 Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. I'm a little none-plussed, I must say, because I am, first of all, a Canadian. And what is worse, I'm a lawyer. What am I doing here? But two years back, actually, the list of books is about five years old. Two years back, I wrote something on secession. The Looming Threat of a National Breakup. All right. Boy, did I nail that one, eh? And it seemed to me then that the divisions in society were such, indeed, they reminded me of what it was like to live in Quebec in the past. One wondered how could a country survive with that level of animosity. Now, if you're going to write about secession, there are so many ways you can talk about it. I mean, you could talk about secession movements in other countries. I clearly could talk about the secession movement in Canada, which is the most opposite point of comparison here. You can talk about secession from the point of view of political theory or public choice. You can talk about secession in American constitutional law, right? But inevitably in America, you talk about this guy, right? Who actually lived about, I don't know, 15 blocks from where I live in Alexandria, Virginia. Now, a friend of mine, a good friend of mine, Alan Gelzo, wrote a book recently, a biography of Lee, which really did not much more in terms of advancing the literature than call Lee a traitor. And that word seemed to appear in every other page of the book. Indeed, Alan was so enamored with the idea of labeling Lee a traitor that he reproduced the oath that Lee took, I guess, on the plains of West Point when he joined the American army. I mean, it's a lengthy oath. And oaths are very solemn affairs. I mean, they're not to be taken lightly, right? But advisedly, reverently. And I know, well, I've taken a couple of oaths in my life, right? So if someone says, this person foreswear his oath, well, I have to think about that, right? Because I swore an oath of loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, right? When I became a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada, that is when I joined the Ontario Bar, right? And it's a very moving kind of experience. And then I foreswore that oath when I became an American citizen on tax day about eight years back, right? And he said, welcome to America, here's the bill, right? Was I to feel embarrassed about having foresworn my oath to foreign princes and potentates? I shouldn't have thought so. It's a well-established rule in international law that you have emigration rights, right? And so when I emigrated from Canada to the United States and became an American citizen, why it seemed to me I had very much the right to do that, right? Now, was Virginia as to Robert E. Lee a separate country in May 1861, even as America was a separate country to Canada when I became an American citizen, right? Because if it was, right, then there was nothing wrong with Lee taking an oath to defend the state of Virginia. And I'm a Virginian, right? And I think, you know, when you think about it, just about everything of interest in American history happened in Virginia, right? Or if not, it's because some Virginia boys came a visiting, right? So was Virginia then a separate country, even as America was a separate country when I swore an oath to become a citizen of the United States, right? Well, there's a special reason why Virginia had a right of secession. When Virginia, in the Virginia ratifying debate in 1788, there was a lot of discussion about whether or not Virginia would actually join the new federal union, right? I mean, the opponents were people like Patrick Henry and the never too much to be praised, George Mason, right? But James Madison, little Jimmy Madison said, well, don't worry about it because if it doesn't work out, we can always walk, right? And so the ratifying convention in 1788 said, the power is granted under the constitution being derived from the people of the United States, maybe resumed by them, when so ever, the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression. All right, so they had an escape clause, right? So was the escape clause triggered in 1861? Virginia took three votes on secession in the spring of 1861 and the first two failed. There was a lot of unionist sentiment, right? And Robert E. Lee was a unionist. Right? I was only on the third vote that the secession ordinance actually passed. And the difference between the first and the second and the third was Lincoln's call for an army to invade the south. Now, President Zelensky recently asked Americans to imagine what it'd be like if your country was invaded by foreign power. And some people in Virginia said, well, we know something about that, right? So was the raising of an army to invade Virginia well to invade the south? Governor Lecter was asked to send his militia to join Lincoln's army and refused, right? So was raising an army preparatory to an invasion, injury or oppression? Well, one person who would have thought so was Madison, right? Madison, the extreme nationalist, right? The great loser in the Philadelphia convention of 1787. Madison's Virginia plan initially said Congress may call forth the force of the union against any member of the union failing to fulfill its duties, right? So what the Virginia plan contemplated was precisely an invasion by the federal government of a recalcitrant state. Two days later, Madison said, what was I thinking? The use of force against a state would look more like a declaration of war and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound, right? So, you know, Madison who famously switched sides again and again and again, right? The ultimate politician. Madison at least in 1787 realized that raising