Human Scale

Small Is Beautiful And Bountiful

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “What have we just learned?  We are hamstrung, we are crippled as a result of erroneous political thought that has forced us into a groupthink, as Orwell called it, that just says I’m American.  Maybe you can be un-Giuseppe America’s continent and be a Louisianan or a Silicon Valleyan or an Oklahoman or a Fort Worthian or a St. Louian.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Here’s Kirkpatrick Sales in Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century:

[reading]

Control and communication also become more difficult to manage over long distances, often to the point where central authority and governance become nearly impossible, and as all the lines and signals become more complex, the ability to manage efficiently is severely diminished.

Small, let’s face it, is not only beautiful but bountiful.

Once that important idea is understood, a further logical argument can be derived from it: that in many cases a smallish nation might find it desirable to divide up even further so as to take advantage of smaller areas for more efficient economic functions. This might be outright secession in some places, where it would simply be good economic sense—and good political and cultural sense as well. But it might also take the form of economic and political devolution, giving smaller areas autonomy and power without outright secession, much as Switzerland is the model of.

In fact, I wish to propose, out of these figures and even more so out of the history of the world, that there is a Law of Government Size, and it goes like this: Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation.

In testing this law in history—Sale’s Law, as I like to think of it—let me begin with Arnold Toynbee’s great and justifiably classic study of human civilization, whose primary conclusion is that the next-to-last stage of any society, leading directly to its final stage of collapse, is “its forcible political unification in a centralized state,” [Mike: Brothers and sisters and all of you out there listening, have we not reached the “forcible political unification in a centralized state”? You bet your britches we have.] and he gives as evidence the Roman Empire; the Ottoman, Bengal, and Mongol empires; the Tokugawa Shogunate; and ultimately the Spanish, British, French, and Portuguese empires. The consolidation of nations into powerful empires leads not to shining periods of peace and prosperity and the advance of human betterment but to increasing restriction, warfare, autocracy, crowding, inequality, poverty, and starvation.

[end reading]

[private FP-Monthly|FP-Yearly|FP-Yearly-WLK|FP-Yearly-So76]

Mike:  I’m going to give you a perfect example right now of what should be a nation-state, a small republic.  It would be to its own benefit and it would be to my benefit and your benefit, too.  I want you to go to a map.  Look at the isthmus of San Jose.  I think that’s what it’s called.  It has as its largest city San Francisco.  Here’s how this works.  The county line of San Francisco is actually latitudinal.  It’s straight.  San Francisco and that isthmus become their own republic, republics.  It would make up a city the size – it would have a population of about, of just under 10 million people.  What’s significant about that?  The city of San Francisco itself would have a population of about 4.5, 5 million people.

So San Francisco becomes its own republic.  San Jose becomes her own republic.  She is clearly defined.  She has the Pacific Ocean on one shore and the Bay of San Francisco on the other, and then all the little, tiny villages of Cupertino and all those other little ones down there.  They then become whatever they wish to call themselves.  They can call themselves the Republic of Cupertino.  They have access to the world.  They have access to the Bay of San Francisco.  They have access to the Pacific Ocean.  They have fresh water.  They have bountiful agriculture up in the mountain area.  They’re easily accessible by road, by plane.  They have a beautiful climate.  Everything you could possibly imagine and wish for in human existence they have.  That little republic now would be telling the United States of America to go pound sound.  There would be no FBI to hack the iPhone.  Because you and I would live here, we would have free and open trade with those republics.  They can even unify themselves if they wanted to into the Isthmus of California Republic if you wanted to.  They could have their own federation.

What have we just learned?  We are hamstrung, we are crippled as a result of erroneous political thought that has forced us into a groupthink, as Orwell called it, that just says I’m American.  Maybe you can be un-Giuseppe America’s continent and be a Louisianan or a Silicon Valleyan or an Oklahoman or a Fort Worthian or a St. Louian.  Why have we allowed this to continue?  You do know as long as that federal monstrosity exists and you have any more children, every single one of them is born with about approximately $38,000 attached as a bounty on their back.  That’s what the current per capita debt divvied up is, 38 large.  Of course, they add to it every day.

Folks, our way forward is clear.  We’ve got to start evangelizing this.  We’ve got to do the Christian part of our evangelization.  We also have to do the nation-state part of our evangelization.  We’ve got to learn to organize and plan.  We can do this.  Our forefathers did it and we can do it.  As a matter of fact, our forefathers were very excited and proud of the fact – take the Kentucky forefathers that we have – that they seceded from Virginia.  Take Tennessee.  They seceded from what?  North Carolina.  The State of Maine, what do they call people that live to their south?  Massholes.  Why?  Because they can’t stand them.  What do they do about it?  They seceded.  Why is there a North Dakota and South Dakota?  Because the North Dakotans can’t stand the South Dakotans, that’s why.  They’re not at war.  They don’t want to be in like and common cause.

