Editor’s note: these lightly edited remarks were prepared for Capitalism & Morality 2026 but were never given as a speech. Jim Ostrowski instead spoke on gun rights as fundamental to freedom.
What is the problem that brings us together today? Government grows. That is its nature: endless, continuous growth.
Not only is that its intrinsic nature, but this tendency is exacerbated by the dominant ideology of our times: progressivism. By progressivism, I mean not leftism, the fanatical use of state power to achieve equality in all things. Rather, progressivism is the belief that positive government action—aggressive, coercive government action—is the cost-free solution to any human problems that arise.
The progressive mindset pours gasoline on the raging fire of archism, the belief that some state or organization has the authority to impose its will on others by force. The natural, structural tendency of government is to grow and grow and grow until it consumes so much of the resources of society that society itself, the host of the parasite, begins to die and, the parasite often kills the host.
The problem is, such a collapse may take generations and even centuries. Who wants to wait that long to be rid of the parasite of the progressive, almighty, state? The state can also die when it is taken over by other states through war, or it can terminate and split into smaller parts as a result of a civil war.
The problem with these mechanisms is that they are violent, brutal, and often make things worse. The worst get to the top, as Friedrich Hayek noted: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, etc.
What are the more peaceful, civilized, and efficient means for staunching endless government growth? History and theory tell us there are two ways to limit the tendency of states to grow endlessly: (1) the right to bear arms and (2) the right of peaceful secession.
I will focus here on secession now, since I spoke earlier about the importance of the right to bear arms. They are, however, inextricably linked.
States naturally resist secession since states by nature exploit their smaller and weaker units and resist efforts by those smaller and exploited units to exit. Indeed, there have been about 400 attempted secessions from 1816 to 2011 with only a few dozen successes.
There are almost never any expulsions, the opposite of a secession, which on its own speaks volumes.
So, it is important to advocate the natural human right of peaceful political association. It is also prudent to recognize that a well-armed civilian population is more likely to be able to enforce that natural human right first recognized in the Declaration of Independence. Those words had to be enforced by 250,000 men with guns, aided by France, defeating the most powerful country on earth at the time.
What is the fundamental problem we need to solve? There is a consensus in the world that we must live in a world of states, monopolies of force within certain borders that are the final judge of their own powers.
There is a consensus that we need states, but there is no consensus or even methodology to determine all the remaining important questions: how many states should there be; how should states come into existence; how should states go out of existence; how may states divide into smaller states; and perhaps of ultimate importance, what should be the boundaries of states?
All that is agreed upon is that states must exist and must be preserved at almost any cost. This goes a long way to explaining the number, ferocity, ubiquitous, and mass-murderous nature of world war, regional war, civil war, insurgencies, border skirmishes, and related genocides and democides around the world for hundreds of years. At this time, there are 65 ongoing armed state-based conflicts.
The irony in all this? We were told we need states to avoid constant conflict, violence and chaos.
In the absence of any such consensus or guidelines, states have been largely free to exploit their own people who, for one reason or another, are in a minority status or otherwise lack the political power to protect their own interests. In Alberta, the main complaint is economic exploitation amounting to a net subsidy to Ottawa of over $6,000 every year from each adult in Alberta, a gargantuan amount of money. As Frédéric Bastiat put it, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Let’s discuss an example outside North America but which illustrates the overall problem clearly. Ten months ago, there was a slaughter in Darfur, Sudan. In addition to 6,000 people dying, there was mass rape and there were attacks on hospitals. The point is that this type of violence happens constantly. Meanwhile, everybody just says, “Oh well, that’s too bad. We shouldn’t have that.”
Few people get to the heart of the problem. Ideology is destiny. Ideologies are kind of like self-imposed mental disabilities. If you’re an ideologue in that sense—you are sort of brainwashing your mind not to see or notice any facts that contradict your ideology.
In my view, most ideologies serve a therapeutic function. If you have an ideology that’s emotionally based, it is a form of therapy. You filter out anything that contradicts the ideology because it interrupts your therapy session, or even worse, your psychotherapy session. This is a major theme of my work.
