Political Decentralization as a Road to Anarcho-Capitalism | Ryan McMaken

all right it's 901 welcome to the decentralization talk uh the official title i believe is uh radical decentralization as uh road to anarcho-capitalism if you're not into antarctica capitalism you're in luck this doesn't require you to be so uh and if you like anarcho-capitalism you're also in luck because then we'll talk about this as a strategy toward achieving that however this is the sort of thing where it's good either way if we adopt uh radical decentralist principles it will simply move us more in the direction of limiting the state and expanding uh people's self-determination and basic human rights and so on uh and i'm ryan mcmakin i'm uh the editor for mises.org for mises wire uh so if you ever wanna write an article for us just send it to me uh directly and i'll email you back about that uh but my background my graduate work was mostly in political science and so this is really more of a field for that uh it has to do with in more of an issue of international relations it's more the domain of historians and so on we're looking about the con at the construction of states and their interactions between states and really what that means for the people who live in them and there's certainly an economic aspect to it uh in in what we'll see and what we'll find is that smaller states are more economically prosperous and that small states are what paved the way for europe's prosperity and and then finally we'll we'll look at a couple of the objections to a world based on small states and small communities but what let's start with just really defining our terms what do we mean by decentralization and in the political science literature of course we have different types of of states we have unitary states we have federalist states that is you can have governments where absolutely everything really functions at the pleasure of the central government and uh probably the most typical example of this may be france where the government in paris really sets the boundaries of local districts and overwhelmingly is responsible for the legislation that that governs the country and there's not much sovereignty afforded to local government units throughout the country the at the other extreme you might find a country like switzerland where you have a variety of cantons kind of equivalent to the u.s state which have a high degree of independence and sovereignty and the the confederation the central government is very limited in what it can do and has to afford a certain amount of independence then to these different districts now so we can look at that and we can see that some states then write into their structure a decentralized structure you might have a constitution that says that uh we have some sort of there are guidelines here that provide some powers to certain levels of government and some powers to to the main central government in some cases though decentralization is just de facto because your your central government is too weak really to impose uniformity on the country and historically that's often been the case and it's still the case in many countries today where there's a weaker central government that simply lacks the resources to go and ensure uh compliance from the regions and to bring them to heal and uh but all countries have some degree of this and also we know that uh internationally uh there's decentralization as well and we'll look at that in a little bit more detail but being pro-decentralist uh recognizing the value of decentralization as a means of limiting state power has long been baked in built into the liberal ideology and when i say liberal i mean 19th century 18th century liberal what americans call classical liberal now most foreigners would know what you mean by liberal it means basically libertarian only americans decided that liberal now means social democrat which is really the the proper term uh if you want to describe a leftist who's in favor of the welfare state so this is a social democrat uh in a classroom context or an academic context liberal just simply means people like thomas jefferson uh people like frederick bastiat and so on and so we find though that this the issue of decentralization is a core concept for the liberals and looking for a definition we might go then to the frenchman charles montalembere who was in the who was a 19th century liberal in the same school as uh alexi de tocqueville also uh maybe even later gustav de molinari and frederick bastiat as well and he defines decentralization as the sum of quote-unquote liberties local and personal municipal and provincial and he was in favor of promoting these in all possible ways and so what he's saying is that you've got other entities outside the state you've got persons of course but you've also got local municipal groups you've got religious groups and so on and if we promote the liberties of these groups we're limiting the state through that way and this and by maintaining the integrity even of these different groups and having those counter balances to the central state this can be very important as well and another frenchman benjamin constant who with only some exaggeration some people have called the inventor of liberalism uh he says the interests and memories which are born of local customs contain a germ of resistance which authority suffers only with regret and which it hastens to eradicate with individuals it has its way more easily it rolls its enormous weight over them effortlessly as over sand so we definitely want not just then independence and liberty for the individuals within a society but it's also important that they be able to create these other organizations that the state hates by the way right so any sort of local association local group that has different ways of going about the world different ways of thinking than the central government this the central state hates that and wants to destroy it but it has an easier time of doing that if those organizations are reduced or eradicated and instead we embrace this idea of