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Why “Classical” Liberals Want Decentralization

Posted by M. C. on July 24, 2023

Today, however, liberal efforts to protect regional power and customs from encroachment by central governments are very much in decline. Whether it is attacks on Brexit in Europe, or denunciations of so-called “states’ rights” in the United States, even limited and weak appeals to local control and self-determination are met with contempt from countless pundits, politicians, and intellectuals.

https://mises.org/wire/why-classical-liberals-want-decentralization

Ryan McMaken

[This article is chapter 3 of Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities. Now available at Amazon and in the Mises Store.]

In recent decades, many pundits, scholars, and intellectuals have assured us that advances in communications and transportation would eliminate the different political, economic, and cultural characteristics peculiar to residents of different regions within the United States. It is true that the cultural difference between a rural mechanic and an urban barista is smaller today than was the case in 1900. Yet recent national elections suggest that geography is still an important factor in understanding the many differences that prevail across regions within the US. Urban centers, suburban neighborhoods, and rural towns are still characterized by certain cultural, religious, and economic interests that are hardly uniform nationwide.

In a country as large as the United States, of course, this has long been a reality of American life. But even in smaller countries, such as the larger states of Europe, the problem of creating a national regime designed to rule over a large diverse population has long preoccupied political theorists. At the same time, the problem of limiting this state power has especially been of interest to proponents of liberalism—including its modern variant, “libertarianism”—who are concerned with protecting property rights and other human rights from abuses inflicted by political regimes.

The Growth of the State  and the Decline of Local Powers

Among the best observers and critics of the problem of state power were the great French liberals of the nineteenth century, who watched this process of centralization unfold during the rise of absolutism under the Bourbon monarchy and during the revolution.1

Many of these liberals understood how historical local autonomy in cities and regions throughout France had offered resistance to these efforts to centralize and consolidate the French state’s power.2

Alexis de Tocqueville explains the historical context in Democracy in America:

During the aristocratic ages which preceded the present time, the sovereigns of Europe had been deprived of, or had relinquished, many of the rights inherent in their power. Not a hundred years ago, amongst the greater part of European nations, numerous private persons and corporations were sufficiently independent to administer justice, to raise and maintain troops, to levy taxes, and frequently even to make or interpret the law.3

These “secondary powers” provided numerous centers of political power beyond the reach and control of the centralized powers held by the French state.4 But by the late eighteenth century, they were rapidly disappearing:

At the same period a great number of secondary powers existed in Europe, which represented local interests and administered local affairs. Most of these local authorities have already disappeared; all are speedily tending to disappear, or to fall into the most complete dependence. From one end of Europe to the other the privileges of the nobility, the liberties of cities, and the powers of provincial bodies, are either destroyed or upon the verge of destruction.5

This, Tocqueville understood, was no mere accident and did not occur without the approval and encouragement of national sovereigns. Although these trends were accelerated in France by the revolution, this was not limited to France, and there were larger ideological and sociological trends at work:

The State has everywhere resumed to itself alone these natural attributes of sovereign power; in all matters of government the State tolerates no intermediate agent between itself and the people, and in general business it directs the people by its own immediate influence.6

Naturally, powerful states are not enthusiastic about having to work through intermediaries when the central state could instead exercise direct power through its bureaucracy and by employing a centrally controlled machinery of coercion. Thus, if states can dispense with the inconveniences of “local sovereignty” this enables the sovereign power to exercise its own power all the more completely.

The Power of Local Allegiance and Local Customs

See the rest here

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Radical Decentralization Was the Key to the West’s Rise to Wealth and Freedom | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 29, 2023

Raico continues:

Although geographical factors played a role, the key to western development is to be found in the fact that, while Europe constituted a single civilization—Latin Christendom—it was at the same time radically decentralized. In contrast to other cultures—especially China, India, and the Islamic world—Europe comprised a system of divided and, hence, competing powers and jurisdictions.3

https://mises.org/wire/radical-decentralization-was-key-wests-rise-wealth-and-freedom

Ryan McMaken

It is not uncommon to encounter political theorists and pundits who insist that political centralization is a boon to economic growth. In both cases, it is claimed the presence of a unifying central regime—whether in Brussels or in Washington, DC, for example—is essential in ensuring the efficient and free flow of goods throughout a large jurisdiction. This, we are told, will greatly accelerate economic growth.

In many ways, the model is the United States, inside of which there are virtually no barriers to trade or migration at all between member states. In the EU, barriers have been falling in recent decades.

The historical evidence, however, suggests that political unity is not actually a catalyst to economic growth or innovation over the long term. In fact, the European experience suggests that the opposite is true.

Why Did Europe Surpass China in Wealth and Growth?

A thousand years ago, a visitor from another planet might have easily overlooked Europe as a poor backwater. Instead, China and the Islamic world may have looked far more likely to be the world leaders in wealth and innovation indefinitely.

Why is it, then, that Europe became the wealthiest and most technologically advanced civilization in the world?

Indeed, the fact that Europe had grown to surpass other civilizations that were once more scientifically and technologically advanced had become apparent by the nineteenth century. Historians have debated the question of the origins of this “European miracle” ever since. This “miracle,” historian Ralph Raico tells us:

consists in a simple but momentous fact: It was in Europe—and the extensions of Europe, above all, America—that human beings first achieved per capita economic growth over a long period of time. In this way, European society eluded the “Malthusian trap,” enabling new tens of millions to survive and the population as a whole to escape the hopeless misery that had been the lot of the great mass of the human race in earlier times. The question is: why Europe?1

Across the spectrum of historians, theories about Europe’s economic development have been varied, to say the least.2 But one of the most important characteristics of European civilization—ever since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire—has been Europe’s political decentralization.

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Doug Casey on the Struggle Between the Powerful Forces of Centralization and Decentralization

Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2022

As HL Mencken quipped, an election is just an advance auction on stolen goods.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-struggle-between-the-powerful-forces-of-centralization-and-decentralization/

by Doug Casey

International Man: We’re seeing several disturbing trends converge: currency debasement, increased surveillance, and more travel restrictions.

It seems governments everywhere—and the WEF elite behind them—are waging an all-out war on ordinary people worldwide.

What do you make of this trend, and where is it headed?

Doug Casey: Well, as I said earlier, the World Economic Forum is actually an informal United Nations, which is bad enough.

It’s populated by people who like the idea of powerful government in general, and a powerful world government in particular. When you look at history, you find that there are people who arise from seemingly nowhere and are able to put themselves in positions of huge influence and power. In today’s world, that usually happens through elections. But Bismarck, Napoleon, Mao, Kissinger, Schwab, Gates, and most others didn’t come up through elections for what they’re worth. They came up through force of personality, cleverness, and connections. Elections are essentially an Americanism.

Incidentally, I don’t believe in elections or “democracy” as means for determining who your boss is and who controls you. Elections have rarely been more than popularity contests at best, and more often, mob rule dressed in a coat and tie. As HL Mencken quipped, an election is just an advance auction on stolen goods. Now, more than ever, they’re just rubber stamps for political operators who are adept at using the media and other forms of influence to get the hoi polloi to robotically legitimize their rulers.

Manipulating public opinion has become a fine art using electronic media. It’s especially effective in getting the bottom half of society—let’s call them marginal citizens—who aren’t famous for researching issues or thinking critically, to vote one way or another. Voting can make sense if the voters are virtuous, independent thinkers, at least 21 years old, and property owners. Many today are none of these things. That’s why elections are meaningless shams, more now than ever. They do nothing but legitimize power junkies.

Where is this trend going? As the economy and the dollar deteriorate further, people are likely to look for a strong leader, someone who will promise to make things better if he’s given enough power.

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On Secession and Small States

Posted by M. C. on October 10, 2022

By Ryan McMaken

Mises.org

On an instinctive level then, many people recognize that something more local is necessary. Partly because of this instinct, radical decentralization in the form of many diverse polities has been the norm throughout human history.

https://mises.org/wire/secession-and-small-states

[This article was adapted from a talk delivered at the 2022 Supporters Summit in Phoenix, Arizona.]

The international system we live in today is a system composed of numerous states. There are, in fact, about 200 of them, most of which exercise a substantial amount of autonomy and sovereignty. They are functionally independent states. Moreover, the number of sovereign states in the world has nearly tripled since 1945.  Because of this, the international order has become much more decentralized over the past 80 years, and this is largely due to the success of many secession movements. 

The new states are smaller than the ones that came before them, however, and this all reminds us that there is a basic arithmetic to secession and decentralization in the world. Since the entire surface of the world—outside of Antarctica, of course—is already claimed by states, that means that when we split one political jurisdiction up into pieces, those new pieces will necessarily be smaller than the old state from which they came. 

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 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, it left 15 new smaller states in its wake. 

So in the current world, secession—when successful—is an event that reduces the size and scope of states. It reduces the territory and the populations over which a single central institution exercises monopoly power. 

Secession and State Size as Two Sides of One Coin

So, if we’re going to talk about secession, then, it’s also important to explicitly to address the issue of “what is the correct size of states.” Is smaller better? 

Now before we go further, I know my audience here, so there’s no need to come up to me afterward and say “well, states are bad so the correct size of states is that they don’t exist at all.” I get it. I agree that’s the end goal. Moreover political communities don’t have to be states at all. They could be other types of non-state polities. But that’s all for another speech.  

For now, we’ll stick to talking about states, as we are already saddled with living in a world composed of states right now.  Until the day comes that a majority of the population wants to abolish all states, it makes sense in the meantime to look to ways that will reduce the power of states, localize that power, and take at least some of it out of the hands of some of the most powerful ruling state elites. 

And the reason we have to address the issue of the size of states, is because many people do believe that bigger is better. They believe that larger states are essential for economic success, for peace, and for trade. Also, many people think that state size doesn’t matter at all. They think every problem of conflict within a political jurisdiction can be solved with democracy. Just let people vote, and there is no need for people to have political independence or a separate polity of their own. People who believe that are going to heartily oppose secession. 

And, of course, states’ agents themselves will oppose it because states want to be big. Being big and getting bigger is an important goal of every state. It’s a major part of what we call state building. States want to consolidate power, annex territories, increase their taxable population. What we want is the opposite of that. We want state unbuilding. State demolition. 

For many in the public, however the idea that bigger is good, or at least that size doesn’t matter, has 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 I would suggest a sizable majority of people worldwide—would be opposed this. Most people, just from casually observing the world, suspect that placing global governing power in the hands of some distant elite from another culture, a different continent, and which uses a different language, might not actually produce a desirable result. 

See the rest here

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The Myth behind the Federal Power to Strike Down State Laws

Posted by M. C. on July 9, 2022

Again, the distinction here is purely arbitrary, and relies on convenient fictions such as claims that a farmer in Idaho and a lawyer at the Supreme Court are “all Americans” and thus the former must submit to the political power of the latter. These pretensions toward American solidarity only apply in one direction, of course, and are never employed to actually limit federal power. Such ideas endure, however, because they conform to the ideological whims of those who successfully mold and propagate public opinion. 

https://mises.org/wire/myth-behind-federal-power-strike-down-state-laws

Ryan McMaken

For more than a century, the process of political centralization and state building in the United States has entailed convincing a large portion of the population that the federal government must be the final arbiter of the moral righteousness of every law and policy adopted in every state. The idea began as a novel concept in the nineteenth century when federal policy makers began to use it as a tool of asserting federal control over states. If federal institutions regard a state policy as conforming to federal notions of “rights,” then the policy is allowed to stand. If, not, then the federal government deems the law to be null and void. This negation of state and local policies, of course, is backed with real or threatened coercive force applied by federal institutions.

Over more than two centuries, the regime’s written constitution has been repeatedly reinterpreted to create powers of “judicial review” and enhance federal veto powers over state and local laws.  Today, this power is accepted without question by the overwhelming majority of Americans. 

