Revolution vs Secession
(this post is part of Wednesday: Secession vs. Revolution in our Secession Week Blogging)
If you’re like most Americans, this Saturday, you’ll commemorate America’s independence with barbecue and fireworks. When asked about the larger meaning of the 4th of July, you’d probably respond with, “It officially began the American Revolution.” I’d like to suggest that this event should be more appropriately referred to as the American Secession.
Revolution and Secession are very different things. Revolution is an attempt by a relatively small group of people to gain control over the machinery that rules a relatively larger group of people. Secession is a relatively small group of people breaking off from the larger machinery. The difference is crucial. Take the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:
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.
Thomas Jefferson and the other signatories wanted to “dissolve the political bands” between England and the American colonies, to break away. They had no intention of obtaining power in London, no designs on ruling England and its other colonies around the world. They simply wanted to become part of a separate political entity.
Revolutions, on the other hand, are about gaining power over the same territory and often, the same political machine. If an already tyrannical power exists, revolutionaries have to overpower it to replace it. You can imagine the result is often worse than the status quo. The French Revolution overthrew an abusive regime but resulted in the Reign of Terror and numerous wars. The October Revolution replaced an oppressive tsar with a government that tortured, starved, and executed its citizens in massive numbers. To quote a wise man, “Revolution is the hell of it.”
The American Secession allowed the colonies to thrive under a smaller, more local government. The secessions of the Baltic Republics from the former Soviet Union allowed the enactment of economic reforms that resulted in a period of unprecedented economic growth. Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia, though involuntary, set the stage for its transformation from third world outpost to one of the richest nations in the world leaving Malaysia far behind.
Granted, there are cases where revolutions have been a step in the right direction, usually when there is a clear separation between the rulers and the ruled. In modern democracies though, the distinction is less clear; we all rule over each other and seek rent from the larger society.
Though there are exceptions, in general revolution is aggressive, violent, and power-seeking, whereas the act of secession is peaceful.
So this Saturday night, when the fireworks fly and you contemplate the complete transformation of the modest Republic into the modern colossal state, remember the choice the colonials made by seceeding from the British empire, and hoist one not to the hope of a future revolution, but to the peaceful turning away and moving apart from the state. Hoist one to secession.
The United States began as a loose federation of states which seceded from the British Empire, exemplifying the local, competitive government that we still favor. Unfortunately, in the ensuing 233 years, the vast majority of power has moved to the central (ironically termed “federal”) government. With a history of local autonomy and secession which is so strong, yet so ancient, it is no surprise that there are strong undercurrents of independence still bubbling in America today.
The future Unitedness of the States is quite unclear. Europe has shown a trend towards centralization, and the iron grip of the US Federal Government is strong. On the other hand, it is common for declining empires to fracture, and the upcoming financial storms of Social Security, Medicare, underfunded pensions, and rising national debt will increase the divisions between young and old, rich and poor, net tax paying states and net tax recipients. Will the Union crack under the pressure? Renard Sexton at 538 thinks not, but only time will tell.
We certainly hope so – because we believe that a world with many small units of political power is more diverse, innovative, cooperative, and better for almost everyone – except federal bureaucrats.
General Background
We begin with the Stanford Encyclopedia for Philosophy’s entry on secession, covering philosophical issues, theories about the right to secede, and secession within international law. Next, Ilya Somin at the popular law blog the Volokh Conspiracy defends secessionism against those who claim that it is necessarily stupid (for example, Ann Althouse) saying: “In light of this history and the ambiguity of the constitutional text, I don’t think that belief in a right to secession is at all unreasonable, much less a sign of obvious ignorance or stupidity.”
Original Posts For Secession Week
Scott Crawford at the Hawaiian Independence Blog explains why Hawaii seeks a restoration, not a secession, including many references and source materials: “…it is very important to understand that Hawaii cannot secede, because it was never ceded. There was never any lawful cession of Hawaii’s sovereignty or territory to the United States, therefore there cannot be secession.
