 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Deist. This week we're featuring a talk Jeff gave at a recent event held by the Mises Institute on the Uncertain Prospects for Liberty. Stay tuned. What Bob and I wanted to talk about today was sort of the political landscape and where we are in America today in the Trump era. And a lot of us are thinking about what we might do as individuals or as groups to move America in a more libertarian direction, a more liberty-minded direction. And what I'd like to suggest to you this morning is that perhaps the best way to do that is to stop always thinking or having a mindset that we have to encourage more and more and more people to become libertarians. Maybe in a certain sense we ought to be thinking about encouraging fewer. In other words we ought to be thinking about trying to develop smaller polities, smaller political subdivisions of political groups in America and applying the principles not only of succession but of subsidiarity. And I'll get to in a bit an example of where subsidiarity works pretty well I think. But what we're stuck with right now is this mentality that we have to win national elections in a country of 320 million people. And what that means in this most recent election in 2016 is compelling about 70 million people to vote a certain way. So that's a pretty dawning task. Let me just give you a thought experiment if you'll indulge me. I'm pretty familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area. You spent some time there. I've lived there twice in my life, two different stints. So the San Francisco Bay Area is about 9 million people these days. It consists of about 11 counties. And it is a deeply and reliably progressive part of the country. These are deep blue counties. They all voted for Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, I'm sure they all voted for Barack Obama, etc. Pretty wealthy counties. Now if we could sort of disabuse ourselves from all of the constitution and federal laws that currently stands and say, what if we just kept things the way they are in terms of social security, military basis, other federal programs. But beyond that we allowed the San Francisco Bay Area, those 11 counties to more or less govern themselves. What would that look like? Well, they'd probably try a lot of things. They'd probably try to have some sort of guaranteed basic income. They'd probably try to have universal health care. They might have very restrictive gun laws or even gun prohibitions. They might have abortion on demand. They might have a system of free education. Let's make Berkeley free. Let's try it. They might have limits on income. They might have very highly progressive income tax schemes. They might have free housing. So in other words, the whole panoply of what progressives tell us they want. What if they could have that right here, right now, today, in 2017, 2018, without having to convince the rest of the country, without having to convince the deplorables. Would anyone in this room really object to that? I wonder. It's not where I would choose to live. Now there would be some victims. There would be some harbors. There are liberty-minded people within those 11 counties. No question about it. And some of those people would suffer and probably have to move, but it's not perfect. We could apply the same perspective to what's happening in Catalonia right now. That's a little different because I think actually maybe a majority of Catalonians would prefer to stay with Madrid. We don't exactly know the numbers. But back to San Francisco, there would be some losers. There would be some people who are harmed. It's not perfect, but I would certainly argue it's easier for them to leave the San Francisco Bay Area than it is for them to leave America, for example. So I wonder why we struggle with this. I wonder why we've all become convinced that everything has to be done federally and everything has to be done at a national level. And what that means is again convincing about 70 million people to vote for your program. Now in terms of the political landscape as it stands, what we have right now in America is a system of bad faith. Neither side believes the other. And by sides I mean the generic common usage of left and right, conservative and liberal. Neither side believes the other. And when you don't believe the other, not only do you not think that they're correct, but you think that they're acting in bad faith, that they're malevolent in their intentions towards you, then at that point you're not inclined to have a debate with them. You're not inclined to have intellectual discourse because these aren't people you're trying to win a parlor game with. These are people who are trying to kill you. I mean that's the mentality in this country. And perhaps it's always been that way. This idea we have today that the political discourse is so dysfunctional and things have gotten so angry and hostile in America. I'm not sure that that hasn't always been the case. What's changed is that now we know it. And we know it for a couple of reasons because there's a comment section on the articles that you read in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times. And that comment section is bites back. And also because we have social media. And using social media, and I've been guilty of this myself, we don't have much of a filter. And sometimes we say angry and hostile things that are at the tip of our tongue. But nonetheless it gives us a glimpse into people's hearts and minds, doesn't it? I mean we're more aware today of the divisions in America, whether those divisions are actually deeper or not, I can't say. But in terms of this post-Good Faith era, just a couple of quick examples. I was reading the other day about there was an updated article in the Washington Post about the assault on Rand Paul. And if you want to try to figure out how much good will Rand Paul has engendered with progressives, just go read the comments in that Washington Post article. All of his trips to Howard University and talking about drug prohibition disproportionately incarcerating black folks and talking about NSA snooping and talking about getting out of our disastrous wars