This guest post is by Claudia R. Williamson, Post-doctoral Fellow at NYU’s Development Research Institute and is part of Secession Week 2010: Culture and Secession.
The boundary of nations can be the result of a naturally emergent process where individuals on the ground choose to align themselves together or borders can artificially be drawn from the top-down for political considerations. Artificial states were often created post-colonization or from post-war agreements without much consideration for how division or unity would affect indigenous groups. At times, some ethnic groups were artificially divided by political boundaries, while other groups wanting separation were forced together into one political unit.
No other continent is affected more by artificial, or fake, states than Africa. Most African borders were created during colonization with few changes made after de-colonization. The consequences from these divisions are substantial. A recent study, Artificial States, by Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeski, documents these consequences stating, “eighty percent of African borders follow latitudinal and longitudinal lines, and many scholars believe that such artificial (unnatural) borders, which create ethnically fragmented countries…are at the root of Africa’s economic tragedy.” The authors illustrate that higher ethnic group separation and more artificially drawn boundaries significantly lowers the level of a county’s income.
These negative effects may persist because as outsiders create states, it may become more difficult for individuals residing in political units to overcome collective action problems such as providing public goods and finding ways to define property rights and enforce contracts. In the absence of externally imposed divisions, socials norms may arise encouraging group cooperation and peaceful exchange. The work of Peter Leeson provides historical evidence that this is in fact the case. In pre-colonial Africa, stateless societies inhabited much of the continent; however, instead of chaos ensuing ethnic tribes developed a variety of mechanisms to signal trustworthiness in order to minimize potential conflict and facilitate trading across groups. The imposition of colonial rule, including the creation of artificial states, created noise in this signaling process causing a breakdown in trade, creating ethnic conflict and contributing to Africa’s current poor economic performance.
So what is a viable solution to Africa’s artificial states and the resulting negative consequences? Secession is one possible alternative, or put a different way, let so-called fake states actually fail.
The Fund for Peace Failed States Index classifies a significant portion of African countries as failing – a situation described when a national government is not providing some baseline functions such as providing internal security and minimal provision of public goods. Instead of continually propping up artificial regimes through the use of foreign aid or direct military intervention, the international community should let these artificial states left over from colonialism dissolve into natural territories more closely aligned with individual preferences.
We have evidence that by doing so individuals might actually become better off. Since 1991, Somalia has essentially been stateless, i.e., lacking a central government; however, this anarchic state should not imply chaos or a lack of governance. To the contrary, Somalia has established a reasonable level of law and order based on a traditional customary system that predates colonial rule. Once the state collapsed, many returned to this traditional system.
And it appears to be working relatively well. As documented by Peter Leeson’s 2007 paper, “The government’s collapse and subsequent emergence of statelessness opened the opportunity for Somali progress.” Comparing data on development indicators pre- and post-statelessness, Leeson finds that Somalia’s welfare is actually improving. Benjamin Powell expands on this analysis showing that Somalia’s welfare improvements are increasing at a faster rate than the average sub-Saharan African country.
The basic idea behind why statelessness can be welfare improving is relatively simple and straightforward. If state predation goes unchecked government can actually do more harm than good, reducing welfare below its level under anarchy. Thus, given a choice between an artificially propped up highly predatory government to a group of individuals operating under a spontaneously emerging governance system, anarchy starts to look more like a viable alternative.
This argument holds not only for African states but for other artificial states as well, including Iraq and the Middle East where conflict persists along colonially drawn borders. This “let ‘em fail” view is counter to most advice for fixing failed states. But, I think, when considering possible solutions to fake or failed states, we should consider allowing individuals to rebuild and restructure their own political and economic institutions from the ground up.
Secession Week 2010: Culture and Secession
Welcome to the third day of Secession Week 2010! Today’s topic is Culture and Secession.
Today’s Posts
- Patri Friedman: Don’t Threaten Anyone’s Homeland – how the urge to defend land causes problems for secession movements and other new country attempts.
And from elsewhere in the blogosphere:
Since much of secession culture in the US centers around individual states, you may also be interested in last year’s Secession Week topic of American Secession & Independence Movements.
Introduction to Today’s Topic
Here at A Thousand Nations, we tend to understand politics with the tools of economics: we think about the incentives individuals face and the aggregate outcomes which arise from their interaction. While I’d maintain that this is the only proper way to study politics, we need to understand incentives widely enough not to miss anything important. I think there are basically two important factors we risk neglecting by focusing too narrowly on incentives: informal institutions and groups identities.
As our guest author Claudia Williamson explained in her 2009 Public Choice paper “Informal institutions rule: institutional arrangements and economic performance”:
[I]nformal institutions are private constraints stemming from norms, culture, and customs that emerge spontaneously. They are not designed or enforced by government. The key difference between formal and informal is that informal institutions remain in the private realm, whereas formal constraints are centrally designed and enforced.
Many of the rules which facilitate trade and cooperation are implicit and unwritten. These rules tend to be resistant to change and exist in a complex web which no central planner can fully comprehend, much less manipulate. The power of informal institutions makes top-down state-building an impossible and destructive activity. Claudia’s post today highlights that destruction and suggests a simple but radical alternative.