Moreover, the idea permeates all corners of the political spectrum, so that conservatives and progressives alike can routinely be heard calling for the federal government to step in and overturn local laws by force when those local laws are not to the liking of activists. The modern Left, of course, has long called for federal intervention in every state and local government right down to the local school board. Through this process, for example, even school prayer at a high school sports game has been turned into a federal issue. Conservatives, meanwhile, demand that the federal government void state and local gun laws where conservatives regard these laws as overly restrictive. 

This is even a common notion among self-described libertarians, many of whom insist that it is entirely proper for one government—i.e., the federal government—to impose certain laws on another government—namely, the state and local governments. 

Among advocates of this sort of thing, whether progressive, conservative, or libertarian, it is justified on the grounds that federal intervention must be allowed to “protect rights”—with the federal government also defining rights to fit federal preferences. Moreover, the central government in these cases is to be the sole judge of its own laws and policies, and not subject to any intervention from any other government for purposes of protecting rights, or anything else. 

See the rest here

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Decentralization and the Rise of the West: The European Miracle Revisited

Posted by M. C. on April 27, 2022

The Amsterdam magistrate, in contrast, chose to treat all merchants, local or foreign, equally. Relatively speaking, the Dutch Republic was a beacon of political, economic, and religious freedom in the seventeenth century, and Holland in particular experienced an economic boom in the Dutch Golden Age. 

https://mises.org/wire/decentralization-and-rise-west-european-miracle-revisited

Bas Spliet

Decentralization has long been at the forefront of the minds of Austro-libertarians. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, for instance, appeared on Austrian television this month sharing his dream of a Europe “which consists of 1,000 Liechtensteins.”

Although principally based on economic reasoning, this policy agenda emerged at least in part out of a celebration of the historiography on the “European miracle,” which posits that the West grew rich because of the existence of thousands of competing political entities of differing size and form in premodern Europe. Since Ralph Raico summarized this historiography thirty years ago, the “European miracle” school of thought has moved forward with varying degrees of success.

The European Miracle

Back in 1994, Ralph Raico wrote an essay on the then emerging “European miracle” school of thought in economic history. The scholars in this school, Raico argued, had at long last repudiated the “historical materialism” of the Marxists. Unlike Karl Marx and his followers, they insisted that technological change and economic growth were the result of certain legal, political, and ideological institutions—or the “superstructure,” in Marxist terms—rather than the other way around.

Institutions such as property rights, restraint in taxation, and liberalism, in turn, arose out of the political anarchy of medieval Europe. Although culturally homogenous and economically integrated, Europe for centuries remained a patchwork of different kingdoms, principalities, city-states, and ecclesiastical polities. This meant that the ever-growing middle classes of merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers could take their business elsewhere if the rulers usurped too much of their productive wealth. As a result, the political authorities competed with each other to develop an atmosphere conducive to economic freedom. As Eric Jones put it in The European Miracle, which Raico named his article after:

Political decentralization and competition did abridge the worst arbitrariness of European princes. There were many exceptions, but gradually they became just that, exceptions. Meanwhile, freedom of movement among the nation-states offered opportunities for “best practices” to diffuse in many spheres, not least the economic…. The number of states never shrank to one, to a single dominant empire, despite the ambitions of Charlemagne, the Hapsburg Charles V or Napoleon. Within many states a long process in the history of economic thought conditioned rulers to listen to academics and other wise men. Writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in central and western Europe dared to offer advice about how to rule, some of which was taken.

Political competition ultimately is what set the West apart from the rest. Asia’s Charlemagnes, Charles Vs, and Napoleons were successful in monopolizing political power, allowing them to establish command economies.

The Nation-State

Raico’s article appeared in a volume called The Collapse of Development Planning, edited by Peter J. Boettke. The implosion of the Soviet Union undoubtedly made Raico optimistic that the influence of left-wing ideologies in the field of economic history would collapse, too. Yet the institutional approach has not come to dominate the field. The idea that the rise of the West is principally the result of the exploitation of labor still holds a lot of support in academia.1 Historical narratives that explain the Industrial Revolution through out-of-the-blue technological progress or coincidental geographical factors abound as well. Moreover, historians have tried to prove the efficiency of premodern antimarket institutions, such as craft guilds and serfdom.

Finally, the nation-state is still allocated a decisive role in the economic rise of the West. In his Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction, for instance, Robert C. Allen celebrates the “standard model” for economic development spearheaded by nineteenth-century European nation-states and the US government. Influenced by Friedrich List and Alexander Hamilton, the four allegedly “successful” state policies, according to Allen, were investments in transportation and mass education, central banking, and tariffs.

Still, few historians would deny that political competition played a vital role in the European miracle. Niall Ferguson, for instance, included competition as the first of several “killer apps of Western power” in his popular 2011 book Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power. The problem is that since most historians are not libertarians, they do not a priori exclude the possibility that the nation-state can create wealth. Therefore, when government intervention and economic growth go hand in hand, even the institutionalists tend to conclude that the state somehow played a contributing role.

See the rest here

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Rural Voters, Guns, and Decentralization Sank the Democrats in Virginia | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2021

But there’s a forgotten man behind Youngkin’s electoral success: the rural voter. This vote was strong not only in terms of the percentages but also in terms of turnout, which was able to take Youngkin across the finish line.

https://mises.org/wire/rural-voters-guns-and-decentralization-sank-democrats-virginia

José Niño

America’s growing rural divide is not going away any time soon. Recent gubernatorial elections in Virginia have rekindled talk about an inevitable Republican resurgence during the 2022 midterms. History has repeatedly shown the party outside of the White House making gains during the midterms elections, one of the most predictable trends of election cycles in American history.

However, what’s more intriguing is some of the new trends that are gradually crystallizing as fixtures of twenty-first-century politics, namely, soft secession. Although Virginia’s 2021 elections had the trappings of an off-year election, what took place below the surface was simply too enticing to ignore.

There was much talk about the suburban vote in Virginia, and justifiably so. Running under the Republican banner, Glenn Youngkin improved Republican margins with voters in major suburbs across the state by hammering away at the latest iteration of leftist curricula engulfing public schools in the Old Dominion.

