The state and its evils are but the shadow cast by public opinion, and this is why advocates for freedom and free markets put so much emphasis on education. We focus on spreading the arguments about the workings of the profit motive versus bureaucratic management, state monopolies versus free competition, international trade versus protectionism and so forth. But we also know that a libertarian is not made overnight. Ask anyone, and the tale of how they became a libertarian usually involves reading numerous books, and often having long conversations with those who are already convinced of the value and virtue of liberty. In short, going through a months and years-long conversion process of learning, reading, and overturning previous convictions and beliefs one after another.
Therefore, as salespeople of liberty, our conversion process might literally take many years to come to fruition. That should give us a pause. This is because we cannot make strides towards a free society by relying solely on the ideological war through arguments. Once again, these arguments are indispensable for the deconstruction of any statist proposition, but they seem to be insufficient for a positive program for liberty, especially one that has the potential to win over a majority in any democratic election.
The solution for this, I believe, is to put much more emphasis on the cause of decentralization. In short, we do not push for political decentralization hard enough.
To reiterate the argument for decentralization in the shortest possible form: the greater the degree of political decentralization in a given territory, the easier it will be for the populace to move if one government becomes ever-increasingly tyrannical. And as governments seek to retain their tax base, decentralization imposes a natural limit on state power.
Often, the basic premise here can be phrased as follows: you and I may have different ideas about how to organize society to achieve the best conditions for all its members. If you believe that your ideas will bring about the best, most livable system, and if I believe the same about my convictions, why not put both of them to test? Instead of a top-down system of politics, why not have a competition of free cities, communities, districts, states and counties, each of them free to implement the policies they deem to be the best, and the rest, seeing the resulting increase in living standards, will be incentivized by those who would vote with their feet to follow them.
To implement the political program of decentralization requires only one simple step — a mere constitutional amendment — that can be effected in every country of the world: If the majority of the inhabitants of a village, town, district or a city express in a freely conducted plebiscite their opposition to any given law ratified by local, state or federal governments, they are to be exempt from the jurisdiction of that law.
One need not be a libertarian to see the value of such a decentralist program. Indeed, this is arguably the only program which has the potential to unite just about everyone globally, whether they be left or right, capitalist or socialist or anything in between under a single worldwide decentralist movement of self-determination to liberate every community, so they may shape their society according to their own values, instead of those imposed on them by the might of the centralized, leviathan state.
