 So this talk will be largely trying to capture a lot of the themes that are in my book, Breaking Away. They're out there in the bookstore. So if you're unconvinced by the talk, just pick up a book and you can explore the topic further. So let's go. The, how can we really start to think about this issue in terms of secession and the sorts of states that are produced by that process? Well, of course, we've already seen it many times in history and we live in a world now that's already the product of that process. In fact, we live in an international system today. That is a system composed of numerous states. Power is not centralized in any particular place. There are in fact more than 200 of these states and most of them exercise a substantial amount of autonomy and sovereignty. They are functionally independent states for the most part. Moreover, the number of sovereign states in the world has nearly tripled since 1945. This is due for the most part to the success of many secession movements that have occurred over that time and before. Also, through this process, we have smaller states now than had existed prior to that. And how does that happen? Well, there's a basic arithmetic to how secession works. That is, since the entire surface of the world, outside of Antarctica, of course, is already claimed by states, every time a state is split into smaller states through a secession process, we end up with new states that are in fact smaller than the states they came from. So it's a process of reduction. And so for example, during the decolonization period following the Second World War, dozens of new states were formed out of the territories of the old empires they left. This meant that the new status quo had a larger number of smaller states. The same thing occurred after the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union collapsed. That left 15 new smaller states in its wake. So when secession is successful, it is an event that reduces the territory and populations over which a single central institution exercises monopoly power. So if we're gonna talk about secession, it's also important to explicitly address the issue of what is the correct size of states. And I should note that before we go further, I know my audience, so you don't have to remind me after wear that the correct size of states is zero and it's nothing that we're against it. I agree. That's the end goal. But, and moreover, these political entities, communities, polities don't even have to be organized as states, right? Historically, we have political communities that aren't states at all. But that's all the topic that I've covered in other talks or will in the future. So for now, let's just stick to talking about states, the status quo situation where we're just trying to move away from it. We're trying to take the next step and really just find ways to break down the power of the ruling state elites by removing some territory, some populations from their iron grip. And the reason we have to address the issue of the size of states, because many people do believe, in fact, that bigger is better. They like big states and want to keep them that way. They believe that larger states are essential for economic success, for peace, for trade. And then there's another group of people who think that size doesn't matter at all. That they think that every problem of conflict within a political jurisdiction can be dealt with by democracy. Just let people vote and there is no need for people to have any sort of political independence or a polity of their own at all. They'll have elections and everything will just work itself out. People who believe that are, they're gonna be difficult to convince on secession. And of course, states themselves, they're agents and they oppose secession because states want to be big. Being big and getting bigger is an important goal of every state. It's part of state building. They want to consolidate power and ex-territories, increase their taxable population. What we want is the opposite of that. We don't want state building. We want state unbuilding. We want state demolition. And so this is a process that we can, I think, use. And for many people in the public, the idea that bigger is good or at least that size doesn't matter does in fact have its limits. For example, most people already have in their minds some upper limit as to the correct size of states. To see this, simply ask a person if he or she wants to live under a single global state. Most people, not all, but most I would suggest, a sizable majority of people in the world would be opposed to this. Most people just from casually observing the world have a sense that putting global governing power in the hands of some distant elite from a different culture on a different continent that speaks a different language might not produce optimal results. On the instinctive level then, many people recognize that something more local as necessary, partly because of this instinct, radical decentralization in the form of many diverse states historically has been the norm throughout human history. Even in the days of the Roman Empire, which viewed itself as having universal jurisdiction, the Romans never subjugated the Persians, the tribes of Northern Europe, the kingdoms of sub-Saharan Africa. They didn't even know about the Americas. So even in the age of huge empires, the world was still decentralized. It's never been ruled from a single place. Yet, ignoring all this, many people continue to insist that adding a new country or a large group of new small states to our already existing large number of countries would bring anarchy. Everyone who's read a serious book on international relations already knows that the world's already in a state of anarchy, though. It's already accepted fact that the international system is anarchic. There