But there’s a forgotten man behind Youngkin’s electoral success: the rural voter. This vote was strong not only in terms of the percentages but also in terms of turnout, which was able to take Youngkin across the finish line. For example, Donald Trump only beat Joe Biden 52–46 percent among rural voters during the 2020 elections. Youngkin dramatically expanded upon the victory margin, winning the rural vote by a decisive 63–36 percent margin, according to an exit poll by Edison Research.

Political onlookers were enthralled by Youngkin’s strong rural performance. Some pundits at the milquetoast conservative outlet The Bulwark even described Youngkin’s victory margins in rural areas as “Assad-like.” The culturally radical path the Virginia Democratic Party has taken since it achieved a trifecta in 2019 offers a glimpse of what caused such an electoral backlash. Specifically, gun policy stands out as an underrated factor behind the strong rural reaction against Virginia Democrats.

Much of this vote likely came on the heels of the budding Second Amendment sanctuary movement kicking off in 2019. This was the year the Democrat-controlled General Assembly passed red flag gun confiscation orders, universal background checks, and monthly limits on the number of handguns a law-abiding individual can purchase.

Subsequently, Virginian gun owners marched straight to their county supervisors’ meetings where they pushed for the implementation of Second Amendment resolutions. By getting active in their respective localities, gun owners quickly built a sizable bloc of angry voters who were ready to lash out against any Virginia Democrat running for statewide office.

Presently, there are well over two hundred municipalities in Virginia that have passed sanctuary resolutions of some sort. The rural counties Youngkin dominated in were among the most prominent in the sanctuary movement. Areas such as Carroll County, the first county to pass a sanctuary resolution in 2019, went to Youngkin handedly, by a vote of 83 percent to 16 percent. This was a marked improvement on Republicans’ victory margin in the 2017 gubernatorial election (77 percent to 22 percent).

The vote breakdown of Virginia elections illustrates the heightened degree of polarization of US politics, where rural areas are not only moving in the opposite direction with regard to their voting behavior but are also trying to break away from urban cores imposing their self-styled “progressive” values on them. We shouldn’t forget that rural Virginia has entertained the idea of seceding from Virginia and potentially joining West Virginia.

The 2021 gubernatorial election could be widely seen as a victory for frustrated Virginians who used the elections as an outlet to constructively lash out against the state’s ruling class. Before the elections, the Democratic trifecta thought its gun control power grab would not be met with pushback. They were operating under the arrogant assumption that Virginia was on the fast track to California or New York status. However, they vastly underestimated the level of furor boiling over in the Virginian hinterlands.

For many Virginians living in Second Amendment sanctuary counties, the right to bear arms is an integral part of their identity. In fact, it would not be a stretch to assume that a sizable portion of rural Virginians can trace their lineage back to the initial settlement of Virginia or share Scots-Irish ancestry—a group that has stubbornly resisted centralized political power since the eighteenth century. Any form of gun control, or iconoclastic attempts to erase their heritage, will activate rural Virginian voters.

Electoral jubilee notwithstanding, governing a state is a whole different kettle of fish. As I mentioned in a previous post on this website, Youngkin appears to be a typical Republican who will not rock the boat. That means lukewarm tax cuts and platitudes about limited government are in short order.

From a historical standpoint, Republican gatekeepers have repeatedly co-opted the contrarian energy of disaffected groups and reoriented it into regime-friendly projects that don’t accomplish much of substance. The biggest fear coming in the wake of Virginia’s elections is the possibility of many individuals going back home now that a Republican is in office, thereby doing nothing to fix Virginia’s current laws or discontinue the decentralist project that the sanctuary movement jump-started.

Indeed, there are valid criticisms of the present set of Second Amendment sanctuary projects, so there’s a significant amount of work to be done. The worst thing that could happen is for people to pack up and stay on the sidelines, thinking everything will be fine and dandy with Republicans back in office. As always, vigilance and dissatisfaction should be the principal mindsets that guide people’s political actions.

All told, the ship has sailed for “normal” politics in America. If anything, the Virginia case shows the need to make nullification projects the new normal. Why bother trying to preserve the very same political order that brought us to our current state of political malaise?

The American system needs a major shake-up. The ever-growing nullification rebellion might just do the trick. Author:

Contact José Niño

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Sign up for his mailing list here. Contact him via Facebook or Twitter. Get his premium newsletter here.

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The Prospects for Soft Secession in America | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 23, 2021

Left progressives oppose the decentralization of political power for a very simple reason: they firmly believe they are winning. So why would they let anyone walk away? They will always portray breakaway movements as nativist or racist or nationalistic. They can’t help themselves. This is the white savior complex of today’s progressive West.

https://mises.org/wire/prospects-soft-secession-america

Jeff Deist

1930, Columbia professor Karl Llewellyn published The Bramble Bush, his famous tract on how to think about and study law. Llewellyn urged readers to consider both law and custom when seeking to understand a society, to recognize the difference between the black letter legal codes and the day to day practices of state officials and citizens. Where there was no sanction, the author instructed, there was no law. In other words, we should focus on the substance of things at least as much as we focus on the form. This is an important lesson for how we view the United States today, with an eye toward what is actually happening on the ground among people and institutions, rather than legal formalisms.

A few years ago, on a panel discussion at an event in Vienna, Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe made an offhand remark I found very interesting. Paraphrasing him, he said that nationalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were largely centralizing while the nationalist movements of the twenty-first century were largely decentralist in character—breakaway movements represented by Brexit, Taiwan, Scotland, Catalonia, and others. Donald Trump also represented a breakaway movement of sorts, away from DC, but of course this possibility went totally unfulfilled.

This strikes me as an important insight. What we know as today’s map of Europe is really countries cobbled together from principalities, city-states, kingdoms, dukedoms. And the EU seeks, but has not achieved, total dominion over them as a supranational government. What we think of as the US is really an incredibly disparate set of regions which became fifty states over which the US federal government asserts almost total control. And in both cases, cities became politically, economically, and culturally dominant.

So our topic today, in the context of the US, is this: What if the greatest political trend of the past two hundred years, namely the centralization of state power, reverses in the twenty-first century? What if this century is not about ideology, but about separation and location? And what if covid has dramatically laid bare this possibility?

Empires desperately fear losing control over their provinces, and exactly that appears to be happening in the US. Those of us on the anti-interventionist right sometimes forget that DC is very much an imperial power with respect to the fifty states, not just in the Middle East. So any discussion of soft secession and its prospects in the US begins with identifying domestic pushback against this empire. And contra the self-styled progressive saviors, any political arrangement which denies people the right to walk away peacefully is not liberal by definition.

What do we mean by soft secession versus hard secession? It is something more than de facto versus de jure, because everything about American laws and political norms already became blurred over the past century. De facto violations of constitutional provisions, for example, become de jure over time, by operation of federal regulations or the terrible Supreme Court. Garet Garrett’s 1944 essay “The Revolution Was” explains this as a “revolution within the form.” Everything ostensibly remained the same: a constitution, fifty states, three “branches” of government. The country was overthrown a hundred years ago—beginning with Woodrow Wilson and reaching full form in FDR’s New Deal. But America’s second revolution was managerial, a seizing of jurisdiction over every aspect of life by a centralized federal bureaucracy.

So by soft secession we mean a counterrevolution within the form: aggressive federalism, regionalism, localism, and an aggressive subsidiarity principle, operating in de facto opposition to the federal state—or at least sidestepping it. Sometimes it takes the form of direct nullification or flouting of federal edicts, which it turns out are fairly hard to enforce without the support of local populations. Biden’s vaccine mandates will be an instructive test of this; several governors already filed suits. Or it can take the form of legal grey areas, as we’ve seen with more “liberal” US states in their approach to immigration sanctuaries and marijuana laws.

Soft secession also sidesteps the thorniest issues: what to do about federal land, federal entitlements, debt, the dollar, military bases and personnel, nuclear weapons.

Hard secession, by contrast, means an outright division of the US into two or more new political entities, complete with their own boundaries and governments and a surviving rump state. This is far more difficult; among other obstacles there is a Reconstruction-era Supreme Court case which claims the various states must agree to let a particular state secede. Yet the possibility remains, and this scenario could be reasonably peaceful or quite violent. It could look like the former Soviet Union and the Baltics, or it could look like the former Yugoslavia. But this is far less likely absent an outright economic collapse.

Yet that’s just it. We need to understand that America is less a country than an economic arrangement. It’s an arrangement about land and jobs and capital. About subsidies like Social Security and Medicare. About cheap imports, a good distribution system, and a strong US dollar relative to other currencies. Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The chief business of the American people is business.” That’s not all bad, and it’s far better than nothing. But it is held together by an increasingly shaky political arrangement, America as a place has lost its sense of meaning or shared commonalities. I don’t know how long this economic arrangement can or will last, but the point is if it fails there is no social or cultural arrangement underpinning it. 

What are the prospects for soft secession in the US? It’s impossible to give odds, but surely the possibility is far higher today than any time in recent US history. Those prospects are higher now than two weeks ago, before Biden announced his vaccine mandates. They are higher now than when Biden was elected, despite his promises of bringing the country together. They are far higher now than before covid, as vaccines, masks, lockdowns, and travel restrictions have divided the American public in remarkable new ways over the last year and a half. They are higher now than when Trump was elected in a brutally divisive election, higher now than after the Bush versus Gore debacle in 2000 created the idea of red versus blue state. And they are higher now than in the turbulent sixties and seventies, when civil rights, feminism, Roe v. Wade, birth control, and radical social change roiled the country. Those prospects are probably the highest they have been since the terrible 1860s. 

The Great Sort

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Contact Jeff Deist

Jeff Deist is president of the Mises Institute. He previously worked as chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul, and as an attorney for private equity clients. Contact: email; Twitter.

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The Terrible Economic Ignorance behind Covid Tradeoffs: My Speech to the Ron Paul Institute | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 8, 2021

Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has a famous dictum: markets produce goods, which are the things we want and willingly buy or consume. Government produces bads, which is to say things we don’t want at all. Things like wars and inflation. They do this with our own money, reducing what we have to spend on actual goods and thus reducing production of those goods.

https://mises.org/wire/terrible-economic-ignorance-behind-covid-tradeoffs-my-speech-ron-paul-institute

Jeff Deist

Some of you may know the name Alex Berenson, the former New York Times journalist who comes from a left-liberal background. He has been absolutely fearless and tireless on Twitter over the past eighteen months, documenting the overreach and folly of covid policy—and the mixed reality behind official assurances on everything from social distancing to masks to vaccine efficacy. He became a one-man army against the prevailing covid narratives. 

Mr. Berenson is famous for creating a viral (no pun intended) phrase which swept across Twitter last year: virus gonna virus.

Which means: whether one is in Sweden or Australia, whether in New York or Florida, whether you have mask mandates or lockdowns or close schools or require vaccine passports—or do NONE of these things—virus gonna virus. Covid hospitalizations and deaths will be concentrated among the obese and elderly. In almost any community, two-thirds or more of deaths are over age seventy, but even among the elderly more than 90 percent of those infected survive covid. And among all covid deaths, only about 7 percent are “covid only” without other serious contributing factors. 

What we won’t ever know, unfortunately—because we don’t have a control group, at least in the West—is what would have happened in a society which simply did nothing in response to the virus. What if a country simply had encouraged citizens to build up their natural immunity through a healthy diet, exercise, vitamins, and natural sunlight? What if it had taken precautions for elderly and immune-compromised populations, while allowing younger and healthier people to live normally? Would such a country have reached a degree of natural immunity faster, with overall better outcomes for the physical and mental health of its citizens? And with far less economic damage?

All of this is the unseen. And no, it wasn’t “worth it” to shut down the world.

Back to Mr. Berenson. Last week Twitter decided it had enough, and permanently suspended his account. This is no small thing for independent journalists—and God knows we need them—who reach a lot of people via Twitter and rely on it to make a living.

Search for his Twitter profile and you’ll find something spooky. His name is still there, but with a quietly menacing “Account Suspended” warning. All other traces of his existence are erased: his header photo is gone, his profile photo is blank, and the descriptive bio is missing. Just blank. It’s eerie, and reminds me of that famous old photo of Stalin by the Moscow Canal. He’s standing next to Nikolai Yezhov (I had to look him up), who fell out of favor with Stalin and was executed—then erased from the photo by Soviet censors.

