Site icon Attack the System

Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities by Ryan McMaken

Keith Preston

Mises Institute

The Mises Institute keeps old classics available to new generations and publishes new original titles expanding our understanding of Austrian economics, the free market, and a classical liberal society of nonintervention. In addition, the Mises Institute’s online library is the world’s most extensive online collection of literature and media of the Austrian school tradition, classical liberalism, and libertarian thought. Your support of our publishing and library programs makes all of these possible.

Fall 2022 Book Campaign! Any donor who gives $500 or more will be listed as a Patron in the following two books.  Go to mises.org/publish. 

Consider supporting these two new books.

Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities
by Ryan McMaken

For decades, when American readers have encountered the topics of secession and political decentralization, the discussion has generally been confined to a narrow range of topics around the American Civil War, American constitutional law, and race relations in America.

This book barely mentions any of those things.
Rather, Breaking Away differs from countless other books on secession and decentralization in that it considers examples and benefits of secession and radical decentralization in a much

broader historical, geographical, and theoretical context. That is, this book isn’t necessarily for Americans at all, but for anyone interested in how issues of secession and decentralization come up again and again worldwide as communities of human beings seek self-determination, freedom, and economic prosperity. An examination of these topics also necessitates a look at small states which often only exist because they have successfully resisted efforts at political centralization, or have been formed from successful secession movements of the past. Small states are often the success stories.

Fortunately, scholars in recent decades have begun to focus in greater detail on secession, decentralization, and small states. For many decades, the study of states has focused overwhelmingly on large states and great powers. “State-building” has long been of central
interest to many scholars. But the processes of breaking states apart—secession and decentralization—have commanded far less attention.
This book is not intended for academics, however, and in fact has its genesis in many short articles written for a non-academic audience.

The Global Currency Plot: How the Deep State Will Betray Your Freedom and How to Prevent It
By Thorsten Polleit 

If everyone in the world uses the same money, then the world currency, the global division of labor, the productivity of production, and world trade would be supported in the best possible way and, as a result, people nationally and internationally would cooperate peacefully and productively. But that is not the world we live in.
Our current worldwide system, however, is not one of free markets, but rather an inhibited, restricted economic and social system. Everything is decisively determined and controlled by governments, be it upbringing, education, transport, health, law, security, old-age provision, environmental protection, or, above all, money and credit. Nothing happens without the governments’ consent, requirements, and orders—whether in the United States, Japan, Europe, or Latin America. This is no coincidence: democratic socialism unites them all. In recent decades this ideology has risen to become the world’s most powerful in political terms.
Democratic socialism encourages all those who follow it to gradually abolish the system of free markets and replace it with a state-run economy of control and command, a planned economy. Many special interests have gathered behind democratic socialism, some of which seem to pursue very different goals: proponents of the welfare state, social market
economists, interventionists, anticapitalists, Christian socialists, state socialists, syndicalists, cultural Marxists, environmental activists, ecologists, political globalists, Keynesians, and whatever else they’re all called. What unites them is the willingness or explicit goal to smash the system of free markets—or what is left of it—to pieces.
The program of democratic socialism is not limited to the national or regional level. By its very nature it claims worldwide validity, aims at world domination, a world government, a world state, and, in the language of the philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), the “peace of a despotism.” The world state that is the subject of this book is essentially what Jaspers calls the world empire.
READ MORE
Exit mobile version