is no final arbiter of law or policy internationally. There's no global monopolist. And so creating anarchy is hardly a danger. It's already here. We already live in the system. The question is what are the size of the subunits in it? Ideally down to super local level, but it's obviously not at the global level right now. So how many independent polities should there be? How big should they be? That's probably the harder question that you're gonna have to endure because a lot of people will choose larger. But I'm going to suggest to you here that smaller is in fact better in most cases. After all, thanks to status quo bias, many people seem to believe that we've somehow magically arrived right now at exactly the correct number of states and they're all currently the right size also. The UN has explicitly said as much. Among the international elites, it's basically been dogma since 1945 that the world's existing borders as they've currently been drawn shall never be moved or changed. The doctrine of territorial integrity basically dictates this. And so the international community likes to preserve borders as they are and forever. There are exceptions, but approved secession as in the case of Kosovo's de facto secession, right? That sort of thing's only encouraged by the establishment when that sort of secession serves the interests of certain great powers and their allies. So for the most part, it's very much frowned upon. So if we're in the thankless job of promoting secession, we have to make the case that smaller and more numerous states are in fact better for the world. From the perspective of enhancing freedom and free markets, we can see three key ways that smaller and more numerous states are better. And we can also look at some of the empirical evidence and the actual historical experience while we're at it. So number one, the first reason that smaller states are beneficial is that they offer more opportunities for exit. This in turn makes states more inclined to respect property rights, whether they like it or not. And Lou Rockwell summed up this principle in a 2005 article called, What We Mean by Decentralization Rockwell writes, under decentralization, jurisdictions must compete for residence and capital, which provides some incentive for greater degrees of freedom, if only because local despotism is neither popular nor productive. If despots insist on ruling anyway, people and capital will find a way to leave, unquote. This is most fully realized, of course, by the type of decentralization that results from full blown secession, as Rothbard put it in 1977, quote, secession 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, unquote. Now, of course, the ideal would be you wouldn't have to physically relocate to escape despotism. But we don't live in that ideal world. We have to work with what we have. And the fact is, governments like to abuse rights. So the question is, do we want governments that are huge and control vast swaths of land that require us to move thousands of miles to escape them, or do we want something smaller where exit is much easier, albeit still not without cost? And of course, keep in mind that in a world with only one state and no secession, there is no escape at all ever anywhere. We've seen this issue of exit in the modern world, of course. It's true in countless refugee situations where the most oppressed people are only able to save their own lives by fleeing across an international border. We saw it in Venezuela over the past decade when Venezuelans desperate for food had to escape across an international border just to get basic necessities. Thank goodness that border was there and limited the reach of the Venezuelan regime. Exit was possible if only the Venezuelan state was even smaller and the people of that region had even more options for bordering states to which they might exit and escape. Historically as well, we know the concept of exit has been an absolutely key factor in how the West rose to achieve the highest standards of living the world has ever known. As the historian Ralph Raco has noted in his essay, The European Miracle, the fact that Europe has been so decentralized throughout its post-Roman history in contrast to the huge empires of the East meant that entrepreneurs in capital could indeed escape across Western Europe's countless borders in a highly decentralized Christendom. This was especially the case in Europe's Middle Ages and as historians Nathan Rosenberg and Ellie Birdsell note in their book, How the West Grew Rich, it was in these highly decentralized Middle Ages that the institutional groundwork was laid for Europe's economic miracle. Similarly, historian Jean Bechelaire showed this in his research and he concluded the first condition for the maximization of economic efficiency is the liberation of civil society with respect to the state. But how did this liberation occur? Which led to the success of markets in Europe, Bechelaire tells us, the expansion of capitalism in Europe owes its origins to political anarchy, unquote. That is to the existence of a large number of small states without any overriding imperial or state power. Not since Rome, has Europe been unified under a single government and that has meant more freedom and more economic growth. One reason this works is that a region of the world or region or world of small states is more difficult to even, it's even difficult to even attempt autarchy. So for a private entrepreneur, moving one's capital from one place to another does not cut off one's access to markets outside the borders of a small jurisdiction. Small states and principalities have always experienced big incentives toward doing business with surrounding states. This means more trade, it means more efficient markets. Opponents of succession and breaking up states are often opposed, however