an army to invade Virginia would be precisely that kind of oppression which would permit Virginia to exit the union. All right, so enough about Virginia. What about the rest of the South? Well, let's first of all talk about slavery just to get it out of the way because it wasn't on the table. In 1861. It wasn't on the table because nobody wanted to abolish slavery at that point. William Seward, the Secretary of State in the Lincoln administration, proposed the 13th Amendment. Not the 13th Amendment of 1865 which abolished slavery but just the opposite. He proposed a 13th Amendment which would guarantee the right of slavery forever in America. And in his first inaugural, Lincoln signaled that he'd be willing to go along with that. It wasn't on the table. It became on the table in 1863 but this is not 1863. We're asking what is Lee permitted to think in 1861? Right? Slavery's not part of this, right? So, that's how the Civil War began. It began in my hometown, right? It began in the Marshall House, right? You all know the story, you know? The Abraham Lincoln's wife spied the stars and bars, not the stars and bars, the bonny blue flag flying from the Marshall House on King Street. I live a few blocks up, right? And so she sent, Lincoln sent some troops under Colonel Ellsworth with New York fire-zuwaves to take it down. And he, Ellsworth, was promptly shot by Mr. Marshall, who was promptly shot by some Union troops, thus providing both sides with the first martyrs. Really, it was all about Virginia. South Carolina, that's just a bunch of Carolinian braggadocho. It began with an invasion. When you talk about secession rights today, or, you know, in the case of Alabama in 1861, one of the things you run up against is the Texas v. White. Decision 1869, where the Supreme Court held there is no right to secession. Well, you wouldn't have expected them to rule afterwards after the Civil War, right? Excuse us, that was just a big mistake. Can we take that back? Can we have a gimme on that? Right? But from a lawyer's perspective, that decision is clearly wrong, per incurium. Why? Because the argument is based on the idea that the Articles of Confederation, which spoke of a perpetual union, remained in effect after 1787, after the new constitution was adopted, which clearly can't have been the case. Why do I say that? Because if the Articles of Confederation had remained in effect, that is the 1781 Articles of Confederation, if they had remained in effect past the new constitution, right? They could not be altered. The Articles could not be altered except through the unanimous consent of all 13 states. Rhode Island didn't ratify the new constitution until 1790. That is, if that argument was correct, the first Washington administration was a nullity. And all the legislation passed under it, including the Judicature Act, were functious, right? Devoid of effect. So that can't be right. So that argument fails. And then you go back and you ask yourself, well, okay, that, you know, sorry, Justice Chase, that doesn't cut it. What else is there? Well, if you go back to the Framers, crafting the new constitution in 1787, clearly they thought there were secession rights, right? The Union, well, the government was over, said Washington. There's nothing left of an American government, right? And in the midst of their deliberations, the Framers many times contemplated the possibility of a split up. Indeed, James Madison was so disgusted at the way things had turned out that he proposed a walkout on the morning of July 17, 1787. He thought we failed, let the country split up. I mean, many of the delegates were willing to let the whole country break up into three different parts. There would be the South led by Virginia, the Middle States and New England, three separate countries. Everybody thought that's kind of reasonably how things would turn out. So the people who put the constitution together contemplated the possibility of that kind of a breakup. And they thought the articles were all over. There was nothing left of the articles, right? The article said the Union shall be perpetual, but clearly the Framers of the 1787 constitution thought those words were no longer effective. The articles were over. Right, which leads me to the tragedy of 1861. I call it a tragedy because like Lee, I don't think the country should have split up at that point, right? One of my little projects is to try to rehabilitate this guy. He's usually ranked to be about the worst American president. I really don't think so. I mean, I wouldn't say this is an example of a moral exemplar. I mean, you look at the face with the combination of cynicism and guile, and you're not really impressed. So this was a person not able to deal with what was unfolding. Nobody was. But you know, I read his last state of the Union message in 1860. November 1860, he said, you know, things are pretty good here. We've had a great harvest. Things have never been better. We're really prosperous. And yet for some reason, people want to split up. He said, I don't get it, you know. Some parts of the country are upset about slavery, right? But there's no country in the world that better protects the institution of slavery than America, and he was right. Not only was slavery better protected here than anywhere else, but as I say, even the Republicans were willing to guarantee its survival in a constitutional amendment, right? But he tried to reason his way around it, and he couldn't, it was tragic. I read there was a Washington conference in February 1861, led by John Tyler with all the big poobos of America in attendance, right? And they had a series of discussions about trying to keep the country together, and it went nowhere, because