17. Too Small to Fail
This is Chapter 17 of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. It continues Section FIVE: Lands of Milk and Money, which is about system change and reimagining how we’d want money to work. In this chapter, I look at the right size for sovereignty. In the years since I wrote it, so many of the global narratives I believed turned out to be psyops. I’d thought myself on the bleeding edge of radicalism. But even the alternative news was another means of control.
It doesn’t mean that every journalist or NGO was in on it. However, I’m more cautious about suggesting what we, as sovereign communities, could do as a global network. I’m certain that’s possible but starts with owning our time, our labor, our media, our words, our truth. In this revision of the chapter, I focus close to home.
Promise them anything, look them in the eyes and lie, spread joy and optimism. After the elections you will keep some of the promises, especially the ones which suit you. —QUINTUS, ADVICE TO HIS BROTHER CICERO, 64 BCE The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways. —FLORENCE KING Right actions in the future are the best apology for bad actions in the past. —TRYON EDWARDS What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork. —PEARL BAILEY
Too Small to Fail
Under the existing system, banks, governments and monetary systems that are too big to fail are propped up and allowed to tower at ever more precarious heights, guaranteeing that when they do topple, no one below will be spared. They are not really too big to fail—they’re too big to be allowed to fail, no matter what the cost is in failures for the rest of society: unemployment, home foreclosures, student debt, medical bills, or capsized savings.
What we want is a system that can’t fail and crash the whole economy. It needs to have firewalls built in, so one failure doesn’t spread to another, and redundancy so that other systems can take up the slack when one goes down. The opportunity to fail small is important, giving the possibility to learn from mistakes and recover. A network of communities, each with the ability to issue its own credit, is more resilient than a centralized structure and can survive the crash and burn of many of its individual elements. In fact, a limited and recoverable collapse may immunize others from a similar fate and models that are working can spread to more places. In the end, only a human-sized economy is too small to fail.
What do you picture when you say the word community? For many, a small town is as likely to conjure feelings of claustrophobia rather than neighborly bliss while rural life seems full of provincial rubes. Apartments, at the other extreme, often provide loneliness in close proximity. But suburbia can feel like a ghost town when two incomes are required to pay the mortgage. The idea of easy, unrushed community, where neighbors stop by for tea and a leisurely chat, evokes another country, another era, or a wholly fictitious place.
What’s the best size for a community? Should communities govern their own land, resources, infrastructure, education, healthcare, retirement, laws, taxes and money? Today, local governments find themselves in a position of having the responsibility without the control. City councils often get the brunt of criticism and displeasure with public policy even though there’s little they can do to change it. But those who set policy are unreachable, insulated within layers upon layers of bureaucracy. What is the best size for self-determination and the ability to control areas vital to self-reliance? That's what this chapter will explore.
the right size for sovereignty
In “The Secessionist Option”, Ian Baldwin writes that when the Declaration of Independence was written almost 250 years ago, there were over 18,000 sovereign political entities. In a global population of 800 million, they would have averaged 45,000 people each.
In the newly-forming United States, each of the founding thirteen colonies averaged around 200,000 people. Today we have 8.2 billion people divided into fewer than 200 countries, as recognized by the UN, or an average of 41 million people per nation. And, as Baldwin points out, fewer than a dozen countries control the lives of all the rest.
If these 8.2 billion people were divided into small countries of around 200,000 there would be 41,000 sovereign states in the world instead of 41 million people per sovereign state. The ‘Untied States,’ as secessionists call it, would subdivide into around 1500 countries with an average of 30 republics per former state. The Federal government would return to being lowercase federal: the negotiating body between a confederacy of sovereign entities.
California alone, if left in its present form, would have 200 nation-states for its nearly 40 million residents. Or the northernmost counties with a total of 8 million people could form the long-awaited state of Jefferson, still leaving a large enough population to divide into five more US states of average size.
To visualize the demographics of the remaining 32 million people, if these five formerly-California states were ethnically-divided, Euro-Americans would make up only two. Latin-Americans would make up another two and Native-Americans, African-Americans and Asian-Americans would share the last state. Another way is to picture a representative California neighborhood as having six white households, six Latino, one First Nation, one black, and one Asian.