Alex Berenson has been similarly unpersoned, removed, erased. But even if he ends up a casualty of this war1—and whether you agree with him or not—people like him have managed to challenge the official narrative in ways unimaginable even twenty years ago. The financial journalist John Tamny made an interesting point last week: complain about social media all you want, but Facebook and Twitter have been great sources of information during this covid mess. And after thinking about it I had to agree. Most of the alternative information about covid I’ve consumed via social media. But of course Mr. Berenson no longer has this luxury.

The Covid Economy and Tradeoffs

Speaking of narratives, we have especially lacked clear and sober thinking about the injuries to the US economy created by covid policies. We profoundly fail to understand the economics behind covid, because we so desperately want to kid ourselves that the economy will be “normal” soon.

Governments are good at two things, namely bossing us around and spending money. They do both in spades whenever a supposed crisis arises, and both Congress and the Fed went into hyperdrive beginning in March 2020. The Fed pumped more than $9 trillion to its primary dealers, estimates are that more than 20 percent of all US dollars ever issued were issued in 2020 alone. On the fiscal side, more than forty federal agencies have spent $3.2 trillion in covid stimulus spending. So that is $12 trillion of inflationary pressure introduced to our economy.

What the economy wants and needs during crises is of course deflation. When uncertainty rises, and it certainly did for millions of Americans worried about their jobs in 2020, people naturally and inevitably hold larger cash balances. They spend less. Meanwhile they were staying home, driving less, dining out less, traveling less, working less. All of this is naturally deflationary, so of course Congress and the Fed embarked on an effort to fight this tooth and nail with intentional inflation. So now we’re in a wrestling match between two opposing forces, one natural and one artificial.

Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has a famous dictum: markets produce goods, which are the things we want and willingly buy or consume. Government produces bads, which is to say things we don’t want at all. Things like wars and inflation. They do this with our own money, reducing what we have to spend on actual goods and thus reducing production of those goods.

The past sixteen months we’ve had lots of government bads, to the point where we might call them “worsts,” which are even worse than bads. The covid and Afghanistan debacles come to mind. 

It may be facile and self-serving to compare the federal state’s inability to manage Afghanistan with its inability to manage a virus, but the comparison is just too perfect to resist. So I won’t resist.

Among the bads government produces is misinformation. One analogy between covid and Afghanistan is the phenomenon known as the fog of war: the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations.

Paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz: war is the realm of uncertainty; the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of uncertainty. Fog and friction cloud the commander’s judgment—even where the commander wholly shares our interests, which is hardly a given with covid. When we declared war on a virus, clarity went out the window. And so we’ve lived with sixteen months of fog, of covid misinformation. This happens in tandem with the media, which parrot official pronouncements from sources like the deeply compromised Fauci and stir up alarmism at every turn.

And we’re still living with it. Consider we still don’t have definitive answers to these simple questions:

Do masks really work?
Do kids really need masks? As an aside, our great friend Richard Rider reports that San Diego County—population 3.3 million—shut down its public schools for a year with one student death!
Is there asymptomatic spread?
Does the virus live on surfaces?
How long does immunity last after having covid?
How many vaccines will someone need to be “fully” vaccinated? How many boosters? Annual?
Aren’t delta and other variants simply the predictable evolution of any virus?
How do we define a “case” or infection if someone shows no symptoms and feels fine?
Can covid really be eradicated like polio? If so, why haven’t we eradicated flu by now?

And so on. We never get clear answers, but only fog.

But perhaps the most shocking thing about sixteen months is our childlike inability to consider tradeoffs! I’m not only talking about the tremendous economic consequence of shutting down businesses, and the horrific financial damage it has done and will do to millions of Americans. I’m not only talking about the depression, isolation from friends and loved ones, alcoholism, untreated illness, suicide, weight gain and obesity, stunted child development, and all the rest.

I’m talking about understanding the basic economic tradeoffs of covid policy: supply chain, food, energy, housing, unemployment. This is bread and butter economics.

I can’t stress this enough: millions of Americans have no conception of economics, and simply don’t believe tradeoffs exist. They think, are encouraged by the political class to think, that government can simply print money in the form of stimulus bills and pay people enhanced unemployment benefits to stay home. That the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], of all cockamamie federal agencies, can simply impose a rent moratorium and effectively vitiate millions of local contracts—it will just work itself out somehow. That Congress can simply issue forgivable PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] loans to closed or hobbled businesses so they can magically make payroll. That the Federal Reserve can simply buy up assets from commercial banks, lend them limitless funds, and command lower interest rates to stimulate housing and consumerism.

Millions of Americans, through sheer ignorance of economics, literally think these actions are costless and wholly beneficial—without downside.

And now we wonder why the economy can’t just flip a switch and get back to normal. But that’s not how an incredibly complex global supply chain, with just-in-time delivery, works. And that’s why thousands of Ford F-150s are sitting unsold, and unsellable, in huge parking lots—there is a global semiconductor chips shortage. Many of them come from a single company in Taiwan. By the way, semiconductor chips are used in everything from iPhones to Xbox consoles to Surface laptops to refrigerators.

There was a remarkable op-ed at CNBC recently about the supply chain interruptions. It gets the cause of inflation wrong, blaming it on the pandemic rather than central banks, but it paints a vivid picture of the serious problems facing a radically overstressed global manufacturing sector. Delays in delivery are said to be the longest in decades. And inflation plus delays is bad news, because it’s so hard for buyers and sellers at all stages of production to know what to charge and what to pay for either capital goods or consumption goods. How many construction projects, for example were blindsided by the five-time rise in lumber prices last year? Ports are clogged awaiting trucks—not enough drivers—so containers sit for weeks rather than days. Empty containers have become scarce. Rail schedules are affected by the ports like dominos, and freight prices are spiking. Will West Coast longshoremen strike in 2022 when their contract is up? Will new emissions regulations which slow ships kill more capacity? Will key Chinese factories shut down again due to delta?