The other factor we need to consider is group identity. Our suspicion of outsiders runs evolutionarily deep, and we should not expect such instincts to disappear any time soon. Personally, I’d quite like to live in a world of rootless cosmopolitans, but that’s not the world in which we live.
As Chandran Kukathas argues, a liberal overarching political order need not consist entirely of liberal communities. In fact, a liberal society consisting entirely of liberal communities is simply impossible. Any attempt to prevent the voluntary formation of illiberal communities is itself illiberal:
The metaphor offered here to supplant those already described [i.e. the ‘body politic’ and ‘ship of state’] is one which pictures political society as an archipelago: an area of sea containing many small islands. The islands in question, here, are different communities or. better still, jurisdictions, operating in a sea of mutual toleration. Political society — and in particular, the good political society — is best understood not as a single body, or an ideal realm of the just, or a ship piloted by a skillful seaman, or even as a single island rightly ordered. It should be understood, instead, as something altogether less clearly bounded, marked by movement within those bounds, and movement across fuzzy boundaries.
The good society, it is argued in this book, is best understood as an archipelago of societies; and because the principles which best describe such a form of human community are the principles of liberalism, the good society is properly described as a liberal archipelago.
The liberal archipelago is a society of societies which is neither the creation nor the object of control of any single authority. It is a society in which authorities function under laws which are themselves beyond the reach of any singular power.
Kukathas uses islands as a metaphor for landlubber communities. Some of us, on the other hand, see a liberal archipelago as a literal possibility worth working towards.
Decentralization – whether through secession, federalism, or competitive government – respects true cultural diversity rather than simply paying lip-service to some weak guidance counselor imitation thereof.
Small Is Innovative
This post by Patri Friedman is part of Secession Week 2010: The Size of Nations.
In my post yesterday comparing the early American state to a startup, I talked about how some of the benefit of a new country with a new political system is to serve as a test of that system. Continuing with the government as a business metaphor will help us to understand why we get so little innovation today.
While the largest R&D budgets are of course in large firms, such as pharmaceutical companies and tech giants like Apple, those firms tend to introduce incremental innovations, rather than truly disruptive technologies. Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been wildly popular – but they were preceded by portable MP3 players, smartphones, and tablet devices made by smaller companies.
Nor is this surprising. The larger a firm, the greater the bureaucracy and the more conservative it tends to be. A large firm wants to protect its market position, and with large pre-existing revenues, its employees are naturally more motivated to compete for access to those existing revenues, rather than creating new ones. There is more rent-seeking and less creation. One of the many reasons for this is that in a large firm, it is harder to identify who has created the value, thus the rewards of success are spread throughout the company, thus value creation is more of a public good problem and individual innovators are not incented.
It’s a simple pattern, and it’s why people work longer hours at startups, and why companies that massively scale have trouble holding onto their entrepreneurs. I was at Google from 2004 to 2008, a period during which it grew about 6-fold. While Google had many programs designed to appeal to the more entrepreneurial, startup-ey “old-timers”, and did its best to create an environment which would be as attractive as possible, there was a steady stream of people who left the company. And not just to retire – many are now involved in smaller companies.
In the history of the world, radical innovations have almost always come from small groups starting with small experiments. The smaller the experiment, the more things you can try, and thus the better you can explore the space of possibilities. Furthermore, small groups tend to be beholden to few interests, and so they can explore disruptive possibilities which a large group would be averse to, for fear of offending one of their stakeholders.
Which brings us to the world of government. There are many reasons why governments aren’t very innovative, but one of them is surely its large size. There are only two countries smaller than 1,000 people, and 7 smaller than 10,000 people. While startup countries will likely be larger than startup tech companies – after all, the business of government is about interactions between individuals – I believe that a new country of hundreds or thousands of people could try a far more innovative political system than one could ever convince a country of millions or tens of millions to try. Just like any other startup, these startup countries will rarely stay their starting size – they’ll either grow by attracting customers, or go bust, freeing up resources for new experiments. But small is the best way to start any experiment.
Let About 2,339 Nations Bloom
This guest post by The Seasteading Institute intern Tony Dreher is part of Secession Week 2010: The Size of Nations.
The size of nations in the future will ultimately be determined by how effing crazy technology gets. It will be somewhere between 1 nation with a population of “the world” in the event of a hive mind(fingers crossed) and 0 nations with a population of “gray goo” or “gamma radiated people ash.” But neither of those will happen for some time(or will they?). Until then let’s start with what we know.
A good lower bound for the population of a nation would be 150. For those familiar with Dunbar’s Number, this is it. Essentially, the idea is that humans are just too stupid to be friends with more than 150 people. But, this number assumes everyone is geared for maximum social grooming and devotion to survival. BOOOORRRRIIIINGG. According to Christopher Allen, if you want time for self-grooming, you can expect a number closer to 50. When you get populations over this number though, laws and administration (i.e. a nation) are required to make things work. And the upper bound? How big can things get before people want to split?