To take it further, if the United States were divided into groups of 50,000, as the world was when the country began, there would be over 6800 sovereign communities, each about half the size of an average county. Today there are 3,033 counties in the US with an average size of 1000 square miles and an approximate average population of 100,000 each.
building blocs of community
A difficulty in talking about the right size for sovereignty is that one person’s country may be another’s county. The words nation, state, province, county, city, and town have no standard range for the populations they denote. A country may range from tens of thousands of people like Greenland or Seychelles to over a billion people like China or India.
Of counties, Texas has 254 while California has 58. Some states have county populations averaging 12,000 people in the Dakotas to 650,000 per average county in California, skewed by the nearly ten million people in Los Angeles County. Ten million people seems a daunting number for whom to take responsibility—or for whom to just provide water. The land of lost angels might be better divided into boroughs or commonwealths, radiating out from the center like an urban pie with a desert crust.
Likewise, we have no words that indicate a community size of a certain population. This muddies the semantic waters when talking about the rights that a group of people should have. For instance, the country of Iceland, at 320,000 people, is able to create their own banks, generate their own currency, pass their own laws, establish their own trade policies, and crowdsource a whole new constitution.
Iceland’s modest size and relative isolation may explain why they’ve had more success in reclaiming their economy than their European counterparts. On the other hand, the county of Monterey, California with 430,000 people, can do none of the above. Neither can they ban GMO crops, aerial spraying of pesticides, or even flouride in their water without facing the possibility of state sanctions.
Words like country, state, county, and city are meaningless because they reflect a political history rather than population size. In a prior era, people there fought and either won or lost the right to possess their own resources, issue their own currency, write their own tax laws, enter into their own trade agreements, and choose their own wars.
In order to discuss group rights, we need generic names for groups of different sizes. The family or household is the fundamental building block of community with households organized into neighborhoods. In the US an average household equals two and a half people, an average block is a dozen households, and a neighborhood would range in the hundreds of people. The yet-to-be-named communities where we could start discussing rights might start in the thousands of people.
the republic in which we stand
Let’s try out some terms for sizes of population:
A household averages 2.5 people in the US.
A block is a dozen households or around 30 people.
A neighborhood is a dozen blocks at around 400 people.
A hamlet equals a dozen neighborhoods averaging 5000 people. This is the heart of the economy and exercises sovereignty over its property, infrastructure and collective mortgages.
A village equals a hamlet and the contiguous hamlets surrounding it for about 40,000 people
A commonwealth equals the village unique to the hamlet, and all the villages contiguous to it, making about 300,000 people.
Under the principle of federalism, decisions should be pushed to the lowest level possible, which would be the hamlet and hamlets surrounding it, or village. This is a size where people can know each other and ideas can be discussed. It’s a workable unit for seeing the immediate impact of programs; a place to grow policies from the grassroots up. Whatever can be decided at this level, should be.
Sustainability is environmentally harder within a smaller foodshed and ecosystem, yet economically easier. Large groups enable a lack of accountability and a temptation to externalize the costs. Networks are a way to spread successful ideas and coordinate actions and mutual support. Tens of thousands of people have been the makings of a small republic for most of the world’s history. The vast majority of decisions that impact people on a day-to-day basis could be made at this level.
Community councils are the heart of republican politics in the original meaning of the word, where the impact of policy decisions is apparent. And a self-contained trade budget, that shows what’s coming in and what’s going out, helps to make clear the decision points and consequences.
the common wealth of nations
North Dakota, with 700,000 people, has proven that the commonwealth is a good size for a public bank and a robust, self-reliant economy. California could support 100 commonwealths, with small counties combining for diversity and resilience and large cities splitting apart like amoebas. Currently, California public schools are borrowing at a 300-1000% repayment cost. If commonwealths could manage their own internal exchanges, they could avoid the majority of these costs for services.
The state of Hawai’i could be three commonwealths with its million permanent residents. The overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani was plotted by Hawaiian plantation owners to get around the import tariff in 1893. Without Presidential approval, US Marines attacked Honolulu and deposed the Queen. But 130 years later, the Liliuokalani Commonwealth could rise again.