in the Middle East has gotten him about this much good will with progressives. I mean that's just the reality. And I also noticed the other day Nancy Pelosi's rhetoric, she was talking about the tax bill. I mean if there's anything less interesting than a tax reform bill, I don't know what it is. But it apparently excites Nancy Pelosi because she said that this is Armageddon. I don't know if any of you know where Nancy Pelosi lives but it doesn't look like Armageddon where she lives. It's pretty nice. So with this political dysfunction I know and we've all struggled with this is what about third parties? And today again we're talking about politics, we're not talking about some sort of libertarian utopia. We're talking about practically, pragmatically what might be possible in the near term or at least within our lifetimes. So there was an NBC poll the other day, I'm sure some of you heard this, is that 71% of millennials are willing to consider a third party or think a third party is necessary. Okay well that sounds pretty good. The problem is that they didn't vote for one in 2016. Now most millennials are a voting age, all but the very youngest millennials can now vote. When I say millennial I mean somebody born in the 80s or 90s. So they're all voting. They had an opportunity to vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or Rand Paul in 2016 and not too many of them took us up on it. So when we say 71% favor having one, that's different than actually voting for one. There's also amongst millennials, depending on what poll you want to believe, a healthy interest in socialism and collectivism. There was a YouGov poll. But again you have to take these polls with a grain of salt, oftentimes there are 2,000 people or something like this. But we don't exactly know where millennials are with this. Now in terms of 2018 and 2020, here's what we have to remember about third parties. We think that there's something new happening, that this discuss with the two parties and the desire to have an alternative is new. But for those of us who are old enough in the room to remember, what we have to think about is that John Anderson who just died a week or so ago, he got 5 million votes in 1980. He got 6.6% of the popular vote in 1980. That's a long time ago. Ross Perot in 1992 got 19 million votes. We forget, Ross Perot got 19% of the general election. Gary Johnson got about 4.4 million votes, or about 3.2%. So the idea that interest in and growth among third parties is rising I think is not supported by the evidence. As a matter of fact, I think what we're doing is going the other direction. We're going towards more and more power to the two parties. So that said, what might 2018, the Congress elections in 2020, the presidential election look like? Well, I think the themes are not going to be about third parties. I don't think they're going to be about Jill Stein or Occupy Wall Street. I don't think they're going to be about Gary Johnson. I think the dominant themes are going to be revenge for Trump. I think progressives are going to go all out and they're not going to want to hear about any third party Jill Stein stuff taking votes away from whoever's going against Trump. They're going to go after Trump. It probably will be the most vengeful election we've ever seen in this country. I think it's going to be about women in office. I think there's going to be a huge push to have female candidates and some of them will be rotten, but they'll be female. I think somebody like Kamala Harris from California, there's just energy around that. When we're talking about energy, and we have to be honest with ourselves, the energy is not in the libertarian sphere at the moment. And we have to acknowledge that. I think it's going to be about progressives and women and getting back at Trump. We'd all like to see Rand Paul do better, but let's be honest here. Unless Trump self-immolates, which I guess is certainly possible, he could be impeached or he could just do something so crazy that the Republicans say, we got to primary this guy. But short of that, you've got to understand, Rand Paul is in Kentucky. Rand Paul is a senator from the state of Kentucky, which voted about 6832 for Donald Trump over Hillary. Two to one, the raw votes in Kentucky. So absent some kind of real calamity on Trump's part, Rand is not going to primary a hugely, a deeply popular president in his own district. So where does that leave us? I think there are some opportunities here, even though the political landscape seems pretty grim. But what I like about 2016 is two things. First of all, and God bless our friends on the left, millions of people in America finally woke up to the idea that democratic elections in and of themselves do not confer any legitimacy on government or on the victor. Do you think people in San Francisco think Donald Trump is a legitimate president in any way, shape or form? No, they absolutely don't. So I personally, I'm buoyed by an appreciative of when the general public starts to question democracy. I think that's healthy for the United States. The second thing that people have woken up to is that democracy does not create some sort of compromise. Where each side has its extreme things it would want and neither side gets everything, but we engineer some sort of compromise down the middle where the two sides get a little bit of what they want but not everything. Complete nonsense. Not at all what modern mass democracy yields. What it does yield is a permanent bureaucratic class that enriches us and gets reelected at unbelievably high rates but never really addresses these supposed ideological, different differences in our country. So democracy is not some sort of compromise where each side gets a little and I think people are starting to realize that. So the idea that democratic elections are not necessarily legitimate and that the outcome is not some sort of compromise I think are both happy things in terms of the development of the American mindset. So what's the way forward for us? I would argue today that we should be thinking smaller, that our revolution is small, that the way forward is found in subsidiarity and decentralization of political power. And I think