at that point, it was psychological. The parties were just too far apart, right? There's no limit to the things of the heart, as Dedo discovered in the Aeneid. At some point, it's like try to preserve a bad marriage, where appealing to common sense and reasonableness doesn't cut it, and so it was fated to happen, right? And the great tragedy was the initial decision to split. There was no reason for it, right? Which is why I prefer that guy. Four countries were put together in the 1860s. Three by war, and one by cases of good Rai whiskey. The three countries were Germany, with Bismarck's wars against Denmark, Austria, and ultimately France, Cavour in Italy, and of course America. But with the threat from the United States after the end of the Civil War, and the Canadian province is united, they united around cases of champagne, and flirtatious French Canadian ladies who danced delegates off their feet, and a lot of Rai whiskey. Another politician, Darcy McGee, asked McDonald, why am I not in your cabinet, McDonald? McDonald said because there's only room for one drunk. But he did it without going to war, right? And that's the great tragedy, right? So what you'd like to do is contemplate the possibility of a breakup without anything like that. And I lived through that sort of thing a couple of times. In the midst of all of the discussions, debates over separatism in Quebec, I really never experienced the level of animosity I commonly see in America. I had colleagues, I was at McGill, I had colleagues, some were separatists, Francophones, some were Anglos. And very early on, we kind of decided, well, there's this political thing, but we're all friends, right? The same thing, by the way, happened with the Montreal Canadians. People said, okay, let that happen, but then there's us. But there isn't that sense of us in America. I mean, it was a near-run thing. In 1995, the separatist vote, the referendum, came within less than 1% of passing. And had it passed, France, the next day, would have recognized Quebec independence. So it came very close. But the secession there wouldn't have involved a civil war. It's not anything anybody wanted. You know? So you ask yourself, what would secession look like in America? And I wanna say, it'd look a lot more like that than it would look like Fort Sumter, or the Marshall House in Alexandria. I mean, I'd like to think so. I'm not somebody who thinks that, oh, this is like the 21st century, we're all past all that craziness. No, no, obviously we haven't, right? But on the other hand, we're a state to decide to secede. The matter inevitably would end up before the Supreme Court. And it's not clear how that would turn out. One thing I don't think would happen would be simply a knee-jerk statement that, oh, Texas v. White solved all that problem. No, it's not like that, it's much more complicated. And one reason why it's more complicated is because a fundamental ground norm of American constitutional law is democracy, right? We're a democracy. And one thing democracy means is you respect the votes of the people. So imagine that there were a state that overwhelmingly wanted to get out of the union. Are we entitled to say that doesn't count? That was a question which the Canadian Supreme Court had to look at in 1998. If you want to know about succession rights, this is the authoritative place to look in international law. So what happened was this. Separatist governments in Quebec proposed a series of referenda on succession, poorly worded, okay, where nobody could figure out what the heck it was all about. They didn't say, do you want us to secede. What they said is, would you like to authorize the government of Quebec to propose discussions with the federal government towards a renewal of the Federation of Canada, yadda yadda yadda yadda. Nobody knew what the heck was all about, right? Except we thought that somehow if this passed, the next act would be the federal, would be the government of Quebec saying, we tried it didn't work, we're seceding. So the government of Canada sent the matter as a reference to the Supreme Court to look at succession rights. And I think American courts would have to look at this. I mean, everybody does basically. And what they said, look, it's not exactly clear cut. For example, in Quebec, you have a lot of native tribes, Cree mostly in northern Quebec, who don't want to be part of an independent Quebec. And you have parts of the West Island of Montreal that are Anglo, right? And you're, you know, areas near Holy Quebec as well. So, you know, it's hard to divvy things up. Plus, what are you gonna do about the national debt? Or in American terms, work California to secede, what do you do about the fleet in San Diego? So what the court said is, any decision to secede doesn't do anything except start a process of negotiations. All right? By the way, which negotiations were proposed by Jefferson Davis in 1861? He said, okay, you wanna talk about federal property, let's talk about it. And of course, it's much more complicated now. There's a lot more federal property and the federal debt is a lot bigger. So you don't have a unilateral right to walk, right? As happened, of course, in the first American secession in 1776, right? There was no deliberation there. Indeed, if you read Tom Payne's common sense, what Payne said is, yes, let's do it, we'll ditch the national debt of England, right? Much more serious today, a lot harder to do, right? So you have to look at a variety of things. Had secession been on the table in 1861, right? Applying this reasoning, there would not have been secession rights. The only way you can say there were secession rights in 1861 is take slavery off the table, as it was. All