketplace but anything that's involving voting and taxes anything any sort of involuntary is not a market but in other words would is it possible that large states would would be more successful and attract people because they had a higher standard of living and that there's something that that smaller states can't do I don't think we see that so much today empirically but I guess it's not impossible well I think they would probably point to the U.S. as maybe your only example of a very large state that has done that and and you can argue that the U.S. has been helped tremendously by the fact that there's been free trade among all of these states that have had their own economic development and have been very successful at it so the U.S. economy is just so huge that it attracts so much capital and the knowledge that once you move to the U.S. you can move around to all of these cities and and it's easy to do so and then you can move your capital around just this gigantic state that certainly has been good in terms of the the political or the economic growth of the U.S. the question is is it necessary to have a strong federal government to accomplish that and I would think the 19th century shows that no you don't that the 19th century had a very weak federal government and that there was quite a bit of autonomy at the local level and it was just those few steps like free migration and free trade among all the states not completely free but certainly quite free that really helped those economies grow and then of course there's other issues like geography and good ports and and all of those things help as well but did the U.S. need to be huge in order to attract a lot of capital while Switzerland has attracted a lot of capital over time and it's not huge sure look at tiny Singapore look at tiny Japan now you could look at the EU and say that's a form of governance or you could look at the EU and say well that's agreements between a bunch of small states like the Schengen Agreement for example allows not only free travel but actually free residence work residency amongst the EU member nations if you have a passport from any of those you know you can work and that's a freeing thing but that you could you could accomplish that I think without a level of governance you could accomplish that with agreements between existing smaller states so we have a question here yep I'm from Quebec and I appreciate the discussion because we talk about nationalism all the time so it's fun to have another perspective I'm going to have to give a bit of a preamble to my question but I swear there's a question at the end of it so there's this every nation has this has this national myth that like the foundational moment that is always defined after the fact but that comes to become like the narrative and I feel like Americans have the propositional nation prepositional proposition nation as their myth and I think that kind of obscures the mechanism through which secession occurs which is nationalism and like nationalism now is the second N word right you can't really use that word anymore but I've turned on that that topic I don't find nationalism the guy from Papa John's can't say nation man we really are getting an authoritarian discussion so yeah basically my question is should we rehabilitate nationalism as a tactical means of achieving an end well look I mean if my choices between nationalism and globalism I'll take it because it provides alternatives and here's the thing Orwell paraphrasing Orwell he said a patriot loves this country and nationalist wants to impose this country on others so anyone who wants to tell me that Lou Rockwell is a nationalist I say go shove it you're full of it here's the thing is what does nationalism mean nationalism can certainly take an ugly turn it can take a xenophobic outward turn an aggressive turn Nazi Germany for example how far do we take that in other words I never hear anyone saying well we shouldn't permit Cherokee nationalism that's always a okay and we absolutely should give Indian tribes America sovereign land as far as I'm concerned the EPA shouldn't even go the IRS shouldn't even apply on Cherokee land are we going to deny the Polish people nationalism after spending the entire 20th century squeezed between the eastern block and the NATO countries and going through losing six million people in World War II which would out of a country of 30 million people are going to say you can't have a Polish Catholic identity that's evil that's bad in other words nationalism is I think is a neutral term it can be imbued with good or bad and I think this idea that nationalism is ever and always a bad thing I think the short answer is it depends and I'm glad Switzerland is a nation independent of Austria and Germany and France and Italy surrounding it so I don't think I think we have made a boogeyman of nationalism and I think a lot of libertarians have fallen for the trap we got another question so yeah I'd like to hear from you what you think about like the threat of centralization in I don't know Russia and China especially and if you what do you think about some people that say that economic freedom will eventually lead to political freedom and stuff like that because it doesn't seem that it's going to happen in China or like I don't know I just want to know what you think about that well you could have economic freedom without political freedom for a long time I mean look at look at Singapore and economic freedom is still better than no economic freedom people who are dismissive of materialism have never lived in poor places you know economic freedom is a huge thing and when we look at at just how much better we off even in the west today versus agrarian times I mean the physical how much is physically materially better off we are it always interests me when people are so dismissive of mere economic freedom that's called civilization folks but you know I think if you don't have political freedom the question is can you maintain the economic freedom you know what is your mechanism to keep it going and you know in the United States I think our political freedom is definitely flickering I think we we live in very troubled times but the beautiful thing about the west in the United States in particular is you know you know it's a double edged sword on the one hand we've been rich so long that we just take it for granted we think that the material abundance just organizes itself on trees every day the flip side is that we're likely to get very unhappy very quickly if the things we do take for granted are taken away or diminished so maybe that you know right now we're financing our wealth on credit in effect so when the day comes that we can't do that any longer and the world's not interested in our treasury offerings that'll be a very interesting day because Americans are used to to being rich and they take it for granted well that reminds me of another key issue of how the states can use control of economic resources to maintain political control and unified political control because when if we ever start talking about serious issues about decentralization in the U.S. to session that sort of thing you're gonna end up talking a lot about things about well what about my social security check and what about the my pension from my military service and so there's so many people that have run through the federal system now and they control so many resources they can come back and say well you can't leave because then you won't get your social security checks now and this is also as the income tax makes it a