on the grounds that smaller states will throw up trade barriers and be more inclined to violate rights. The reasons for this assumption aren't actually clear but they are common objections. On the contrary, small states want to attract capital and it shows. This is why efforts to impose a single global minimum tax tend to meet the most resistance from smaller countries like Ireland and Hungary as is the case nowadays. Having lower taxes is a major way that small states attract wealth. Moreover, in modern times, the empirical evidence supports the idea that small states tend to be more open to free trade, more open to a free flow of labor, more open to lower taxes. For example, Sergio Castello and Turo Tomozawa conclude in their study on small states that in a world of specialized and growing trade, quote, small economies naturally grow, more trade oriented in both exports and imports, ceteris parabas, small nations thus become more trade focused than large ones, unquote. Economist Gary Becker in 1998 noted, quote, since 1950, real per capita GDP has risen somewhat faster in smaller nations than it has in bigger ones. Becker concluded that the statistics on actual performance show that the dire warnings about the economic price suffered by small nations are not all warranted. Smallness can be an asset in the division of labor in the modern world where economies are linked through international transactions. Of the 14 countries with populations over 100 million, only the US and Japan are wealthy. William Easterly and Art Kray conclude from their own study on small states, controlling for location, smaller states are actually richer than other states in per capita GDP. Microstates have, on average, higher income and productivity levels than small states and grow no more slowly than large states. So it turns out Rothbard was right when he suggested that small states are more likely to embrace free trade. As he wrote in the 1990s, this was due also to sociological reasons. Rothbard says, the greater the number of new nations and the smaller the size of each, the better, for it would be far more difficult to sow the illusion of self-sufficiency if the slogan were buy North Dakotan or even buy 56th Street than it is now to convince the public to buy American. Similarly, down with South Dakota or down with 55th Street, would be a more difficult sell than spreading fear or hatred of the Japanese or whatever foreign boogeyman we currently hate. In other words, bigness brings delusions of self-sufficiency and it is actually large states that more often turn to protectionism and economic nationalism and control. A second benefit of small states is that they prefer a, is that they offer a solution when constitutions and democracy fail to protect minority rights. We often encounter the argument that the size and scope of states doesn't matter so long as there are elections and there are words written on parchment somewhere saying that the government cross my heart and hope to die will not violate your rights. It's great if that works, but a lot of the time it fails. In reality, neither constitutions nor elections protect minority rights when minority groups are a permanent minority or minority interests diverge sufficiently from the interests of the ruling majority. We see this frequently with ethnic and linguistic minorities. Ludwig von Mises himself understood this when he wrote, quote, the situation of having to belong to a state in which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of military conquest. At every turn, the member of a national minority is made to feel that he lives among strangers and that he is even if the letter of the law denies it, the second class citizen, unquote. Similarly, problems exist for ideological minorities, especially on issues where there is little room for compromise. For example, consider a state where about half the population thinks abortion is a basic human right and the other half thinks abortion is a gray violation of human rights. We can see a problem here even in an allegedly decentralized political system like that in the United States. The Supreme Court has told the states to set their own policies, yet both sides continue to call for nation-wide laws forcing their own preferred policies on the entire nation. Confederation's only work when people in one region are willing to tolerate the deviations, quote, unquote, of the people in the other regions. But much of the time, the impulse to impose uniform national policy on everyone within a state's borders is inexorable and without breaking states up to match regional preferences, the only choice losing minorities have is to turn to violence or simply accept their status of powerlessness. In cases like this, democracy and constitutionalism offer no answer. Parchment guarantees of rights can be ignored by judges. We see it all the time. Elections are won by majorities. Constitutions may work for a time, but what happens when the majority gets large enough to amend the constitution and abolish the protections for the increasingly beleaguered minority? The losers become permanent losers. In other words, over the long term, the ruling majority coalitions tend to win, and if you're not part of that coalition and it doesn't serve your interests, you're out of luck. Because Mises understood this, he supported the idea of local self-determination, bias accession, and other types of decentralization. In nation-state and economy, he wrote, no people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want for these reasons. Whenever the inhabitant, he also writes in liberalism, whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known by a freely conducted plebiscite that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time their wishes are to be respected. And he goes on to note that