Michael Malice mentioned a good post he made on secession 4 years ago to dunk on David French.

This brings to mind an important point which occurred to me over the last few years. If I can live my life with essentially no contact of any meaningful kind with people living in the same city I live in, what business of mine is it that they:

• Get Fair Trials
• Don't live in squalor
• Live in Peace
• Share my cultural or ideological or religious values

This might seem heartless for people not but 10 miles away (I live in a big city), but if I never ever meet them (and statistically, I won't)... How are they different to my life from people in say, Congo who most certainly don't have any of said things. Should I want the bureaucratic systems which have the power of life and death over me to have anything to do with them? Or would a more sane social order to have an arms-length relationship with them as is common of international relations?

The answer should be self evident. Cities like I live in are simply too large to even pretend anyone has (or should have!) a say in the systems which have power over such huge masses. The same is true of the state it resides in and the nation said state is subordinated to. No amount of voting can change the fact that the dilution of stake disenfranchises as effectivelly as any other type of tyranny.

The only meaningful solution in the end is fragmentation to the point that people have something remotely resembling a meaningful stake in the outcome of politics. Even a 1/250,000 stake such as in the case of most large cities is so small as to guarantee some other means of influence must become dominant for the outcome to be anything but cacophony. In practice this means "political parties", which in reality is just centralization; pledging your votes by proxy to people who you do not know and will never meet. This is little different from having a king, nobility or warlords, aside from it actually being made less effective due to "design by committe".

This insight makes one realize the only meaningful question in politics is one of organization; are we to be:

• Centralized - Top-Down: This is what the monarchies of the west spent generations making happen, until they caught the virus of "democracy" from the french.
• Decentralized - Multipolar: This is what resisted the monarchs, but was smashed. It was this network of small polities, the church and the nobility that kept the monster of total war chained for a long time.
• Distributed - Bottom-Up: This is the actual "Liberal" program; e.g. Subsidiarity. Only the Swiss are even close to this.

So where does secession fit in?

All it does is de-centralize which paints a big fat target on your back to get thumped on by Big Daddy Centralizer. It is more effective to simply sieze local control over enough things the state cares little about influencing until it's too late. This is probably why Agorism has turned out to be the most effective strategy. Just start doing what accomplishes your goals by hook or by crook. The laws, formal relationships and all that are all nonsense anyways. This is actually how the church in the early days actually achieved the influence (and international freedom!) it had.

Enjoy the decline. It is in crisis that the major institutions actually fail to grasp opportunity. Which is where "the meek" (better translation: those who kept their powder dry) finally get their chance at the brass ring.