Dividing the Nation: Going Galt vs. Government a la Carte

When most Americans think of secession, they imagine maps of a divided America such as the one above. Most of us learned in history class what happened the last time a group of states decided to secede from the Union. Very few people want a repeat of the War Between the States. Therefore, a far more popular form of secession -- personal secession -- is gaining more modern adherents. Personal secession is a more finely grained form of secession than regional, state, or county secession -- it is secession on the individual level.

Have you seriously thought about seceding from the monstrous beast that the US government (or any central government) has become? First you have to consider all the things that governments provide. Police, fire departments, water, sewer, medical care, national defense, schools, roads, licensing, environmental regulation, protection from fraud and abuse, and so on . . .

"Personal secession ....things like homeschooling, house churches, home gardening, home-based economics, just regaining privacy and a sense of community rather than worrying about what's going on in Washington, D.C... What's the latest thing from the Supreme Court? _CNN

The quote above comes from the leader of a group of christian secessionists. But it could as easily come from a group of libertarian or communist or hindu secessionists. Personal secessionists may "go Galt", or do most essential things for themselves. It is possible to do that, but a division of labour in society provides for more leisure, and more choices in products and services.

How can you non-violently secede from an idiocracy without having to do everything for yourself and your family? Call it "virtual secession" or non-territorial secession.

The problem with physical secession is that it is very difficult to achieve critical mass. There is probably not much overlap between the people you want to live with and the people who want to choose your particular form of government. The vast majority of us put up with government we dislike in order to live in proximity to people with whom we want to work and play.

With virtual secession, you could still live in San Francisco or Manhattan or Silver Spring while seceding from much of the government at the city, state, and Federal level. You and your next-door neighbor might belong to very different governmental units. _ArnoldKling

Patri Friedman runs a blog called A Thousand Nations, which looks at increasing personal freedom through new nation formation. This post from A Thousand Nations looks specifically at "virtual secession" or "non-territorial secession." And Cato Unbound devoted a special issue to the topic of "self-governance" or personal secession.

Libertarians and other informed malcontents have been thinking and writing about secession for well over a century. And with the coming of the uber-statist Obama Pelosi regime, the idea is likely to come to the surface more and more often. People who believe that they can work within the system to make it more rational, may get involved in the "You Cut" movement, where citizens work with legislators to cut the least useful and most destructive government programs. But for many persons, government has gone much too far off the deep end of totalitarianism for such "trimming about the edges" to work.

Today, our government interacts with us as subjects and children. It takes money from the productive and responsible and uses it to pay for the consequences of the people who are irresponsible and unproductive. As long as bad behavior is subsidized two things will be true. The irresponsible will not make responsible choices unless they are forced. The second is that the government will continue to assert its right to regulate all our behavior on the grounds that it is paying the bills, even though it is with our money. If we choose to interact with our government as children, expecting it to meet our every need, then it will fill the role of parent and will exercise legitimate control as a consequence of that occupation.

The fix to this is simple. Remove the government safety net. For one hundred and fifty years of our history we got by just fine without it. There was no FDA, no welfare checks, no illegal drugs, no government health insurance or Social Security. Somehow, without the government intervening, the American citizen built this country from a few colonies on the eastern seaboard to a world power, economically and militarily. Somehow, hard drinking settlers tamed the west. Without government regulation, we all had food to eat and water to drink and roofs over our heads, and that food and shelter was considerably better than that in the Old World. If you engaged in negative behavior you bore the consequences. If you lost your job you found something else or you depended on your family or neighbors and they determined your “recovery” or the worth of putting their time and money into your life based on your cooperation. If you resorted to crime to support bad habits, justice was swift and harsh. Morality, justice and community were essential in such an environment and that is exactly the way it should be. _SecessionUniversity

You will find a lot of reading material pertaining to such topics at the Mises Online Library, and at the Library of Liberty Online.

The basic idea is the formation of organisations that operate in parallel to the government, to provide essential goods and services which persons cannot reasonably provide for themselves. In such a system, bad choices will lead to unpleasant consequences. That means that persons who are particularly stupid or impulsive will not do well in such a system unless they are surrounded by a close-knit society of friends, relatives, co-religionists, etc. who are standing by to help them through the rough spots.

Systems of self-governance will tend to promote and unleash persons who are intelligent, disciplined, competent, and forward thinking. That is exactly the type of person the future will demand, to meet the type of challenges that wait for us.

In the US, society has been engaged in the dumbing down and handicapping of generations of its citizens -- at least since the 1950s. That process of induced helplessness and dependency received a turbo-boost from the election of the Obama-Pelosi regime. But the final destination of selectively breeding for incompetence in the face of hopeless economic and demographic challenge, is utter calamity.

Unless thoughtful persons are willing to try another approach, they are dooming future generations to a society of certain collapse from debt and demography -- the very problems that are doing in Europe, Japan, and Russia in real time.

This is not a flush of oil a mile deep, 100 miles offshore from a lazy big easy. This is a river of destruction flowing down on all of us from the source -- Washington DC. What are you going to do?

As Nation States Fall, and City States Rise , What of the Micro - Nation?

Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. The mighty Hanseatic League, a constellation of well-armed North and Baltic Sea trading hubs in the late Middle Ages, will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate “free zones” across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world. _ForeignPolicy_via_LATNB

The new blog: "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom" is dedicated to the idea of the micronation. One form of micronation that is already familiar to Al Fin readers is the seastead. But micronations could occur in other forms such as sea-floor habitats, polar colonies, artificial islands, orbiting colonies, perpetually floating or flying atmospheric colonies, and so on. Most of the desirable real estate on Earth may be taken, but imaginative and creative persons can often take the undesirable and make it desirable. But can they protect it once it is made valuable?

The current issue of the WFS Futurist magazine looks at the issue here and here (via LATNB). A more comprehensive look at the issue can be found at seasteading.org.

For several convergent reasons, many nation states are in danger of collapsing. Nation states within tribal lands were often poorly conceived at the start, and increasingly expensive to maintain. Without massive aid from the developed world, many third world quasi-tribal nations would have long since collapsed.

Other nations in the developed world are in danger of collapse from demographic implosion: the failure to breed. Nations such as Germany and Japan that were under such a compulsion in the 1930s to expand at the cost of world war, are now finding themselves shrinking every year. The same story can be told in Spain, Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe -- and especially Russia. Demographic collapse, at varying rates. The transformation from one type of world to the other is apt to be tumultuous.

The election of Barak Obama in the US may well prove to be the catalyst in this transformation. As the economic, military, and moral standing of the US steadily falls, the subsequent vacuum will be felt worldwide. The threads of the world fabric may unravel far more quickly than anyone believed possible, without the strong moderating presence of a world hegemon with America's pedigree. A world that has China as its hegemon would be a far different world than the one we know.

Power and importance will be relegated to the region and city-state, over the nation state, as central governments face the limits of government action head on.

It is important not to dwell on the incompetence of the Obamas and the Putins overly much, although they seem to have the talent for doing almost everything exactly wrong. The key focus should be on mitigation, and on laying the foundations for better prospects in the intermediate term. That can only be done with a realistic assessment of the current situation. Such an assessment must swing wide of most conventional wisdom, and consider the unthinkable.

Governments Die, Countries Live On .....

As this chart shows, the lessons of the rise of the American economy in the 20th century have finally been learned by the rest of the world. If the top corporate tax rate of 40%, which includes a 5% state tax on top of the 35% federal rate, remains much longer, American companies will find themselves on the short end of the stick thanks to their competitive disadvantage.

That means more people will lose their jobs. That means less wealth for all. _Heritage

Never mistake the government for the country. They are two distinctly different things. And while governments can easily die, countries are a bit tougher. The graph on the left shows the declining global trend for taxing corporations. Corporations naturally go to the countries that tax them the least, all other things being equal. If a government taxes corporations more than it is worth to the corporation to locate there, the corporation will go elsewhere and take its jobs with it.

California, New York, Massachussetts, and several other states are getting caught up in the "tax 'em high" fever emanating out of Obama et Pelosi's DC. But as you can see, the global trend has been in the other direction. Corporations are leaving California etc. and new startups are hesitating to locate there. The same phenomena is beginning to show on the global scale.

The US government is heading down the road of fiscal and budgetary suicide with a lethal combination of new, non-productive spending plus punitive taxation on productive entities and employers. Add to that devastating new regulations and taxes on energy and industry plus a growing stranglehold by trial lawyers and labour unions over business, and one can see how easily the US can go from being a good place for corporations to locate to being a losing proposition.

Corrupt high roller state governments such as California, New York, Illinois, Massachussetts, and Michigan are living well beyond their incomes -- and running to the new Obama / Pelosi reich for multi-billion dollar welfare for the states. Although the federal government is in no condition to be handing out goodies to corrupt state cronies, that is exactly what is happening with the O / P "stimulus bill." And they are just getting started.

Anyone who took the trouble to watch the 30 minute IOUSA film clip should have at least a vague idea of the coming budget disruption. You need to know how a responsible government would deal with such a problem in order to understand how badly our current government is focquing up. Rapidly failing state governments are a microcosm of the larger problem at the federal level.

The federal government can print money, it can sell notes, bonds, influence interest rates etc. as long as it has some degree of fiscal credibility. When it loses that credibility it will be stressed to the breaking point. Looking into the future, there is no sign that either the governing or the governed have an understanding of the problem, nor the will to deal with it. Demographic implosion plus government fiscal suicide plus cultural and educational decadency. Not a pretty combination, although quite common in western Europe also. In fact, most European nations have a bit of a head start. A few countries may even be starting to wake up.

What happens to the country after the government falls? What do you think happens?

When Nation-States Fail

We are in the middle of the failure and bailout of financial institutions in the US, Europe and China. There are the contemplated bailouts of the auto industry, of the State of California, and no doubt more states and industries. The country of Iceland itself is in the market for a bailout, and Iceland is not alone. What will it mean for nation-states to fail, and who will bail them out?

What we are seeing is the slow motion failure of nation-states from the third world, to the BRIC nations, and even in the developed world as in Iceland, England and France.

Entrenched corruption -- think government employees unused to financial deprivation not getting paid except by graft. An inability to govern territory and a general loss of legitimacy. A global swiss cheese effect from Mexico to Pakistan, where thousands of small holes in the global security system appear with rapidity.

A rapid increase in the number and power of criminal guerilla groups that will challenge nation-states. These groups will flourish within the ungoverned spaces that emerge, particularly in urban areas and even within the U.S. The combination of access to global markets, rapidly improving technology, and new methods of warfare mean that these groups will be ascendant militarily until successful strategies emerge to counter them.

Worst of all, these criminal guerrilla groups (collectively known as global guerrillas) will be able to generate wealth via transnational criminal networks and control political services to local populations (through both disruption and parasitically draining national infrastructures), gaining legitimacy that nation-states will not be able to provide. This means that these groups will not only emerge quickly, they will grow stronger over time. _Wired

These are warnings that Robert D. Kaplan and others have been sounding for decades. The death of the nation state from an inner corruption eating away at its heart and nerve centers. The emergence of competing organisations of a military and para-military nature capable of creating "no-go" zones where the local and national law enforcement agencies do not dare to go.

Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia ... But where US assistance helped Iraq and Colombia shrink their "no-go" zones significantly and increase areas of civil order, many nations of Europe and parts of North America themselves are becoming quasi no-go zones. The emergence and growth of religious terror cells in Europe, Canada, and Virginia, along with criminal gangs for illegal drug smuggling and distribution, spell insurrection for the first world.

As US cities perpetuate "Sanctuary Zones" for the importation and unchecked proliferation of criminal gangs, the incoming administration of the narcissist-elect promises to close the off-shore prison for terrorists in order to bring them to US soil for civil trials. The chaotic US Mexican border should be well defensed and guarded, but instead the Border Patrol is defanged and demoralised, and the construction of even a minimal border wall is stalled.

Parts of the US have had higher murder rates than Iraq virtually throughout the worst of the Baath-Sunni-Sadrist terrorism and insurrection. Under a more permissive and corruption/illegal immigration-friendly US regime, expect things to become much worse. California is asking for a federal bail-out, naturally. Michigan and New York may be next in line.

Unfortunately, the type of bailout that the current inept Congress and the narcissist-elect have in mind, will only make things steadily worse. Financial failure breeds failure of cohesiveness in a multi-ethnic nation state. Things fall apart and the central powers cannot hold, after disruptive forces reach a certain point.

Do not fail to make contingency plans.