Let’s go to the telephones.  I’d like to get your thoughts on all this.  Please call me.  Don’t be shy.  I’m going to pray for the grace of fortitude for you right now, that you have the grace of fortitude to pick that phone up and start this conversation.  I cannot do this by myself.  I don’t want to.  I don’t wanna do it by myself.  Here is Mark in Oklahoma first up here today on the Mike Church Show on the Veritas Radio Network and the Crusade Channel.  Hello, Mark.

Caller Mark:  Hey, Mike.  Good morning.  I’ve got to say I’m kind of a new listener.  My buddy Mark Kreslins turned me onto your show.  I’ve been listening and I’m hooked.  The message you guys are putting out on all your broadcasts are just great.

Mike:  Thank you very much.  I’m glad you like it.  Please tell a friend and then you can be the next Mark that recruits a new listener.

Caller Mark:  I don’t know.  I don’t look enough like Santa Claus to be the next Mark.  Anyway, I wanted to call in, talking about Don Livingston’s Rethinking the American Union.  That has become a foundational book for me and my political thinking.  I knew all the elements, but it was never really tied together like Don and Kirkpatrick and the other authors in there have.  It just makes absolute sense.  If you thought of our federal government as a pickup truck, it would be the size of an aircraft carrier.  Wherever you drove it, it would just be mayhem and destruction.  It would pack the ground where nothing would grow for 20 years.  I think we’re seeing that.

Mike:  Don Livingston makes the point at speeches now, when he still gives them, that if you took the current scale of the representation in Congress and applied it to the first congress of 1789, you’d have three members of Congress.  The whole Congress currently scaled would be three members when it first convened.  That’s how far out of scale we have become.

Caller Mark:  I think it applies to our states as well.

Mike:  I think so, too.

Caller Mark:  I can’t remember who wrote it, whether it was Kirkpatrick – maybe it was Don writing about Hume’s large republic and how you can apply it to a giant place.  I looked at my Oklahoma.  We have as many people living here in this little prairie state as lived in the original 13 states when the Constitution was ratified.  We have the possibility of an Oklahoma State constitutional convention for our state constitution.  I think a Hume large republic is something we can apply to Oklahoma and break it up and decentralize the power out of Oklahoma City.

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Mike:  Hume wrote an essay called The Perfect Commonwealth.  He divides a little republic of 10,000 people up.  He divides them up into little cantons of 1,000 each.  Inside the little cantons of 1,000, he divides them up again.  He divides them up into even smaller cantons.  Then out of these 10,000 you get judges.  The judges are chosen – it’s a very republican system of government.  James Madison actually read this.   He read Hume’s essay on Perfect Commonwealth.  He kind of loosely based his political thinking on that.  Hume didn’t get much else right.  Hume is not a guy to turn to for much else philosophical thought because he’s pretty erroneous.  I think he got the government and the republican part of it.  I think that’s useful.  It’s not the end.  The conversation doesn’t have to end with Hume.  It can certainly include Hume.  I concur.

Here in Louisiana, we have to have another constitutional convention.  Ninety-three percent of Louisiana’s budget is now, thanks to the nitwittery out there that keep voting themselves constitutional amendments because the legislature is too lazy to do its job or afraid to do its job, 93 percent of all money that the state has to spend every year is now constitutionally mandated.  They can’t not spend it; they have to spend it.

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Caller Mark:  We’ve got the same thing, maybe not at that percentage level, but the same thing going on in Oklahoma.

Mike:  You look at a state like Oklahoma, for example, and you see that very long, detailed northern boundary line that goes all the way from the east to the end of the panhandle.  You look at that boundary line, which is obviously – anyone that knows anything knows that that’s the line that Jefferson said sounded the knell of the union.  That’s the Missouri Compromise line.  That’s the 22^nd parallel, I think.  If you look at that, that can only be arbitrarily, governmentally installed.  No border in any of these countries like the ones I’m talking about here, they don’t have borders like that.  Their borders are rivers or oceans.  They’re not set arbitrarily because they’re not set for governmental purposes.  The borders are set for the purpose of living.  Imagine that, Mark.

Caller Mark:  Yes, I agree 100 percent.  You talked about that long border.  If you look at Oklahoma, if you took the very southeast county and ran all the way up the end of the panhandle, the people and terrain are so different, they could be from two different planets.

End Mike Church Show Transcript