Vice President Biden labeled Russia’s annexation of Crimea a
“land
grab”. He may be spot on with that assessment. However, the bigger picture truth is that
Vladimir Putin is swimming against the tide of history. The trend in governance is in favor of
smallness and localism as opposed to aggregation and national expansion.
Throughout the world provinces and cities are agitating to secede from
larger nations. Legitimate secession
movements are budding even in what we might consider to be old-line rock solid
nations. In Great Britain, Scotland is
seeking Independence. Venice wants break
from Italy, Catalonia from Spain and to our North, Quebec is making separatist
noises once again.
At home in America, counties
and regions are bucking to extricate themselves from the majority tyranny
of their state capitals. A movement is
afoot to devolve
California and a piece of Oregon into six states. Also percolating are the Northern
Colorado and Western
Maryland initiatives. In the Great
Lake State, much of Michigan is looking to sever ties with Detroit. Who wouldn’t?
One might object that none of these movements has garnered majority
support. True enough but neither did the
first great separatist movement, the American Revolution. Not a problem according to Samuel Adams who
told us, “It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an
irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of
men.”
Secessionist movements aside, nullification is
gaining acceptance as an accepted means of pushing back against Washington’s
heavy hand. On a cultural level, the locally grown / Farm-to-Table
movement strengthens local allegiance and identity.
The modern nation state is a recent invention. It absorbed formerly autonomous fiefdoms,
principalities and city states for the purpose of aggregating the massive
natural, capital and human resources needed to wage Industrial Age wars. Otto von Bismarck, who was the architect of
the modern German nation, invented the modern welfare state system as an
apparatus to buy loyalty and build dependency among the citizens. Murray
Rothbard explains:
“Generally, a State
cannot win the passive support of a majority unless it supplements its
full-time employees, i.e., its members, with subsidized adherents. The hiring
of bureaucrats and the subsidizing of others are essential in order to win
active support from a large group of the populace. Once a State can cement a large
group of active adherents to its cause, it can count on the ignorance and
apathy of the remainder of the public to win passive adherence from a majority
and to reduce any active opposition to a bare minimum.”
It is becoming increasingly evident from the massive
deficits, municipal bankruptcies and the EU monetary crisis that the welfare
state can longer afford to buy off its citizens.
Similarly, warfare between advanced industrial nations is no
longer viable. Our destructive capacity
is too staggering, especially if the combatants possess nuclear weapons.
Finally, digital technology empowers private individuals as
well as businesses to transcend national borders. In their visionary 1999 book, from The
Sovereign Individual, authors James Dale Davidson and Lord William
Rees-Moggs assert:
“The process by which
the nation state grew up over the past five centuries will be put into reverse
by the new logic of the Information Age.
Local centers of power will reassert themselves as the state devolves
into fragmented overlapping sovereignties.
Government will have
to adapt to the growing autonomy of the individual. This will make smaller jurisdictions more
successful.”
The point of all of this is Putin’s Crimean “land grab” is
strictly old school. Even if they manage
to annex new territory, their hold will be tenuous and unstable. Successful
and sustainable millennial governance will be smaller and more cognizant of
local needs as opposed to massive, bureaucratic and unwieldy.
Subscribe to the 2 Percenter blog by going to http://feedage.com and entering 2percentpov into the Search box on top -choose your favorite reader.
Connect through:
OnFire Radio Show
"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
No comments:
Post a Comment