that this is the only approach that can actually reduce these rotten tensions that we refer to in the United States as the culture wars. There really isn't any other way to allow for real diversity in society. Again this winner takes all top down national election system where literally half the country feels subjugated when the wrong guy or gal wins. That's not diversity. I mean Ludwig von Mises had a quote to the effect where he said if people are forced to live under a government with which they disagree that's not really different than having been invaded or overtaken. And I'm sure progressives feel invaded at the moment by Trump. So let me give you an example of a place that's far from perfect, that's far from a libertarian utopia, but I think could work much much better in a huge 320 million person country like ours. And that's Switzerland. There's some interesting parallels between Switzerland and the aforementioned San Francisco Bayer. They're both about the same, about 8 million people. The Swiss system is fascinating. It's divided up into about 26 cantons which are the equivalent of US states. Beyond that they call their cities, their municipalities, they call them communes. So I have a good friend named Claudio Gras who's a great libertarian, lives in Switzerland. And I've had the opportunity to talk with him at great length about this. So I'd be curious to know, does anyone in this room know the name Doris Lutherd? Anybody? Not a single hand Doris Lutherd? Well this is Lou Rockwell's dream. Doris Lutherd is currently the president of Switzerland. Lou wrote an article where he said, my daydream is that I wake up the day after the election and no one really knows or cares who won. That the presidency has so little power it means that it's on page A30 of the newspaper, it's way in the back. Well this is what happens in Switzerland. They have a seven person national council, a federal council. And the presidency rotates for one year at a time, one year term among the seven people. This is the greatest thing ever. If you go to the Swiss government website, you will be absolutely astounded by the humility exhibited on this website. This website basically says, well, we don't want any federal power where it's not necessary. Our federal powers are limited to a few different things, just a few small things. We've never heard that before. But everything else we push down to the Canton level and optimally down to the communal level, to the city level. So there's an amazing lack of hubris. Imagine Trump or Hillary campaigning last year in Des Moines or Honolulu or whatever saying, you know, I don't really know what's right for you guys. When I get to Washington, I want to sort of make it so you can make your own decisions here locally. That's the exact opposite. We demand this ridiculous omniscience out of our federal politicians. They're supposed to know everything about Social Security and Yemen and health care insurance exchanges preposterous. Nobody can know all that stuff. So Switzerland actually takes the opposite approach. And what's so fascinating about the Swiss government website again is there's even a line on there where they say, we feel that federalism is an important part of promoting and maintaining social cohesion. Well we could use a little bit of that here. And don't think Switzerland isn't diverse. We think of cows and mountains as Alpine Country, but Switzerland is very diverse. It has a very distinct population. There's a French speaking majority area. There's an Italian speaking area. There's a German speaking area. And then there's another Romance language there as well. And the north and the south are different. The Alpine versus the city. Switzerland is diverse. It's just small. It's 8 million people. And of course it has the wonderful history unlike the rest of Europe of not being involved in two disastrous wars. And that's a happy occurrence. But what really strikes me about the Swiss system is just the humility embedded in it throughout. And imagine living some place where a decision about whether someone is granted immigration or visa papers can be determined or can be influenced by his or her neighbors. They're closest neighbors. At the communal level in Switzerland people can come give their comments and whether some recent arrival has been a good neighbor. It sounds almost quaint and it is. But it's better than what we've got here. And what I don't like is this idea that our progressive friends in San Francisco, for example, have to hate and fear the possibility that Roy Moore is going to be elected in my now home state of Alabama. I mean what kind of system is that? I don't care any water for Roy Moore, not a fan. But I understand their perspective. What they view as some redneck senator from Alabama get to vote on what abortion standards are 2,500 miles away in the San Francisco Bay Area. Does that make sense? When did we decide that everything has to be federal? So this winner-take-all system, the nation of 320 million people. There's not a single Green Party or Libertarian Party or a peace and freedom party member or Constitution party member of Congress. 435 members of Congress, 320 million people, not a single third party member of Congress. If you go back to Revolutionary Times and extrapolate forward, there should be maybe 10,000 members of Congress today to account for the population growth. Unless you live really out in the hinterlands or in some deeply rural area, you should basically be within a mile or so of your member of Congress. You should run into them at the grocery. They should have a little bit of fear of you. So here's the thing that strikes me so much about this is that every other aspect of life other than governance is becoming decentralized. When we think about the trends in the modern world, when we think about early man, nomadic by necessity, tribal, then the agricultural revolution was a centralizing revolution source because it allowed people to stop moving and come together into rural areas and farms and stay put. That was revolutionary. Then we think of the industrial revolution, took people from rural areas and brought them into cities to amass in cities and work in factories and