He is Prince Leonard of Hutt, the absolute monarch of 18,500 acres of farmland in Australia’s sparsely populated wheat belt, about a five-hour drive north of Perth. His kingdom, the Principality of Hutt River, declared its independence on April 21, 1970, to protest newly introduced grain quotas that Prince Leonard (a farmer whose real name is Leonard Casley) says would have crippled him financially. After unsuccessfully petitioning the government for an exemption, he brushed up on his English common law and promptly seceded.

That decision made him the founding father of a micro-secession movement that has popped up across the globe, including in the U.K. and Israel. Hutt River is one of about 30 micro­nations spread across Australia, ranging from the ridiculous—the four people who comprise the Republic of Awesome—to the sincere, like the Principality of Snake Hill north of Sydney that takes itself extremely seriously, even if few others do.

The event, presented by the Temple American Inn of Court in conjunction with Gray’s Inn, London, pitted British barristers against American lawyers to determine whether or not the American colonists had legal grounds to declare secession…

To the British, however, secession isn’t the legal or proper tool by which to settle internal disputes. “What if Texas decided today it wanted to secede from the Union? Lincoln made the case against secession and he was right,” they argue in their brief.

We agree with the British in these pages that it was secession. But, if you read our July 4th secession week blogging, we disagree that the grievances listed in the Declaration were too trivial to justify secession.

This isn’t total secession. The new state would still be a member of USG, just as West Virginia became a state by breaking off from Virginia in the summer of 1861. No one takes this seriously, and they shouldn’t, but it leads to some interesting questions.

Ilya Somin comments:

This is one of those areas where I think the Constitution gets things wrong. Seceding from a state should not be easy. But it also should not be as impossibly difficult as the Constitution currently makes it. Some of our present states are probably too big, and California is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon.

Normally, dysfuctional state policies are constrained by the possibility of “voting with your feet.” If a state imposes overly high taxes, adopts flawed regulations, or provides poor public services, people and businesses will tend to migrate elsewhere, thereby incentivizing the state government to clean up its act in order to preserve its tax base. For reasons I discussed in this article, foot voters usually have incentives to be better-informed and more rational in their decision-making than ballot-box voters.

In California’s case, however, this dynamic has been undercut by the state’s size and favorable geographic location. Because California is extremely large and controls most of the warm-weather coastal territory on the West Coast, people have been willing to put up with a lot of bad policies for the opportunity to live there. Competitive pressure on the state government would be much greater if there were three or four states occupying California’s present territory instead of one.

And Arnold Kling adds:

The theory and some of the practical issues involved in this are discussed in the widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced. There, I argue against the notion that there are scale economies at work in large governmental units. If that were true, then places like Denmark would be failed states. And Switzerland would be a hopelessly failed state. Each Swiss canton is about the size of a county in the state of Maryland, and yet the cantons have more autonomy than U.S. states. Below the canton level, there is local government.

A few years ago I read a lightweight history of how the states got their shapes. California broke all the rules because it had the gold and other minerals. Its borders run so long north-south because the elite wanted to control as much of the Sierra Nevada range as possible. That fact is not going to change their mind completely, but once people see the arbitrariness in this border-making process, then perhaps their imaginations might become just a tad more flexible when thinking about the status quo.

Community leaders on Easter Island have threatened to secede from Chile and transfer allegiance to Polynesian states in a row over land rights and immigration.

Prominent families from the indigenous Rapa Nui population have told the Pacific Islands Forum, an inter-governmental body, that they wish to renounce Chilean sovereignty and be considered part of Oceania rather than the Americas…

Leviante Araki, head of the Rapa Nui “parliament”, an advocacy group for indigenous people who comprise half the 5,000 population, requested secession in a letter this week to the Pacific Island Forum and Chile’s President Sebastian Pinera. The would-be separatists resent what they say is an uncontrolled influx of tourists and settlers and accuse the government of taking over ancestral land with state offices. Protesters occupied several state-owned buildings.

I can imagine, for instance, in the year 2020 or so, a movement in some states to break away from the union. Which would bring about, of course, a drama of Lincolnian darkness. . . . You will know that things have reached a bad pass when Newsweek and Time, if they still exist 15 years from now, do cover stories on a surprising, and disturbing trend: aging baby boomers leaving America, taking what savings they have…

She’s quoting herself there from 1994, but it came back to her because she read a story on Drudge about Americans in London giving up their citizenship. Imagine that.