this is what we have to do in order to avoid civil wars and revolutions and violence of that sort. And this is also significant because Mises himself was a Democrat. He thought democracy often worked, but he also recognized that without this safety valve of secession and a way to change the borders of states, which he explicitly thought was the natural progression of all stages to change borders to match current demographic realities is that it essentially leads to a loss of self-determination and basic human rights. So we can see this issue illustrated with a thought experiment. Suppose that in 20 years, some groups of elites in Eastern Asia suggest it would be a great idea to form a confederation of states from the region, the United States of East Asia. It would include China, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Indonesia. This new union would be put together to facilitate free trade in a variety of other things. But we immediately see the problem with democratic representation in this case. The Chinese would outvote all of the other countries just generally and most of the time. Even if all those other countries voted as a block, they would not be able to compete with the lopsided representation scheme. And sure, you could have a Bill of Rights written in there. You could have a Senate with equal representation, but over the long term, it just wouldn't work because people would recognize that. When you're that lopsidedly favoring one particular group, it eventually leads to a breakup. Or if a breakup isn't permitted because the ruling oligarchy has enough power in its hands militarily, it leads to civil war, rebellions, violence, a variety of types of unpleasantness. So you can see how unions, widespread states, they only work if there's a certain amount of uniformity that exists among the population and they have common enough interests. And for these reasons Rothbard often supported secession as a matter of national liberation. He considered the American Revolution a secessionist cause, of course, to be among the world's first wars for national liberation. But he also applied the same analysis to say when the Baltics seceded from the Soviet Union. And when, for example, that the Latvians wanted to break off from the USSR, he recognized that having one million Latvians against a hundred million ethnic Russians was gonna be problematic. He, at the time he was writing this, was doing so against the prevailing narrative, which was used by the State Department and the New York Times, which was we actually don't want to break up the USSR. That they wanted to keep Ukraine, they wanted to keep the Baltics all inside the USSR and we'll just have a new democratic constitution for the USSR and that'll make everything work out fine. And so being horribly outnumbered by a different ethnicity with different interests was just no problem. Just let people vote and it'll be fine. But fortunately the elites didn't win on that and a lot of those countries got what they wanted, which was to just get out of the USSR, which of course they had been added to against their will in many cases, especially in the case of the Baltics. So Rothbard said every group, every nationality should be allowed to secede from any nation state and to join any other nation state that agrees to have it. So you can certainly see that that runs not just through those cases, but in a lot of he supported the Biafran War, for example, against the unification of Nigeria, a secession move that ultimately lost. And finally, for a third reason for opposing large states is that large states tend to be the most dangerous ones. On this, Rockwell writes, tyranny on the local level minimizes damage to the same extent that macro tyranny maximizes it. If Hitler had ruled only Berlin and Stalin only Moscow, the history of the world may have been considerably less bloody. Large states are playgrounds for despots and dictators while small states provide far fewer opportunities for ambitious politicians to spread their mayhem beyond their local communities. But we don't have to take Lou's word for it. The highly influential political scientist Hannah Arendt has discussed how only larger states can hope to be truly totalitarian even. She notes that a number of states in Europe in the 1930s had pushed totalitarian ideas and as their ideal, but outside the Soviet Union, none managed to actually achieve the goal. And here's a long quote, but it helps us. So we'll quote it like, although totalitarian ideology had served well enough to organize the masses until the movement seized power, the absolute size of the country then forced the would be totalitarian rulers of masses into the more familiar patterns of class or party dictatorship. The truth is that these countries simply did not control enough human material to allow for total domination and its inherent great losses in population. Without much hope for the conquest of more heavily populated territories, the tyrants in these small countries were forced into a certain old fashioned moderation lest they lose whatever people they had to rule. This is also why Nazism up to the outbreak of the war and its expansion over Europe lagged so far behind its Russian counterparts in consistency and ruthlessness. Even the German people were not numerous enough to allow for the full development of this newest form of government that is totalitarianism. Only if Germany had won the war, would she have known a fully developed totalitarian rulership. So a rents a Holocaust survivor, hardly a defender of the Nazis, but even she concluded that, yeah, they wanted to be totalitarians, but not even Germany was big enough to bring that about. So they're smaller's better in this case, especially when it comes to the worst case scenarios as well. But what about that middle ground, right? We're not