right? So it's a process of negotiations which could, well, who knows where it would end up. It might end up with secession, but may end up with just a lot of people talking endlessly, a lot of lawyers talking endlessly. You never know, right? I mean, are there serious secession movements? There's something called Kalexit in California. I'm a hero for those guys. They love me. They lost a bit of steam, by the way, at one point. One of their leaders decided about four years back, he decided to move to Moscow and become a Russian citizen. Yeah, that hurt. But if you remember about 20 months back, the Democrats were game-planning what they were gonna do if Trump was re-elected, right? And John Podesta game-planned secession, right? What he said is, if Trump were to win, what should follow there afterwards is secession by California, and he contemplated bringing the army on board, right? I think those guys would be willing to play tough. That's why I think were it to happen, this time secession would be politically correct, right? This time it would be liberal states wanting out, right? If Trump had been re-elected. And at that point, a Republican president probably would have said, burying sisters, departing peace, something like that. I'm looking at what the Electoral College looks like now and I'm happy, all right? So could it happen? Well, there are a number of scenarios we can talk about them. I wanna open this up to questions, but before I do so, one thing I did in my book was since I'm from Scalia or George Mason, right, and we do number crunching, I did some econometric studies of bigness and badness, and this was a huge debate in 1787. So Madison, an extreme nationalist, comes to town with this Virginia plan and wants to centralize all power as much as he can in the new federal government. And his argument is people are gonna be happier in a big country, and a big country at that point is the 13 states, right? And what he's looking at is essays by David Hume on bigness. Hume argued that big countries are gonna be happier than small countries. Madison and Hume thought that in a big country you'll have interest groups, but they'll never be able to unite because they'll be separated geographically, right? Montesquieu, on the other hand, said no, it's just the opposite. He said people are happier in small countries. The debate never really got off the ground, but for libertarians or conservatives, the guy you should respect is not Madison, right? Who started a war against Canada and then lost, like how stupid, okay? But this guy, Roger Sherman, and Sherman is not exactly a great thinker. He's one of those guys who both signed the Declaration and the Constitution. And his only response to Madison was, he said the people are more happy and small than in large states. Small is beautiful. And he's equine Montesquieu, right? And he's right. So I did these econometric studies of bigness and badness and what I discovered is the bigger the population, the more corrupt the country, the less happy the country, the poorer the country. And it's Montesquieu who got it right. Montesquieu said, in a small country, the officials will be more closely aligned with ordinary people, right? So the really happy country here is Denmark, right? It's a small country with a lot of big companies, right? But it's a country where everybody is pretty much the same. You know, they like smoke herring and bicycling. And the only country, other country that speaks Danish is Greenland, right? So they're doing okay, right? So the bigger the population, more corruption, bigger interest group problems, right? Amongst conservatives, you know, Madison and the Federalist Papers, it's a bit of a hero, right? And I think that's nonsense, right? I mean, Madison is precisely the wrong fellow. But yet there are these Madison scholars here. These guys go around talking about how great Madison was. They talk about the Constitution as a Madisonian Constitution. That's absolutely silly. I mean, Madison's plan for the Constitution is that people elect the House, the House elects the Senate, together they elect the President, and there's a national veto where the federal government can veto state laws. And he got that. He got all that, okay, in Canada. So you can call him the father of the Constitution if you want, but just be clear which country you're talking about, okay? So, no, if you like smallness, if you don't like a big overarching federal government, Madison is precisely the guy you don't like. The guy you do like is plain old Roger Sherman, right? You know, or the saint of George Mason, people like that. So I was told to talk for half an hour and take questions, and I've exceeded that, so let's do questions now, okay? And speak up. Do you have any thoughts on what, when the dust settles, what the new political landscape might look like in the United States? The new what landscape? The new political landscape, what the country, you know, how the breakup would actually take shape. The new landscape in terms of whether there'd be a breakup or just generally? I'm sorry, like, if this were to happen, do you have any thoughts on what the new countries would be? If there were a new country, if there were a breakup? Yes. Oh, well, you know, I suggested that if it happened, it would be liberal America splitting up from a Trump-ified rest of the United States, right? And, you know, in that case, they can in California have all the drag queens story hours they want. We don't, you know, fine, go for it, right? Just, you know, let us do things our own way. But, you know, I really don't have an answer for that. Okay. In part because I think, you know, most Americans are kind of waking up to the fact that we've