This is difficult to predict. Traditionally, a nation grows because of some combination of a good economy, high fertility rate, and an effective means of denying exit. China is great at all of these and its population is well over a billion now. But how well would it fare if people were allowed to secede? Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher suggest that under the right conditions and in a completely controlled environment, it’s possible to get at least 60% cooperation in prisoner’s dilemma simulations even with increasingly higher population sizes. Since the real world is perfectly analogous to laboratory experiments, it follows that under an ideal government, 40% of the citizens would still rather not be there.
So how big are good governments? Definitions of what makes a good government are hard to come by; we’ll look at the population sizes of the top ten countries/u.s. states by GDP per capita instead.
| State/Country | GDP per capita in USD | Population |
| Qatar | 83,841 | 1.4 million |
| Luxembourg | 78,395 | .5 million |
| Washington, D.C. | 66,000 | 5.3 million |
| Connecticut | 54,397 | 3.5 million |
| Norway | 52,561 | 4.5 million |
| Singapore | 50,523 | 4.9 million |
| New Jersey | 50,313 | 8.7 million |
| Massachusetts | 49,875 | 6.5 million |
| Brunei | 49,110 | .4 million |
| Maryland | 48,285 | 6.5 million |
Average population: 4.22 million
Average population – Qatar, Luxembourg, and Brunei: 5.7 million
Therefore, assuming free exit, the best countries will probably have 60% of this average or 3.42 million people. But then I’m leaving tons of things out.
Assuming the 60% cooperation rule remains constant (and I’ve assumed a lot by this point, so I see no harm in continuing), what happens as competition between free-exit nations plays out? Two of the benefits of allowing governments to compete are the requirement that they change quickly to match innovations and the ability to try out atypical political models. It’s reasonable that someone might offer the Wal-Mart of government — dirt cheap, palatable to as many people as possible, and everywhere.
And what about technology? In prisoner’s dilemmas you don’t know the decision your opponent is making until after it’s made, but we’re getting rapidly closer to radical transparency. I can see tons of people naked right now. Social media is [tired cliche about social media doing something amazing]. Maybe rampant voyeurism will actually make it easier to live with people. Plus, nudity.
In any event, I think the world’s governments are worse than we give them credit for — they’ve become predictably bad. It’s no fun when you know what happens next. Give me liberty or give me something more entertaining. Like A Thousand Nations for instance. Or to find out where we’ll learn the answers to these questions first: The Seasteading Institute.
The Long Tail and the Size of Nations
I started writing a post arguing that the optimal size of nations is decreasing due to a combination of technological innovation and social change. Now that I’ve thought about the problem more carefully, though, I’m beginning to think that the effect of these changes is to render the whole idea of territorially defined states less attractive. Simply insisting that the current geographical monopolies in the market for governance should be smaller doesn’t go far enough.
While it’s not clear that the idea of an optimal country size ever made sense – as Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren argued in 1961, not all public goods are best provided at the same scale, which means that we need polycentric governance – recent social and technological developments has made multi-purpose territorial government much less attractive. The factors affecting the optimal size of nations have changed over time. As the essays in this wonderful book edited by Fred Foldvary and Dan Klein show, technology can void previously sound policy rationales by shifting costs and benefits. I think that’s happened with the size of nations in some rather confusing ways.
Recall that, in Alesina and Spolaore‘s model of optimal nation size, the benefit of large countries comes from economies of scale in the provision of public services, and from the network externalities of a large market. Briefly considering the second factor, it seems that the cost of borders has been decreasing in recent years. Tariffs and have been reducing, while the interoperability of business law has been increasing. These factors both tend to decrease the optimal size of nations. Further, there seems to be some tendency for technology to reduce the fixed costs associated with running an organization. In particular, IT makes outsourcing easier. When small governments, like small firms, can outsource much of their back-office work to specialist firms, citizens can enjoy some of the cost savings which result from firms serving a larger customer base without the disadvantages of product homogeneity: we can have something like mass customization of rule-sets. If certain technological trends continue, we might such an extreme reduction in fixed costs that desktop manufacturing of public goods becomes possible.
So: I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that it’s now more feasible to run a country at a small scale due to a reduction in economies of scale in public good provision and an easing of the friction caused by borders. It’s when we start thinking about the costs of large countries, though, that things start getting interesting.
Recall further that, according to Alesina and Spolaore, the major cost of large countries comes from preference heterogeneity. What has happened to preferences in recent years? Well, I think they have become more heterogeneous, which means that more people will be more dissatisfied with their governments.
First, there has been a long-running trend towards more urban populations. One of the great things about cities, from an individual perspective, is that they allow sorting by lifestyle preference. In small towns, there are few people with whom to interact and therefore no opportunity to form niche subcultures. It’s difficult to imagine a queer nationalist movement emerging in a medieval European village, for example, since preference homogeneity tends to reinforce itself by increasing the costs of difference. The increased communication facilitated by the internet makes this trend more pronounced: As a resident of Christchurch, New Zealand, I doubt I’d be able to find many people with whom to discuss anarchism, seasteading, and competitive government without the internet. Another trend increasing preference diversity within countries is the increase in migration. As the ethnic diversity of a country increases, so too do the religious and cultural factors which influence policy preferences.
In short: changing patterns of communication have likely made preferences more diverse within countries and increased the cost of one-size-fits-all government. It’s tempting to conclude that this, especially when combined with the reduction in economies of scale suggested above, reduces optimal country size. I don’t think things are that simple.
Recall even further that Alesina and Spolaore’s model relies on preferences being separated along geographic lines. While overall diversity within a country, and especially within any given region, that diversity is probably becoming less regionally-based. Lower barriers to communication likely increase diversity within any area, but make each region more alike. (Tyler Cowen makes the same argument with respect to different cultures on a global scale in Creative Destruction.) The upshot is that social change has given us a greater need for a means of escaping the tyranny of the majority but has also made territorial secession a less effective way of improving government. You probably have more in common with a random dude on 4chan than with your neighbor. Thus, getting together with other locals is going to be less useful than it once was.
Does this mean we should put up with large, one-size-fits-all government? Well, no. It means we should press for non-territorial secession: we should be able to choose our service providers without also making that choice for our neighbors. The most powerful means of overcoming the tyranny of the majority in the face of diversity, though, will be dynamic geography. If we could create a technology allowing the land of nations to be constantly rearranged, we’d not only see more nations, but nations which include all and only the people who want to be so included.
(This post is part of Secession Week Tuesday: The Size of Nations.)
Secession Week 2010: The Size of Nations
Today’s Posts
- We also have a guest post by The Seasteading Institute intern Tony Dreher on group cooperation nation size: Let About 2,339 Nations Bloom.
From elsewhere in the blogosphere:
- Rick Weber points out that the size of for-profit countries, such as we’d see in a world of Heathian seasteads, will be determined by a complex mix of factors, with the profit motive pushing nations towards optimal size.
- Andrew Smith offers some Thoughts on the Size of Nations, suggesting that a general theory of nation size is elusive.
- While it well before secession week, this piece by Kirkpatrick Sale is well worth a read.
An Intro to the Size of Nations
As you might have guessed from the name of this blog, we want to see more nations. There are serious benefits to having more and smaller states: the efficiency coming from jurisdictional competition, the robustness coming from decentralization, and the satisfaction coming from choice are all, frankly, awesome.
In his keynote at the 2009 Seasteading conference, video below, Peter Thiel asks how many countries there will be in the year 2050. There are just under 200 independent states now; significantly more than at the end of the second world war. It would be a strange coincidence indeed if that number happened to remain roughly the same. We therefore need to think about two possible futures: a world with many more nations (let’s say a thousand), or many fewer (let’s say one). We want the first outcome; others want the second.
While the size of nations is normally taken as an uninteresting brute fact by political economists, there have been some notable attempts to explain what causes a country to be a particular size and what size a country should be.
In his 1977 paper A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations, David Friedman uses the tools of economic theory to lay out the conditions which determine the size of nations. He is concerned purely with how big nations will be, not how big they should be. He models states as profit-maximizing leviathans in military competition with one another for territory.
A government aims as maximizing its tax yield net of collection costs. Generally speaking, states will want to take over as much land as possible in order to achieve this goal. They are, however, constrained by other states seeking to do likewise. What happens when two government want the same piece of land? One answer is that the state with the most military power always prevails. That’s not a good answer, however. Rather, we need to think about the price each country is willing to pay for the territory in terms of military and/or diplomatic effort. Just as markets provide goods to those with the willingness, not simply the ability, to pay, disputes over land are decided primarily by who wants it the most.
Given the assumption that each state aims to maximize its total net tax yield, it’s the complementarities among regions in terms of tax collection we need to consider: the state whose other land will best combine with a disputed territory in order to increase total tax take will be willing to pay the most and will prevail. This means that national borders will be arranged in a way which maximizes taxes minus collection costs.
What factors maximize the total net tax yield? If a state can tax trade, it will be in its interest to encompass an entire trading area. If a state can tax labor, it will be in its interest to increase the barriers to exit. Large and culturally homogeneous countries increase exit costs by increasing the physical and cultural distance of neighboring jurisdictions. Friedman shows that the size and shape of past and existing nations tends to support his theory.
If you think that sounds like a bad thing from an individual welfare point of view, you’d probably be right.
In their book The Size of Nations, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore take a different approach to thinking about how big countries will be, and also consider how big they should be.
When considering how big countries ought to be, they compare the costs of large countries with those of small countries; the country size which minimizes the sum of these costs is considered optimal.
The main cost of big countries comes from preference heterogeneity. As a single state encompasses a larger population, we’re likely to see more diversity in what people want government to do. Since government imposes one solution upon everyone, a larger country is going to make its citizens less happy with government on average. If this were the only issue, we’d want roughly six billion countries each having one citizen (which sounds alright to me). That way, we’d have no preference heterogeneity within countries.
A central simplifying assumption of the model is that physical distance from the center of a country matches up with ideological distance: geographically peripheral regions diverge most strongly in terms of their preferences over government policy.
There are, of course, costs of small countries too. First, Alesina and Spolaore suggest, there are economies of scale in the production of government services. As the size of a country increases, the fixed costs of government are shared among more people and the cost per head decreases.
Secondly, a bigger country implies a bigger market. Wealth is generated by specialization and the division of labor which, as Adam Smith pointed out, is limited by the extent of the market. This means that being able to trade over a larger area makes people better off. Of course, living under different governments shouldn’t stop two people from making a voluntary trade, but borders do increase costs. Most obviously and annoyingly, governments like to restrict trade across borders by means of tariffs, subsidies, and quotas. They best idea is to get rid of protectionist policies, but given they exist there’s a second-best case for having geographically larger states.
There is also a more inevitable cost of transacting across borders. Since different jurisdictions have different rules (a wonderful thing in general!), striking a deal across a border is more complicated. There are many mundane examples: certification or labelling requirements for products frequently vary by country, meaning that a product sold in one country will often be illegal in another. Getting the right certification and including the right information on the label is costly, and will tend to reduce cross-border trade. Another issue is the settling of disputes. Living in different jurisdictions under different rules increases transaction costs. With negotiation, they can agree to rules which suit the situation, but the fact that businesses within a country are generally optimized to local law makes cross-border trade costly.
When it comes to how big countries will be, Alesina and Spolaore’s argument depends on the system of government in question. In a dictatorship, their way of modelling the problem is similar to David Friedman’s. In a democracy, they assume that majorities can vote to split up an existing country. When the costs of preference heterogeneity exceed the benefits of economies of scale for a majority of voters, a country will fracture. Alesina and Spolaore see the incentives of democracy leading to countries which are too small. In his review of the book, though, David Friedman shows that this result is entirely dependent on arbitrary assumptions: we could get the opposite result with equally reasonable assumptions.
The work of these economists provide a useful framework in thinking about the size of nations. We’ll attempt to move beyond this static approach, though, and consider what happens when we consider a dynamic market for governance.
Secession As Startup: Providing Examples & Competition
When we think of secession, we often think of it as mainly being about regional autonomy for a cultural minority who are being oppressed within a larger state. The immediate and primary result of such secession is freedom and self-government for that minority. The United States, for example, was a frontier nation of independent pioneers that had a major culture clash with the distant and aristocratic British, and so they revolted. The most visible result of that American Revolution was the formation of the United States of America – freedom and self-government for Americans.
Yet there is another way to look at secession, based on the economics of the invisible, where events are like icebergs, their effects mainly lurking beneath the surface. This way is to look at the long-term consequences that secession has on the entire world.
America did not merely secede and copy the governing documents or style of the United Kingdom. Rather, it innovated, creating a system based on the English Common Law, yet different, one with explicit checks and balances to restrain government, and with no place for a monarch. It was an experiment with a more radical form of democracy than existed anywhere in the 18th-century world.
And it was an incredibly successful experiment, as the combination of that innovative rule-set and the empty frontier resulted in America growing rapidly in population, wealth, and influence. During the open immigration periods of the 19th century, some years saw over a million new immigrants arrive “yearning to breathe free”. As a result, the new American state had influence far beyond its shores.
This influence occured in two major ways. First, America served as a test of the brand-new American Constitution, and the Founding Fathers’ philosophy about the role of government. By showing that it worked well in practice, political philosophers, politicians, voters, and revolutionaries around the world were (slowly) convinced that this was the best government technology to be had. Second, America dramatically outcompeted existing states, based on the simple metric of net migration. Those million+ people a year who went to America can be thought of as customers of government services voting with their feet, which means that other countries were losing market share.
You may not be used to thinking of government in this sort of economic and business framework, but it is a core part of our philosophy here at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom, and we find it provides a unique and refreshing angle on government. In this case, it shows us the invisible, long-term effects of the American Revolution.
Because, just like any sensible business that loses market share to an upstart competitor, the nations of the world responded. In many cases by imitating parts of the US that seemed to work – by moving away from monarchy and to more egalitarian, democratic societies. So it may well be that the greatest effect of the formation of America was on non-Americans!
New ventures (here in Silicon Valley we call them “Startups”) have the same effect in any industry. Startups are tests of new ideas (part of the trial-and-error learning process of the market), and when their examples are successful, larger companies take up the ideas. These larger companies are motivated to do this through the fear of competition – because if they innovate, the startups will grow and take their market share and become the new market leaders. Thus the startups’ greatest influence, in the long run, is on the customers of the market leaders – not their direct usefulness to their own customers.
Trial and error and the growth of what works and ending of what doesn’t is how a healthy industry works, and for awhile, the government industry worked that way. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons (running out of new land, countries joining into large federations, citizens less willing to engage in revolution), there isn’t much room for startup governments any more. So we lack new experiments which could find us new government technologies that might be as much better as today’s democracies as the US Constitution was compared to the awkward monarchy/democracy hybrids of the time.
