THE MORNING RANT: Decentralization versus Libertarianism

Earlier this week I posted a piece titled “More Winning in the Culture Wars at the State & Local Level.” It discussed major victories against woke capital, green energy, DEI, etc that are occurring at the state level. The thesis of the piece was that we will never win these battles at the federal level – certainly not in the halls of Congress - but we are winning them at the state level. A conservative Republican elected as state Attorney General, or to the state Utility Commission, or as Treasurer entrusted with investing state funds, is far more important to our cause than any US Senate seat.

State-level victories in the culture war are also an important reminder about the importance of federalism, which perhaps could use a re-branding as “Decentralization.”

Those of us on the right who cherish freedom, the Bill of Rights, etc have long championed federalism, but we often conflated the idealistic personal freedom of libertarianism with the vast economic and political freedom that federalism makes possible.

With 50 states offering 50 “laboratories of democracy” there are 50 different permutations of political and economic freedom (or lack thereof) that are possible.

Perhaps because “states’ rights” is a term that carries racial baggage, too many conservatives abandoned the idea of federalism altogether, and instead became obsessed with the utopian notion of liberty via national - or even global - libertarianism, which is just as unrealistic as “true communism,” due to human nature of course. Instead, we ended up with a freedom-crushing level of corporatism in which government tyranny has been outsourced to an oligopoly of obedient mega-corporations, who monitor, censor, and control allowable thoughts and behaviors on behalf of government and/or the ruling class.

As Nick Hudson notes, unelected “world leaders” such as Klaus Schwab are most afraid of not having top-down control over all political and economic activity. Schwab does not fear any disobedience from a mega-corporation that has been entrusted as the enforcer of the WEF’s anti-freedom agenda, but he is very fearful of decentralized bodies that are not under his control. Per Mr. Hudson:

The “anti-system” to [Schwab’s] world-destroying authoritarian one is not libertarianism, but decentralization; a world where ideas compete in an open society and many alternative systems are free to flourish or fail.

Roger Kimball has also recently been discussing the importance of Decentralization.

“Our Democracy™: The Democratic Weaponization of Government and the Need for Decentralization” [American Greatness – 01/28/2024]

The overriding imperative, as I have argued before, must be to do everything possible to reduce the place of Washington in the metabolism of American political life. To this end, Trump should endeavor as far as possible to govern the country from outside of Washington. The first symbolic act should be to hold the inauguration someplace other than Washington. I do not insist that it be held in Mar-a-Lago, but why not?

Decentralization goes beyond politics, obviously. Corporate monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels must be broken up so that authentic, competitive marketplaces can return. A greater number of smaller competitors might also rid us of global-celebrity CEOs who have more power and influence than do many heads of state - power and influence that they are using to pursue suppression of personal and economic freedom.

Decentralization rather than libertarianism looks like the best hope for liberty right now.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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