The monster states created by modernity are not necessary for economic or political freedom or for the flourishing of culture; taking their history as a whole, they are responsible for spectacular losses of both. – Donald Livingston, “Dismantling Leviathan”
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| Wiki Commons/Library of Congress image |
The first, most fundamental, and most necessary step in the transition to a free society is the demise of the modern “monster state.” And the first, most fundamental, and most necessary step in this process is the demise of the monstrous American state, its erstwhile role as a beacon to the world having long ago given way to a superpower that brings not light but heat, pulling a shroud over its own people in the process. The monster will object that it only wants to keep its people warm and safe, of course, but as people elsewhere start kicking their shrouds off, it is increasingly clear that the status – as in statist – quo is changing and that neither suffocating domestic policies nor incendiary foreign ones will be tolerated much longer.
It is increasingly clear, moreover, that the American welfare-warfare state is on its last legs and that its use of the present crisis to extend its reach both at home and abroad is an act of desperation, its towering inferno of debt being inextinguishable for the simple reason that desperation is what fuels it. The United States Government isn’t fighting fire with fire, in other words; the American Empire is setting the world aflame with domestic overindulgence and foreign overextension, the difference being that it won’t merely become the latest victim of “imperial overstretch”; instead, it will become the last victim, its collapse igniting a worldwide devolution of power the likes of which the world has never known. For while it might be assumed that Russia or China will rush in to fill the resulting power vacuum, it is far more likely that the collapse of the American Empire will precipitate a worldwide devolution revolution that no state – least of all the “monster states” – will be able to withstand, as emboldened bodies politic and sympathetic international spectators frustrate central government efforts to suppress secessionist uprisings.
Granted, what is going on in Egypt and elsewhere has nothing to do with secession, as it involves regime change, not regime collapse. And granted, the temperament of the American people remains such that secession is something that was attempted in the past but for which the subject is now all but closed. However, as their central government moves ever closer to defaulting on its welfare obligations – both selectively (through raising the retirement age, means testing, and the like) and monetarily (through debasing the currency) – it will become clear to the American people that far from securing the blessings of liberty, what has instead been secured – for themselves and their posterity – is the curse of tyranny, the only alternative to which is a return to the principle upon which their nation was founded.
No matter that their central government no longer recognizes this principle, the fact is that is no law against – i.e., no Constitutional prohibition of – secession. On the contrary;
The procedure for joining the Union also applied to withdrawing from the Union. And the Tenth Amendment, which reserved to the states powers not delegated to the federal government, would seem to put the matter of secession with the states and the people.
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