Arnold Kling points to audio of a lecture by Ben Powell on Somalia’s experience with statelessness. As Claudia Williamson argued in her guest post for secession week, when we compare statelessness with the relevant counterfactual of predatory government, anarchy seems to perform well.

One of the more interesting aspects of Somalia’s statelessness, from the competitive government perspective we take here at LaTNB, is the role of flexible clan identities. As Arnold puts it, “there is competitive virtual government, in the sense that you choose your legal system by choosing a clan, and clans are not geographically based.”

I think this is a key historical example of competition among social institutions in action. In a 2008 paper [ungated working paper] Powell and coauthors Ryan Ford and Alex Nowrasteh describe the situation:

Although the interpretation of the law stems from clan elders, the clans are not de facto governments. Throughout all of Somalia upon becoming an adult, individuals are free to choose new insurance groups and elders.

They are allowed either to form a new insurance group with themselves as head or join an already established group, provided it will accept them. As described by Besteman (1996a,p.124),

Movement between Somali clans is not only possible but it is particularly widespread in the populous south. People switch clan affiliation for protection, for marriage, for grazing or land rights, for labor, for political reasons – or for other personal reasons. The process of affiliating with a clan other than the one into which a person was born is quick and easy in the south, and not necessarily permanent. Some clans, especially those in the south, may have more members who are adopted than members who are descended from the purported founding ancestor.

The individual clans and insurance groups are not geographic monopolies. As Little (p.48) notes, “In no way does the geographic distribution of clans and sub-clans correlate with neatly defined territorial boundaries… drought and migration blur the relationship between clan and space.”

While local cleric courts became the dominant source of law in some regions, and Qur’anic law is traditionally applied to marriage and inheritance, the common law of Xeer and the accompanying elder dispute resolution and insurance groups are the main source of law in Somalia.

Somalia is not the only case of flexible group affiliation stimulating social evolution. In The Art of Not Being Governed (a fascinating book for many reasons), James C. Scott suggests that flexible identities were key to avoiding centralized government control.

The tremendous linguistic and ethnic fluidity in the hills is itself a crucial social resource for adapting to changing constellations of power, inasmuch as it facilitates remarkable feats of identity shape-shifting. Zomians are not as a rule only linguistically and ethnically amphibious; they are, in their strong inclination to follow charismatic figures who arise among them, capable of nearly instantaneous social change, abandoning their fields and houses to join or form a new community at the behest of a trusted prophet. Their capacity to “turn on a dime” represents the ultimate in escape social structure.

Another example is the flexible nature of tribal identities of the New Zealand Maori. The politically most important descent groups in traditional Maori society were the hapu (“sub-tribe‟), iwi (“tribe”). Hapu often acted together militarily and economically – collectively producing food and sharing resources – while iwi links were weaker but often formed the basis of military coalitions.

While these groups were based on descent and therefore not infinitely malleable, the multiple levels of affiliation which could be claimed by individuals on a bi-lineal basis (trace lineage to a common ancestor on either side and you’re in!)  meant that Maori were free to affiliate with a tribal group suited to their needs. An individual couldn’t choose to affiliate with just any hapu or iwi, but normally had a range of options. Loyalties could be switched over time and it wasn’t unusual for a person to spend different parts of their life in different hapu while claiming simultaneous membership of multiple iwi.

The flexibility of Maori identity groups led to interesting outcomes with the arrival of Europeans to New Zealand. Foreign contact brought new ideas, technologies, ways of life. One important change came from the introduction of the musket into Maori warfare, which made larger forces more effective. This increased the scale of political organization, with long-term alliances and multiple hapu living in and around fortified villages becoming more common. Individuals preferred larger groupings, and the power of choice ensured they got them.

Later, mostly in the latter part of the twentieth century following mass urbanization, a new pan-Maori national identity began to emerge. This has facilitated moderately successful attempts to reclaim certain customary rights to land and resources which were seized by the British during colonization. A pan-Maori identity was better suited to western-style politics, and the power of choice ensured that such an identity emerged.

In short, European contact altered the costs and benefits to individuals of different forms of social organization, generally making large groups more desirable. The fluidity of Maori identity – as is the case in Somalia and the Zomia – allowed social structure to respond to these changes. Indeed, the case of the Maori seems to show that the individual power of exit from politically relevant identity groups has produced undirected improvement and innovation in social structure.

Competition makes everything better, including tribal organization.

Though development projects are often lauded as critical for improving human welfare and alleviating human suffering, one nuance of development goals that must be addressed is the relevant alternatives to the proposed project.  One such alternative, infrequently considered as a realistic option, is letting failing states fail rather than attempting to fix them.  In spite of the best intentions on the part of foreign aid agencies and their counterparts, what is best for human well-being may be no intervention at all, especially in cases where a predatory government rules, making outside aid subject to confiscation by a corrupt and malicious government.  In such cases, instead of helping those worse off, outside “fixes” fund a government that perpetuates the problems aid is intended to fix.

Christopher Coyne and Matt Ryan describe this scenario in an aptly titled paper: “With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?”  They note that “a consideration of the world’s worst dictators indicates that world leaders, even while publicly condemning these dictators’ gross violation of basic civil, human, and political rights, have been generous with foreign aid…[that] allows these dictators to consolidate their positions, remain in power, and sustain their brutal and corrupt methods.”  Sudan’s al-Bashir and Zimbabwe’s Mugabe are two of the most notorious examples they cite.  When foreign aid is filtered through governments known to violate the basic human rights of their citizens, why should we expect these governments to act any differently?  This is akin to doling out money to the school bully to purchase band-aids for his victims.

In spite of the conundrum associated with allocating aid to corrupt governments in the hopes of increasing the welfare of those worse off, we must consider what is achievable through such aid in order to compare the trade-off between letting weak states fail and propping them up with foreign funds.  Jeffrey Sachs, one of the proponents of the Millennium Development Goals, argues that increasing the income in these states will allow them to invest in better institutions and infrastructure comparable with governments that respect human rights.  However, when outside investments are made in a country currently under corrupt rulership, what incentive do these rulers have to divert funds into such institutions that would, ultimately, strip them of some of their power?

Conversely, what would happen if we refused to give aid to governments that abuse human rights?  Given that we expect expropriation by the government to be the norm, it may be the case that the corrupt government is made much worse off by the lack of foreign aid than those we were intending to help with the aid.  In fact, without outside aid, a government that continually robs its citizens and violates their rights will soon find that there is nothing left to plunder and no means by which to extract further rents from its citizens.  In other words, the government will crumble from a lack of resources.  While anarchy may, at first consideration, seem like an unstable alternative, it can be a welcome change in countries with better informal institutions than formal institutions.

For example, if local customs are founded on trust and mutual respect, even if only within like groups, these cultural norms will yield more prosperity than the formal institutions perpetuated by an authoritarian dictator who usurps power and income.  Even small-scale trade between neighbors is better for human welfare than the alternative.  Relying on these informal institutions that foster trade, one can envision a more hopeful outlook for the future of these societies than the outlook faced under the former corrupt government.  Somalia, as pointed out in Claudia Williamson’s blog post and in Peter Leeson’s work, is one current example of a country where no central government is better than the central government that existed before.  In other words, given the relative trade-off between a stable but corrupt government or no government at all, there are cases in which the latter proves to be the better choice.

Happy 4th, folks! It is time for the closing ceremonies of Secession Week 2010. Enough theoretical contemplation. Break out the spirits. Turn up the music.  And stride out into the irresistibly lurid carnival of America with a little Dionysian yea-saying. As Patri says, let us take inspiration from the Declaration of Independence to grow bolder in our aspirations:

Nowadays the theoretical morality and practical advantages of replacing despotism with democratic self-government are widely recognized.  Those who throw off the chains of tyranny are following a well-trodden path to a known destination.  But someone had to take that first bold step into the unknown, guided by their vision of a just society and frustration with existing systems.  Without such pioneers, the world would be doomed to endlessly retread the same weary paths, ignorant of the greener pastures that might lie ahead.

Change always provokes defensiveness and suspicion from entrenched power structures and the human mental bias towards stasis.  But it would have been a terrible loss for humanity if America’s founders had resigned themselves to the status quo of monarchical tyranny.  As it would be for us today to resign ourselves to the status quo of terrestrial democracy.  So on this July 4th, let us pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor that we will not make the same mistake.

