Dear Friends,
It seems to me, people voting with their feet is a better metric of the quality of government than all the statistics in the world. Why would a person risk life and limb to travel to a distant land and set up a new life for anything less than the presumption of a better life? The answer is, they wouldn’t. We can then use migration patterns to establish which nations serve their citizens best, economically, socially, or personally. Moreover, migration patterns within those nations establish which states, provinces, or prefectures serve their constituents best. Further, if we examine counties and provinces that have active and powerful secessionist movements, we see that they also want to move to less legalist jurisdictions. At each level of examination, people who are self-interested vote with their feet.
Alberta, Canada, has a strong secessionist movement. They want to secede from Canada and join the US or become an independent nation. The reason isn’t because the US is actively promoting the movement. It is entirely because the government in Ottawa has regulated and taxed them to near economic ruin. Then it takes the lion’s share of the hard-earned profits for itself. People tend to resent it when a central government dictates to them laws and regulations that serve the central planners, but are corrosive of the fortunes of the regulated and taxed. This is because people are self-interested. Carneades said that people are like animals, self-interested, and so true justice is absurd because for one to be just, they would have to do violence against their self-interest…
At the writing of this piece, two counties in New Mexico want to secede and join Texas. In this case, Texas isn’t pushing for it nor does Texas want them… residents are the driving force there as well. Meanwhile, the politicians in Santa Fe are angry at Texas but not themselves. Their self-blindness is as profound as the elites in Ottawa. They also can’t understand why someone else would be self-interested. Only they have the right to self-interest. Clearly, by attacking those who want to secede and the states and nations they want to secede to, the elites are missing the point. People vote with their feet when the ballot no longer works. That’s why people move from Mexico to the US. Not because they want to learn a new language but because they have given up on Mexico.
Once people give up on a place they start looking around for a better one. That’s why I moved from the State I was born in to another. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the land… but the government was becoming increasingly oppressive. My economic well-being was in jeopardy if I stayed there. So they effectively drove me out. In the end we only have ourselves to judge by. That’s why I judge that most people leave their homelands or demand their locality change jurisdiction, because they are forced to. When was the last time you undertook great effort for no reason? Fighting political entities is the greatest of effort, so those who do it must have the greatest of drive. This is why I say, follow the migration patterns of people to discern what kind of government they want to live under.
If we examine migration patterns then, extraordinarily few people migrate to centrally planned societies like North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. People in those places are instead desperate to escape them. There isn’t much movement to Islamic nations either. I bet the line of immigrants looking to move to the West Bank is minuscule. Before the CCP got Hong Kong, it was also a draw for immigration, but not so much now. The character of a government is clearly repulsive if provinces and counties want to secede from it. This is a metric governments could use to gauge the quality of their governance. They instead attack the places people flee to. This is a suboptimal strategy, though. It doesn’t address the cause of migration and so makes it worse, because to fix it sacred cows would have to be slaughtered.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