just individuals who have liberty and take away the independence of certain groups within the state and that's generally what we see when we're talking about a a state or a confederation or someone that's been reduced to a variety of sovereignties whether it's a state or a canton or a province or some other sort of group the idea is that that group would serve as some sort of counterbalance to the power of the central state and this is uh just simply typical for a lot of debate amongst liberals in the 18th and 19th century now this comes down to a historical view as well there's this uh of course a long time prevailing myth that uh in the in the middle ages all of europe was ruled by despots and theocrats who enjoyed almost total untrammeled power and they claimed total divine acceptance of everything that they thought should happen and that was only with the enlightenment and the age of reason and so on that people started to see that that government power could be problematic and we should limit it in some way uh this certainly is not the way it actually happened and uh alexi de tocqueville talks about this a little bit uh here's a passage from uh democracy in america the second volume 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 so he's saying 1740s 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 but what he's saying is that at some point in the 19th century then certainly after the french revolution this began to be reversed and you started to get a larger bureaucratic state more state centralization and uh so he was lamenting that uh that was the case and saw these earlier uh aristocratic groups and religious groups and so on as providing a obstacle to the centralization of state power and he says that the state has everywhere resumed to itself alone these natural attributes to 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 so he's in democracy in america part two he looks extensively at the issue of decentralization and how this is what really stands in the way then of total despotism most people recognize on a basic fundamental level that decentralization has value we could consider for example a global system that was all one giant state most people if you ask them would think that was probably undesirable and uh wow it doesn't have to be a global state we could just look at something like say south america why isn't south america all just one giant state and why shouldn't it be a lot of people would identify that there are perhaps different regional interests and historical reasons why all these people shouldn't just simply be with within one group and if we look at the mechanics of it we could immediately see a big problem we see that among the population of south america brazilians constitute uh very nearly 50 percent of uh all the population like 49.8 percent or something like that and so you can see immediately what's going to happen right whatever it is that interests brazil and as behooves brazil all they have to do is ally with one other country and they can therefore dictate policy to to everyone else in our south american republic then and so a lot of people recognize from the beginning that if they were to have any sort of self-determination they were going to have to decentralize then the state and this was of course the original goal of many uh independence fighters in south america was that we're going to break off from state spain and have one large free state but it didn't work out that way because there are regional differences and people recognize that in matters of language in matters of economy and industry and so on it doesn't make sense to simply shove everybody into the same country at the global level of course it would it would this would make very little sense you would have a country with a billion people like china or a country with a billion people like india if these were governed on a one-man one-vote sort of principle they'd be out voting everybody all the time uh all of the americas doesn't have as many people as some country some single countries in asia so that's certainly problematic and people don't think of themselves as being pro-decentralization just because they think there should be many countries in the world but that's essentially uh what they are they're conceding that concept now we're here today to talk about radical decentralization though we can find lots of decentralization in various times and places and we can see that the liberals promoted it and so on but what is it when it's radical now the phrase radical decentralization as far as i know it's it was mostly used and popularized by rothbard in just a few places and it's something a little bit different i think we could say that if we're to define uh radical decentralization it's a type of decentralization that is robust both in terms of the amount of sovereignty attained by each individual unit and the degree of its localism that is essentially the smallness of it or the population within it not necessarily geographically small but small in terms of population and you would probably need both of those concepts then obviously we can have states that have a high degree of sovereignty uh which the united states for example which has sovereignty in spades right no other nation state really threatens u.s sovereignty in any way and at the same time though this isn't a highly local sort of government even if you take into account the federalism involved as well this is a huge state governed for the most part by five supreme court justices who then dictate to 330 million people what's constitutional what's acceptable and what's not that's certainly not radical decentralization at the same time we could have a very high degree of locality we could have a country that has lots of different municipal governments and lots of small units within it but if they are essentially at the mercy of a central government in uh whether in a constitutional way or a de facto way then we wouldn't say that's radical decentralization as well what we've got to have is a lot of real largely independent states not