Those seeking to restore Hawaii’s effective independence are very explicit in avoiding the term “secession.” This is more than just semantics. It goes to the heart of Hawaii’s true history and legal status.“
Carol Moore offers a guest post about “top principles for a successful secessionist movement”.
Just My Biased Opinion contributes an original piece covering some of the controversy and concerns about secession found on the Sean Hannity, as well as a good collection of related links.
Stewart Browne writes about Restoring Our Spiritual Faith, and historical cycles from bondage to liberty and abundance and back to bondage.
US State Secesssion & Independence Movements
There are so many independence movements and websites that we cannot list them all, but we will try to cover the major ones. For a more complete listing, see Wikipedia.
Alaska
The Alaskan Independence Party‘s platform reflects the increase in secessionism which has gone along with the last decade’s increase in federal tyranny: “There is a commonly held belief across Alaska, that the US Constitution has been set aside, and other then ourselves, there are no protections to the liberty and freedoms we are to have as our continued inheritance since the formation of the Union of the “several States”. Our main “goal” is a legal vote and ballot; one that was not given in 1958 and was in violation of International Law and Treaty. Alaskan were robbed of the choices we were to have as a non-self-governing territory, and steam-rolled into the current classification of a State.”
California
Jefferson State seeks to unite Northern California and Southern Oregon. It has an interesting history: it got major media attention when it started in 1941, but was pre-empted by the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into WWII. Proving, yet again, that war and strong central governments go hand in hand.
Florida
No discussion of US secession movements would be complete without The Conch Republic, whose motto is: “We seceded where others failed.”
Hawaii
Quite appropriately, the strongest state independence movement is in Hawaii, a state annexed quite recently (1890’s), and quite illegally. For those who naively view the fifty states as a harmonious consensual union, it may be shocking to realize that a mere hundred years ago, the United States conquered a nearby sovereign country by force, and has permanently occupied it ever since. See:
- Wikipedia’s article on Hawaiian Independence
- Dr. Sai’s doctoral dissertation, “The American Occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom: Beginning the Transition from Occupied to Restored State” (PDF)
- Hawaiian Independence Blog
- Hawai’i Nation
- Hawaiian Independence Action Alliance
For obvious reasons, the prospects for independence for geographically isolated regions such as Hawai’i and Alaska seem strongest.
New Hampshire
With the libertarian autonomy movement The Free State Project making its home in New Hampshire, it should be no surprise that there is a Republic Of New Hampshire site.
New York
Long Island Independence is not a major movement, I just included it for this Jon Stewart segment making fun of them. (If we secessionists can’t laugh at ourselves and each other, it’s going to be a long road!)
Puerto Rico
Like Hawai’i, Puerto Rico was invaded in the 1890s and forcibly transferred from Spain to the US for military reasons. The Puerto Rican Independence Party site has a history of Puerto Rican autonomy.
South
The League of the South seeks independence for the states that lost the Civil War.
South Dakota
The Republic of Lakota made the news in 2007 by declaring themselves independent from the US, as chronicled in their sovereignty timeline. The arguments for Native American sovereignty are somewhat different from conquered states (like Hawai’i), or states that wish to succeed, which is great because the more angles that secessionists try, the more likely it is that one will garner public sympathy and/or prove its legal merit.
Texas
As a large, proud, old, and very independent-minded state, Texas has quite a large secession movement. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, a recent study reported that 18% of Texans are in favor of secession, which is a huge number. The movement has also generated a lot of media coverage and interest around the country, like this segment on the Glenn Beck show last week with Texas Nationalist Movement president David Miller:
Some key resources:
- Texas Nationalist Movement – a large, active community site with the motto: “Independence In Our Lifetime” and a presence on all the major social networks. (Hmm, reminds me of the FSP motto: “Liberty In Our Lifetimes”).