And that is why we care about secession and related topics – because the world needs startup governments to make progress. If you aree, I encourage you to subscribe to this blog and keep up to date on the topic, or check out my own venture to re-create the frontier: seasteading.
(this post is part of Secession Week 2010, specifically Monday: Independence Is Better Than Revolution.)
The State of Secession
Our first guest post comes from William Miller, founder of Secession News, a daily news-feed of secession related stories and commentary. He also maintains Secession University, an online resource for secession related material.–Editor
Partly due to the efforts of the 2009 version of “Let a Thousand Nations Bloom,” I started a small service, SecessionNews.com, described by some as a “Drudge Report” of secession. For a year now, I have reviewed each day’s relevant and significant (at least, in my opinion) secession-related articles and news reports. In doing so, I have read well over 1,000 online articles and posted excerpts from more than 500 of those that I believed would be of value and benefit to anyone interested in the topic.
With a year’s worth of reading articles and thousands of their related comments, I have acquired some instinct as to the mood of the country on the idea of seceding from an all-too-intrusive and abusive federal government. Therefore, after a year of being fully immersed in the subject, I offer my modest view on the current state of secession in these not-so-united States of America.
Before getting to the meat of it, I’ll say it straight away: It has not been a good year for the notion of secession. One might think that due to the calamity of the current socialist movement in Washington, the public would be clamoring for workable solutions—say, withdrawing from such government—but so far, the public reaction has been more consternation than action.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some very positive and noteworthy developments. Chief among them are the slate of secessionist candidates running for statewide offices in Vermont. While we must wait until November to gauge the support of Vermonters for an independent and free Vermont, it would be an upset of major proportions should any of them win. [Our hope is that they at least make a respectable run of it.]
Another positive development of significance has been the advancement of secession scholarship by the likes of Russell Longcore (DumpDC.com) and Timothy Baldwin (LibertyDefenseLeague.com). Their thoughtful insights and prolific writing on the subject have lifted the level of discourse and advanced the cause with common sense and logic. If you spend much time at all pursuing the blogs where discussions of secession are crackling, you often will find little common sense or logic; therefore, the frequent reflective opines from Longcore and Baldwin become noteworthy. That is not to say, however, that a number of others have not written thoughtfully and well on the subject, too.
On the national stage, economist and modern thinker Walter Williams did speak favorably of secession to a huge radio audience when he filled in for Rush Limbaugh a month or so ago. While many like me hold the reasoned opinions of Williams in higher esteem than Limbaugh’s, he doesn’t have the same cachet, doesn’t garner the same attention, so his refreshing comments went largely unnoticed by the media.
The same can be said for Judge Andrew Napolitano’s fearless defense of both secession and nullification on his Fox Business show as well as when he fills in for Glenn Beck. Unfortunately, the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity are much too comfortable with their preeminence to risk the blowback that secessionist talk would bring. And that, my friends, epitomizes the current state of secession in these un-united States: It’s just much too hot of an issue for the politically timid to handle. Talk of withdrawing from the Compact in the presence of politicians and media elites is akin to raising the Confederate battle flag at an NAACP meeting.
This makes it quite significant that, while not directly secession-related, the idea of nullification has experienced such a truly remarkable rise in acceptance—and application. A growing number of states are now in various stages of approving state sovereignty bills, effectively nullifying a number of federal encroachments, including ObamaCare, medical marijuana, federal gun laws, and the REAL ID Act. The implication of this movement cannot be overstated, since it re-legitimizes the long-forgotten sovereign authority of the states. Public approval of something that, until recently, could have been equated to “heresy” means nullification could very well be the first step to the public’s acceptance of its first cousin, secession, as another valid option to blunt an abusive federal government. The public need not be convinced of the necessity of full withdrawal from the Union, mind you. Just the threat of it might be all that’s needed.
Perhaps my pessimistic view is clouded by the contrast I routinely see with secessionist movements bubbling up in one foreign country after another. This past year has seen many areas outside the United States openly debate and consider the option of seceding. Currently, nearly 50 developed and undeveloped countries throughout the world have active secessionist movements, and surprisingly, in the most substantial cases, the United States government generally supports those wanting to secede.
The most amazing contrast exists between the attitudes of the citizenry in third-world and first-world countries. The concept of withdrawing from an oppressive government is accepted by the public in the less developed countries, whereas the “sophisticated” public here in the United States deems secession to be unconstitutional at best and even treasonous by many, demanding that the people remain shackled to their government, no matter how tyrannical it may become.
Yet many Americans feel increasingly oppressed by their government, as witnessed by their ongoing gatherings of protest, waving their “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. One of these rallies brought on perhaps the most earthshaking event of the past year, when some in the crowd began shouting “Secede,” and Texas Governor Rick Perry responded, “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.”
At first, one might think this was a positive development for the idea of secession—a governor supposedly egging on his state to secede. But in reality, the reaction to Perry’s words turned out to be a setback for the public’s acceptance of this most sovereign right. First, the governor didn’t call for secession, and actually praised the Union, saying, “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it.” Granted, he did seem to accept the right of Texas to secede (a momentous statement for a governor to make), even though he didn’t actually say that secession was an absolute right.