seen just a lot of craziness in the last couple of years. Everything you love is dirty, says the left. Right? And we are asked to tolerate the intolerable. And we're not doing that anymore. So I think that at least, I think a more plausible response would be not so much a session, but a movement towards a more sensible Republican party, which maintains some of the things Trump brought to the party, but for God's sakes, without Trump. Now, look, you know, I advise Trump, I wrote speeches, I advise on appointments, and my friend said, do you realize if he wins, it's not gonna win well? And I said, but it's so much better than anything you have. And it turns out we were both right, right? So, I mean, I think part of the trick is going to be to maintain a party shorn of the unpleasantness associated with a guy who revealed himself to be a complete narcissist, unwilling to adhere to basic constitutional norms, right? The left has paraded any manner of stupidities before us. I mean, things we could never believe possible before are now commonplace. And if you remember what the past was like, you realize you just couldn't do it again. You couldn't have a band of brothers many series, because all those people are revealed to be racist, according to the Washington Post, right? And in going my way too with Bing Crosby, he'd be revealed to be a sexual abuser, right? June would divorce Mr. Cleaver, and the beef would have a sex change operation. So, I mean, it's, you know, we're not prepared for that kind of craziness. I'd like to think the way back is the way shown in Virginia. Right? Governor Yonkin, which is, you know, we're going to respect Trump, but there's going to be this 10 foot barge pool between him and the party. I think that has to happen. So, I'd like to think that that would happen before there's a session. By the way, you know, when you talk about the session, people say, yeah, but you know, what about the military power? You know, who's going to stand up to Putin, right? And, you know, and I admit, it's very much in the interest of Ukraine to have World War III, but it's, you know, and much as I hope they win, I don't see that I want World War III, particularly. Sometimes, yeah, go ahead, yeah. Could you go back to the very interesting point you made in there about the relationship between secession and democratic principles when you were talking about the Quebec potential secession? Well, my point was, how far down does it go? Is once Quebec has seceded in pieces of it, it will secede again? How did that discussion go? Nobody, the Supreme Court didn't address itself to that. The Supreme Court said roughly, what if we did this again and you ended up with not just a bare majority, but a solid majority for secession, right? I mean, there are no fixed rules here, but the point is, what you're not permitted to do is say that didn't count, okay? A democratic, an overwhelming democratic vote on a clear secession referendum counts. You can't ignore that. If at the same time, you want to argue that democracy is a ground norm of the American constitution, which it clearly is, right? So it doesn't answer all those questions. And yes, where it to happen in America today, you'd have precisely those kinds of problems. I mean, what happens to liberal Austin in the middle of Texas, right? Or what happened to West Virginia cruelly taken from the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1861? I mean, I'm still upset about that. Right? Can you imagine if West Virginia was still part of Virginia? I mean, it'd be so much cooler, you know? They wanted, you know, West Virginia would like some counties in Virginia to join West Virginia. And I say, no, take the whole damn thing back. Right, it's ours, we didn't give it away. Yeah, so inevitably there are those problems of kind of stray cities, conservative cities in liberal states and vice versa. And could there be a breakup within a state? Yeah, that's possible. I mean, some counties in eastern Washington state want to join Idaho. There's sort of a greater Idaho movement kind of, you know, Idaho has territorial ambitions. Greater Idaho. I don't know, I don't see the attraction unless you're talking about Washington state in which case I do see it, yeah. And that can happen, yeah. Are there any lessons to be learned when we look at Brexit that's going on with Ireland, you know, and how they kind of partition it up there? And then also, having multiple votes in some of these countries, let's have another vote, right? Yeah. Are there some lessons in that? Yeah. Back in 2016, somebody I knew wanted to be the new ambassador to NATO and he was saying you could put an exit in front of every country and it would work, you know, there'd be a Spanish exit or French exit and so on. It's a good parallel, right? Because what had happened in Europe was a concentration of regulatory power in Brussels, which was really oppressive. And we'd like to get ourselves out of that. I mean, when you think about it for a moment, think of all the things you could do with a separate country, right? Getting rid of the regulatory morass cleaning up higher education, right? Which needs to go through a great breakup. I mean, I'm obviously not talking about Auburn and I'm not talking about George Mason. But for the rest of it, frankly, you know, my solution, by the way, was give students the bankruptcy option to burn off their debt, but impose the burden on the universities that educated them. You do that and see how quickly you would get rid of gender studies. What happened right away? That's the problem, right? I mean, it's a problem of no accountability. We gave the universities the power to print money with federal loans for education, right? And