- Texas Secede
Vermont
VT Commons is a nice journal about Vermont Independence. They state the major reasons for wanting to secede as: “First, the United States suffers from imperial overstretch and has become unsustainable politically, economically, agriculturally, socially, culturally, and environmentally. Second, Vermont finds it increasingly difficult to protect itself from the debilitating effects of big business, big agriculture, big markets, and big government, who want all of us to be the same—just like they are. Third, the U.S. government has lost its moral authority because it is owned, operated, and controlled by multinational corporations. Fourth, U.S. foreign policy, which is based on the doctrine of full-spectrum dominance, is immoral, illegal, unconstitutional, and in violation of the United Nations charter. Fifth, as long as Vermont remains in the United States, its citizens face curtailed civil liberties, the risk of terrorist attack, and the risk of military conscription of its youth.”
The Second Vermont Republic “is a nonviolent citizens’ network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government, and committed to the peaceful return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly the dissolution of the Union”. Glenn Beck interviews Thomas Naylor, the founder (author of the Vermont Manifesto book):
Please join us tomorrow, with the theme of Secession vs. Revolution.
Restoring Our Spiritual Faith
A guest post from Stewart Browne, who blogs at Scarecrow For President.
The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to selfishness;
From selfishness to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
— attributed (sometimes) to Scottish intellectual Sir Alex Fraser Tyler (1742-1813).
Tyler’s “historical sequence” has been getting a lot of notice in America lately, with good reason. Even the most hardened skeptic cannot deny the prophetic accuracy of the cycle as applied to America. If the bondage…liberty stages are those that led to the American Revolution, both the 200-year timeline and the sequence say we’re due to be at the end right about now.
After liberty comes abundance. Thankfully for Americans, the liberty/abundance combo would seem to be the longest stage, with abundance either beginning in the latter 19th century or post WW2, depending on how you wish to define it. Abundance certainly gave way to selfishness at some point during the Boomers’ reign, and one might argue that complacency really kicked in post-Vietnam when the draft disappeared from American life. The 90s were all about apathy (even the dominant clothing style then was meant to convey the sentiment that you just didn’t care). And without question all of America entered into the most severe sort of dependence during the Bush years, when government, businesses, and individuals accumulated a level of debt that is beyond obscene by any historical standard.
So when does bondage begin anew?
Many (or most) libertarians will tell you that America is already in the bondage stage. Some might argue that it began with the Civil War; others would say that bondage began in 1913, when both the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve came into being. The Great Depression, The Great Society, The War on Terror, The First $700 Billion Bailout — all make for good starting points when making a case that America has crossed over into bondage.
No matter where you start, it is hard to deny that we’re here now. When more than half our national income is lost to the government, and more than all of our future income is already spoken for against our will, it’s safe to say that we are no longer a free society.
As awful as that sounds, it can also be comforting to think we’ve reached the last stage of the cycle, because that would imply we’re ready to make a go of starting over with spiritual faith, great courage, and once again, liberty.
If we desire to start over and repeat the 200-year cycle then naturally we should look to the beginning for guidance. How did our predecessors, those who last faced our current predicament, harness spiritual faith and great courage to move from bondage to liberty?
Happy Secession Week Everyone.
Prepare to be Overwhelmed by Secession
(A guest post by Carol Moore)
In April 2009 there were hundreds of news stories about Texas governor Rick Perry talking about the possibility that Texans will get so fed up with the federal government they will secede. And I still get two dozen a week stories, opinion and blog pieces about the possibility of Texas or another state seceding.
Imagine how many stories there would be if it was 30 states and 50 big cities ready to secede. As a long time proponent of secession, my mind is already boggling.
There is no doubt that the United States constitution and its majority rule representative form of republican government is a failed experiment. And an experiment is just what the founding fathers considered it to be. (Remember Thomas Jefferson’s recommendation there be a revolution every 20 years?) We simply cannot have have a liberty-oriented secessionist movement using the same old political modus operandis and structures.
