{ "episodeId": "SLP603", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "ryan_mcmaken": { "name": "Ryan McMaken", "role": "guest", "tag": "RYAN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.23, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast, brought to you by Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save your Bitcoin over at getbold.io, that's for American listeners. Rejoining me today is Ryan McMaken. He is the executive editor and economist at the Mises Institute. He hosts, I think two shows and is also the Author of two books, one of which we're gonna be talking about today, it's called Breaking Away. So Ryan, first of all, welcome back to the show. Thank you, it's great to be with you. So Ryan, as I, as I was telling you offline, I really enjoyed reading the book. Obviously I would, I'm a libertarian, pro secession, of course, but, nevertheless, I think it's a topic that a lot of people could do with learning a bit more about it, because I'm sure there's a lot of misconceptions floating out there Let me ask you this, how did you come to get interested in secession and these ideas?" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "01:06", "start": 66.4, "text": "Well, I think the phrase that kept rolling around in my head for years where I wasn't involved in any of this stuff, particularly, I worked as a government economist for ten years, did a lot of work in state and local government, so a lot of issues that concerned me were real basic stuff like law enforcement, the low- Local level and issues related to tiny regulations at the local level, differences between this place and that place in terms of some religious value like abortion or something like that, right? And it quickly becomes clear when you're dealing with the daily life issues of what does this county government do versus what does this municipal government do, that trying to come up with one universal system is just It's, it's not really practical. And the phrase that kept rolling around in my head was a phrase used by both Murray Rothbard and the historian Ralph Raico, who factors a lot into my book and some of my later work as well, is the phrase radical decentralization. And they just look at the issue of, look, the, the successful part of the world, that is the Europe, the Europe that produced a highly free and economically prosperous system, this was historically a radically decentralized system. Also, radical decentralization is the only system that really takes into account differences in populations and values and addresses the issues that democracy pretends to address but doesn't really address. And so it's really decentralization that looks at that, and also it just answers a fundamental issue of, okay, if, if one huge government works, why shouldn't we have world government, right? Most people kind of understand on some fundamental level why that doesn't work. And so the question is, okay, well then what is the right size of a government? So I just, I started looking at that, and then it turns out there's just a whole literature on it. And then I realized, okay, we're clearly not discussing enough about the broader historical and theoretical context around secession and small states. So much of what gets discussed-- and this was another, so one motivation was just the issue of dealing with state and local and, and just how do we deal with these little issues? But the other was the fact that I just felt that the issue of secession had been way too much focused on just the American context. context and the nineteenth century American context. And, just as an example, after I'd already started working on this issue, and I'm looking at it in terms of secession, like for Iceland and Malta and the post-Soviet world and all of the secession that's going on globally, a lot of it, most of it, peaceful, really. And then I, I read, Frank Buckley's book that just came out a few years ago called American Secession. And the, and right off the bat, the book starts talking about the American South and secession there, and I'm like, \"Oh, here we go again, right? I, I like we've got a whole world to look at in terms of this topic, self-determination in the global context, and people are still talking about stuff that happened in the eighteen sixties. I mean, what other topic from the eighteen sixties is relevant in the modern world, in terms of political development and politics? Like, almost- Nothing, that was so long ago. But you've still got Americans saying, \"Well, that issue was settled in the Civil War.\" I'm like, \"Really? Like something that happened a hundred and sixty years ago is now, basically handcuffed us to a certain system? We don't believe that about anything else.\" And so the whole issue was just mired in all of this parochial talk about, gee, what, what was Andrew Jackson saying two hundred years ago on this topic? And I just felt that, okay, now's the time to look at this through a much broader context, and that's a big part of what's ba-what's behind the book." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:14", "start": 314.45, "text": "Yeah, well said. And so a really interesting stat that I wasn't aware of, until I had, read the book, and I think I had heard you mention this as well, is this stat that The number of countries or states in the world has almost tripled since World War II. I mean, that for a lot of people, that's just like-- That's just gonna hit you like a real, because I think for most of us, we're kinda growing up and we have this kinda status quo bias about, \"Oh, these are the countries that exist in the world today, and it's just set in stone, and you just can't change it.\" But that's actually not the reality. So could you just explain a little bit about how the world changed so rapidly?" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "05:54", "start": 354.37, "text": "Right. You, what you get are a lot of people who think that the borders of countries in the world were ordained by God somehow, and that these are really unchanging and something fundamental to our world, which they're not at all. Within a single human lifetime, the borders have changed massively. Not only was there a huge amount of change that occurred between forty-five and seventy-five, but then there was another big change that occurred after nineteen ninety, with the end of the Soviet Union. And yes, you can, you can just try it Trace this if you just look at the United Nations membership. So there was about, after World War II, United Nations had about sixty-five truly sovereign nation states that became members. But by the year two thousand, you had well over, one hundred and eighty, maybe one hundred and ninety. I mean, it's, there's kind of debatable as to which countries are truly sovereign entities or not, but we all agree it's more than one hundred and ninety, maybe around two hundred. And That's the reality of where we are now. So how did you get from a world that had maybe about sixty, sixty-five countries in nineteen forty-five, and now we're at over a hundred and eighty, so that's over, that's about a tripling? And the answer is of course, there was a lot of secession going on in that period. You had a lot of parts of the world that were united politically to certain colonial metropoles for the most part, and then they all broke off. it's called decolonization. It all happens by secession And a whole lot of it happened in the twentieth century, and that's just another thing that's just generally ignored by anti-secession people. They act like, \"Oh, secession always and everywhere leads to war.\" Really? It didn't. Throughout much of the sixties and seventies, in some cases, there were armed conflicts that resulted from attempts at decolonization, but in many other cases, there wasn't an armed conflict that resulted. So that's how we got to where we are. Lots of secession occurring, lots of decolonization, and then some other stuff that you wouldn't Maybe the Baltic states after the Soviet Union collapsed, which they had never really been colonies per se, they were just simply conquered, in a more conventional sense. so you had just had a lot of that going on in the twentieth century, and that's how we got to our about two hundred nation states today." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:13", "start": 493.46, "text": "Yeah, fascinating. And so I guess, yeah, after World War II, and, you know, you started to see there were different countries that gained their independence, let's say from the UK as an example, like, like India or even Sri Lanka or, others. And then, as you said, like the USSR breakdown, and even kind of in recent years, people talk about, let's say, Serbia and Montenegro have broken apart, Czechia and Slovakia, obviously Brexit, right? Brexit, I mean, it's a little bit more complicated, but still kind of still kind of counts as an example of a breakaway state, and so I guess certainly a type of" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "08:48", "start": 528.45, "text": "decentralization when a Brexit state breaks off. Yeah. I mean, there's, I think that fits under the general topic. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:56", "start": 536.09, "text": "for sure. so let's talk a little bit kind of upfront, what are some of the advantages? Like, why, why should we be pro-secession? Why is that a good thing for liberty or even just humanity and economic outcomes, prosperity, these kinds of things? Well, at the beginning" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "09:13", "start": 553.04, "text": "of the book, in Breaking Away, I look at it from a larger historical and theoretical perspective, and a lot of that was introduced to me by the historian Ralph Reckhow, who has a lengthy, essay called The European Miracle, and he looks at, takes a broad view of, okay, what research has been done on why Europe became this very free place, a place that valued freedom, and also as a result of its valuing freedom, became the leading economic power in terms of- The, the, this is the part of the world that has the, the most economic wealth, and it wasn't just some unknowable thing that happened. It's not something like written on our hearts by some mystic source or something. There were real historical events that we can look to and developments, and what Raico, finds, and he's drawing upon lots of developmental historians here, Douglas North, E. L. Jones, who when And they looked what made Europe different, and what they found was what made Europe different was the fact that it was so much more decentralized than any of these other major civilizations that you might look to and say, \"How-- that was, that was a part of the world that looked like it would become the richest.\" And For example, if an alien came to Earth in the year thirteen hundred, and they looked around, they wouldn't look to Europe and think, \"Ah, yes, this is, this is gonna be the richest place in the world soon.\" They would look at, say, the Caliphate. They would look at, right, because that was certainly, if we look at the riches of the Eastern Mediterranean at that time, you thought, \"Oh, well, this place is gonna, is rich now, it's gonna continue being rich.\" Or China, for example, which in the Middle Ages also looked like To become one of the rich places. But what happened was, is that those places that were more politically centralized, they were able to control their economic factors, they were able to impose, more regulation, they were able to essentially impoverish their most productive people. And those places all fell behind Europe. What was going on in Europe? There was no single government in Europe at any, at, any point in time during this time. This is all West. I, I, we can't include the Eastern Old Roman Empire because that was pretty centralized too. And so it was in the West, in Western Christendom, where there was con-constant church-state conflict that didn't allow any single government to arise. You had all sorts of different principalities, you had a variety of different- Different, not even really states yet, and kingdoms and city-states, and they all had very different sorts of governments. They all, had local rules that were different from place to place. But what, what it turned out Was that these places would then compete with each other. They were forced by the fact that productive people would move from a bad place that regulated and impoverished people to a better place that did less of that. So you had places in Europe that popped up that were more open to economic freedom, and people, the most productive people would prosper there, that's where wealth would go, and those places would then be better off. So it was this variety. Is this decentralization that existed in Europe that made the difference? You get a lot of talk today about, \"Oh, you need a big government that can really project itself on the global stage and all that.\" Well, you had that with China in that time period, and China fell behind and isn't catching up. I, I, it's gonna take a long, long time, even with all of the good stuff that's going on in China, they're, they're still just a small fraction of the GDP per capita of the West, and the West- continues to this day to benefit from that radical decentralization that existed in those days, and that's, that's true today. Let's just look at the smaller states in the world, right? It's still true that, with the exception of the United States, which is the most ideologically liberal state and also has some of the highest levels of decentralization, it's a lot less than it used to be, but it's still far more decentralized than a lot of other states. and so combined with those two issues, that's what, makes the US an exception. If we look Look at any other large state, Indonesia, India, China, even some Brazil, some of these lesser places, Russia. All of these places are tend to be highly regulatory places that aren't in any way leading, in terms of GDP per capita because they control their economies more. Contrast that with Switzerland, with Norway, neither of which are in the EU, by the way, and they are the wealthiest places. In fact, the the top- Top three wealthiest countries in the world by this measure by GDP per capita, and of course, we can just look around and say that, \"Yes, these are pretty darn rich places.\" Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. And these are all very small states. So if we were to put together some sort of correlation here, we're more likely to find that smaller states are simply wealthier, and, as we see in a lot of the larger historical data, there's, there's reasons for that, and that shouldn't surprise us at all." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:35", "start": 875.21, "text": "Yeah. one other point I wanted to ask you about there, just from-- on the historical discussion and even today, it could be around the question of larger, not necessarily being better, because an empire costs a lot of money to sustain, right? Doesn't, and just like even people would argue now, the American government is sustaining these massive military bases around the world and this huge projection of power into the entire globe, that's a costly thing to do, and even- You know, the British used to do that, and that, and their power sort of waned a bit. I'm curious if you have any comment on that being one of the, the downsides of being large." }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "15:16", "start": 915.5, "text": "Yes, it's absolutely it's a problem of being large, and it's also a problem of political unity. You can think if the United States were simply as really originally intended, if it had simply been a mutual defense league where all of the member states came together with the, the goal of, okay, if one of us is attacked In fact, we will all come to each other's defense. they came up with this idea a long time before NATO, right? And there wouldn't have been one state that dominated in that American defense league either. You can see how that would be a very different situation than to the current situation we have, where the US government's far more unitary than that. It's far more than just a mutual defense league, and that enables-- and probably made possible more by, The imposition of direct taxation, probably the, income tax more than any other single thing that enabled the United States to just start all these massive amounts of defense spending and start throwing its weight around globally, that, that does require significant amounts of taxation. It does, result, however, ironically From the success, the economic success of a country, right? This is, why Lenin was able to tell a somewhat, somewhat plausible idea that, \"Look at all these capitalist countries, clearly one stage of capitalism as you move through it is imperialism.\" The-- there's a correlation there, but there is no causation. What, what happens is that you get a country that's, that starts out free, that has lower levels of government intervention. We can look at the French. Look at the British, all of which had embraced, significant amounts of freer trade and freer markets, especially in the mid-nineteenth century. And as they became very wealthy, they realized fifty years later, \"Oh, look, we have all this wealth, we can start to really impose our will on foreign countries 'cause we're so much richer than them.\" But there, there's no reason that has to happen. Capitalism doesn't require a turn toward imperialism. What happens is your country gets so rich thanks to its free markets that it only needs to shave off a small percentage of that wealth then to have a gigantic army or gigantic navy and start throwing its weight around. The answer to that is also political decentralization. We could look to how much better the history of Europe would have been if the Germans, so the German Confederation in the late- nineteenth century, if instead of uniting politically the way they did, that all the German city states and kingdoms had simply entered into a mutual defense league, that if someone defends, say Bavaria, we all defend each other, that doesn't enable a state to project its power. It doesn't enable a state to, enter into aggressive foreign policy, or at least it highly diminishes the likelihood of that. And so you could have a state that's very secure in terms of its, national, quote unquote, its, its, I say, its, the safety of its confederation in terms of foreign policy. Without enabling a central government to access and really project power in a way that centralized and, and unitary governments can. And so that's a mistake that the people in these countries allow to happen, is they, they think defense requires unified government, but it doesn't. You can create all sorts of other mechanisms that help defend it. But once you start to go down that road of unitary government and you start giving the central government the ability to directly tax the people and collect, wealth wealth itself, then it can start to enter into all this terrible foreign policy. So that's how all that interacts, and yep, bigger governments are able to do that, assuming they're wealthy, of course, right? A country that has a billion people, but only say fifteen billion in terms of wealth, well, most of that wealth's gonna have to go to feeding and housing those people. It's not gonna have enough surplus to, try to conquer the world. it's gotta be just-- it's gotta be extremely wealthy on a per capita basis, not just on a- An overall GDP basis." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:29", "start": 1168.52, "text": "The lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. 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This show brought to you by CoinKite dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on the, the seed word cards, and keep that secure. Now, you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Bep20 Desktop or Nunchuk. A few examples. Now, you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices, such as passphrases. You can use seed x or, or my favorite is multi-signature. Now, if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your setup. But I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins, especially as you start to migrate up into multi-signature security. But don't be disheartened Don't be, scared away. They are accessible, and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code livera to get a discount on your cold card. Gotcha. Yeah. As an example, something like in India is kind of maybe in that category. but yeah, let's talk a little bit about some of the advantages of- Smaller countries, right? it's, it seems like one crucial one that you spell out in the book is this idea that if there were smaller countries or states It's easier to move away without losing access to your family and friends back, you know, back home in the state that you are originally from or that you were. So that's a, that's an example that I think, a lot of people You know, it might not seem apparent, but in practice, it makes a big difference, doesn't it?" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "22:18", "start": 1337.88, "text": "Yes, it's not, it's not just people, but of course, capital and labor in general can move. I, I suppose that's a type of migration, but specifically the migration of these economic units. you can move businesses, and the key that's pointed out in the whole European miracle issue is not only was Europe radically decentralized, but it also was culturally uniform enough throughout this entire- entire continent that it was fairly easy to move, where you could move next door and there might be a similar language spoken there. you could move, you're in one part of, say, the Rhine, along the Rhine River, there's one kingdom there, they start to overtax you, you could move down the river to a different place, take your capital or your shipping business with you, and you don't have to completely uproot yourself from your civilization or from all the people you know or the culture that you're familiar with With, and that, that was a big factor there. And so it's important to keep in mind that human beings, as much as many people may wish it weren't so, were physical people who live in the physical world, and if you have to move a thousand miles to, to change your political fortunes, that's a much bigger burden than if you only have to move a hundred miles. And that's just, that's the reality and has been the reality historically. And so when you have a variety of small states, especially when When you have several states where this-- where a common language is spoken, you have an incredible amount of mobility in terms of people, in terms of capital, in terms of wealth that are able to move around because those cultural barriers are real, the language barriers are real, and this has of course helped countries immensely is when they managed to create just these language blocks where so that everyone who speaks Norwegian is in Norway, right? The Germans were never able to accomplish that. There's at least three German speaking countries but a lot of countries have said, \"Hey, hey, if you're, you know, you, you speak Czech, good luck going to some other country.\" So that imposes real barriers. So the ideal actually is, is a variety of countries that are decentralized to the point where there are, there's even a uniform culture across barriers. And, throughout most of Europe's history, until the formation of our modern nation states, that was the reality, and that enabled, a significant amount of movement in And persons and capital and the, again, the most productive people. And so the countries that were more free would be rewarded, and the countries that were less free would be hurt. And you can see that even today, there's been some good, real quantitative research looking at, especially in the wake of the Cold War, so in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, what have small, small states been doing? And what they found was that small states, do tend to embrace More openness to more migration in terms of productive workers. They tend to embrace lower taxes. They tend to embrace more use of, more, movement of capital because they want to attract capital. That's all they've got. Really, in many cases, is, okay, we're starting out as a poor country, we're a country like Poland, we're a country like, say, Hungary. These countries have embraced lower taxation schemes since they were able to break free from Moscow in all real terms. And then you even have some other countries that weren't in the East, like, say, Ireland, which has-- which is known for having lower tax rates and was able to attract immense amounts of wealth during the 1990s as it integrated more fully into Europe. That's what these, that's the currency these smaller countries have, and you can see then today in how when you get talk from Angela Merkel would talk about this for years and years, and this is clearly the something that the European leadership in Brussels wants, is they want, tax regularization, tax normalization. What they want is to set a minimum tax rate for all of Europe, because they hate that there are some of these member states that have lower tax rates, and then capital and wealth flows to those countries. So they, they don't like that. They want to mandate that Hungary raise its taxes, that Ireland raise its taxes, so they can't act like magnets for capital. That's not a new thing. Small countries figured that out a long, long time ago, and it continues today, and you can just see how much the ruling classes hate that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:48", "start": 1608.27, "text": "Yeah, that's a really interesting and important point around lower taxes, lower regulations in, various smaller countries, because as you said, that's what they've got, and you think about Singapore or I'm here in Dubai, in the UAE, lots of places that just have lower taxes, and that is actually a big part of the drawcard, and maybe to an extent they're able to offer more safety, some of these countries as well. Maybe that's also a reason that it's like a competitive reason that people might wanna come there. I wanted to ask a little bit about, let's say, realistic pathways to secession, right? So if we were to talk about, at least historically speaking, or maybe even what, what does it look like going into the future? What are some of the conditions that enable these kinds of breakaway states?" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "27:38", "start": 1657.64, "text": "Well, usually they occur in situations where the, the benefits of political unity no longer outweigh the benefits of separation. And that normally happens when the local hegemon, the country that dominates surrounding countries, or is able to basically just outright, Control the government, so let's say the Soviet Union and the Baltic States, where the central metropole, Moscow, no longer can offer any real benefits. And so people say, \"Why, well, why are we tying ourselves to this central government? Let's, let's move, let's move out of their orbit. Let's create our own government for ourselves. It can't really get any worse than what we've got going right now.\" Now that then, of course, there needs to be other factors too. If you can have a country get poor and poor, and if they see themselves as just historically and culturally united to this country even as it gets poor, they might not seek separation. But in a place where you might even have a different language, you might have a different historical identity, the, the things that we might call nationalism Local nationalism, that those countries are looking for a good excuse to break off, and so central governments, they know a lot of the time they can buy off, they can buy the loyalty of some colonized part of the country, some politically dominated part of the country that might prefer to, all else being equal, prefer to be separate, but hey, they get free money from the central government. And so they, they choose to not break off for those reasons. This has always been true in Scotland, for example, from the very beginning. Scotland joined with England and created the United Kingdom because Scotland was doing very poorly economically, and they were in the midst of an economic crisis, and they realized they could do better by joining with England. I mean, that was a major factor just back in the eighteenth century, and it's never really stopped being a factor. I mean, the, the Scots have always been the poor First part, it's been a small part of the country, and a major reason they didn't vote for independence when they had their referendum several years ago was there was so much money flowing from London into Scotland, and so Scottish nationalism wasn't yet enough to justify separation. I don't know how a vote like that would go today, but if, if London does get to the point where it's enough of an economic basket case or it just follows the overall global economy, downward, which is where it looks like it was going, then it just may be that it's not worth it anymore. And then of course, in the case in the Baltics, right, with