The other noncontiguous state, Alaska, is a prime candidate to go rogue at 730,000 people. Of their 213 native villages of the indigenous Yup’ik Eskimos, 184 were subjected to flooding and erosion in 2008. Now Alaska is building an 800-mile pipeline to export liquified natural gas to Japan. The Yup’ik have set up wind turbines in their new villages. Self-reliance or part of the climate psyops? The Inuit Commonwealths could figure that out for themselves.
an eco state of mind
The next level of organization is the EcoState, composed of around 2.5 million people in a common ecosystem and foodshed. The name of the EcoState indicates its function: to share, protect, and proliferate the natural resources of the region.
Spanning different bioregions, these could make up watersheds, educational networks, mineral repositories, and energy exchanges. A state like Vermont, with 625,000 people, could join with its neighbors to form the EcoState of New England, or the New Iroquois EcoState if they wanted to honor a different heritage.
Each of the commonwealths might have a coalition dedicated to fostering each form of community wealth: natural, physical and human. Forestry groups and riverkeepers could promote the use of nature within the EcoState while alliances would nurture the resources that go over and under the ground—clean air, pristine water, mineral deposits, and underground fuels. Each EcoState would control its own roads, railroads, postal system, and communications networks, yet they would work together from the grassroots up. The human capital could be grown organically—raising healthy children from healthy local soil.
federal fever
A true federation is the most resilient form of government because it can't be co-opted. It doesn't own the rights to resources that it can sell or give away. It can’t incur debts that have to be repaid by the member states. No leader can commit to war on behalf of the entire alliance. No army can easily defeat it because there’s no head to chop off. Every hamlet would have to be conquered and occupied separately. And each economy is an experiment from which the others can learn.
Rather than the imperial incentive that bigger is better, the impetus is to divide into smaller sizes and add more voices to the conversation. If the US divided into smaller federations, it could join its northern EcoStates with Canada, or Southern states could rejoin Mexico in an ecological alliance.
As groups get larger, their roles become more limited. The function of the EcoState is to caretake the given wealth of natural resources while the commonwealth protects the derived wealth of health, education and housing. A federation is too large for governance of the people and by the people. Decisions should happen between hundreds of thousands of people rather than hundreds of millions as it is now.
In a truly federal organization, no one has power over others, but the agreements they come to are binding for membership in the group. If membership isn’t desirable enough to warrant the changes, a group can leave, take their ball and go home—meaning keep their land and assets and join with a more like-minded alliance.
sibling commonwealths
The neighborhood, the hamlet, the village, the commonwealth and the EcoState make sense to be contiguous within their own boundaries. They share common resources and could pool their strengths to offer their residents more opportunities. Federations, however, are a blend of geography and ideology, and have no need to be contiguous. The work of forging global partnerships and making progress on common issues could be done in a decentralized way by federations and voluntary organizations within them.
This would enable communities to supply the foreign imports they needed from "sibling commonwealths," and to export and import with a relationship.
In addition, a far-flung alliance could be a source of mutual aid and support. Environmental disasters usually affect regions at different times and in different ways. We have sister cities and fraternal orders to create bridges of goodwill across oceans and continents; in the same way trade could create fond feelings between those linked by appreciative commerce.
It’s commonly thought that developed nations have the resources to help in an international crisis but, in reality, they provide the money that organizes other people’s labor—which could be free. Cuba has the best-trained crisis response teams on earth, with the ability to make do in a pinch. They offered assistance after Hurricane Katrina, although it was refused. They send doctors, midwives, and medics throughout the world. Cuba shows there’s untapped generosity in every profession and every country, only waiting for the political will to enable it.
Without a monopoly on currency, there isn’t a cost to giving. As long as there’s energy to assist someone in need, it only requires the local currency to provide a conduit. Like all forms of energy, goodwill flows both ways.