How do we keep the genuine desire for human freedom and self-determination from degenerating into violent anarchy and mass murder? Only through clear, simple and workable principles that will quickly be absorbed and embraced by the vast majority of secessionists, even those who lust to take up guns and go to war!
Here are my top principles for a successful secessionist movement:
* Nonviolent Strategies and Institutions: After racism, the greatest fear unionists promote is that secessionists will violently provoke “legitimate” central government violence that may harm innocent citizens. I recommend a thorough study of nonviolent action analyst Gene Sharp’s 198 methods of nonviolent action and a very public commitment to practicing them. Creating institutions committed to using conflict resolution and nonviolent enforcement of laws and contracts should be an equally important goal. Read Gandhi on nonviolent police and armies. The urge by some to “prove their manhood” through revolutionary violence must be opposed firmly. And watch out for authoritarians and charismatic leaders who foment violence to increase their control over people and resources; modern day knights putting together their fiefdoms.
* Bills of Rights: We must ensure all secessionist political alternatives publicize widely their written guarantees for individuals of freedom of association; of movement in and out of political entities; of equal political rights of members to participate in community decision-making and have access to public information; of procedural rights of members and of visitors to trial – to due process, counsel, appeal, and to no cruel and unusual means of interrogation or punishment.
* Consensus-Oriented (or Super-Majority) Direct Democracy: Representative, majority rule decision-making, in small organizations and even more so in large ones and in government, leads inevitably to defacto minority rule by wealthy and/or well-organized elites and special interests who know who to elect, who to pressure, who to pay, to get their way. All the attempted and proposed tweaks couldn’t fix the basic majoritarian/representative structural flaw, even if they could be enacted, which they cannot under current systems. Many libertarians dream of a society regulated by contract, but even such a society inevitably will encounter unexpected situations requiring democratic decision-making. And then there are the people who just love making decisions by committees, councils, congresses and parliaments. Learning and practicing direct, consensus-oriented democracy in our organizing will prepare us for creating them in our new political communities, should we need or want to do so.
* Emphasizing voluntary nature of secessionist entities: Obviously, secessionists do not intend to wait for a super-majority of people in their communities or regions or states to decide they want to secede from the union. Most will be ready when they obtain a critical mass of 15 or 20%! Nevertheless, we must reassure the public that communities and new confederations will be created by voluntary alliances, not by driving off unwanted people and confiscating their property. We must assure non-secessionists that those who want to retain citizenship in the nation state, obey its laws and pay its taxes may do so, even if many or most of their neighbors secede.
* Freely chosen unity and diversity: To reiteratte the point above, one purpose of secession is to allow people to form communities (especially residential) which reflect their personal values and believes. Choice is what is all about. However, those small number of individuals infiltrating secessionist movements who advocate that races, religions, ethnicities, ideological factions must be separated into different states and communities, even if they advocate this be done nonviolently, is not only bigoted but bound to foment violence and eventually dozens of authoritarian enclaves. I am sure that over time many people will gravitate toward any number of communities that reflect their values. And others will gravitate to more diverse communities than those which government laws and regulations have artificially corralled them into. Look forward to a much more comfortable and much more exciting world than the restricted, constricted one we inhabit today!
Carol Moore is long-time libertarian and decentralist activist and web master of Secession.net.
Secession Week Blogging, Monday, Intro To Secession
Welcome to Secession Week here at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom! To celebrate Independence Day, each day this week we’ll be bringing you secession related posts and links from around the web. To learn more about the event and how to participate, read our intro. For Monday, we’re going to focus on how secession is going mainstream, and an introduction to secession.
Secession Goes Mainstream
Secession suffers from a coordination problem – you can’t do it alone, and so there is no point in working on it unless other people are too. So we’ll start by showing that even in the US, secession is becoming an increasingly mainstream topic.
From Wall Street Journal article on secession
To start, Mike here at A Thousand Nations points us to an article about secession in the Wall Street Journal – not exactly a fringe or obscure media channel (Cameron Parker also writes about the WSJ piece). And even the New York Times reported on Texas Governor Rick Perry’s recent expression of sympathy for secessionist Texans (18% of the state, in a recent poll).
And via Stunatra, we can also see secession being talked about by Congressman Ron Paul:
The Basics Of Secession
The topic is covered in quite a number of books, like Secession, State, & Liberty (a collection of essays reviewed here), A Constitutional History of Secession, and The Dynamic of Secession from Cambridge Studies in International Relations.
Patri has written a post introducing our unique approach to making government work better: Let’s Try Everything: Local Autonomy and Innovation In Government.
Did you know that there is an institute about secession? Check out The Middlebury Institute: For The Study of Separatism, Secession, And Self-Determination. They co-sponsored the Second North American Secessionist Convention in 2007, which received quite a bit of press via an AP story.
Several other good sources of information about secession are Secession.net – Principles, Goals, and Strategies, and The American Secession Project – “Dedicated to placing secession in the mainstream of political thought as a viable solution to contemporary problems.”
We’ll update this post the rest of the day, as new links come in, and we’ll have more new posts all week on different topics, like American Secession Movements, Secession vs. Revolution, and Federalism (Secession Lite). If you’re a blogger, we encourage you to write on any of these topics, or secession in general, and comment, trackback, or email us the link.
Secession Week Posts
- Prepared to Be Overwhelmed By Secession
- Restoring Our Spiritual Faith
- Revolution vs. Secession
- Bloodless Instability
Please join us tomorrow, when the theme will be American Secession and Independence Movements.
Here at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom, we have a different way of thinking about politics which we believe greatly simplifies a number of issues. Instead of fighting about what policy should govern a nation of 300,000,000 people, we believe in promoting an ecosystem of competing nations. Instead of uniformity in political goals, culture, and implementation, we believe in diversity. Instead of solving problems, we believe in setting up a system where problems solve themselves. Sounds impossible? Let me explain.
As I wrote in my Cato essay Beyond Folk Activism, we can look at politics at three different levels:
- Policies: Specific sets of laws.
- Institutions: An entire country and its legal and political systems.
- Ecosystem: All nations and the environment in which they compete and evolve.
Most political discussion occurs at level (1) – argument about what the best policy is. Protection or free trade? Socialized medicine or our current vaguely-private-ish system? Private retirement accounts or Social Security? The revolution of public choice theory was to point out the importance of level (2), the institutions of a society, in determining what policies get passed. For example, while a democracy will tend to pass policies that are broadly beneficial compared to what monarchs and one-party states implement, it also tends to pass policies which appear to reflect the will of the electorate, but whose details benefit special interests. To keep debating about what the perfect policy would be, and ignore the fact that perfect policies never get passed, is to ignore the last half-century of economic research showing that level (2) matters, and that policies are an emergent behavior of institutions.
But that’s not the end of the story, because national governments are not the highest level system. They emerge from and compete in the global ecosystem of nations, and we think that the future of economic research and political activism lie in understanding and changing this ecosystem. Currently, there are less than 200 governments for almost seven billion people, and it is very difficult to start a new country. All land is claimed, and countries are reluctant to allow secession or local autonomy. Why would they? The governing industry is an oligopoly, and current nations are like any cartel which tries to restrict the entrance of new firms in order to keep selling a bad product (government) at a high price (taxes).
What if we somehow changed this, by restoring American Federalism, increasing support for secession, or opening a new frontier for colonization, like the high seas – and thus Letting A Thousand Nations Bloom? Any change to the ecosystem of governments which allows creation of new governments will make government more diverse and innovative by allowing for small-scale experimentation with many new ideas. And it will make the market for government more competitive, which will lead to it providing a better product at a lower price. In other words, the governing industry is just like any other industry – restrict it to a few big firms, and it stagnates, but allow small ones to enter, and they will innovate. No wonder politics has so few new ideas – it has no startups!