You have many ideologies out there. There is progressivism. There is leftism. Although more obscure, archism is the ideology underlying the state system. The type of violence that happened in the Sudan is very common, but nobody ever explains why because we are often blinded by ideology.
If the world is going to be divided up into states, you will have boundaries. So how do we set the boundaries? My contention is that archism has no theory of boundaries. Boundaries were created mostly by accident, and usually as a result of war. Some guys beat the other guys in the war and grabbed their territory, and then sometimes there was a peace treaty and the boundaries were adjusted to some extent.
We live in a world where boundaries were created mainly by violent chaos. Many people fear anarchy. However, the way borders were created was pretty anarchic, violent, and chaotic. Very little about border creation was rational.
So you have these boundaries, and because the boundaries make no sense and do not reflect the facts on the ground, you have different groups at odds with one another: tribes, religious groups, ethnic groups, racial groups, and economic classes. Sometimes you have an ideological conflict, but that often itself correlates with tribalism.
I do not know the exact breakdown in the Sudan. I guess it is Arabs versus non-Arabs, and they do not like each other. So they both try to control the government, because whoever controls the government gets to put the screws to the other side. I am just describing all of history here without any ideological blinders.
Let’s say you had Roman Catholic Martians all living in an imaginary state. Well, there might be some conflict between the Martians in that state, but they would not be fighting over being a Martian. Likewise, they would not be fighting over Catholicism because they are all in the same category. However, racial, ethnic, religious, and economic groups will fight each other. So again, that is the problem.
To make matters worse, borders are arbitrary. There is also the further problem that there is no established way to change the borders peacefully so these groups do not have to fight each other constantly as they have for thousands of years.
Boundary conflicts are wherever there are people who cannot get along with another group. This type of problem caused World War I, and it partially caused World War II. This is a major historical problem that frankly has an easy solution that people have almost never applied.
The state system has no particular theory of borders that makes any sense. The only peaceful and rational way to determine this would be by a binding local plebiscite. You would just have a plebiscite in that area. I am proposing a practical solution to the problem as opposed to most commentators, politicians, governments, professors. They talk about the problem, but they never solve the problem.
Now, you are always going to have a few stragglers who lost the election, and now they are living in the country that they prefer not to live in. That is easy to fix. Just have sort of a house trading deal. You trade your house with maybe some compensation if your house is twice the size of somebody else’s house, and then you move to the other country where the side that you favored voting won the election.
There is a solution to this arbitrary border problem. However, archists themselves do not have a solution, and they subliminally understand that borders are arbitrary. That is why any time you talk about changing borders, like 1861 in the United States, archists get really nervous. “No, you must save the Union,” they cry, and they make up all sorts of fake history about how the American people preceded the states.
It is a Freudian slip that indicates they really do not think their underlying theory of archism—which divides the world into states—makes any sense. It has not been proven to be rationally correct.
Archists have no theory of borders and cannot afford to brook criticism of existing borders, lest all borders fall like the house of cards they are. There is a weird taboo. No one is supposed to ever talk about or challenge existing borders or risk being labeled a madman. Too many people remain silent—year after year, decade after decade—as the pointless slaughter in the name of that never-to-be-named super ideology that controls our lives and produces an endless pile of corpses.
The solution to all this is simple, but prevailing ideologies will resist it. Ludwig von Mises wrote in Liberalism (1927):
“Whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with.”
The easy and obvious solution to the vast majority of major conflicts and war throughout world history is to let communities, regions, provinces, states and territories decide if they wish to join forces with other communities or secede from them. Secession is the ultimate check on progressive big government that allows exploited or endangered communities to escape from larger governmental units that have been hijacked by corrupt political machines, global or national elites and strangers in distant capitals.
Far from being a crackpot 19th-century doctrine, secession turns out to be a sophisticated modern theory vindicated by a large body of evidence that shows that forced political association is the leading cause of violent conflict in this world.
Jim Ostrowski is a lawyer by trade and a longtime author and strategist devoted to individual liberty.
