It is often said that before the Civil War, the United States “are,” but after the War, the United States “is.” This is a reference to the formerly theoretically sovereign nature of each state as compared to “one nation, indivisible.” More than just the theoretic sovereignty of the individual states, the territory now comprising the U.S. has a rich history of sovereign states outside the control of the federal government. Some of these you’ve almost certainly heard of, but a lot of them are quite obscure. Each points toward a potential American secession of the future.
Tag: government
Open Borders Are a Trillion-Dollar Idea
Do I seriously think I am going to convert people to open borders with a short article—or even a full book? No. My immediate goal is more modest: I’d like to convince you that open borders aren’t crazy. While we take draconian regulation of migration for granted, the central goal of this regulation is to trap valuable labor in unproductive regions of the world. This sounds cruel and misguided. Shouldn’t we at least double-check our work to make sure we’re not missing a massive opportunity for ourselves and humanity?
In Praise of Spontaneous Order
My girls and I recently spent several days in New York City, where I filmed this clip about unschooling and self-directed education. We decided to make it a field trip, enjoying a Broadway show, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although I have been a city dweller in Boston for over 20 years, it pales in comparison to New York City’s size and scale. Walking through Times Square, the phrase that kept popping into my head was: spontaneous order.
Do You Talk About X in Open Borders? Yes!
The modal question about Open Borders is, “Do you talk about X?” The answer is “YES” for all of the following…
Voluntaryist Voices by EVC
Have you noted Voluntaryist Voices by EVC? This is one of my favorite features on EVC.
Legislation, Laws, Not the Same Thing
How much do you respect and obey laws? How much should you? I suppose that depends on what you mean by “laws.” Most people confuse legislation for laws. Laws were discovered — usually thousands of years ago — while legislation is made up by politicians and imposed under threat of violence as if it were law. Occasionally, legislation is written to copy or reflect law, but not often.
How Republicans Can Win Back the Immigrant Vote
Today’s immigrant voters are heavily Democratic, but ’twas not always so. As Open Borders explains, immigrants were almost evenly split during the Reagan era. It’s not hard to see why. At least rhetorically, Reagan nearly endorsed open borders: I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever […]
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Evil Among Us
When I was a teen, an IRS agent lived across the street from my family. No one said anything to him about it, but everyone looked at him as though he were in the mafia. Which is closer to the truth than I realized at the time. People were a bit suspicious and standoffish around him. And he didn’t really socialize much. He acted guilty because he was.
In Syria “Withdrawal,” Less is Probably More
When US president Donald Trump announced his plan to relocate a few dozen US soldiers in Syria — getting them out of the way of a pending Turkish invasion — the Washington establishment exploded in rage at what it mis-characterized as a US “withdrawal” from Syria. Instead of fighting that mis-characterization, Trump embraced it, pretending that an actual withdrawal was in progress and announcing on October 9 that “we’re bringing our folks back home. ”
Guns and History
The enslavement, oppression, torture, genocide, forced starvation, concentration camps, and wholesale mass murder wrought by governments on unarmed citizens utterly dwarf by orders of magnitude harms, crimes, and accidents done by armed citizens to one another throughout history.