necessarily totally independent they could be in some kind of loose confederation or some sort of association that's part of that sort but if we're going to say that they're mostly can do what they want especially internally and and there's a large number of them then we would say that's a radically decentralized system now the international system today is arguably radically decentralized it depends on what you mean by a lot of states it could certainly be much more radical now the political scientists have a word for the international system and that is it's an anarchic system and uh so uh some people i'm familiar with this act as if there's anarchy just means chaos but within the context of academic political science it doesn't mean that at all it means in fact in many cases a large system that has its own legal system and very set and commonly followed ways of uh acting among the independent entities and this is what the international system is right now we've got about 200 odd countries that are all at least uh technically sovereign but many of them are in fact sovereign in the fact that they can do what they want without a whole lot of interference from another state now yes the u.s and other major powers try to interfere in a lot of cases but we do have mitigating factors there such as international law and the fact that especially in the modern world invading and bombing other countries back into the stone age has significant cost to it especially if those people are your trading partners and if it makes you a pariah state among other states so there are limits on what just powerful states can do in the international system and we would definitely say that this is an anarchic system and one that is certainly decentralized radically so uh arguably it's less radical now than in the past and if we look then at what it was that made europe rich we come upon the theory of uh the european miracle and this is a this is a theory among historians who wanted to go in and they wanted to see why is it that europe which had been this economic backwater in uh in the early middle ages and had seemed very primitive and unimpressive compared to say the great empires of the east especially china how is it that just 500 years later europe was this major massive economic power that could easily dominate entire continents elsewhere and so on and one reason given for this is that it was due to europe's radical decentralization that existed throughout much of the middle ages and we go back to that myth with this idea that uh europe was dominated by the catholic church and it was all this one huge theocratic state and so on and that of course wasn't the reality at all what you really had was a system of hundreds of small principalities where certainly the church tried to exert its influence over these states but usually failed considerably because of course the locals in these places had their own interests the princes had their own interests and resisted so you had a constant back and forth you had a tension between the religious authorities and the secular authorities and the civil authorities and other groups as well and uh this led to a situation where you never had any single state that dominated the region this was very much unlike china and unlike the islamic world where you had much stronger states who were able to exert a lot of influence over a smaller number of states and so historian ralph raco who he's got books in the bookstore here i highly recommend them and was along an associate of rothbard certainly one of the best liberal historians he examines the issue of the european miracle and he sums it up this way he says 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 and have you ever seen a map of the holy roman empire which by no means really any sort of unified district in no way a nation-state as we think of it today it was just a countless number of tiny provinces and principalities and so on where you could easily travel from one to the other and what did this mean in terms of daily practice well an example that rhaego would give would be something like this i am a merchant and i live in my i run my operations out of a small principality that's on the rhine river in northwest europe and the prince in my region where i am he decides he's going to raise taxes considerably and so what am i to do well a lot of modern people under democratic theory and so on say oh well you need to put get together an interest group and maybe you can go to the legislature and ask for a different law and all that sort of thing but that's not the way it worked at all the easiest thing to do in many cases was simply to move your operation slightly down the river and since these principalities were so small you this was quite feasible you didn't have to leave europe you didn't have to pull up everything and move hundreds or thousands of miles away you could simply move to a neighboring district in many cases where you might have a prince who was very glad to have you as a merchant who could then bring wealth into his district and this would be contrasted with china whereas in china if you had a problem with some law passed down by an imperial bureaucrat or the emperor or so on where could you go you could leave china but what did that require that requires you possibly to move hundreds if not a thousand miles away also you're gonna have to go someplace where you're gonna have to learn a completely different language you're gonna have to go to some place where civilization was totally different and if you think that moving of course from one country to another is a big cultural change today you can only imagine what it was in the year 1300 and so on it was enormous and in europe however that wasn't the case if i moved down the river they quite possibly speak the same language and even if they didn't speak quite the same language still the educated classes spoke latin uh and so i could at least then conduct business to some extent and then learn the local lag which was probably related in a similar language anyway and then of course