we didn't cap the loans the way other countries did. So other countries said, right, you know, we're gonna give you loans, but you can't charge tuition above X dollars, right? And we didn't do that. And so when the Dems want to reform the problem now, what they would offer is a bankruptcy discharge, roughly, without capping tuition. So that's the problem, by the way, with reform, generally. We should not be afraid to tackle reform issues because we do it so much better and they do it so much worse if they did it, if the Dems did it. Somebody had their hand up back there. Yeah, sir? Yeah. Speaking of printing money, what I think of, let's say I were advocating in Florida with some other people that we should succeed and we were to do it by FEMA sites, or had to be by popular vote, a huge amount of the state's population is receiving money from Washington. And those people aren't gonna vote for it unless we could credibly promise them that the state would replace the money that they receive, Washington receiving it from Tallahassee or whatever, instead. It'd be very hard to make that promise because we wouldn't have the reserve currency of the dollar and the Fed and everything. So I think that's the biggest practical problem is just that essentially, that Washington will continue to buy loyalty from buy by Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, et cetera. Well, you're absolutely right. I mean, that's how it worked in Canada. What happened was the federal government and the federalists, the anti-separatists in Quebec, they were called federalists, they reminded Quebecers that they were net recipients of money from Ottawa, and so they campaigned on the basis of what was called a federalisme ron tabla, that is a profitable federalism, profitable in the sense that more money for people in Quebec. Okay. But it works the other way actually too. And the CalExit folks have figured that out, right? So there are have and have not states. There are states that are net recipients of federal largesse and then there are the payers and California is a payout state. So the people pushing CalExit and California say, look, we're sending so much more money to Washington than we're getting back. If we stopped funding the feds, and if at the same time we stopped contributing to the American war machine, we could fund a Medicare scheme for Californians. So put that to the average liberal California and that would be a selling argument, right? So all it means is that there's a disincentive to secede if you're in a handout state, right? But if you're a giving state, you've got an incentive to secede. So that works for CalExit. The Fed can make every state a handout state, though. Well, no, there'll be a net transfer with winners and losers, right? I mean, some states will contribute more than they get back. California is one of them. Somebody else? Yeah, back there. Yeah, yeah. You're quote on the screen at the moment, the people are more happy in small states than large states. Is that being geographically or small state apparatus versus large state apparatus? Because as it stands now, it seems like I don't see many Floridians or Texans going to Delaware or New Jersey or the Medicaid. So I was just curious about that because I would think that seems like the opposite's happening because the state power is so oppressive and they're going to states with a smaller state footprint rather than just mere geography. Well, in 1787, when they were talking about this, they were thinking about geography, right? And Madison's argument was the geographical barriers are such that people, interest groups, will never combine at a national level. The roads in America were so bad at the time that it took roughly twice as long to get anywhere as it did 2,000 years before in the time of the Roman Republic, right? But today, geographical barriers don't matter so much. Now it's a matter of population. So when I did my regressions, I looked at population, right? What's the point? The point is geographical barriers are gone. It's as easy to organize at a national level than it is at a state level. And there's so much bang for your buck when you form a interest group coalition in Washington than in Dover, Delaware, right? So I'm not looking at Texas versus Delaware. I'm looking at big countries, Russia, United States, China, and I'm comparing them to smaller countries like Denmark, right? So I guess, I forget, I had about 150 countries. Yeah. So kind of two questions. So I know that the international debt just reached 30 trillion dollars. And it's kind of getting to the point where we're probably not going to activate it, probably not going to get it solved. I know the federal reserves will be raising interest rates. So it's kind of going to get to the point where or that our country's going to go bankrupt. So I'm kind of wondering, what happens after the United States doesn't have any more money? Do we reform the government or does that need to break up that doesn't even have to deal with liberal versus conservative? I don't know of any country that's gone through exactly that, although there are parallels with 1776, a greatly indebted British government at that point. And we just cut ourselves free from all of that debt. So if it ever ended up that we were truly a bankrupt country, would there then be an incentive for some parts of a country to break off and say, we're going to go our own way and we want nothing to do with you? What I contemplated was a peaceful kind of succession where people faithfully, where the states faithfully try to meet their joint obligations. When you don't do that, all bets are off the table. Indeed, that's exactly what Madison had in mind with the Virginia