the Soviet Union, they had always wanted to be free. I mean, they had, they never stopped hating Moscow. They had a small scale independence war, in the late forties, I believe, that might even have extended into the early fifties. Of course, Moscow just crushed that by force. Then Moscow started trying to just replace the local ethnic group with the- Russians with ethnic Russians, and they never, I guess, were successful enough to destroy the local ethnic identity and the fact that there's local language there, that they all associate with their own quest for political independence. So as soon as Moscow started looking like it wasn't gonna be able to project its power anymore over the Baltic states, they all seceded and founded their own countries. And they're perfect examples, by the way, of how small countries can do very, very well. These countries are- are now, really rivaling some countries that we see elsewhere within the EU that have been members much longer within the EU and have been considered parts of the West much longer. So those countries have really succeeded as small new countries that were able to break away, from a controlling state. But you can see in all those cases, right, it required- That, that larger dominating regime to really lose its ability to buy compliance, to buy loyalty, to hand out favors, and also when that happens too, those countries are also unable to project military power as easily as well. And then just when it looks like this central government that we never particularly liked anyway just starts to look weak, then that kind of starts A, a frenzy of, of thinking and ideological change. You saw that at work in Czechoslovakia when the Czech Republic and Slovakia decided they were gonna separate. They didn't see a big difference between the two, there wasn't a whole lot of enthusiasm there among, I think, the general population, but it grew over time once they started talking about it, and once they started talking about, \"Oh, the Czechs could have their own country and the Slovaks could have their own country,\" it started to really kind of snowball. So that by the time the actual separation took place, people were really starting to think in terms of supporting separation. There, there was sort of this, localism, this localist fervor that took over, so that support for the separation was much greater than it had been just a few years earlier. So you can see how people really start to get into it, but what's, what are the, the initial, motivations? It's gotta be, I think usually there needs to be There'll be some feeling that there will be an economic advantage to it, and then that, that has to feed into other nationalistic and, and localist ideals as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:12", "start": 1992.02, "text": "This show brought to you by mempool.space, the world's leading Bitcoin visualizer, and now they've got an accelerator program. So if you have a transaction that you sent at a fee that was too low to get confirmed, now you can fix this at, with the mempool accelerator. The way it works, you can go and search your transaction, scroll down, click accelerator, and you don't need an account, And then it'll show you it's now in the process of being accelerated, and then after a few minutes, it's confirmed. And so this is a great way to help you out if you are stuck, and this can happen where maybe your wallet doesn't have RBF or CPFP, or it might help you in situations where it's impractical to go and re-sign, so for example, multisig with keys in different locations. And thirdly, even in some lightning scenarios, perhaps a force close, you might not be able to use RBF, and so in this case, the mempool accelerator And you can find out more over at mempool dot space slash accelerator. And now back to the show. I see. Yeah, so I guess I'd summarize it then, there's probably three main parts there. One is kind of the money, are they paying us to kind of stay here? Maybe that's the case with, say, a Scotland or something, the military, are they gonna exert military power to kind of force us to stay? And then third, I guess, you, as you said, the ethnic or nationalistic identity component of it, the stronger that is, and, and Might try a, a sense of propaganda to try to say, \"No, see, we're all united under this one flag with this common identity, therefore you shouldn't try to break away from us because we're so-- you know, we're so good together.\" That kind of, you know, I guess that's, that's, that's a part of the, the propaganda, isn't it?" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "34:49", "start": 2089.35, "text": "Oh, yes, hundred percent. And you see that a lot, especially among older Americans, people who were successfully propagandized in their public schools in the fifties and sixties. Yeah, they said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and all that sort of stuff. They're, they're fully inculcated in this idea that America is like Jesus' favorite country or something. You can never break it up. It's, it's some sort of-- it's something special. And good luck convincing those people. Also, those people tend to be on Social Security. So They, they also have an economic interest in collecting, yeah, they want their monthly checks from the central government. So those are gonna be the hardest people, I think, to win over in many cases. But I think a lot of younger people, as time goes on and as it becomes clear that being associated with this bankrupt federal government that's thirty-five trillion dollars in debt, what are the benefits there? especially if it looks like whatever money you're promised twenty-five years from now Now with some Social Security pension, well, how much is that gonna be inflated away? How much are you gonna be able to rely on from that, especially if you could break off and found some sort of social safety net that would be far more responsive to actual, local interest and just the re-- and just economic realities. We all know that Federal welfare programs aren't responsive to economic realities because they just rely on printing new money all the time, and there's, there's-- that's how you create these huge debt burdens. And it doesn't matter how bad the economy gets, doesn't matter when, federal tax receipts go down, they just make up for it with more newly created money. They, they just completely ignore the realities, and that all ends up coming back to bite them. I'd you, in the future, big time. And so why not free yourself from that? That's, that's of course what happens a lot of the time when-- in the case of the post-Soviet world, was people just didn't wanna be tied to this economic mess anymore. So a-as the US becomes more and more of an economic mess, you're gonna wanna see people breaking off and doing something new and something different. And since the rest of the world is just as much an economic mess, you don't really have the option of just emigrating Somewhere else real easily, it's gonna be the best option that's gonna present itself is in many cases gonna be some sort of decentralization in the United States, maybe an economic, a more severe economic decentralization. there are lots of arrangements you can come up with where the newly independent state doesn't present any sort of independent military power. You could simply, reduce the United States back to its intended form as a, a common military unit where nevertheless all of its member states function to govern themselves totally on their own internally. And of course, that model's very, very old, in terms of Europe and the West, that's been around for many centuries. So there are many different ways to get that ball rolling, but I do think that it's gonna require people coming to grips with the reality of the fact that the, the US federal government can't offer you economic prosperity and wealth and good times forever as the current propaganda is. And then just people aren't just buying the, \"Oh, we're one nation, we're all united, forever.\" I mean, let's face it, if you are a practicing Christian who values- Values free markets and a certain way of life that you grew up practicing in, say, Idaho or most of Colorado or certainly Utah or e-- or Kansas or, I don't know, Indiana Let's face it, like the, the average person who's living in, say, Boston or New York City, they think you are ridiculous. They have no respect for your way of life, and they may even hate you. And they certainly hate your religion, if we look at just the general demographics. So these people have no interest in respecting your freedom. If they get hold of the central government, they're gonna wanna destroy your rights, they're gonna wanna destroy your freedoms, which they hold in contempt. So this idea that, oh yeah, we're basically the same as people who live in some wealthy neighborhood, diehard leftists in New York City, we're basically the same as the people running Massachusetts. We all, we're all of one nation. No, we're not. They hate you. They don't want you to, you to be able to practice your way of life, and the only reason that your way of life hasn't been utterly crushed Is because still some elements of the central government veto that and prevent it from happening. But where are you gonna be ten years from now if Kamala wins and stacks the Supreme Court, which is totally constitutional, by the way, doesn't require any like significant change, just requires Congress to make a new law? if they start completely changing the character of the federal judiciary, they get rid of the filibuster, which is not even, it's just a custom in the Senate. So then you've got fifty-one percent of the country Which, which all you need is California, New York, and New England on your side, and you can just run roughshod over the rest of the country. And it's all totally constitutional, doesn't require any significant change. So when they start doing that, are you still gonna be ridiculously talking about how we're all one nation and we all should be united and respect each other? It's a joke. You sound like an idiot if you, if that's your long term plan for protecting your freedoms. But there's still a lot of people who believe that. They just simply haven't come to terms Of what demographics and politics are in the United States today." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:37", "start": 2437.28, "text": "Yeah, and invariably, at various points of time, there will be people and politicians who market themselves as the unity candidate. Even in this election, you're seeing this kind of-- There was definitely that narrative of, \"Oh, look, we're all so divided. I'm gonna try to unite us all again under this one country. Let's, you know, we had it so good, baby, let's bring it back.\" You know, that kind of-- That's, this kind of idea. but I'm, I, I As, as you were talking about the, the money is one example. How do we deal with things like pension obligations and national debt if some individual, let's say US state, were to kind of piece out and say, \"Hey, see you later, I don't really want a part of your, I don't want to be part of this big government national debt.\" What's the negotiation gonna look like there? Like, would the, let's say, you know, if there was a Texas secession movement or someone else, and they had to negotiate with the federal government what the deal is to exit, what, what would that actually look like? Or how could that negotiation be approached? Or maybe you have some insight on how historically it's been done? Yes, it" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "41:42", "start": 2501.9, "text": "certainly has happened historically. We have many cases of this happening in Latin America in the nineteenth century, where debt was often a very large burden. and so you had countries split off, assert independence, but they still had, capital markets were a thing by then, by the nineteenth century, and there were, there were debts, there were bonds, you had to worry about this sort of stuff, and you didn't want to completely destroy, your local government's reputation. You wanted to create the impression that, okay, we, we, we can pay back our debts. The reality is, is that any cases like this, you're gonna have to write down the debt. the reality is the Un-- the United States is, is that is one of its real options. If the United States were honest, it would start writing down the debt. It would start saying, \"Okay, we can afford to pay back eighty cents on the dollar of the debt that we owe, \"or really, I don't know, fifty percent on the dollar. That would be the honest way to deal with its current debt. what it does now is it just simply prints more money And is just hoping that that will somehow work, going forward. I think if you had some sort of political split, it would then force more honesty, on the situation, and you would have to have these newly independent countries negotiating about, okay, we can take this percentage of the debt, but we're only gonna pay eighty cents on the dollar on this. And that's what happened in many cases after the Soviet Union. That is what h-has happened in some of these other smaller cases of- The session in modern times where you did have a debt burden and the question was how to deal with it, it happened with Czechoslovakia as well. They enter into negotiations and they start talking about, okay, how can we do this while maintaining some semblance of orderly division where we, we don't send the message to investors that, well, you're just gonna lose everything. They, this is what always happens when the debt gets out of hand, they try and come up with a percentage that they can pay back of the debt where they can, get out of the situation without forcing interest rates up into stratospheric territories, right? Okay, w-if we pay back seventy-five cents on the dollar or whatever the currency is Will, will that be enough to create enough confidence in local capital markets where interest rates will only go to twelve percent? Okay, great, we can live with that. And yeah, interest rates are gonna go up when you start to have this political instability result, but they're gonna go up anyway. Where we cannot continue with this current situation where we'll just keep printing money and, and it'll all be well and, we have decided that we're gonna, in order to, Make our economy more robust, or at least make it look like it is based on GDP numbers. We're-- the Fed is just gonna, reduce interest rates, again, its target, federal funds rate. Well, how does it do that? It buys bonds. if the-- when the US decides to issue another few trillion dollars in debt, how does it keep the interest rate from skyrocketing up to five, six, seven, eight percent? The central bank buys bonds. I mean, that's what it's doing now. It's all just a trick. It's A, a maneuver to make it look like there's still a bunch of demand for these government bonds, and so the percentage rate on government debt doesn't reflect reality by any means at all. It's being hidden by monetary inflation, which of course, is the reason you can't afford to buy a house right now. And so if you start to get into a situation where, okay, we've gotta deal with the reality of how much debt there is and how is it gonna get paid off, and we just don't wanna be tied to the federal policy anymore, but here's how much we can write it down and here's the reality of it, I think that's a more honest way of doing it, and, and that's what history has shown happens when you start to have these states, break off. You enter into negotiations and you come up with something that is livable for everybody. But people kid themselves if I think the current real situation is, oh, everybody wants American bonds and interest rates are really three percent or at least will be in a couple of months after the Fed starts forcing down rates again. That's all imaginary. That's not real. It covers up a significant future problem that we're gonna have to come to terms with. And so you can't really say, \"Oh, everything's fine and interest rates will go up if you secede.\" Well, they're, they're gonna go up anyway. And so why should we voluntarily- Really tie herself to this sinking ship forever. Independence, I think can, you can easily argue is a more realistic and honest solution to that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:19", "start": 2779.0, "text": "Now, for maybe some listeners, or just people might be curious, they might have a view that, let's say, look at Brexit, Brexit failed in the, in their, in their eyes, let's say. how'd you answer that? Would you say, you know, yeah, it did, or would you say maybe they just didn't do it right? They had an opportunity to do it better and they failed, they fl" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:41", "start": 2801.18, "text": "And you know, the breakaway there, from the EU." }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "46:45", "start": 2804.88, "text": "Well, obviously, I mean, just as you would note that, well, failure probably depends on who you're talking to, right? People will often, tolerate, a worsening of their economic situation if it brings them more self-determination and ability to have more control over their own lives. So if you asked a lot of people, \"Oh, look, GDP per capita in England, flattened out after the UK,\" They left the EU, and they would say, \"Well, I'm, I'm just happier now that my life isn't controlled by Brussels bureaucrats, and I'm willing to, to submit myself to that.\" That, of course, the choice Americans made when they decided to break off from the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century. They, America took a huge economic hit after the revolution, and GDP per capita went way down initially. And they clearly, in fact, they said this explicitly in many cases, is, \"If you're willing to...\" To, sacrifice your own freedom and independence in order to stay harnessed to this British economic powerhouse, well, then I have contempt for you and you don't actually value freedom. This is stuff that Samuel Adams would say. and of course, in the long run, of course, as we know, it led to far greater economic freedom and success because the United States broke off and became a more liberal country than the United Kingdom became, in the nineteenth century. But if, if you wanna say, \"Oh, well, not being a part of the EU dooms you economically,\" I would say, \"Really? Well, it hasn't been a problem for Norway or Switzerland. The two, two of the three richest countries in the world aren't members of the EU.\" The Norwe- The Belgians have been smart enough to not join the EU, and the Swiss have been smart enough to not join. What's interesting too is that both of those countries just simply negotiated their own special treaties with the EU, so they, they get most of the benefits of being a member of the EU without all those downsides. Submitting yourself to Brussels control, the migration issues, they have control over their own migration to a large extent. The, it was the British who were dumb enough to enter into the EU and then withdraw, and it's clear now that the EU is just trying to be punitive against the British. Well, they came in and then they left, and now we hate them, so we're no longer-- English is no longer an official language. I think that's, that's one thing they did, where they, they removed English as an official language in the EU, and they went back- Back to recording everything and, their, their focus for translations now is French, I think, right? It used to be English when the English were, an EU member. A lot of this stuff is just to give the middle finger, to the UK after the UK left. Yeah, all I can say is don't, don't be dumb, don't join the EU. Simply negotiate your own treaties, as the Swiss and the Norwegians did. You get most of the benefits of being part of the EU without the costs. And it would seem that a That, the UK faces now are just attempts by the EU to now screw England as in \"I told you so.\" But of course, England could be much better off overnight. England could, of course, deregulate their economy. They could get rid of the Scots, which would immediately turn England into a freer country, and, the rump state of England would have, politically speaking, have much more ability to deregulate their economy. It would lessen their, their welfare state burden Then they could become more oriented toward global trade. And I've advocated for years that there should be, that the whole-- Just as a, obviously I think there should be a free trade for everybody, but I know all the arguments against free trade and everything, so I say, okay, well, then why not just an anglosphere free trade union? like, you're gonna have a hard time convincing me that England or Canada or, New Zealand or Australia Australia are all gonna suddenly overnight become foreign policy problems for the United States, that, oh, they're gonna lie themselves with, with China. And, no, they're not. They're, they're culturally, and politically united, yeah. Unless they're in a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:57", "start": 3057.47, "text": "nation" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "50:58", "start": 3057.93, "text": "state. Right. I, I mean, they have no interest in antagonizing the US whatsoever. And so it's not like they're gonna all go in league together and now, oh, ho, ho, Canada now produces more steel than the United States. So- They're somehow gonna use that as an ace in the hole to, throw their weight around politically. There's no reason for the US to not be completely united economically with the entire anglosphere. So the UK should have been, should be pursuing some sort of free trade agreement with the United States and with the entire anglosphere. The fact that that's not happening is just stupid and just shows the fact that it's all based on really just local political interests and really has very little to do with any- sort of real economic theory or with foreign policy. The only believable argument against free trade is that it could have bad repercussions, in terms of global alliances and stuff. But those countries have been our allies since eighteen fifteen. It's, it's just not going to be a problem. So the UK should be full time talking about free trade agreements, free trade unions, deregulation, hey, we wanna be the Singapore of the North Atlantic. They haven't done any of that. There's, there's no interest in that. They don't need the EU to be successful, as is shown, of course, by these other rich countries we just talked about. But on top of that, they could be surpassing even those countries, but have no interest. It's because their ideology, their ideology is just generally anti-capitalism, anti-freedom, and that's what's killing them. These are mostly self-inflicted wounds." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:31", "start": 3151.41, "text": "Yeah. I also got the sense that, a lot of the people who were anti-Brexit, some of them come from, you know, Of, at least this is my, my interpretation, a lot of them were lamenting that they wouldn't be able to go through the fast lane when they go to the EU, right? Like they were kind of like, \"I want my passport to have this extra power, right?\" Now, okay, maybe that's one thing, but I guess let's say there were to be a lot more secession That might actually create a little bit more difficulty for people from the passport perspective, because, you know, people like having these kind of, you know, if you come from one of the richer, more, quote unquote, powerful countries, your passport gets you in visa free into all these, you know, into these countries. What do you think that would look like if there were to be a lot of, a lot more secession? Like, what would it, you know, do you have any ideas on what that kind of thing, how that would be managed?" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "53:23", "start": 3202.99, "text": "Well, certainly countries that are, culturally similar and have similar, values in terms of, geopolitics, they tend to have pretty non-fortified borders. and what's notable is that even though there's been no change in the border at all, the situation's actually gotten far worse in North America, because Americans have become far more paranoid. And it used to be, you didn't need a passport to go to Mexico or Canada. You, you, you kept your pat-- your non-photo birth certificate with you, and you would, you would just-- they would waive you across the Canadian border. They would waive you across the Mexican border. It just wasn't a thing. but as countries have become more focused on-- as Americans have become more focused on various imagined terroristic threats, right? 9/11 didn't occur because the Mexican border was insufficiently fortified. same with the Canada border, right? These people were enrolled in higher education institutions in the United States, they were on the FBI's radar, but instead they've turned it as a way to essentially close the border and to prevent just ordinary people from moving back and forth who are just ordinary migrants and such. And that's just a choice countries make. It, there isn't a set rule about human society that you need to have these extremely closed borders. We could also, of course, point back to the- nineteenth century, when there weren't passports, there was widespread movement of labor throughout Northern Europe and very lightly monitored. movement at all. Of course, part of the reason going on there is that welfare states weren't open to non-citizens. That was a big reason. If you were gonna move, you were gonna have to be economically self-sufficient. That made a big difference. And then of course, there were those cultural barriers as well. But there's no reason why you couldn't have something like the Schengen zone as occurs right throughout, Northwestern Europe. You don't need the EU to have that. You can simply have countries enter into an agreement that, okay, we're gonna have a relatively open border. And every time I look at the border situation in Switzerland, the Swiss seem to be con-moving more and more toward a more open border with the rest of the EU, even though they're not part of the EU. These are all independent factors. They don't require political unity. And that's just the reality, a-and you can just look at the ease of which Americans used to move around their borders, and that the-these can get worse, these things can get better, and it's not like, \"Hey, you've got two choices. Either there is total political union between country A and country B, at which point the borders will be open, or your other choice is these will be-- these will not be a unified country, and therefore the borders will be totally closed, and you have to stand in a long line and we're gonna check out everybody.\" party's background as they come across the border. That just hasn't been the reality historically, and it doesn't have to be the reality moving" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:27", "start": 3386.94, "text": "forward. Turning to the American, political debate sphere, there's been a lot of talk recently about the borders in America, and I think even, you know, now as we're speaking, you know, kind of a big story I'm seeing now is in, in Ohio, I think in Springfield, they apparently moved, shifted twenty thousand, Haitians there, and apparently the, you know, the story now is that there's people there who are There's cats and eating them and, you know, things like this. now, you know, kind of- It's pretty, it's pretty grim stuff, really, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I, so recent, I mean, even, you know, a few months ago or I don't know, maybe six months ago, there was that thing about the Texas border and, you know, some of the red states were sort of saying, \"We'll contribute\" or \"We, we kind of, we're with you, Texas,\" and then some of the blue states were against" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "57:21", "start": 3440.68, "text": "Well, I do think that's gonna be a, a problem that's going to, really feed into the attempts to get more localized control of one's political situation, is because people know on a fundamental level that when people in Washington, DC are making border policy, that they don't care what the reality is for the border states, because the border states have a very small group of representatives in Washington. They're just not important, and they're creating then a huge magnet for migrants on the one side of the border that impacts disproportionately one part of the country, mostly right Arizona, New Mexico, California, Texas. And If you're in these places, you're a rancher in Southern Texas, many of whom are Hispanics, by the way. These aren't, these aren't like, right, red-faced Anglo-Saxon types who just don't like Mexicans. Maybe they just don't like criminals streaming ac-across their land, with, with absolutely no checks whatsoever, and also no ability for local law enforcement to really address the issue or to make their own laws that are tailored to the specific situation. As we've already- Already discussed, smaller countries tend to be open toward labor that offers some sort of economic value, and they want people to come into the country. They want people who will come in and work and provide value, and smaller countries have no interest in autarky, where they wanna just close their borders. But at the same time, the way migrant policy is done out of Washington, D.C. doesn't reflect the, the needs and- And the realities of what's going on in these border states, and they simply aren't able to veto Washington's laws, assert any real control of their own, vet who's coming in, create, say, some sort of invitation-based migration policy where- You have, you have an employer that invites you in, and you come in and you sign away any claim to local welfare payments, and you come in, and you could see how many local economies would be fine with that sort of thing, where they're not gonna be on the hook for providing food and shelter, and it's up to employers to actually provide employment before the person gets there. These are all reasonable policies that the federal government forbids and prohibits and doesn't- Let any of these border states develop their own policy. And just looking, and there's an essay in Breaking Away looking at how immigration policy in the nineteenth century functioned, where immigration wasn't a matter for federal policy. It was decided at the local level, at the state level, and in fact, many states actually had extremely liberal, migration policies because they wanted more people to come in and settle farms, and bump up their population so that they had more represent- presentation in Congress and so on. So this is why in Colorado, you-- in the 19th century, when, when Colorado became a state, you had, huge minorities of German and Spanish speakers, and that, if you read the original constitution of the state, it mandates that all new laws be printed in English, German, and Spanish so that the residents of the state will be able to read these laws. After World War I, they started oppressing the German speakers and wouldn't let them speak German anymore. and, there's still plenty of Mexicans In Colorado. and this just showed then that you don't know what the policies are gonna be. You had some parts of the country that were lacking in labor, and they invited in more people. You had some parts of the country, that viewed a lot of migration through the state as an economic burden, usually because of federal mandates about welfare payments that had to go out and providing public schooling and all of that sort of thing. And of course, a lot of those migrants in the 90s, et cetera, they didn't even show up and use public school, and they showed up and went to Catholic schools. So they weren't even a burden on the local government in terms of school costs. The situation is very different now, but a lot of that is a result of things that the federal government is forcing upon the locals and denying the locals any say in how those policies are created. And if you wanna really lessen the conflict, if you really wanna come up with a situation that addresses the needs of both migrants and the You're much more likely to come up with something reasonable if you have the laws and policies made by the people who are actually affected by them, not a bunch of rich people who meet in Congress, who don't know the first thing about the cultures involved, about the reality on the ground. And why should these people be in charge of that? especially since what, forty five states just-- they're not border states, they don't care. It's just not an issue. So it's, it's a, it's a very messed up system when you've got people who live- Two thousand miles from the border, making laws about how that should be done, it's just in my view, not a very reasonable way of doing it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:34", "start": 3754.29, "text": "One other thing, as I'm looking in at American politics, from, you know, I'm from the outside, right? I'm an Australian living in Dubai, but nevertheless, it seems to me like there are all these very entrenched interests in terms of, you know, the welfare state, you know, the healthcare and how big that is, the military, you know, industrial complex and how big that is, and it just seems like- You know, there's so-- and there's so many people surely in government jobs. I'm curious, will they represent entrenched interests that maybe they would fight against secession or breakaway movements, or do you have any thoughts on wh- what is the, you know, what's a, what's the likely pathway there?" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "01:03:12", "start": 3792.22, "text": "I think you could expect, the ruling class of people who run Google, people who run Congress, I think they'll all be together opposed to any sort of, decentralization, secession, breaking up of the country in any way, because they-- you can see who the winners are from the current situ-situation is these mega corporations that are deeply embedded in Congress. They have huge lobbying operations, they're friends, With people who are at the highest echelons of the federal government, and that's what they're invested in. They're invested in, lobbying that system, in controlling that system, and being important in that system. So obviously they have no interest in a different group of elites. Getting some sort of power, and that's a big threat to them. and also that's probably the main threat is if you have a different group of elites somewhere else in the country that's able to assert more control over themselves and over their lives and present some sort of balanced opposition to the elites in Washington. This is old, if you-- I mean, if you're into old school radical classical liberal thought from the nineteenth century, this was known back then. This is called, right, elite theory. Where probably maybe its most famous, expositor is Vilfredo Pareto. He looked at, he looked around at these embedded interests And he saw that, okay, at, at the national level, you've got this one regime, and it's run by certain elites. He, he, he said it's very, very hard to unseat those, those elites with just a ground, a grassroots movement alone, right? A ground-up movement alone. He says what you need are competing elites. You need elites in another region or, or in a, a city where these people have resources, where these people have a command of some local loyalty. Where they're able to put up a fight, both in real terms, in terms of military, but all-- but mostly just in terms of political allegiance and resources and funding, and create a com- a competing group of elites, and, and that's what you would need to, I think, develop more fully in the United States before you can start to really deal with these entrenched interests, because yes, the people we currently regard today as national elites, the billionaires, the, the, the people in the White House, people like, Mitch McConnell, they're all gonna totally be against any sort of challenge to the status quo. So you would have to have elites coming from outside that system. You're never gonna get in Washington More than a tiny number of people, supporting breaking up their monopoly and their current power structure, it's gonna have to come from somewhere else. So yeah, we can just, we can just write off the idea that we're suddenly gonna be hearing from Bill Gates that, \"Oh, you know, maybe we should break up the US into smaller pieces.\" It's never, never gonna come out in favor of that. You're gonna have to develop some competing elites." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:20", "start": 3980.42, "text": "Yeah, interesting. And I, I guess- Looking at the federal election coming up for the US, you can kind of see the kind of different elite groups, I guess if you kind of categorize it, it seems like the likes of Elon Musk and David Sacks and the kind of some of the tech guys are kind of, they're sort of lining up on Trump's side as kind of, you know, the, the, the elites on that side, let's say, the wealthy, influential people. but maybe to your point, maybe the counter-elite in a secession context would be more at the state level, right? Like," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:52", "start": 4012.2, "text": "The federal elites and say, \"Hey, we wanna break off, we wanna, you know, go and do our own thing.\" so I guess from that perspective, do you have any thoughts on the US secession movements? Like I've heard of Texxit and, New Hampshire Exit and some of these others. Do you have any thoughts on, you know, any progress that they're making or what, what you, you-- do you have any thoughts on their probability of success?" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "01:07:17", "start": 4037.33, "text": "Well, I, I agree with Ron Paul when he talks about the issue of de facto secession as being your first steps. this is a big part of why the Confederacy failed, you know, we can bring them up briefly. Where that's another reason why I didn't wanna focus on secession of looking at the 19th century Confederacy or something. I was focused on people who succeeded. I'm focused on the secession movements that worked. I didn't wanna spend a lot of time looking at the losers. and these guys lost. And part of the reason they lost is they were obsessed with this idea of big gestures, where we're a, we're a, our own independent country now, right? We get, we got our own flag and we're doing everything ourselves. History has shown that in many cases, the more successful way to do that is far more gradual. So what you've got a state is, Texas actually does a lot of these things, right, where they created their own Texas Gold Depository, where, hey, we're creating this state bank, where we're gonna try and attract people from around the country who will start investing their physical gold into this depository, and we can start making loans backed on this gold. You can see how they're trying- Trying to toy with this idea of creating some sort of future situation where you have a, a currency, a local currency backed by this, this gold hoard that they're trying to attract to Texas. That's the sort of thing you really need to be thinking about doing, asserting themselves on the immigration issue in terms of, well, we're just gonna have to guard the border ourselves because you're not willing to do it, and even making a constitutional argument in that favor, in favor of that policy, which I think is, is savvy, right? well, you, you claim to like the Constitution right up until you don't have to anymore. It's probably a good policy. And just really asserting things like, happened on marijuana, where, well, we're not, we're just simply not gonna enforce federal law on marijuana in all of these states anymore, and ma-- it's something like twenty-five states now. Y-you can no longer say the United States is a country where marijuana is illegal. It's, it is in some states, but, in about half of the country, it's not. So clearly it's a state-by-state issue, and a lot of that was just simply, \"We're not gonna enforce federal law.\" Anymore. You've got some states toying with the idea of refusing to enforce federal law on guns. And, part of the reason that hasn't happened yet is because most conservatives are spineless on the issue of decentralization and, oh, they, they, they mumble incoherent slogans like the Constitution is the supreme law of the land or whatever, which they interpret as the federal government can do whatever it wants. weirdly, you get con-- you get a bunch of conservatives saying, \"Oh, if, if you don't like marijuana,\" On a federal marijuana law, wanna laws change the law, even though those laws are blatantly unconstitutional and prohibited under the Tenth Amendment. So it's because constitution-- it's because conservatives don't like marijuana, so they invented this federal power to regulate marijuana in their own minds. And so you can see how they haven't quite come to terms with the reality of asserting any sort of-- type of local rule. It's really the-- I was shocked that the Texans came out and said, \"We're basically appropriating border policy to ourselves.\" It's a little bit of a border policy that they're doing there, but it's, it can only grow, and I think that's the right way to start it. Really, these states should be passing blanket constitutional amendments saying none of our law enforcement resources will be used to enforce any federal laws at all, period. And you could even go farther with that when, when Northern states were, refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts, which was-- which were these federal laws that required, or, they didn't require, they, they allowed federal agents to go into states and kidnap former slaves and return them to their slaves in the slave states. And federal governments wanted no part on this whatsoever, or state governments wanted no part on this whatsoever. So not only did they pass laws- Refusing to help federal agents in any way do this. They also pass real fun laws like, you can't use our jails. So if you go in and you capture, a former slave, you can't put them in our jail. You've gotta fund your own federal jail somewhere that you can use. You can't use our courthouse to have any of your hearings. You can't use a state building at any point in any way in trying to enforce any of your laws. That's what the states should be doing. They should be passing laws saying, \"Hey, federal government, you can't Any of our research, you can't be on federal, on state lands, you can't use state buildings, you can't call, state agents. We're not gonna help you in any way, we despise you, and yes, you can assert con- control over us as insofar as what's in the constitution, but it ends there. They're not even taking those first steps yet, but that's what they should be doing. And then just generally doing things like Florida doing, where they're creating- this was just such a brilliant thing when Florida created its own, surgeon general, and a few states have their own surgeon general. So every time you had the stupid federal surgeon general coming out and saying something about COVID or whatever, they trotted out the Florida surgeon general and said, \"No, no, that's, that's bad medicine, that's not a good idea.\" So you can see how they're creating their own competing system that's saying, \"Hey, look, the federal government isn't the dispenser of truth and righteousness and knowledge.\" There are many different places where that could occur, and so you do have to, I think, create a sense of, \"We can handle our own affairs, and we don't need the federal government to do everything.\" w- as a libertarian, you start to get into, a lot of resistance from libertarians on that because They, what they, they are able to do, because state governments are more responsive to the people, they're able to, to cut state taxes a lot. But what, what happens then is the state government becomes more and more reliant on federal grants and federal funds, and I'm not sure that's the best" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:35", "start": 4415.07, "text": "strategy that seems like that they have local revenue so that they can say no to the federal revenue." }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "01:13:41", "start": 4421.01, "text": "Right. But good convincing, good luck convincing a, coming out against a state tax cut, in, in a group of libertarians, because they're just gonna see that as a, as support for higher taxes. But the reality of it is, historically, and time and time again, we see that really the only time you're- Able to really lessen the centralized regime's power is by being able in some way to assert more, a local replacement regime And that's the only thing that we've seen that has worked historically. Usually that occurs at the municipal level, not at, not at some broader level. but that's, that's something that I think we need to come to terms with ideologically and how can that be, how, how can that offer some sort of alternative to the federal government? but those are things that people who are in favor of secession need to look at. yeah, yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:14:39", "start": 4479.95, "text": "it's a fair point. Like you have to learn to- Sort of zoom out and see the forest for the trees and understand, you know, sometimes in life you gotta take one step back before you can go two or three steps forward or something like that." }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "01:14:50", "start": 4490.92, "text": "And we need to point out that that's one of the greatest things the US federal government ever did for itself was create a federal welfare state. So as, say, in the EU, where your welfare states are done at the national level for the most part. So when the UK seceded from the EU, that didn't affect in any way their national health system. Right. So it didn't affect in any way their pensions for, for old folks. So you could say, \"Oh, we're leaving the EU,\" but don't worry, old folks, don't worry, people who love the national health system for some reason. they-- that's all gonna be the same. You can't, you can't have that in the United States 'cause they've managed to centralize that at the federal level, so you got all these old folks relying on federal money specifically. So that's something that is gonna have to be dealt with when you start pursuing some sort" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:15:38", "start": 4538.72, "text": "It's kept you for a long time, but, let's, have a-- if you have any final closing thoughts, for listeners out there who, maybe they're supportive, but what's, what's the path forward? What's the best way to get more people to understand some of the ideas of secession and why they can be a good thing for liberty?" }, { "speaker": "ryan_mcmaken", "time": "01:15:57", "start": 4557.31, "text": "Well, I wrote my book specifically to address a lot of these issues. We also address the issue of nuclear war and, and foreign policy in the book, and just a lot of these, Issues that are related to how do we deal with, problems like political majorities, right? So what if my state secedes and there's still a-- there's a minority group left behind in California that's now gonna be less free because the California government is free to impose its will more freely without any checks of the Supreme Court, that sort of thing. So we try to address all of that in the book. So I definitely, if you have questions, check out the book, and it's written right in short chapters. For regular people. so I just want to get that conversation going the best I can because these questions, I think, do need to be addressed before we can really start to talk more broadly about the secession issue. If people can be convinced that, oh, there's no answer to the foreign policy issue, there's no answer to the national debt issue, those are gonna continue to be seemingly convincing arguments from the anti-secession side, but there are actual answers and there's historical experiences that address these issues, and we just need to make that- Those more commonly known." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:08", "start": 4628.75, "text": "Excellent. Well, listeners, I, I enjoyed the book. I'll put the link in the show notes. You can find it at mises dot org. So the book is called Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities. So, Ryan, thanks for joining me today and, catch you, catch you around." } ] }