they had the same religion too most likely and so i didn't have to change my religion which course you would have to do if you switched empires or something like that in uh in other parts of the world so you can see then how the cost to escaping one jurisdiction is much much lower in europe than it is in another place where you got to change religion language everything leave your family behind maybe even leave your property behind because this empire was strong enough to prevent you from taking your property with you and this uh all of these events then conspired to create a system where european princes were afraid really in many cases to really impose themselves and extract taxes in a draconian way because they thought people would simply go away then and from a historian jean-bash lair he says the first condition for the maximization of economic efficiency is the liberation of civil society with respect to the state the expansion of capitalism owes its origins and raison de tre to political anarchy so bae schleyer is talking on the european miracle here as well he's saying that if you want to maximize economic efficiency and growth you need to limit civil society and uh how do you do that political anarchy that's really the key now and then so to really just drive home the issue we have another raikou quote here where he says decentralization and power also came to mark the domestic arrangements of the various european polities here feudalism which produced a nobility rooted in feudal right rather than in state service is thought by a number of scholars who have played an important role through the struggle for power within the realms representative bodies came into being and princes often found their hands tied by the charters of rights like magna carta for instance which they were forced to grant their subjects in the end even within the relatively small states of europe power was dispersed among estates orders charter towns religious communities corps universities so on each with its own guaranteed liberties so this wasn't like planned ahead of time this wasn't hey let's uh let's create a little kingdom here and we're gonna we're gonna write everything out and who's got what rights and so on this was a process that took place over centuries where you might have a group of uh bourgeois merchants in a city who then began who gained enough political and economic power they could start to demand their rights so then they got something written in for them into the charter that gave them their own city and town where they could live by their own laws and so on and this compounded over time where he ended up with a complex system of different rights and different privileges and so on that ended up really sapping the power of the central state now we see this can this these advantages continue today there's uh there's significant research out there showing that small states today that they do better that their gdp per capita is higher that these states are more flexible more versatile even the world bank admits this uh in some studies uh well in one study we can see that the world bank concludes quote controlling for locations smaller states are actually richer than other states in per capita gdp unquote it is true that because of their small size these countries could be more susceptible to volatility when there's an economic collapse and so on but quote their openness pays off in growth and we've seen other studies where this applies even in africa where smaller african states are more open they have more free trade and they're more able to deal with economic crises and problems this isn't due just to the economic issue as well but it you can see how in a smaller state you would have left less in conflict among different ethnic groups and so on so they of course uh opponents of century of decentralization claim oh well any country that gets its independence and so on will immediately close its borders and raise tariffs and so on there's there's no evidence to support this claim at all what they always do is point to like some one weird exception like north korea or something like this but when we look out there and examine the world as a whole clearly the preponderance of evidence points to the fact that small countries are more likely to be open with smaller taxes and in fact other research has shown that small countries benefit everybody even the people in the large countries because what you get then are small countries that are neighboring to large countries the small countries want to attract capital because large countries are able to attract capital because they're large they have in the the era of fiat currency they have a larger economies trading in that currency there's economies of scale that take place in larger countries and so on but if you have a neighboring small country they're going to try and then suck away some of those resources by lowering taxes or lowering uh their regulations and this is why you see eu officials and people like angela merkel complaining about how we need tax harmonization they want to pass legislation that requires all countries to have more or less similar tax rates because if we let if we keep letting the irish or the slovenians and so on setting their own taxes going to set them low because they're going to want to try to compete with the larger states and we can't have that so we need to set similar tax rates everywhere and this is because they recognize smaller states are they're kind of a thorn in the side of the larger states because they're always searching for ways to actually appeal to the merchant class and there's lots of other ways that we can look at the ways that uh small countries are better uh lots of measures there was a recent book that came out by a person named frank buckley called american uh secession and there's a section of the book has he does a lot of regressions and so on trying to find out what are the benefits of small states and you know you take that those regressions with a with a grain of salt but i think they can be uh illustrative of things