This rather innocuous statement resulted in a tsunami of negative reaction that still resonates today. Virtually every article related to Governor Perry mentioned something akin to, “Governor Perry called for secession during….” The result of this overreaction was to strike fear into any and all politicians whenever the subject of withdrawing from the Union was broached. It’s as if secession is now the new “third rail” of politics, never to be mentioned, much less supported.
The problem with secession in this country is the widespread ignorance of the public on the right to secede. This fact was reinforced just the other day when a Rasmussen poll reported that only 18 percent of the public believed a state had the right to secede. A year ago, according to a Zogby poll, one-third of the public believed a state had that right. It wasn’t that they were asked if their state should secede, just if they had the right to do so—a very disappointing indictment of the American education system.
Here in Charleston, where I write these words only a few blocks from where South Carolina seceded in 1860, great fear gripped the city’s timid and weak leadership this year when it came to proposals for memorializing the sesquicentennial of perhaps the most significant event in this city’s history—approving the Ordinance of Secession. It all began when a group wanted to establish a memorial to that event and to those that signed the ordinance, but no official could be found with the courage to back the idea.
Yet, the top contender for the biggest disappointment of the year is the Tea Party movement. These good folks are sincere, but they have misplaced ideas as to the best solution for tyrannical government. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that sending “better” politicians into the quagmire of corruption called Washington will solve our problems. Not only do they shun workable solutions such as nullification and secession, but they actively disparage such Founder-like efforts. An example of such can be found on the Austin Tea Party website where they proudly proclaim, “We do not support secession.”
Despite such negative developments, I do remain positive about the outlook for the coming year. As the nullification movement gains strength, we may benefit from their coattails. As the public becomes more aware of the sovereign rights and authority of our states, they could also become more accepting of the sovereign right of a state to withdraw from a Compact that has been repeatedly violated by the federal government.
Those who are already in the ranks of the sovereign-rights advocates can help advance the cause of secession. It is simple, only takes a few minutes of time, and could actually be great fun. Here’s how: When you finish reading an article supporting or rejecting the idea of secession, become a part of the conversation. Endorse the informed. Correct the clueless. If enough of us do this, the public just might become aware of the duty that their state has to reject an abusive and tyrannical government. Perhaps then, next year’s report on “The State of Secession” will have a few more victories to celebrate.
(this post is part of Secession Week 2010)
Welcome to Let A Thousand Nations Bloom’s second annual Secession Week! This is our way of celebrating Independence Day and pointing out that the revolution was based on the idea that it is often reasonable to seek the dissolution of a political community:When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We noted last year that secession was becoming a more polite topic of conversation in the US, with the Wall Street Journal publishing an article suggesting that the U.S. as it currently exists might not be viable, and the large number of secessionist movements around the country. As Bill Miller points out in his guest post today, the idea of secession is being criticized more heavily by some while being recognized as a viable option by others as power becomes more centralized in DC.
Organizations such as Tenth Amendment Center want power taken from the federal government and given back to the states or the people. Nullification is one way of doing this, and many pieces of federal legislation are being challenged.
There are also many explicitly secessionist movements in the North America and around the world. This is not surprising, since the world contains many unrepresented nations and peoples.
The Middlebury institute is devoted to the study of secession, and their website contains some very good material. For regular updates on secession-related topics, two good sources are Secession News and DumpDC.
Our own Patri Friedman brings the economics-based perspective to secession with his post Secession as Startup: Providing Examples & Competition, which explores the ways in which secession positively influences other countries, not just the newly independent state.
We’ll be looking at secession from a range of perspectives during the week. Below is a list of topics we’re hoping to cover. We’ll be updating this post and our shorter index post throughout the week with links so stay tuned.
Today, we encourage bloggers to post about anything secession-related and anyone without a blog but with something interesting to say to email us your contribution.
Tuesday: The size of nations. Obviously, if there are going to be a thousand nations (and that is likely a conservative estimate), they’ll each have to be smaller. What general factors should we consider in thinking about the optimal size of nations? How is the size of nations determined in reality?
Wednesday: Culture and secession. At this blog we generally take an economic approach to understanding the benefits of regional autonomy. Most secession movements around the world, though, base their arguments on group identities. Cultural factors such as this are important and make the case for a world of more nations much stronger. How do the myriad of cultures and values erode centralizing tendencies in governance?
Thursday: Economic Secession, from Agorism to tax havens. Brad Taylor recently wrote here about how government services crowd out the private provision of similar services. But what are the ways market-based, voluntary institutions can pave the way for incremental secession from political institutions? For example, how can monetary secession protect wealth from predatory confiscation? We’ll explore.
Friday: Is it possible for a state to secede from U.S.? Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has written that, if any constitutional issue was resolved by the Civil War, it’s that there’s no right to secede. Is the U.S. forever to be, as the Pledge of Allegiance has it, “one nation, indivisible”?
Saturday: the American Revolution–Bryan Caplan says the U.S. didn’t gain all that much from revolution. We’ll don our counterfactual hats to discuss the possibilities prompted by Caplan’s skepticism. Was the US constitution a mistake? Would the Articles of Confederation have been a better constitution and were the Anti-Federalists on to something? Would not revolting have been even better?