None of it is pretty and may last into 2023. So buy your Christmas presents now!

We are starting to see the unseen, but economists, whose job it is to show us the tradeoffs, have been largely AWOL over the past year and a half. Consider this recent post by a famous libertarian free market economist:

US GDP is now higher, in fact a fair bit higher, than when the pandemic began.
US labor force participation is about 1.5% lower than when the pandemic began.
Was there really slack to the tune of a few million people in Jan of 2020?
Has inflation really changed enough to make the GDP numbers misleading?
Has total factor productivity improved that much in that time, under those stresses? (i.e. more output from less input, labor & capital).

Or is this all a sign that the structure of the economy is more stratified than we think—that there are millions of people in more-or-less filler jobs who can be cast out and the economy just keeps on running along? Yes, there are all sorts of reports of labor shortages, and all manner of supply chain hiccups which seem to often be associated with off shoring, but general activity is still high. (Or is it? Are the numbers reporting “vapor GDP?”—or are the inflation adjustments really out of whack so real GDP is not what we think it is?)

This is clever masquerading as smart, and it’s the sort of thing which makes people dislike economists. It’s homo economicus nonsense. This kind of navel-gazing—wondering aloud, as though we could shut down the world for a year, send everybody home, suspend rent payments, and not suffer tradeoffs—makes me think economics as a profession is not doing the world any good. People desperately need productive activity for their basic health and happiness, even if that activity doesn’t much add to the national economy.

A friend who runs a large chain of retail stores across several states sent me this in response.

It’s amazing how [BLANKED]-up this person is. An economy is a way to get stuff. Is there much stuff, or less stuff, than when this all began? More cars or less? More computers and personal digital devices or less? More food or less? More oil or less? Greater business to business supply chain or less?

But because this [BLANK] thinks the economy is a symbolic architecture, not a real thing for getting real stuff, he’s absolutely flummoxed by a simple question. Go outside, moron. Step away from the keyboard and the spreadsheet.

I thought he was spot on. Economics is the study of choice in the face of scarcity, of how we get the goods and services we want in an environment of tradeoffs and uncertainty. Nothing could be more disastrous to that environment than vague, open-ended government lockdown measures. We don’t need to move numbers around until they please us as some kind of substitute gnostic knowledge. We shut down the world over a virus, restarting it will be difficult, and the economic damage will be enormous and long lasting. Economists should be showing us the unseen damage, not cheering the juiced-up data.

My point here is to suggest the economics of our present situation are worse than advertised, and that economics is about that holds us together. What we think of as America is mostly an economic arrangement, not a social or cultural one—and certainly not a political arrangement. America is hardly a country anymore, and I take no pleasure in saying that. What happens when the economics unravel?

The Great Unraveling

But there is a happy upside to all of this. A silver lining, perhaps.

Over eighteen months we’ve learned that all crises are local. For eighteen months it has mattered very much whether you live in Florida or New York, whether you live in Sweden or Australia. And the physical analog world reasserted itself with a vengeance: no matter where you are, no matter how rich you may be, you must exist in corporeal reality. You need housing, food, clean water, energy, and medical care in the most physical sense. You need last-mile delivery, no matter what is happening in the broader world. Your local situation suddenly mattered quite a bit in 2020. It was the year localism reasserted itself.

Whether your local reality was dysfunctional or did not matter quite a bit in the terrible covid year. And people are waking up to the simple reality of this dysfunction. We know the federal government can’t manage covid. It can’t manage Afghanistan. It can’t manage debt, or the dollar or spending, or entitlements. It can’t even run federal elections, for God’s sake much, less provide security, or justice, or social cohesion.

So how can it manage a country of 330 million people? How can it manage fifty states?

Whether we want to call it the Great Awakening or the Great Realignment, something profound is happening. Imagine if the twenty-first century reverses the dominant trend of the nineteenth and twentieth, namely the centralization of political power in national and even supranational governments? What if we are about to embark on an experiment in localism and regionalism, simply due to the sheer inability of modern national governments to manage day-to-day reality?

A kind of centrifugal force is at work. Here in the US, people are self-segregating—both ideologically and geographically—in what we should think of as a kind of soft secession. A recent survey by United Van Lines confirms what we already knew: people are fleeing California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois for Texas, Idaho, Florida, and Tennessee. This is simple flight from the dysfunction of big cities and unworkable progressive policies, laid bare by the analog lessons of covid.

We should cheer this. If just 10 percent of Americans hold reasonable views on politics, economics, and culture they would constitute 33 million people—we could coalesce as a significant political force! And this nation within a nation would be larger and more economically powerful than many European countries.

Furthermore, we are witnessing a tremendous shift in political power away from cities toward exurbs and rural areas. There really is nothing like it in US history. America started in colonies and villages, before moving westward to farms and ranches. When factories began to replace farms as major employers, Americans moved to the old Rust Belt cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh and Detroit. When tech and finance began to overshadow manufacturing, Americans moved to Manhattan and Seattle and Silicon Valley for the best jobs. But that revolution in finance and tech means capital is more mobile than ever, and covid accelerated our ability to work from home. All of this could have huge beneficial effects for smaller cities and rural areas, which in turn could have profound effects for the congressional map and electoral college. If the angry school board meetings over masks are any indication, politics already has become more localized.

Covid policies ruined cities, at least for awhile, and the Great Unraveling will reduce the political and economic power of those cities. 

So a once-in-a-generation opportunity is before us. The federal government is far and away the biggest, most powerful institution in America, but as previous speakers mentioned, faith in institutions is crumbling. And it should crumble. Washington, DC, has been the centerpiece around which we organize society for a hundred years now, and that’s a profoundly evil reality. So we should cheer when Americans lose faith in it due to Trump or covid or Afghanistan or public opinion polls which show a deeply divided and skeptical country. There is a growing sense that DC is over, it’s done, and it’s time to turn our backs on it. We are losing our state religion.

Contra our political elites, covid and the disastrous reaction by governments may end up reducing their power and standing in society.

This article is excerpted from a talk delivered at the Ron Paul Institute conference on September 4, 2021

  • 1. Don’t let this happen! Read Mr. Berenson here. 