For those who doubt that governments compete, look at the tax rates on capital (corporate tax) vs. labor (income tax). Capital is taxed less because it is more mobile, and so countries must compete for it. Which they don’t like – which is why they are trying to form a cartel to keep taxes up.
Imagine a world where instead of debating furiously about what policies to impose on everyone, we debate just enough to establish the top contenders – and then go try all of them. For example, socialized medicine (or radical free-market medicine) could be implemented on a state-by-state (or city-by-city) basis. Some experiments will work and be universally adopted, others will fail and be universally loathed, while many will fall in-between and be or attractive or unattractive based on individual preference. But in every case, our judgements will be based on trials and real-world experience – not hot air from pundits or politicians advancing their own agenda.
There are many ways to get such a system. Secession obviously increases the number of polities, and even the threat of secession should enable local governments such as US states to reclaim a large amount of local autonomy (ie move the United States back towards its founding principle of federalism). Opening a new frontier, where social entrepreneurs can go try experimental systems of governance also does the trick. I’m sure there are more that I haven’t thought of.
The important thing is that we try to make the industry of government more competitive, rather than pushing our favored specific policies. This solution is glorious because it lets everyone dissatisfied with the performance of the current government industry (which is pretty much everyone) work together to make the world better for all of us. Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians – we may not agree on what policies work best, but we can all agree that a world of small governments trying new things will teach us far more about what does and doesn’t work than continuing our endless debates.
Let’s all get behind this global goal of local autonomy: To Let A Thousand Nations Bloom.
Rethinking Sovereignty
Michael Strong points us to a fascinating paper by Jurgen Brauer and Robert Haywood. Echoing the idea of breaking the monopoly on law, they argue against the concept of territorial based sovereignty. In its place, they imagine a type of polycentric sovereign order where, in any territory, political authority is fragmented and overlapping among states, civil society and private enterprise. They write:
virtually the entire academic and public discussion regarding global governance is carried out in terms of the Westphalian-type, sovereign state-based, and state-centric system. But unlike global civil and commercial society, the members of that system are, ironically, the least global players. They cannot but act with merely local, parochial interests in mind. Thus, by design, state-based global governance is always likely to fall short of what is needed. Myopia prevails over utopia.
What is needed is an enforceable, rules-based global structure that balances the respective strengths of political, civil, and commercial society, the first operating through power, the second through moral suasion, and the third through markets. Indeed, humanity’s very conception of sovereignty must return to its pre-1648 sense: universal assertion of authority and universal assertion of supremacy, but in a non-territorial way. (For example, religious doctrine generally asserts universal authority and supremacy over the faithful, wherever they may be located.) The question arises of how this can possibly be achieved today. Our suggestion looks to non-state sovereign (civil society and commercial) entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. This refers to trans-boundary, non-state actors as they impinge on and aim to supplement, even supplant, certain powers of sovereign states.
Commercializing the success of free economic zones like the Dubai International Finance Center and Hong Kong is one way to realize a portion of their framework. On that note, Strong and Robert Himber have a new article in Economic Affairs on the lessons Dubai offers for such free market reforms.
Upcoming: Secession Week Blogging!
The Fourth of July is commonly known as Independence Day, but a better term for it is Secession Day. Secession almost always involves multiple groups of people, some small and local, others large and distant, who want to rule the same territory. And history tells us that large, distant rulers are often reluctant to grant independence. The word “independence” takes all the historical messiness involved in winning freedom from a hostile enemy and sweeps it under the rug, while the term “secession” puts this inherent tension right out into the open.