and he concludes after running a bunch of these that smaller quote smaller countries are happier and less corrupt they're less inclined to throw their weight around military militarily and they're freer if there are advantages to bigness the costs exceed the the benefits bigness is badness and you'll notice a lot of the time when we see all these uh lists of the world's happiest countries and the world's freest cleanest countries safest countries and so on it's usually a country like norway and of course what they immediately say oh it's because norway is a socialist country which isn't even true but they don't consider the norway as 5 million people and that this would be this is the same size as say colorado or minnesota if those were independent countries these are small countries uh sweden has around 10 million denmark has under 10 million these are small states even in the u.s context and so maybe the smallness has something to do with it buckley would claim that yes i mean obviously we know it's not because they're allegedly more socialist now so how would radical decentralization actually work in real life so we we can accept that smallness is good that we need more small states how is that actually achieved well uh fortunately ludwig von mises provides us with a blueprint for this he was very concerned with self-determination how do we avoid conflict between different ethnic groups here mises was especially concerned with different uh uh language groups partly because he was uh consumed with the issue of the world after world war one where they were redrawing the lines on the map to uh well polish speaking people go here and german speaking people go there and so on mises are very familiar with the sort of conflict that arises out of those sorts of conflicts and he uh he he basically said here here's how you do it this is how you get smaller countries and you do it in a in a just and reasonable way the right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory whether it be a single village a whole district or a series of adjacent districts make it known by a freely conducted plebiscite that they no longer wish to remain united to the state in which they belong at the time but what but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state their wishes are to be respected and complied with this is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars unquote so he's recognizing there are lots of different places in the world where you have people of different ethnic language whatever economic interests and so on and they're all shoved into a single state together that's going to lead to civil war it's going to lead to unrest it's going to lead to problems what's the solution to this you let the people in that region take a vote and then if they want to leave you let them leave you certainly don't fight a war over it and he goes on though this isn't just for big areas if it were quote if it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination that is this right of secession to every individual person it would have to be done this is impracticable only because of competing of compelling technical considerations which make it necessary that the right of self-determination is restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country so mises coming out right here and saying uh basically that theoretically anarchy where you had just a small single family theoretically could then vote to leave your nation state or failing that maybe a small village maybe a neighborhood and he sees that there's really only a practical problem to this that uh because of economies of scale and some other issues you need a group of people large enough to actually administer uh some sort of district or some sort of province how big that is well he probably imagined that was actually really quite small looking at the the context in which he's writing we're certainly not talking about something that required 10 or 20 million people uh you could be looking at 50 000 people uh which uh in his book uh human scale kirkpatrick sales says that this is the correct size for any state it's fifty thousand that the entire world should be city states composed of fifty thousand people anything larger than that is absurd and it could no way reflect the will of the people who live there and so what does that mean that just means you have a system of where people are getting together all the time determining do we want to be part of this nation state and if we want to secede from it we will and we'll hold one of these freely elected plebiscites and the right of self-determination dictates that you let us do this and what this means then for the the issue of really limiting state power is that we need to recognize what happens then when a large state breaks up into smaller pieces and and what this means is that we almost certainly want more states uh well the more states there are the more choices you have so what mises was trying to accomplish with his his strategy of having different groups break off from larger states or join other states is that people are actually able to engage in some sort of choice and this then reduces uh the amount of monopoly that each state is able to exercise over people and there are some objections raised against this the problem is what if you have some people in that district who voted no they didn't want to leave the answer that of course is then more secession to break that leaving district into smaller districts so say california votes to secede from the united states clearly you're going to have some people within that region that voted no because they wanted to stay in the u.s some people argue well you can never have secession because of that because they're always going to be some some minority vote the answer doesn't lie then and forever prohibiting secession and just ending decentralization the answer lies then and allowing then california to break up into smaller pieces and then the people in those areas can do what they want now of course there's mixing of population in certain cases