lot harder to leave too where if you had a true confederation where it was membership based and each member state paid an allotment of taxation to the federal government for services rendered each year that would be so much easier to break up a confederation like that was like well we're just gonna take our money and not join anymore we're not gonna show up at the next meeting of states but you can't do that now because the federal government extracts resources directly from people in each state so if that government then comes to you and say oh well California's leaving so you don't have to pay federal taxes anymore and but the feds are gonna come back and say you better keep paying those taxes because after we settle this problem with the California government we're gonna come after you for any back taxes that you didn't pay in the interim that's pretty high risk for you as a resident of California to just suddenly make this decision to stop paying your federal taxes even if you don't care about getting your federal pension or whatever so so many resources now go through the centralized state that they can now say nope you can't leave and we have to remain as one big state forever or else you're never gonna get those resources you were promised and I think that's a big problem we're gonna have to face over time we have question here in the front this is more a comment to an extent it's more just on the notion of decentralization one of the so the criticisms that they give is that you're going to have more tyrannical local governments as that happens but I think that's a very short it's a short-sighted response it's them saying that that's the end of it as soon as one active decentralization occurs that's it so take the California initiative to lead the union the Cal Exit initiative at the same time as it's happening you have two initiatives one's the formation of the state of Jefferson or split dividing California into three pieces as well so it's showing that it's a process and it's not just one single action that'll get you to a Rothbardian society I just think that would be important to throw out there a little bit you guys could elaborate right and the short answer is we may never have a Rothbardian society but are we like the progressives willing to year after year decade after decade grind in that direction you got to hand it to progressives look at the 20th century I mentioned this yesterday and you also have to hand it to people who are willing to do work to build something that may not bear fruit until after they're gone but this is what healthy societies do this is what our ancestors did they built they built up capital they produced more than they consumed and that's why we're rich today and the question is whether we're going to do the same or whether we are going to be late stage heediness of a sort and devour at least a part of what ought to go to our children and grandchildren on a macro on a societal level well and of course the more secession you have the harder it becomes to make the claim that well that's just crazy talk so in California that has a successful secession movement and then some people in a part of California say well we want to form our own state too it's a lot harder to come back and say only crazy people want secession well they just had a secession right so now that you just have to make a practical argument well that secession was good this secession wasn't and you would you wouldn't hear so much about how that's just an extremist view because obviously you well you just supported it and we have entered a much better phase I think in history where you can now actually openly talk about secession and it's not you don't immediately end up talking about the southern secession back in the 1860s we all recognize that other places in the world discuss it like in Europe especially right now where we're talking about Brexit we're talking about Scotland we're talking about Catalonia that obviously none of those secession movements have anything to do with what most people try to pin secessionists with here in America and so and then since the Californians started talking about their own exit now it's recognized that oh maybe secession is a progressive thing to do also so I think the dialogue has actually improved quite a bit there it just still hasn't gotten to the point where it's viewed as a mainstream view yeah well if Trump wins in 2020 we're going to be redefining what's progressive very quickly I assure you that we have time for one more question yes right here what are alternatives are these critics of decentralization offering out to get us to a more free society then well you know they think that basically the same thing that neoliberal globalists think but in in more of a libertarian framework that we need worldwide libertarianism and I would I love that idea but I think if you go to a lot of places in the world and say look we can all agree that the starting point for how we organize the society is a recognition of the supremacy of the individual self-ownership and property rights a lot of people will look at you like you're a Martian I mean we we assume a lot of things are universal that aren't that's the problem and I also think there's a bit of hubris involved here that we America screwed up enough we know you know trying to save the world is a little beyond my pay grade and and I think you know the idea that that western style classical liberalism will win the day across the globe across cultures across languages across religions if it's simply explained to people that's hubristic that's hubris that sounds an awful lot like a missionary you know not a political philosopher well and then of course if they don't accept your views then you can drop bombs on them a typical thing too but and then ultimately if democracy solves all of our problems right we'll just have majority rule and all that well what if there's not an obvious libertarian view on this on the issue of abortion right some people think that the unborn child is a person deserving of legal rights some people don't think that there's no way to argue that away using libertarian arguments this is like a fundamental view about biology and metaphysics in some cases and so on and so people get into debates over this and well clearly this is the libertarian view that the baby is trespassing all of this stuff well that may seem really self-evident to some people but it's not to a lot of others so then what do we all just agree that whoever gets 50 plus one in this libertarian society gets their view imposed all right that's a recipe for disaster and then other issue other examples are things like circumcision and stuff right in order we have to balance religious liberty against the right of the child to not be harmed in this way well how do you pick a side on that one then well I've met some libertarians you think well you know religion is superstition is stupid just outlawed Judaism well I'm reluctant to do that given the history of some countries and so there's no easy answer to that then oh just whatever country with 50 plus one votes to outlaw circumcision and thus outlawed Judaism therefore gets to win that battle I don't think that's a great approach and so clearly just majority rulers having one big country where most people agree on something is not a sufficient answer ladies and gentlemen we're out of time thanks to Ryan Mcmakin for joining us thanks to all of you for being here great week subscribe to Mises weekends via iTunes U Stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on Mises.org and YouTube