necessarily just always talking about avoiding full blown totalitarianism, but we do find, for some of these previous examples, you want more free trade, you want more freedom, you want the ability to escape despotism, smaller states are generally your answer. Now, as a final issue, though, we have to cover, as the book does, the issue of international relations and war because we see these advantages all for the domestic population, right? But anytime you bring up this top, you're gonna hear that breaking up states into smaller pieces, this is bad because if we reduce the power of the US government or any other Western states, then China will step in and conquer the entire planet the next day. So this is a difficult topic, and so I've tried to provide as much of a treatment as I can in the book. Certainly, it's not exhaustive and we do need more people really exploring these issues and with all the international relations, it requires a certain amount of speculation, but some good research has been done looking at the issue of how do small states fair against these larger states? And so there are a few things we can note when talking about this. For example, the assumption that large states will always dominate international relations is based on mistaken notion that larger states, in terms of GDP access and access to military resources currently, are necessarily the more powerful states, more accurately, however, it is wealthier states and blocks of states, not necessarily the larger states that tend to have an advantage in terms of military deterrence. In innovative research by China expert Michael Beckley, for example, he notes that the biggest variable here is actually GDP per capita, not overall GDP, and this helps explain why we can find many cases of smaller states successfully deterring and defeating larger ones. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, both Japan and the United Kingdom repeatedly defeated and humiliated the much larger China at the time. A reliance on GDP and military manufacturing statistics would also suggest that the Soviet Union, three times the geographic size of the US and with an immense weapons industry, should have outlasted the United States. The GDP measure also suggests that Israel is the weakest military power in the Middle East. Clearly, none of these things were true, are true. These really cases instructive because it shows us that small states, rather than having to become big themselves, can simply free ride off larger states, as the state of Israel has managed to long exploit American wealth and taxpayer revenues without actually giving up its own independence. Moreover, the possibility of nuclear deterrence diminishes the need for immense and expensive conventional forces. As again, demonstrated by the state of Israel, deterrent defense capability can thus be obtained even by Switzerland-sized states. And then, of course, there's no reason why a group of small wealthy states cannot very effectively form an alliance of their own among themselves without having internal control mechanisms, as has been done throughout history. You don't necessarily have to have small states form a state of their own in order to carry out effective defense measures. So, for example, were the United States to break up into smaller pieces then? There's no reason to assume the new smaller successor states would be at the mercy of larger ones. There is every reason to assume the new smaller American states would be just as unified on foreign policy as they are now, which is to say, virtually in lockstep. Unfortunately, no matter what might be said about small states and international relations, many will cling to the idea that because of alleged foreign threats, virtually nothing could justify secession ever. There is, of course, nothing new about this attitude for century states have justified their bigness and their taxes on the claims that you need us to defend us against foreigners. And of course, in the United States, we've seen this in many cases, where you're just supposed to accept whatever the government wants to do in the name of national defense. And this is, I mean, the conservative movement standard bearer back in the 50s, William F. Buckley said this in the early 50s, quote, we have to accept big government for the duration for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged given our current government skills except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. We must accept large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington. Unquote. So yeah, freedom's all right, but I mean, come on, you got, you're just gonna have to have the CIA and you're just gonna have to surrender those freedoms until we defeat all the bad guys in the whole world. If that takes 300 years, then, you know, them's the brakes. So, the real world, experience suggests that fortune actually favors the decentralized in terms of wealth, freedom, economic development, and more. And for these reasons that Rothbard supported what he called universal rights locally enforced. As an adherent of natural rights, Rothbard believed rights are certainly universal, yet he also understood that their enforcement must be local. As Rockwell explains, these two concepts, universalism and localism are frequently in tension, but concludes, quote, if you give up one of the two principles, you risk giving up liberty. Both are important, neither should prevail over the other. A local government that violates rights is intolerable. A central government that rules in the name of universal rights is similarly intolerable. Experiences already shown since at least as early as the middle ages that the Western world has always embraced and benefited from some degree of radical political decentralization, we would benefit from more of it today. Thank you very much.