So Saturday, July 4th is Secession Day. And to commemorate this day, Let A Thousand Nations Bloom is going to host a Secession Week Blogging Event. Starting on Monday (6/29), we will post a roundup of secession-related links every day. Some will be original pieces here, some original pieces from other blogs, and some older articles. This is a brand new event, so I don’t know how popular it will be, but secession is a hot topic lately so we should be able to get a decent following that we can build on in future years.
If you’d like to make an original contribution to the event, write a post next week and email it to us at athousandnationsbloom@gmail.com, or just trackback one of our posts. If you have a blog or website and find our Secession Week posts interesting, please post links to us.
Secession Week Blogging Posts:
- 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
Imperialistic Democracy – A Threat To Localism?
As various western factions debate whether Iran is or is not a democracy, or is or is not in the process of becoming one, or mired forever as some sort of mishmashed autocratic theocracy or theocratic autocracy or theo-oligarchic dictatorship or military oligocracy or or or . . . it does us well to bear in mind that not one of these various régimes, Hitlers, enemies-of-order, terrorists, failed states, nemeses, adversaries, competitors, ad inf. exhibits anywhere near the hegemonizing, evangelical zeal of the club of Western democracies when it comes to their political institutions and variously scorned or vaunted ways of life.
…
Our various scardeycats prattle fearfully about Islamofascism and its expansionist impulses, but while one can certainly find radical voices calling for the unification of the Ummah, even the wildest dreams of some new caliphate stop short of Cordoba, let alone Vienna, despite the fever dreams of The Internet’s more entertaining madmen. Occasionally you will hear some American rightwinger or British nationalist averring that the Muslims are overrunning London, Paris, Marseilles, but even this doomsday is more a worry about displacement than conquest, a vaguely held fear that white folk are being outbred. There is no sense or evidence that Osama bin Laden wishes for America to convert and embrace the religion of the Prophet. The Taliban have no designs on Topeka. Yet you cannot say the US Congress has no plans for Karachi.
This democratic imperialism will be a future issue for our movement of diversity and local autonomy. As I blogged earlier, because democracy is a freer, better political system (if institutions and appropriate culture are present), the spread of democracy is making the world freer. Yet within each democracy, true to Mancur Olson’s analysis of the accumulation of special interests, things are getting worse.
So for the present, it may still be the case that democratic imperalism is increasing freedom by recruiting more democracies. But the narrow-minded obsession with this single political system does not bode well for the experimentation required to come up with the next brilliant idea in social organization. All Thousand Nations will not be and should not be democracies.
Much like free speech involves defending your right to speak, even if I do not like your words, we should defend local autonomy and diverse governance, even for regimes we don’t like. The localist approach is that revolution must come from within, not be imposed from without. Thus we should decry democratic imperialism and arrogance, and let each local populace find their own way to a better society.
Broadly Representative, Narrowly Captured
I’m a big fan of public choice theory, especially the work of Mancur Olson, and ever since Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter came out, I’ve been wondering how to resolve an apparent contradiction between public choice and Caplan’s work.
The public choice perspective is that legislators are driven by incentives, like everyone else, and so craft policies which benefit them and their special interest backers. Thus policies reflect narrow interests. Caplan’s claim is that policies broadly reflect public interest – that we have trade barriers because most people are protectionist. He goes even further and says that politicians (being more educated, economically literate, and wanting to produce good results) give us better policies than we’d get in a Mencken-style democracy where the common people know what they want – and get it good and hard.
So what’s the deal? Do policies reflect broad interests, or narrow ones? I suspect the answer is that it depends on your scale. Looking at policies in a broad sense, they reflect broad interests – people want trade barriers, we have trade barriers. Looking at the specific details, we see specific interests – we don’t have general tariffs, we have very specific tariffs which help the specific industries and companies who have the most political clout.
Thus the voters get their desired policies, while the politicians earn their kickbacks by arranging for special interests to benefit from the implementation details. It is very difficult for voters to control this sort of thing, because most are not aware of how the details can cause lossy transfers from broad interests to concentrated ones. Even if they were, they wouldn’t have time to read the details, and even if they did, it takes economic education and specialized knowledge about the industry to understand who is getting screwed and who is getting a handout. Lobbyists have that knowledge, voters don’t.
I don’t want to claim that this resolution is uniquely mine, so I’ll quote a couple of pieces that I am fond of that mention this same idea. First, Russ Roberts in Pigs Don’t Fly connects this phenomenon to the idea of “Bootleggers and Baptists” coalitions:
When the city council bans liquor sales on Sundays, the Baptists rejoice—it’s wrong to drink on the Lord’s day. The bootleggers, rejoice, too. It increases the demand for their services.
The Baptists give the politicians cover for doing what the bootleggers want. No politicians says we should ban liquor sales on Sunday in order to enrich the bootleggers who support his campaign. The politician holds up one hand to heaven and talk about his devotion to morality. With the other hand, he collects campaign contributions (or bribes) from the bootleggers.
Yandle points out that virtually every well-intentioned regulation has a bunch of bootleggers along for the ride—special interests who profit from the idealism of the activists and altruists.
If that’s all there was to Yandle’s theory, you’d say that politics makes for strange bedfellows. But it’s actually much more depressing than that. What often happens is that the public asks for regulation but inevitably doesn’t pay much attention to how that regulation gets structured. Why would we? We have lives to lead. We’re simply too busy. Not so with the bootleggers. They have an enormous stake in the way the legislation is structured. The devil is in the details. And a lot of the time, politicians give bootleggers the details that serve the bootleggers rather than the public interest.
Second, David Friedman (my dad) says that, even if you agree that government sucks because incentives matter, ideas can still influence the world by influencing what policies are broadly requested:
I see democracy as equipped, like a microscope, with a coarse control and a fine control. The fine control is special interest lobbying, the coarse control is majority voting. It is coarse because of rational ignorance. Voters know their vote has a negligible effect on outcomes and so have no incentive to acquire the information they would need in order to do a good job of making sure that governments do good things instead of bad things. The result is that how they vote and the outcome of their voting are largely driven by free information—what everyone knows, whether or not it is true.
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Or consider the longstanding issue of free trade vs protectionism. All economists know that tariffs, as a general rule with perhaps some exceptions, injure the country that imposes them as well as its trading partners. Everyone who isn’t an economist “knows” that tariffs help the country that imposes them by protecting its industries from the threat of foreign competition and are bad only because other countries are likely to retaliate with tariffs of their own.
Part of the reason people believe that may be the same hard-wired hunter/gatherer mindset that Patri discusses in a different context, this time taking the form of a view of almost all issues as us against them. But another and perhaps more important part is that the wrong analysis of foreign trade is easy to understand, the right analysis is hard to understand, which is why the right analysis was not discovered until the early 19th century when David Ricardo worked out the theory of comparative advantage. One result of the mistaken popular understanding is to lower the political cost of passing tariffs and so to lower the cost to industries of buying such legislation.
Since political outcomes are in part driven by the free information that affects the political cost of alternative policies, one way of influencing outcomes is by influencing that free information.
This is a great point, and it means that education and culture matter. Unfortunately, the progression of culture in past decades in the West has been for increasing government intervention, which gives special interests more opportunities to exert influence. Crises are inevitable, and with every crisis, government expands its scope. The Iraq War and the credit crunch/stimulus/bailouts are the latest examples, and they have led to enormous expansions of government power – and thus of special interest power.
To stop this culturally, we would need a culture of unresponsiveness – of believing that the best thing to do is usually nothing. And “Crisis! Do Nothing!” is a tough sell. So while I applaud the efforts of cultural activists, I prefer to find ways to reset government (to clear the sclerotic growths of special interests), and increase competition (to squeeze some of the inefficiency out of regulation).
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom!
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom 