+1
But I think this is part of what we need to change. In this respect, I’m coming full-circle to a kind of “pragmatic minarchism”, i.e. that we need to think about how to create governments that are inherently local and too structurally solid to be externally manipulated by colonial/imperial powers.
This approach is far more intellectually challenging than the bluntly anarcho-capitalist “push the Big Red Button” approach. There will never be a Big Red Button anyway, so it’s not even a strategic consideration. I think I’m starting to understand where Hayek was going with his Constitution of Liberty idea but maybe I’m reading my own agenda into it.
I see no reason we can’t have more “competition in governance” to put it in the language of seasteaders… there’s really no reason we need to put out to sea in order to do this and I see no real obvious advantage to being out at sea unless lots of seasteads are already there (collective action problem).
But the great political centers - Washington, DC, London, Brussells, etc. - are like magnets that suck up the vast majority of the intellectual and other talents that could be the building blocks of a distributed grid of mostly localized, competing jurisdictions. Something similar happened with Louis XIV and his constant diversion of the aristocracy while he built out a political structure of nearly total centralization of France’s political power in his own hands.
A blunter way to say this is: the lords - whatever their evils - protect us from the King! Without lords, we are exposed to direct expropriation and subjugation by the King. And when the King becomes even more adept at plundering us than the lords ever were, we suffer a twin evil - unrestrained abuse and expropriation. (As Leviathan becomes ever more concentrated, it has less and less incentive to preserve the capital value in its subjects as there is no “escape” anyway… you’ll be abused exactly the same no matter where you go).
In the past, peoples have courted a ruler from a foreign land for the express purpose of providing a blanket of protection. The arrangement is often uneasy as the transplant ruler has no kin or geographic loyalty to his rented subjects but that’s the rule in modern politics anyway. But maybe we need a change of mindset. Maybe sub-sovereign political units need to start shopping around for rulers who are skilled in all the arts of political machination, military strategy, financial warfare - essentially, a King - and who can engineer and pull off a secession in exchange for a constitutional monarchy modeled on something like Hayek’s constitution and maybe the British monarchy or another long-standing monarchy that has demonstrated a capacity for dealing with complex limits to its powers.
I know this is alien-speak to Joe Sixpack at this point in time. But that doesn’t mean that it will always stay that way. Perhaps it’s something we (liberty-oriented people) can start developing the intellectual foundations for.
Clayton -