Now, in case you missed any day of these festivities, let’s recap our musings:

• Monday: Introduction, Independence is Better Than Secession
• Tuesday: The Size of Nations
• Wednesday: Culture and Secession
• Thursday: Economic Secession
• Friday: Federalism and Secession

And around the internets, others have been developing the theme. Check’em out:

• A Radical Thought Experiment
• Black Market Secession
• The Real Meaning of July 4th
• Nobody Actually Agrees with the Declaration of Independence Anymore
• Third Palmetto Republic: The Many Benefits of Secession
• Pennsylvanians, The Case for Secession
• Disallowance of Secession is Endorsement of Slavery
• Celebrating the Independence of America
• It was a civil war within a common polity
• Declaration of Singularity
• Happy Secession Day!

And if you didn’t catch last year’s secession week, there’s lots of great content:

• Monday – Secession Goes Mainstream, Intro To Secession
• Tuesday – American Secession & Independence Movements
• Wednesday – Secession vs. Revolution
• Thursday – Federalism (Secession Lite!)
• Friday – Non-Territorial Government: Secede Without Leaving
• Saturday – American Revolution, Declaration of Independence

Speaking of independence and all that, nothing says “I love liberty” more than grown men stuffing their bellies with real pork:

Thanks for tuning in this year! Many thanks to all our contributors. You’re brilliant. Keep us in mind next year, when the event will return, bigger and better. Until then!

Arguably the simplist and most immediate path for “Letting a Thousand Nations Bloom” is to support tribal sovereignty movements around the world, especially in the Common Law nations of the Anglosphere like the U.S.  Other colonialist European nations unapologetically battled and conquered indigenous peoples, but coming from a revered tradition of rule of law and the Lockean principle of “first possession,” many British colonists found the entire “conquest” project a bit morally awkward even several hundred years ago.

Thus in the U.S. and other Common Law nations, these armed or diplomatic confrontations ended in negotiated treaties with the native peoples that reserved land for their nations, within the boundaries of the federally governed territories.  In the U.S. the sovereignty of the tribes as wholly separate from the federal government is noted often in the constitution.  While the governments of these countries may have infringed and even ignored these treaties in many ways over the centuries, there has been continuous recognition of sovereign rights negotiated de jure and in the last fifty years a new de facto assertion and recognition has begun to bloom as regards the “sovereignty” of indigenous peoples (especially in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada).

In the U.S., Chief Justice John Marshall laid out a series of opinions starting in the 1830s that affirmed the sovereignty of indigenous peoples.  For instance, in Worcester v. Georgia, he wrote, “The Cherokee nation . . . is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.”  To which, of course, President Andrew Jackson is said to have replied “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”   Jackson’s subsequent policy of “Indian removal,” including his infamous support for removing the Cherokees from their homes and sovereign territory in “The Trail of Tears” makes his actions among the most shameful in U.S. history (Google offers “Andrew Jackson worst president” as among its autocompletes).

Arguments for continued and expanded Native American sovereignty are strong; Here is an excellent summary of the state of Native American sovereignty from Harvard’s Project on American Indian Development led by Joseph Kalt, who got his doctorate under Armen Alchian.  Even more important than Marshall’s Supreme Court decisions is the fact that the U.S. government signed treaties with most of the Native American tribes as sovereign governments.  As Kalt states:

The reality is that few tribes in the U.S. were conquered by military campaigns.  Most, but not all, tribes entered treaties with the United States.  This was particularly true of those that engaged in military combat with the U.S.  The very act of treating is a nation-to-nation form of intergovernmental interaction, and the British-cum-Americans certainly saw such interaction as de recto and de jure more regularly than the Spanish or the Portuguese in the Americas.  The resulting treaties did not and do not absorb the tribes into the United States; rather, the reverse is true.  The treaties recognize and preserve tribal sovereignty:  In return for giving up almost all the land in the U.S., the U.S. made promises to the tribes.  It promised to respect their rights over reserved land, and to recognize that those lands would be governed by tribes, not by the state governments.  Those tribes that did not sign treaties were similarly protected by the doctrine that inherent sovereignty is to be respected by the United States.

In addition, Kalt’s research shows unambiguously the connection between economic prosperity and sovereignty for Native Americans:

If we look back on the history of federal Indian policy in the Twentieth Century, it is not a coincidence that it has only been in the era of self-determination that a significant number of reservations have begun to break the cycle of poverty and dependence. Sovereignty is one of the primary development resources tribes can have, and the reinforcement of tribal sovereignty under self-determination should be the central thrust of public policy. One of the quickest ways to bring development to a halt and prolong the impoverished conditions of reservations would be to further undermine the sovereignty of Indian tribes. We are aware that this is a very “pro-Indian” conclusion. But I must stress that it is a conclusion based on the evidence from case after case. There are no successful cases where federal planning and management has produced sustained economic development in Indian Country. The only thing that is working is self-determination— i.e., de facto sovereignty.

Colonialism, socialism, and dependency never bring prosperity – nor do they bring pride and self-respect.  Economic prosperity and self respect only come through self-determination – through de facto sovereignty.

Since the 1970s, there has been a global movement to acknowledge increasing degrees of sovereignty for indigenous peoples around the world.  In the U.S., the rise of gambling is the most high profile outcome of this movement, but in many ways the U.S. tribes are in the infancy of regaining and exercising their sovereignty.  There are, of course, political forces that would like to keep them subjected to U.S. government power.  That said, there is also a global indigenous rights movement that has, among other things, justice on its side and language in various U.N. documents that supports growth in their right to self-determination.  It would appear timely and honorable to continue the movement toward proper recognition of American Indian sovereignty in a deep way on the territories that they govern.  Again, from a paper co-authored by Kalt,

The Indian nations of the United States face a rare opportunity.  This is not the occasional business opportunity of reservation legend, when some eager investor would arrive at tribal offices with a proposal “guaranteed” to produce millions of dollars for the tribe—although such investors still appear, promises in hand.  Nor is it the niche economic opportunity of gaming, although that has transformed some tribes’ situations in important ways. This opportunity is a political and organizational one. It is a chance to rethink, restructure, reorganize—a chance not to start a business or exploit an economic niche but to substantially reshape the future. It is the opportunity for nationbuilding.

This opportunity has been unfolding during the last two decades. It is a product of changed relations between Indian nations and the federal government, relations with roots in the Indian politics of the 1960s and in the failure of a century of United States Indian policies that established the federal government as the primary decision maker in Indian country. Since the mid-1970s, partly in response to the demands of Indians themselves, federal policy has shifted toward something called “self-determination”: a belief, often more stated than acted upon, that Indian nations should determine their own futures.

This shift toward self-determination has allowed those nations that have been willing to do so to engage in genuine self-governance, to turn sovereignty as a legal matter into de facto sovereignty: sovereignty in fact and practice. They still face many constraints, not least the power of the courts and of the United States Congress, but since 1975 a significant number of Indian tribes have become the effective decision makers in their own affairs, often with strikingly positive results.”

Among the little known facts about U.S. native american tribes:

1.  That they can, under certain circumstances in certain states, acquire new land and transfer their sovereign rights to the new territory.

2.  Tribal membership criteria may be determined by the tribes themselves, and need not include any genetic criterion.

Thus, in principle, the Native Americans are in a strong legal position to create 560 nations within the U.S. borders.

Indeed, the tribes are already actively experimenting with diverse approaches to governance.  The Navajos are combining traditional Navajo law with common law in interesting ways.  For a fascinating analysis of the importance of forming a match between cultural norms and governance structures, see this paper, co-authored by Kalt, on Cultural Evolution and Constitutional Public Choice:  Institutional Diversity and Economic Performance on American Indian Reservations.

Of course, the U.S. federal government is a powerful opponent that can do whatever it wants.  But if we work together to create a strong moral and practical case for increasing Native American sovereignty, and if the tribes actively deploy their newly gained sovereignty in ways that are beneficial to all, there may be a realistic legal path towards more competitive government within the U.S. boundaries.

Given our belief here at “Let a Thousand Nations Bloom” in the importance of regulatory arbitrage as a means of improving the health and well-being of people (and governments) everywhere, perhaps the Native Americans will save the U.S. from demosclerosis by means of letting 560 Nations Bloom within the U.S. borders.  This may be especially true if we combine the legal status of Native Americans with my Free Cities strategy.  Perhaps we could see a Nozickian Utopia of Utopias led by the indigenous peoples of North America within our lifetimes.

If you were a leader of a Native American tribe, in what specific ways would you push for sovereignty?  What business opportunities, beyond gaming, might there be for a business savvy tribe concerning the opportunities of regulatory arbitrage in an increasingly statist U.S.?