Author:

Contact Jeff Deist

Jeff Deist is president of the Mises Institute. He previously worked as chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul, and as an attorney for private equity clients. Contact: email; Twitter.

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How America Abandoned Decentralization and Embraced the State | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 4, 2021

Bassani sees in the states’ rights tradition the primary focus of resistance in the American context to the Leviathan state. “Whatever else might be said about the states’ rights tradition, one thing is certain: Over the course of the modern era it has shown itself to be the most potent intellectual restraint on the growth of Leviathan. . .

https://mises.org/wire/how-america-abandoned-decentralization-and-embraced-state

David Gordon

Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government 1776—1865. By Luigi Marco Bassani. Abbeville Institute Press, 2021. Vii + 356 pages.

Marco Bassani is a historian of European political thought and it is from the perspective of his discipline that he looks at the American political system that came to an end in 1865. As he sees matters, the United States from its inception as an independent country resisted the dominant trend of nineteenth-century Europe, the rise of the all-powerful state. Before the Civil War, the United States, as its plural name suggests, was federal and not central in form, and sovereignty resided ultimately in the people of the several states, taken separately, rather than in a unified entity. Bassani’s book is rich and complex, and, rather than attempt of a summary of its many valuable ideas, I’ll discuss only a few of them.

The state, he tells, us is a modern invention. “In fact, the state is modern. Indeed, the term ‘modernity’ itself makes very little sense politically except in relation to the state. . .The state is European in the sense that it originated and developed in Europe (thought it then became highly exportable). It is modern because it began its history during a period which more or less coincides with the modern age. And it is an ‘invention,’ not a discovery.” (pp. 12-13)

This puts him at odds with Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, and Bassani is explicit about this disagreement, but I do not think admirers of these authors need be too disturbed by this. Bassani does not deny that predatory bands that permanently settled in a territory extracted resources through the “political means” from the subject population. What he argues is new is the state taken in the Weberian sense, an entity that claims to be the sole source of legitimate authority. “In short, the first item on the agenda of the modern state was the centralization of power. At the dawn of the modern era the state began its long journey when absolute monarchs created a single decision-making center of command, which gradually imposed itself on all other decision makers. The centers that constituted the ‘medieval cosmos’ were obliterated. The state asserted itself as the sole, overriding and exclusive focus: In due time no other political power remained.”(p.24)

America took another path, though centralizers, most notably Alexander Hamilton, would have been happy to follow the European pattern. But though the Constitution increased the power of the central government over the weak arrangements provided for in the Articles of Confederation, it did not enact the plans of the centralizers. Moreover, the Constitution was ratified only after a bitter struggle. Bassani stresses the continuing influence of Antifederalist opposition to the Constitution on the Jeffersonian party, the principal opposition to the Federalist centralizers whose greatest figure was Hamilton. “The Antifederalists absolutely did not disappear from the American political scene; rather they simply became less visible for a few years. . .The divergent views of society—essentially, whether it directs itself or must be directed by the paternal iron fist of a national government—were at the heart of the divisions over power between the newly emerged Jeffersonian party and the Federalists in power. And these in turn were but the further development and the ideological crystallization of the political issues raised during the ratification debate. “(p.119)

Bassani devotes a great deal of attention to Jefferson and Calhoun as leaders of the opposition to the centralizers. Calhoun, in particular, he regards as the greatest American political theorist since the Constitutional debates, an opinion also shared by John Stuart Mill. “John Stuart Mill’s judgment reserved for the Disquisition [by Calhoun] is much better known. Calhoun, he wrote, ‘has displayed sharper powers as a speculative political thinker superior to any who has appeared in American politics since the authors of the “Federalist”’”. (p.233, note 111) But I will leave it to readers to investigate what he says about them, in order to concentrate on something else.

This is the role of Abraham Lincoln as a proponent of the European central state. “Lincoln’s deep political convictions emerged with great clarity and marked the decline of all the conceptions that had presided over the development of the Republic to that point. Lincoln stated that he held the Constitution to be an ‘organic law,’ thus introducing a European idea that had little precedent in America. . .Within the space of a few phrases we encounter all the constitutive elements of the theory of the modern state, expressed by a man who had probably never heard of Machiavelli, Bodin, or Hobbes, but who nevertheless was following in their footsteps.” (p.278)

Lincoln regarded the American national union as a matter of world historical importance. ”As proof of Lincoln’s concept of the Union and its goals, there is no more important document than his message to Congress of December 1, 1862. His impassioned description of the United States as a living being, as our ’national homestead,’ is the premise on which the President erected his argument for union. ‘In all its adaptations and aptitudes it demands Union and abhors separation. In fact, it would ere long force reunion, however much of blood and treasure the separation might have cost.’ In short, the Union, being an article of faith and exempt from rational cost-benefit analysis, has no price.” (pp.284-285)

Bassani sees in the states’ rights tradition the primary focus of resistance in the American context to the Leviathan state. “Whatever else might be said about the states’ rights tradition, one thing is certain: Over the course of the modern era it has shown itself to be the most potent intellectual restraint on the growth of Leviathan. . .The Constitution is not enough: The modern state, because it is self-regulating and judge of the extent of its own power, inevitably creates an absolute monopoly. In contrast, in an authentic federal system the government is subject to controls by other governmental powers. The institutional history of America, at least in the time frame we discussed, can be clearly seen as a large laboratory in which Calhoun’s refrain is clearly corroborated: Power can be checked only by power.” (p.311, emphasis in original)

Marco Bassani has written an outstanding book, based on a thorough knowledge of political theory and American history. I noted only a few mistakes. It is not true that “the formidable indictment in the Declaration of Independence targets only George III.” (p.66) The shift in the Declaration from the clauses that begin “He has” to those that begin “For” mark a movement from indictment of the king to an indictment of parliament. The 10th Amendment does not use the phrase “expressly delegated.” I would have preferred also a greater emphasis on the importance of individual rights. But all students of political theory and American history will learn a great deal from Bassani’s impressive work. Author:

Contact David Gordon

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review.

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