but there's really only so much you can do with that i mean what do you say just that whoever's in the minority then is just stuck or whoever's in the majority then just gets to dictate everywhere always uh whoever's in these places at some point you have to recognize that just the status quo borders everywhere are not ordained by god and that it could be that these do not suit the arrangements and that some people might even have to move in order to take advantage of the the freedom offered by other neighboring jurisdictions now this is then enhanced by the option of having more states so let's think about it we've got the united states and it's all one big state if we divide it up into two now i have more choices so if i live in i live just west of the mississippi so i live in kansas and i decide that western america this new republic is is uh very oppressive to me i'm going to move to eastern america now so i can do that i just have to move across the mississippi river let's say that's now the border now what do i have to do to make that move i don't have to move very far uh i might still be able to move close enough where i could even visit my family on a regular basis i don't have to learn a new religion the climate isn't significantly different if there's some level of freedom and trade i can even continue to trade with a lot of my old customers there's a lot of advantages to that it's exactly what we saw in this earlier example from europe and that i don't have to leave the civilization i don't have to change my religion or anything like that i simply now need to move slightly across this new border that's been created now then what if we take those two states and we break them up into four now whatever state i'm in i have three other choices that are relatively nearby where the same language and same culture is basically practice and you can see where it goes from there the worst possible situation of course is one single global state where i have no other choices at all and this is the this is the perfect state since the state is founded on the idea of of creating a total monopoly over the means of coercion if there's only one single state i've finally attained that monopoly in a in a world where there's a multitude of states that monopoly is never really quite achieved and so there's no really true states in the world in the in the true pure form because you can move to a certain extent however states raise the cost of doing that so it's difficult to do so as long as the united states remains one single state and i want to leave i've only got two other choices really in north america i can move to mexico or canada if i go to mexico i have to learn a new language if i move to canada i still might probably have to move 300 400 even a thousand miles away and so on and that's just that's a pretty high cost that imposes on me and that's of course if canada will even have me which they may not and uh but what we do know from our earlier empirical evidence is that a large number of smaller states is actually more open uh to movement within those states because they're always trying to attract more capital especially people from the merchant class so the key here is we want to bring about more choice we want people to be able to look out there and see oh well there's five other choices just within 500 miles that i can move to and so if we look at decentralization in the context of how do we move toward a more uh anarcho-capitalist society toward a more true free society the answer lies then in creating a lot of states 200 globally is far too few now a lot of people say well then we should you know we need to reduce and secede down to the individual level there should be seven billion states okay that's a fine ideal but it would be a massive improvement just if we had a thousand states instead of 200 or 10 000 or 20 000 or 30 000 that's still a lot of people per state if you divide 30 000 into 7 billion right these aren't like tiny tiny jurisdictions however the amount of choice you would have would be significant and then of course once you start to get down to a certain micro level at some point the state really ceases to become a state and is more like a homeowners association or something where you're simply living within a district where you have considerable influence and say and if it's just no big deal to leave and go to a neighboring district is this even really a state in in the way that we think of it because its power has been so curtailed at that point now a lot of people will continue to complain well yes even if i had 100 choices nearby though there's still going to be people there that i don't like and it's not going to be a perfect situation for me and so really i should be able to just have my own state where i do whatever i want well now we're just well into complete fantasy land right this isn't the way the market works of course if you want to go out and buy a car unless you're fabulously wealthy and can have a custom car built from the ground up you're not going to be able to get a car that suits you in every conceivable way when you go out and you look for a car you're going to try and find the car that's least bad that suits your needs that has the amenities you want and sometimes they're not going to be mixed together because those people who produce cars they're creating cars in a way that suits their production facilities that which they think will sell to a large number of people which will appeal to most people but maybe those mass-produced cars that appeal to most people don't appeal to you well too bad i mean you just you can't have everything you want in life and the same is true of communities if we were going to choose among those communities the more choices you have the the better the odds are that you're going to be able to find one that suits you in terms of your religion your worldview uh your habits your family type your sexual orientation all of these things there's going to be probably something that suits you relatively well now what this means then is that those communities