then cities grew around that. So that was also in the geographic or physical sense a centralizing revolution. So fast forward now to the digital revolution, everything's becoming decentralized. Every industry you can think of, every business and the ones that aren't, the ones that insist on having sort of the old hierarchical system. We think of the IBMs versus the Googles and the Amazons. The ones that refuse are dying. They're dinosaurs. Everything's becoming highly decentralized. My older brother works at Google as an engineer and everything is teams. Everything is this sort of non-hierarchical team system. Now I kid them that there's hierarchy at paychecks. But it's really interesting how when we think about universities and academia, you can learn anything online today. We have all the world's knowledge in this little device that we hold in our hands. You don't need a library. You don't need a professor. Those are middlemen of sorts. Again, decentralized information, banking, money, even social organizations. You can find groups of friends or people with shared interests anywhere around the world online. Whereas before, if you were into skiing or gardening or motorcycles or whatever it might be, you were stuck with the people in your town. Well, that's not the case anymore. There's endless combinations of decentralized networks. It's not the old hub and spoke model anymore for businesses or any other kind of organization. So what the current age is all about is removing intermediaries. When we think about Bitcoin, the idea behind it is to get rid of banks and get rid of governments and central banks and just have peer-to-peer money on a decentralized ledger, which is basically a database that you both share. When we think about Uber, Uber doesn't own a fleet of taxis. Uber doesn't have a central dispatcher. Again, a decentralized network, you're on your phone, the driver is in their car and you get together. So everything is becoming decentralized except what? Governance. We think about organizations, not only has everything been federalized hopelessly in the United States, including these cultural issues like abortion that we're never going to have unanimity or anything close on. But even beyond national governments, we see United Nations, we see the OECD, we see the EU in Europe. Increasingly, at the political level, we see calls for things to be done super-nationally. So while the rest of the world is busy decentralizing, our political friends are going the other direction in contravention of the dominant trend of our time. It's just like government. Everything they do goes against what humans are doing freely otherwise. So, and don't kid yourselves about the IMF. There are plenty of people who think the world needs a global central bank under the auspices of the IMF. And if we have another currency crash, we have another equity markets crash and the stock market crash, those calls are going to intensify because people are going to say, well, see whiz. The dollar is the world's reserve currency. If the dollar gets sick, the whole world gets the flu, so we can't just have one central bank controlling that in the United States. We need to coordinate among central banks, so we need to create a central bank for central banks. And there's plenty of talk, this is not a conspiracy, there's plenty of talk about doing just that under the auspices of the IMF. So why on earth do we allow this? Why do we allow governments to increasingly try to centralize how the decisions that affect our lives are made when the marketplace is doing the exact opposite? Everything about government, as Michael Mallis points out, is stubbornly binary. It's zero sum, it's win-lose. And that's where we are, unfortunately, in the United States today. So my argument in closing is that we ought to be thinking small. We ought to be thinking about subdivisions and subsidiarity and decentralization and even secession as ways we could walk away literally or figuratively from Uncle Sam. And I don't think that this necessarily in the digital age means that we geographically break up and we form new governments. I think there are a million ways short of outright secession from Uncle Sam because it's going to be awfully hard to figure out Medicare and Social Security and military bases and things like that. But there are a million and one ways we could let San Francisco be San Francisco and we could let Auburn, Alabama be Auburn, Alabama. And in closing, I'll leave you with a quote from a blue stator, not a red stator talking about this. This is from an article that came out in March after Trump won. It was called Blue Exit. This is from the New Republic magazine, which is obviously a long-standing left-wing organ. And he was responding in part to this amazing article that Angelo Codavilla had written. Angelo Codavilla is a neoconservative right-wing guy, but very brilliant guy at the Claremont Institute. He had written an article called The Cold Civil War and he wasn't kidding. He was talking about how bad things have gotten in America and how even as a right-winger, he could accept the idea of sanctuary cities for illegal aliens or whatever it might be if that could go both ways. If that could also mean that you could have a sanctuary city in Texas or someplace where they had prayer in school. And so for sort of a Lincoln-loving neocon conservative, this was a pretty amazing admission that he would be willing to consider this. And so from the left, our friends at the New Republic, a writer's name was Kevin Baker, wrote an article. And I recommended to you just about his disgust that Trump is present. It was called Blue Exit. And so this is a quote from that article from him, from Kevin Baker in the New Republic. We won't formally secede in the Civil War sense of the word. We'll still be a part of the United States, at least on paper. But we'll turn our back on the federal government in every way we can, just like you've been urging everyone to do for years. And devote our hard-earned resources to building up our own cities and states. Well, if that's a threat, I'll take it. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud. Or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.