In the nomenclature of federations, no one has more clout by virtue of their country’s size or power. There might be 100 to 200 federations spanning the globe, no more than the number of countries now, and every person would be connected to the rest of the world by a mere six degrees of separation. They could compare their own village to any other in the world, joined in a like commonwealth, within an EcoState of equal magnitude, tucked within a parallel federation, linked to a worldwide alliance of federations. And no one would have power over anyone else because of it.
brutus speaks
The so-called Anti-Federalist, New York judge Robert Yates, wrote under the pseudonym Brutus about the danger of the large republic when the Constitution was being debated by the people:
... remember, when the people once part with power, they can seldom or never resume it again but by force. Many instances can be produced in which the people have voluntarily increased the powers of their rulers; but few, if any, in which rulers have willingly abridged their authority. This is a sufficient reason to induce you to be careful, in the first instance, how you deposit the powers of government.
... It is proper here to remark, that the authority to lay and collect taxes is the most important of any power that can be granted; it connects with it almost all other powers, or at least will in process of time draw all other after it; it is the great mean of protection, security, and defence, in a good government, and the great engine of oppression and tyranny in a bad one. ...
No state can emit paper money—lay any duties, or imposts, on imports, or exports, but by consent of the Congress; and then the net produce shall be for the benefit of the United States: the only mean therefore left, for any state to support its government and discharge its debts, is by direct taxation; and the United States have also power to lay and collect taxes, in any way they please. Every one who has thought on the subject, must be convinced that but small sums of money can be collected in any country, by direct tax, when the federal government begins to exercise the right of taxation in all its parts, the legislatures of the several states will find it impossible to raise monies to support their governments. Without money they cannot be supported, and they must dwindle away, and, as before observed, their powers absorbed in that of the general government.
... History furnishes no example of a free republic, any thing like the extent of the United States. The Grecian republics were of small extent; so also was that of the Romans. Both of these, it is true, in process of time, extended their conquests over large territories of country; and the consequence was, that their governments were changed from that of free governments to those of the most tyrannical that ever existed in the world.
Not only the opinion of the greatest men, and the experience of mankind, are against the idea of an extensive republic, but a variety of reasons may be drawn from the reason and nature of things, against it. In every government, the will of the sovereign is the law. In despotic governments, the supreme authority being lodged in one, his will is law, and can be as easily expressed to a large extensive territory as to a small one.
In a pure democracy the people are the sovereign, and their will is declared by themselves; for this purpose they must all come together to deliberate, and decide. This kind of government cannot be exercised, therefore, over a country of any considerable extent; it must be confined to a single city, or at least limited to such bounds as that the people can conveniently assemble, be able to debate, understand the subject submitted to them, and declare their opinion concerning it.
... The territory of the United States is of vast extent; it now contains near three millions of souls, and is capable of containing much more than ten times that number. Is it practicable for a country, so large and so numerous as they will soon become, to elect a representation, that will speak their sentiments, without their becoming so numerous as to be incapable of transacting public business? It certainly is not.
CHAPTER 17 EXERCISES
Using examples from the book, or from your own research, logic, and experience, comment on the following and what it means today:
Paradigm Shift #17
No government can be by, for, and of hundreds of millions of people: while it might control them, it won't be for them.
Historically, around the world and in the pre-United States, hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands of people were considered sufficient to be their own sovereign republics.
Bigger is better for empire, but smaller supports sovereignty.
LEXICON
Explain how the following definitions change the dialogue around social problems. Is this concept used in discussion of the examples to which it applies? If not, how does this affect the potential solutions?
household: a home which averages 2.5 people in the US.
block: around a dozen households with about 30 residents.
neighborhood: around a dozen contiguous blocks averaging 400 residents.
hamlet: a dozen or so contiguous neighborhoods with around 5000 inhabitants.
village: a hamlet with the other hamlets contiguous to it: about 40,000 people.
commonwealth: a village with the other villages surrounding it: around 300,000 people.
EcoState: an average of 2.5 million people who share an ecosystem and foodshed.
federation: tens of millions of people from different commonwealths united by a common ideology on human rights, trade policy, governmental philosophy, or another set of values.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
Consider the place where you live and how you would organize it. What are the borders of your neighborhood? Which dozen neighborhoods would make up your hamlet? What’s the village that surrounds your hamlet? What would be your commonwealth?