plan. I don't know what happens there. Way back there and you're going to have to speak up, I'm afraid. Can you hear me, sir? Yeah, I can. Great, so going up the statement you made over there and talking about your regressions that you said, did you look at small countries in Africa like Gambia where it's a very small population of small people and I'm very certain that corruption is rife and you're not very happy over there. Did you include that in your, how did you control for that? That's one question and the second one is, see you said that in 1861 slavery was not on the table while I believe that slavery had been abolished in 1807. So what's, and what you didn't say, so what started the Civil War then? What was the reason for the invasion of the jam? Why didn't they control for that? Slavery was actually abolished in England in 1773 I think with a Somerset decision. I mean it's a great story. What happened was a slave from Virginia applied for habeas corpus from the British court system. The master wanted to take the slave and return the slave to I think the islands, right? And so a writ of habeas corpus was demanded by a British abolitionist, Granville Sharp. It ended up before Lord Mansfield and Mansfield basically just quoting from Sir William Blackston. Blackston's commentary said the state of slavery is so impure it can't exist in England. So thereafter, after 1773 there was no slavery in England. Now that did not apply to the empire, right? The slave trade's abolished in England in 1807. The slave trade is abolished in the empire in 1832. Right, Wilber force is still alive at that point. But so it's gone throughout the British Empire. It exists in Brazil. It doesn't exist in Mexico, right? And there was a movement of slaves to freedom, both northward and southward to Mexico. They're quite a remarkable story. So that slavery is controversial and deeply resented across the world at this point is absolutely clear, except in America. And I stress the point about the proposed 13th Amendment just by way of saying how right, right, Buchanan was in 1860 to say, I don't get it. Right, I don't get why you want to secede. You know, here's what Buchanan said in 1860. He said, you have no reason to secede. He said, number one, you have no reason. Number two, I think secession is illegal. But then he said, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to send in an army? He didn't think so. He thought he wouldn't want to do so absent congressional authorization. Well, Congress wasn't in secession. For that he's blamed and for that he's labeled America's worst president. And I want to say, no, there's one thing worse than that than that's sending in an army to invade the South. Right, so I'd like to think that somehow it would all work out, had there been a success. I mean, I think secession was a tragedy. I think it should never have happened. If it hastened the end of slavery, then as Lincoln said in his second inaugural, perhaps that's the price. But I should have preferred a cheaper price. I should have hoped for something that would work out. I hoped for something that would eliminate the scar, the injustice and the cruelty of the institution short of that, but we'll never know. Yeah. Go ahead, David. The Canadian court case that you referenced looking at secession since it's 1998, did they examine the velvet divorce between the Czechs and the Slovaks? And is that something of a model of what you're discussing? Yeah, it's called, you know, there was a velvet revolution and that was a velvet divorce. They didn't talk, I don't recall them talking about the Czechs and the Slovaks splitting up. Were there great differences between them? The Slovaks were basically farmers and the Czechs kind of liked rock music. But they got along very emically thereafter. Right? So that's kind of a model of what it's like. So I guess, you know, the benign version of what secession would look like in America would be one like the split up of Czech Slovakia, where the big winner would be U-Haul, right? And what this would do would be accelerate that which is happening already, which is people moving from California to Texas and maybe vice versa a little bit, right? People will sort themselves out. It'd be jurisdictional competition writ large and that's okay too, right? So, you know, my prediction would be at that point, frankly, you know, there'd be a lot more people exiting California after than even now and that would be perhaps a good thing. There'd lot to be said for jurisdictional competition. That's one of the great key ideas in political choice. Yeah. Is it possible to construe the adoption of the constitution as a secession from the Articles of Confederation? I said the necessarily you have to understand the 1787 Constitution as having ripped up the Articles of Confederation because the alternative was George Washington was in property elected in his first term, which makes no sense. So, you know, I'm happy with that. And clearly, that's what the framers thought, right? When our constitution said it's effective when ratified by nine states, that explicitly stated that the Articles were no longer in effect. So, wouldn't that constitute secession in effect? Well, it's not secession, it's the same territory. Well, but it's a secession of one government from another government. It doesn't have to be territorial, let's say. Unless you thought that that government was over already, which most of the delegates did, Washington particularly, our government is at an end, he kept saying. So, there's no government. There's nothing to rip up, it's gone, right? It's gone because everyone is ignored it. Washington in particular, right? The, you know, Washington has a conference