Over at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom - a blog focused on political decentralization of various sorts including market anarchism, seasteading, and federalism - we're running our second annual Secession Week. I'm sure a lot of folks in the Mises community will have interesting things to say on the topic. So: post something secession-related on your own blog and we'll link to it; send us a guest post; or simply help spread the word via Facebook, Twitter, or however you'd prefer.
We're organizing the event by theme. Here's the schedule:
Today, we encourage bloggers to post about anything secession-related and anyone without a blog but with something interesting to say to email us your contribution.
Tuesday: The size of nations. Obviously, if there are going to be a thousand nations (and that is likely a conservative estimate), they’ll each have to be smaller. What general factors should we consider in thinking about the optimal size of nations? How is the size of nations determined in reality?
Wednesday: Culture and secession. At this blog we generally take an economic approach to understanding the benefits of regional autonomy. Most secession movements around the world, though, base their arguments on group identities. Cultural factors such as this are important and make the case for a world of more nations much stronger. How do the myriad of cultures and values erode centralizing tendencies in governance?
Thursday: Economic Secession, from Agorism to tax havens. Brad Taylor recently wrote here about how government services crowd out the private provision of similar services. But what are the ways market-based, voluntary institutions can pave the way for incremental secession from political institutions? For example, how can monetary secession protect wealth from predatory confiscation? We’ll explore.
Friday: Is it possible for a state to secede from U.S.? Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has written that, if any constitutional issue was resolved by the Civil War, it’s that there’s no right to secede. Is the U.S. forever to be, as the Pledge of Allegiance has it, “one nation, indivisible”?
Saturday: the American Revolution–Bryan Caplan says the U.S. didn’t gain all that much from revolution. We’ll don our counterfactual hats to discuss the possibilities prompted by Caplan’s skepticism. Was the US constitution a mistake? Would the Articles of Confederation have been a better constitution and were the Anti-Federalists on to something? Would not revolting have been even better?
Sunday: We’ll circle wagons, round up the action, and launch of few final squibs and fireworks.