The purpose of the honeycomb design, where every village and commonwealth is unique to the hamlet, is that no one is on the border. Any economic unit of exchange is good in the surrounding area. True to its name, a commonwealth might extend as far as the unit of exchange is traded at a 1:1 ratio, backed by the common wealth of housing. What would be the advantage of a commonwealth with fixed borders set by nature, like rivers, mountains, forests and deserts?
What feels like the right size for sovereignty to you? Give examples of some decisions you would like to make at the hamlet level of 5000 people.
What would you see as your EcoState? How would you share and protect the resources that flow over and under the land—the air, water, minerals, oil and gas? How would you protect the plants, trees, insects, fish, birds and animals of your ecosystem? Could you use your shared labor to regenerate the land?
What are the shared passions under which you would like to join with people around the world into a federation? What would you name it?
Who Stole the Assets? on Anwar Shaikh (only on YT):
Responds to Russell Brand's interview of Anwar Shaikh, What Does Capitalism Mean? by asking Whose Capitalism? Describes what community capitalism or family capitalism could look like if we owned the assets. Explains why we don't need to change human nature and what we could learn from China. Suggests that Russell is asking for too little with higher pay for employees, and we should ask for it all—ownership of our time, our labor, and our assets.
Responds to James Corbett's Free Your Mind interview on anarchy and auto-didacts, and Mathew Crawford on ways to weaken the Matrix. Rob of Occam's Razor explains why both red and blue pills are needed and I suggest we get all the blue pill we can, while the dementors line up to suck the joy out of our souls. I end with why free will vs. predestination is another false dichotomy.
The inspiration for this episode is the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. They cite The Bad Popcorn Study and why you don't have a people problem, Chocolate Chip Cookies vs Radishes and willpower exhaustion, and how to direct the Rider and motivate the Elephant. I apply these to our mission to change the global economy to enable communities to be self-reliant. In the process, I bring in the world's best flourless chocolate cake, my daughter's wedding, my leaky refrigerator, and aerial ballet Buddhas.
A movement called The Greater Reset is gaining traction, based on a 1970 radical libertarian philosophy called Agorism. Its members aggregate in Freedom Cells and practice counter-economics, as explained by Derrick Broze in Manifesto of the Free Humans. I give my understanding of it and the people I admire, like Joel Salatin, RFKjr & James Corbett, who are part of it. But I also raise four concerns and ask the question: can you change the system by dropping out or can you only drop out by changing the system? I explain how my system differs and why I think it would make The Great Reset obsolete.
I’ve been meaning to comment, just been busy! Love the title and the mathematics. Guessing it’s a bit of a”more or less” involved with the numbers right, and maybe different for rural vs urban vs jungle communities/neighbourhoods/etc? Also am I right in thinking this substack text is different from your published book as you say “revision of the chapter”?
PS have you done any film reviews of “Finding the Money” on MMT? I just started watching it today. Was a bit skeptical at first due to few things like focus on government as currency issue (when it’s private central banks), taking a loooing time to discuss interest and how banks create money out of nothing, and something just seems a bit weird I can’t put my finger on yet…but I like the historic anecdotes and like to challenge my brain with new economics ideas even if I’m not liking them at first lol. Haven’t finished it yet https://rumble.com/v6sovz1-finding-the-money-documentary-enjoy-and-share-thank-you-.html
Interesting. It is always dificult, or impossible, to lay out a better system from scratch. I have been in the intentional communities scene for years and been disappointed for various reasons... the distance between the members dont disappear. From the initial excitement underneath layers of complexity are progressively revealed living together, only to discover the muddy nature of many, perhaps all, intrigue, selfishness, bad faith... For me it is more effective to start off from the "dont like" point as a departure line. Things start to change unsensibly without a specific plan or project, as an adventure, a kind of living magic. I am reading a lot of buddism, again. Boddidharma said, the teaching can only be passed from heart to heart, without mind, without project, unnoticed and unseen, which pretty much corresponds with Marx's determinism of the real movement of history, not the apparent one, a sort of millions of micro stories, micro gestures, micro decisions... Perhaps.