in Mount Vernon in Alexandria in 1785, which is explicitly prohibited by the Articles. And he pays no attention. So, you know, here's a guy more meticulous in the quest of honor than anyone you could ever imagine saying, this does not bind me. Yeah. Isn't there a right of secession under international law? There is, I wouldn't have called it a right. I mean, I don't like rights language to begin with. The Canadian solution was not to speak in terms of rights. It was to speak in terms of a nuanced set of interests which demand respect, right? So there's no right of, if there were a right of secession, right, then I guess you could imagine California exiting the United States and keeping the fleet. I don't see that, right? Or you could imagine New York exiting the Constitution and saying, we're not gonna pay our share of the national debt. So I don't see that. A follow-up question, this affects Crimea and the Holocaust, do they really want it to see from the Ukraine? Well, you know, the great tragedy of what's going on right now is the missed opportunity of cutting a deal with Russia back when we could, you know. I helped craft the first foreign policy speech that Trump gave, and I put in a line to the effect that I could see how Russia might feel threatened with the NATO countries encircling it. And that line was taken out by Jeff Sessions who substituted the following. They say you can't cut a deal with Russia, I intend to find out. That was much more prudent than what I was gonna say, right? But the point is we never got a chance to do that reset because of the madness of a false Russia collusion story. So that really harmed America's interest in preserving peace in the world. And by the way, it was clearly the case that the deal would have involved Crimea, you know. I mean, everyone understood at that point that Crimea was going to be Russian. The fleet is there, right? And messy as that was, we thought you could cut, we thought that Trump, that Putin was a thug, but the point is you make treaties with thugs, not with your friends. You don't need a peace treaty with Canada, right? You need a peace treaty with Russia. We needed one, it's too late now, right? The tragedy of what's going on is the missed opportunity of the failure to do that which we had wanted to do in 2016 because we spent three years chasing a false narrative. All right, that's where we are. Yeah. Just a quick question. What are your thoughts on the likelihood of secession maybe leading to more extremist public policies on both sides, resulting in maybe more adverse effects than if the two were together and aggressing on a critical. Well, you're describing basically the processes of democracy and seceding states. And you're saying with that, I guess your point is that necessarily would lead to more craziness and say a seceding California? Well, there are reasons why I wouldn't exactly expect that. One of them is immigration rights. So before things become absolutely crazy, I'll start seeing people even more than now booking you all to get out. I propose a great deal of confidence in ordinary Americans to solve these problems. I see a problem as one where elites have captured the public discourse in a very unhealthy way. And we see what happened when elites are threatened. You kind of, you know, when you get to a certain age, you think in terms, you don't, you think long-term. Right. After a hypothetical breakup, what happens to the nuclear weapons? I get them. I don't know, you know. It depends on whether or not it's just one or two states wanting out like California. I mean, if you get a kind of rest of the United States, which is very much like the present United States, then I guess the nuclear weapons stay with the rest of the United States, you know. There are a lot of questions like that where you won't know the answers until things happen, right? You're gonna have to let events answer those questions. This is uncart, this is unrelated, but you talked about jurisdictional competition. Yeah. Were you surprised during the whole COVID thing, the degree to which, you know, there wasn't like a sort of big federal response and a lot of states did their own thing? Or was that something you would have expected? Well, there was jurisdictional competition, right? I mean, you know, some states got out of it more quickly than others. I mean, look, it was a very vexed problem where you were getting messages from all sides. You were getting messages from the medical community who knew something about illnesses, but who knew nothing about the cost of shutting down the economy. And you got another set of messages from economists and politicians who knew nothing about the medical problem, right? So who do you turn to? I mean, as it happens, my daughter and my son-in-law are epidemiologists, so I got double vexed, right? But, you know, most of us were up in the air. And in all of this, we never knew what was coming around the bend next. So there was such uncertainty that we moved fairly slowly, but then we moved. And once we moved, everybody joined in, right? Even the liberal states, right? Oh, yeah. I was wondering, like, what with people working online and stuff now? So like, I could work for a business in California, but I'd work from Indiana. Like, how would that work with secession? Like, how do you, from a legal standpoint, like, what are the issues? Well, if you live outside of California, you're a citizen of that jurisdiction. Would California be permitted to hire foreign workers? That's for California to figure out, right? I mean, can California hire workers from Ghana or Alberta or whatever? I mean, you know, you have jurisdiction matters. Okay. That's it? All right, thank you. Thank you.