are probably going to have people in them that want to preserve to some extent uh a certain type of community that they like and this takes us then to the issue of the the covenant community and this is something that hapa discusses we'll start with a quote from him so we can imagine one of these very small states uh the republic of pasadena for example where this is just about 80 000 people or so and we all live in this community and people come and go but if you move there it's probably a deliberate choice this is small enough where after a while people who stayed people who came this was something they did on purpose they weren't just born there and grew up there people who live where they live they live there due to some deliberate act just as if you drive a toyota it's because of a deliberate choice you made in most cases you probably didn't just inherit it from your parents uh so hapa says all lay so in this covenant community in this very small state in this neighborhood in this place where we entered it and we maybe signed a contract that said we're going to live here because we like it because it suits our needs uh quote all land is privately owned including all streets rivers airports and harbors with respect to some pieces of land the property title may be unrestricted that is the owner is permitted to do whatever he pleases with his property as long as he does not physically damage the property of others with respect to other territories the property title may be more or less restricted as is currently the case in some housing developments the owner may be bound by contractual limitations on what he can do with his property which might include residential rather than commercial use no buildings more than four stories high no sale or rent to unmarried couples smokers or germans for instance unquote so you can see how this of course works with homeowners associations now when you start telling people that oh yes well in a covenant community-based uh anarchic order it'll be somewhat like homeowners association well everybody hates homeowners associations right because for whatever reason they don't want to read the contract and they don't want to be held to these these voluntary rules that they've signed on to and they think later that they should be able to do uh whatever they want but if we were to be living in a system where you had you had communities to choose from and you had to pick one that best suited you chances are you're probably gonna have to assent uh to certain rules that are in there now you may not like those rules and that's why the key is to have uh other choices but we we could see what the point hop is making here right say you move into a community and your neighbor uh he's running a brothel out of his house um and he's got junk cars piled up in the front yard and so on you might find that objectionable i mean i often when i give talks every now and then to groups of people who fancy themselves libertarian and so on i asked them how many of you would be perfectly fine you you believe in private property right how many of you would be perfectly fine with your neighbor um just having a crack house next door and uh just running a car a dealership out of his driveway all hours of the night right that's his property don't mess with it right some people in the audience maybe pretend like they have no problem with them but i don't believe them i think i think all of these property rights loving people they don't like that that concept they recognize there's some way to deal with that a lot people deal with that with homeowners associations in many cases but you could have a more broadly envisioned community as well something that we would call a city or a municipality or a city-state that would have its own internal rules the key to the freedom in that case is that you would have other choices you would have ease of escape and of course some way of affecting the rules once you're there and it's not like these are just static jurisdictions where the rules never change but it would be certainly not a state in the way we think of it today with huge frontiers and 100 million people and escaping is very difficult and so this is what we're thinking of when we imagine radical decentralization small number or a large number of small states where you can influence what happens but which it's based more on private contract and a deliberate choice you make to live there now there are other some other issues here that are important as well rothbard spoke of radical decentralization as a type of national liberation and he this he uses this in the context of the american revolution uh which uh writing and conceived in liberty talks about the american revolution the first successful war of national liberation we had these americans who weren't quite british who wanted to do their own thing and they threw off the chains of their rulers through secession they were decentralizing the world when they fought to to get 13 new independent colonies uh through the revolutionary war but then he applies a similar he was nothing if not consistent on this issue and he applies similar analysis later at the end of the cold war for example he was of course totally in favor of massive decentralization on the ruins of the soviet union and he wanted all the old uh states of europe that were behind the iron curtain to then be uh removed from the old soviet bloc and granted independence and uh one issue was the baltic nations and something that drove him bonkers at the time was the fact that the establishment in the world at the time was greatly opposed to decentralization the new york times and all the usual suspects they didn't want the baltic states to secede from the soviet union we're talking about lithuania estonia and latvia up there um northeast of poland and these were countries that had suffered horribly under soviet domination and they were talking about leaving the soviet union but the times and uh the people in the the bush administration so well you can't have that that's just anarchy if you just let let these people leave and we'll turn it into a democratic state and then the russians everyone all the citizens of the former soviet union can vote on what should happen and so on well of course rothbard pointed out which way that would go right you can imagine if the baltics were still in some sort of russian federation today how would each vote go would the uh 5 million people live in the baltics be able to have any influence over the 100 million people live in the rest of of russia who would be absurd and so uh rothbard sums it up this way dripping with disdain for the very idea he's kind of summing up the new york times position oh the baltic nations are part of the soviet union and therefore their unilateral secession against the will of the majority of the ussr becomes an affront to democracy to majority rule and last but far from at least to the unitary centralizing nation-state that allegedly embodies the democratic ideal and so a lot of people when they when they oppose decentralization it's not just on the grounds that they think the state should have more power and they don't want people doing their own thing they they believe this ideology of the fact that we don't need decentralization because we have democracy and people will just vote but as we discussed already in our south america example once you start to do that what do you do with the problem of minorities they have no way of asserting any sort of independence or self-determination and so on and that's why mises wanted these groups these minority groups to be able to break off and the last issue the last objection is the issue of foreign policy and you you can see this in any comments on any articles that we might run about radical decentralization and the benefits of small states and they always say oh yes well small states might seem fine until you have a large neighbor who decides to just conquer you and there's some good research showing that this really is in fact not the case because richer states uh do far better in terms of military defense than than is really thought and it's better to be rich than large uh in many cases also just the historical record shows this isn't true right why didn't the united states just conquer canada uh long ago why canada and the u.s been at peace since 1815 and why doesn't the u.s just conquer mexico there's a there's a cost to conquering other countries and you can become a pariah state it upsets the status quo better to just dominate it if you can however in research done by a political scientist named michael beckley uh he's done some good work on military uh efficiency and he does a a fair amount of empirical research looking at have small states how have they performed against larger states and he shows lots of examples one chief example being israel for example this is a small state surrounded by enemies that does really quite well in terms of defending itself people say oh well israel depends on the us as its sponsor and its defender but that doesn't defeat our argument simply shows that some small states are extremely effective at using somebody else's resources to provide defense for themselves i don't see how that's that's great for israel that's really that shows their success is a small state and you have you have a similar issue with the uk in fact since the uk ceased to be a great power they've relied significantly on their alliance with the united states to really promote and defend their interests and so they've been able to really extend their power as a medium-sized state really not a small one but say they were much smaller they would still be able to rely on the us because of cultural uh and economic bonds uh between the countries so there's another it's why isn't the u.s conquered the united kingdom right there's a small state why don't we just take it over and make it the 51st state and so on well there's a reason so that doesn't happen so i would if you want to look into more of this i would recommend uh beckley's work where he's he uh has historical examples as well and he says uh per capita gdp is actually uh every bit as important if not more so than total gdp so when you're looking at a state like china yeah china has total gdp that's very high but their per capita gdp is very low so they're not actually nearly as powerful as you suspect they are because a country that produces a lot because of a large population also consumes a lot and if you start then siphoning off resources to wars of conquest and so on that brings further down the per capita consumption and now you've got civil unrest and a starving population on your hands and that threatens the actual existence of the state so it's not there's not some pad answer about oh yeah small states are worthless because big states will just conquer them all obviously not the case since there's lots of small states in the world but also we can see that some good empirical research has been shown uh that this just simply isn't the case and there's good reasons for that so that concludes my talk uh for today there's a i would certainly encourage you to look deeply into both the uh the the analysis of of current small states and how they perform they're richer the historical conditions that led to europe uh and its prosperity which was rooted in the small states and and maybe examining further uh mises uh explanation and and uh strategy for bringing about a world of more small states and how it's significantly more just than the current situation we have so thank you very much you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 5,263

Rating: 4.8878503 out of 5

Keywords: Economics, Politics, Anarchy, Capitalism, Anarcho-Capitalism, Mises, Rothbard, McMaken, Decentralization, Secession, Freedom, Property, Hoppe

Id: VyfytL_JuGo

Length: 49min 23sec (2963 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TyrantSmasher420]

Maybe we could adopt the term isostocracy (or rule by network) rather than 'anarchy'. This would better indicate we want a decentralized government that doesn't presume political authority, rather than no laws or rules.