Federalism can be seen as an attempt to get some of the benefits of large government while avoiding some of the costs: certain powers would be given to central government while others would be retained by states. The crucial question, though, is whether a robust federalism in which states retain significant independence is possible. I won’t attempt to answer that question here. Rather, I’ll suggest that the way the U.S. attempted to protect states’ rights, the Tenth Amendment, was bound to fail.

The legislative power is competent to lay taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; — there is no limitation to this power, unless it be said that the clause which directs the use to which those taxes, and duties shall be applied, may be said to be a limitation: but this is no restriction of the power at all, for by this clause they are to be applied to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States; but the legislature have authority to contract debts at their discretion; they are the sole judges of what is necessary to provide for the common defence, and they only are to determine what is for the general welfare; this power therefore is neither more nor less, than a power to lay and collect taxes, imposts, and excises, at their pleasure; not only [is] the power to lay taxes unlimited, as to the amount they may require, but it is perfect and absolute to raise them in any mode they please.

… It might be here shewn, that the power in the federal legislative, to raise and support armies at pleasure, as well in peace as in war, and their controul over the militia, tend, not only to a consolidation of the government, but the destruction of liberty.

This is essentially the argument of rather more recent political economists such as Gordon Tullock and Anthony de Jasay: a rule enforced by the agent it is meant to constrain is no rule at all. De Jasay insists that if the dominant forces within society wanted the government to perform some action prohibited by the constitution, government is likely to ignore, change, or disingenuously interpret the constitution and perform the action anyway. Without an external enforcer, we’d need a constitutional rule “that is representative yet stands above interests, decisive yet benign, conflictual yet unanimous, square yet round.”

Constitutions can implicitly change over time, even as the document remains unchanged. Robert Higgs (in his chapter in this book) posits three loci of the constitution: the constitutional document itself, what the court says it is, and what the public thinks it is. Especially in times of emergency, the latter two loci drastically change and we see a distinct crisis constitution which increases government power. Voters panic and insist that something be done. Politician respond to this demand by doing something. Courts either share in the panic or are reluctant to strike down unconstitutional regulation for fear of being ignored and having their authority undermined. Once the crisis is over, some of the power might be returned to the people (or, in the case of the tenth amendment, to the states), but rarely all of it. We thus see a ratcheting up of government power. This seems particularly true of the division of powers between states and the federal government. As Anthony Gregory says:

During the Progressive Era, the federal government expanded in numerous ways, regulating trade, adopting an income tax, creating the Federal Reserve, and imposing new standards on industry for the production of foods and pharmaceuticals. Almost all these new federal programs and agencies were violations of the Tenth Amendment, which precludes the federal government from exercising any powers not explicitly delegated to it by the Constitution.

In domestic policy, the most significant “achievement” of the Progressives was alcohol prohibition, which so nakedly expanded federal power beyond constitutional limits that the Constitution had to be changed with the 18^th Amendment, lest Americans simply refuse to put up with it. In banning alcohol, the politicians not only sought to modify the relationship between the federal government and the states and people – as spelled out in the Tenth Amendment – but also attempted to control individual lives and personal behavior. Many Americans had championed drinking alcohol as a personal right, unenumerated but fundamental. The Ninth Amendment exists for the sole purpose of protecting those rights of the people that are not specifically listed anywhere else in the Constitution. Thus, Prohibition and its enabling constitutional amendment not only altered the Tenth Amendment’s restraints on government, but the Ninth’s as well.

Since then, we’ve seen a further decline in state autonomy prompted by various panics over war, drugs, the economy, and terrorism. A whole bunch of current federal legislation today is unconstitutional.

Constitutional rules such as the tenth amendment could potentially have some impact on political outcomes by altering public opinion, but they are certainly not binding rules and only work if people retain, in the words of James M. Buchanan, a “constitutional attitude.” An abstract commitment to freedom among the people certainly seems like an unreliable means of protection when compared to something like the power of exit. When it comes to states’ rights, the people haven’t done much to prevent centralization of power.

Tacking an unenforceable rule meant to guarantee state autonomy to a document which otherwise centralized power was never going to create a robust form of federalism. If you think deals giving all the power to one party and leaving the other with no means of recourse are enforceable, have I got a deal for you!