Sunday: We’ll circle wagons, round up the action, and launch of few final squibs and fireworks.
Link to us, tweet us, facebook us, pick sides like fanatics, and argue like philosophers–It’s all good!
I’ve been reading through this wonderful collection of anarcho-capitalist articles (HT: Brad Taylor), and thinking that we need to get people to realize that polycentric law, or anarcho-capitalism, is just no big deal and we should get over it already.
One of my favorites is this common sense article on Market Chosen Law by Edward Stringham. Stringham points out that universities, condominium associations, and shopping malls all act to some extent as private governments on a local basis already. Stringham points out the extent to which universities customize their private legal systems to suit the needs and tastes of their clients, needs and tastes which may differ from those of the external legal system. A personal example: When I was attending Harvard in 1980, one of my dorm mates was a drug dealer, selling mostly cocaine and marijuana, a fact which the Harvard administration was fully aware of. In keeping with their implicit understanding of their local sovereign powers, they asked him not to sell drugs late in the evening, because the foot traffic going to and from the dorm room would disturb other students who were trying to sleep. In essence they established informal regulatory boundaries for his business while respecting his right to sell “illegal” drugs on campus. His Harvard admissions essay had explained how he had smuggled drugs across international boundaries. While his brazenness, both in writing his admissions essay on his experience as a drug smuggler and then conducting open business operations on campus under the watchful, regulatory eye of the administration brought a few smiles, no one was overly shocked by the situation.
To take a different example, this spring, after the second student death by heroin overdose in two years, Reed College was threatened by federal authorities with a potential loss of federal funding if they did not control drug use. What is most striking, in terms of the de facto legal autonomy of universities, is that the Reed community felt outraged that outsiders were trying to influence their culture and policies. From a summary of an interview with the Reed Dean of Students on the issue, responding to external criticism for the heroin deaths:
“What we really have at Reed is very clearly a reputation for a permissive stance on drug use, and our policies and implementation are not substantially different from a lot of other colleges that don’t have that reputation,” he said. Further, a big part of the campus reaction comes from a tradition that “our student culture values autonomy and culture in a very intense way,” he said.
As a result, “many of the students who are most vociferous in their declarations about not having heavy-handed enforcement at Reed College don’t use drugs. They just don’t want people telling them what to do,”
Universities, where most professors regard anarcho-capitalism as beyond the pale of legitimate discourse, act largely as private governments whenever it suits their interest to do so. Their customers, often upper middle class kids who enjoy ingesting drugs, demand a legal system in which they have the freedom to do drugs, and the university legal system provides that environment.
Stringham also points out that the international commercial arbitration system acts as a de facto international governance association without the geographical monopoly on coercion which we normally associate with “governments.”
To jump to the issue which most frightens people when they hear the term “anarcho-capitalism,”, it is worth remembering that we already live in an anarcho-statist world in which (happily) there is no formal monopoly on force for governing the world’s 200 or so nation-states. And, yes, sometimes we do see violence between nations. Would we see more violence if the cartel responsible for global poverty allowed for the entrepreneurial creation of new sovereign entities? It is not at all obvious that we would. Would we see more violence if there were a thousand nations rather than 200? Seems unlikely, though if someone would like to argue that we would I’d love to see that argument. Would we see more violence if some of the sovereign entities were for profit rather than the existing motley collection of dictatorships, democracies, family regimes, etc.? Again, I’d love to see the argument that we would, not in some imaginary “what if the whole world was run by mafia-like protection agencies” but rather given the existing nation-state system.
Why exactly would a new for profit sovereign entity initiate violence? Why would investors invest in such a sovereign entity as compared to a non-aggressive for profit sovereign entity? Which is the better business model given present global realities? Right now it would be tough enough to get the global system to allow an openly for profit sovereign entity to come into existence. While there are plenty of gangs in the Congo and elsewhere that are “for profit” in the sense of plunderers of natural resources, there is no chance that any of those will be recognized as sovereign entities. The existing highly conservative global system for recognizing sovereignty would only recognize a for profit sovereign entity if it were more benign than most existing nation states. The big profit opportunities available to entrepreneurs of effective government would all involve integration into the global commercial system. The big multinational corporations are not going to allow an aggressive for profit sovereign entity participate in the international arbitration system and the other various networks and organizations for which they control access – such a move would unnecessarily (further) damage the brand of global business.
Anarcho-Capitalism – Get Over It! It’s already here. As Caplan and Stringham argue in this brilliant paper, private arbitration itself provides a path to anarcho-capitalist paradise if only governments would allow people to make voluntary agreements:
For arbitration to live up to its full potential, however, government has to stop holding it back. Public courts should, as a matter of policy, respect contracts that specify final and binding arbitration. Legislatures should abolish laws that hamper ostracism, boycott, and other non-violent private enforcement methods. These small changes would make private courts much more attractive than they already are – and go a long way towards putting the public courts out of business.
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom 