I have a few minutes to kill… so here’s some random thoughts on libertarian action items that can further the cause of liberty.
The central evil of the modern State is the territorial monopoly on law. Attacking this through every means direct and indirect will yield the greatest gains for liberty. The single most effective means to achieve a breakdown in the territorial monopoly of law is secession, that is, reduction in the size of the territories.
Alongside this, however, we can advocate for other changes which would weaken the territorial monopoly on law. For example, why do appeals stop at the Supreme Court in every nation? What if the problem is that the government is simply being unjust? This is not a negligible problem, even in the nations that are supposed to be enlightened and fair.
We already have a multiplicity of arbitration service producers, that is, the various national territorial law monopolies. Would it not be more just if someone who wants to appeal a decision by a US court could request the plaintiff (usually the government) to choose a mutually agreeable non-US court?
Are British courts really so unjust that an American getting the short end of the stick from US courts could not get better justice by appealing to the British court system for relief?
This line of reasoning is relatively harmless on its face but it really opens Pandora’s Box when you think about it. What if I have a tax dispute with the US government? While the British government may be more likely to side with the US government than with me, they are still less likely to side with the US government than the US govenrment is to side with itself. Oops. And if British courts will hear cases from US citizens, why can’t British citizens have their cases heard in US courts. And so on.
We need to get more creative in making the case for secession. One of the resident Keynesians on the board recommended that Mises dailies should be covering the plight of Native Americans rather than the effect of government regulation on the cleanliness of our clothes. He has a point. We should be identifying groups and territories who have the strongest legal and political case for secession. Why aren’t the Native American territories truly autonomous? They can sell fireworks and run casinos. Seriously? That’s the definition of “sovereignty”?? I’ve located a half-dozen Native American tribal lands along the Canadian border or on the Pacific Ocean. The tribes holding these lands are in a uniquely strong position to make a case for absolute secession since they do not need to pass over US territory in order to trade with foreign nations. But if just one such territory were to be recognized as truly autonomous, a domino effect could ensue. If those tribes which happen to hold land on the borders can be autonomous, why shouldn’t all tribes be autonomous? And they should be. This would turn the United States into a Swiss Cheese of pockets of at least nominally autonomous entities. You might shrug off nominal autonomy since the US government would still have economic bully power over the encircled lands. But if nominal autonomy is so unimportant, why is the US government so careful to ensure that Native tribes are not recognized to be even nominally autonomous?
Forcing concessions on paper is a big deal because it’s a breach of containment. The paper definitions of government’s legal “rights” act as a first line of defense against breach of its de facto power. Cornering the government into conceding that it doesn’t have a legal right to act in the ways that it does is a necessary first step to forcing the government to stop violating people’s rights in those ways.
Also, in the “globalized” world of modernity, we are facing a situation where once-remote portions of the world are entering the market as peer participants. Rural backwaters that were once almost completely unplugged off the grid are getting cellphone coverage, and so on. What this means is that the poor countries of the world are the new poor neighborhoods. The poor have a much lower opinion of authority than the middle class and the wealthy because they are frequently the butt end of abuse of authority. Poor people tend to be much more anti-police than middle class and wealthy people. Hence, there are a lot of inadvertently pro-liberty attitudes among the poorest people of the world as the US has expanded its realm of aggression to almost every corner of the globe. The poor in the US are more often than not on the public dole and while they may bitch about abuse of power, they’ll never advocate for real resistance against the government since that is how many of them are deriving their sustenance (the welfare morphine-drip). Hence, we need to be prepared to reach out to people in the poorest parts of the world and help them speak up about how they are being abused by the global power regime.
Anyway, those are just some random thoughts. I’m not sure if any of this will do any good since I’m pretty pessimistic about the short-run prospects of liberty.
Clayton -
Clayton: