This talk was delivered at the Abbeville Institute’s conference on Secession and Nullification in Dallas, Texas on November 10, 2018.

My talk today is about decentralization and epistemology. At the outset I wish to disclaim any specialized expertise in this subject. I’m a lawyer by training who loves literature and earned a doctorate in English. It would be a stretch to call me a philosopher or a political theorist, hence this anchoring disclaimer to prevent me from sailing too deep into philosophical seas.

A federal judge today ruled the White House must temporarily re-instate the press pass of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s, who had been barred after an argument with Donald Trump in the press room. The judge ruled the White House had violated due process by banning Acosta.

CNN, however, had requested a ruling saying that Acosta more or less had a constitutional right to a press pass, and that the First Amendment guaranteed CNN and its reporters access to the White House press conference room.

Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future
Kirkpatrick Sale
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017
411 pages

Amazon isn’t the first big corporation to manipulate policymakers by shopping around the idea of relocating its headquarter to the “right” city. The “right” city, of course, is the one that provides the company with enough tax breaks and other political favors so as to make the move worth it.

Back in 2001, for example, Aerospace company Boeing did exactly the same thing, with Illinois and Chicago governments winning that contest:

JEFF DEIST: One issue discussed recently at our Supporters Summit is whether we’re winning or losing. So two questions: Who is “we,” and are we winning?

LEW ROCKWELL: Well, the “we,” fundamentally, is everybody who believes in civilization, who is opposed to what’s been going on ever since the French Revolution, when the Left came to total power and set up a totalitarian state. This includes some, but not all libertarians, and many conservatives as well — but certainly not neoconservative warmongers.

[Adapted from an address before the American Farm Bureau “Farm, Family and Christian Resources” Conference, October 30, 1958; reprinted in The Freeman, January 1959.]

Free will is the starting point of all ethical thinking and it plays an equally important part in the business of making a living. If man were not endowed with this capacity for making choices, he could not be held accountable for his behavior, any more than could a fish or a fowl — an amoral being, a thing without a sense of morals. So, if man were devoid of this capacity, his economics would be confined to grubbing along on whatever he found in nature.

In an attempt to “clean up” government the sheriff of tiny Marshall Country, Alabama (pop. 97,000) ordered 22,000 rolls of toilet paper and 450 cases or trash bags. No word if this was an accident or if it was an attempt to bankrupt the county.

[This talk was delivered at the Mises Institute’s 2018 Ron Paul-Mises Circle In Lake Jackson, Texas.]

There is a crisis, and only you, and people like you, can get us out of it.