Alright, it's 901. Welcome to the Decentralization Talk. The official title, I believe, is radical decentralization as a road to anarcho-capitalism. If you're not into anarcho-capitalism, you're in luck. This doesn't require you to be so. And if you like anarcho-capitalism, you're also in luck, because then we'll talk about this as a strategy to achieving that. However, this is the sort of thing where it's good either way if we adopt radical decentralist principles, it will simply move us more in the direction of limiting the state and expanding people's self-determination and basic human rights and so on. And I'm Ryan McMakin. I'm the editor for Mises.org, for Mises Wire. So if you ever want to write an article for us, just send it to me directly and I'll email you back about that. But my background, my graduate work was mostly in political science, and so this is really more of a field for that. It has to do with more of an issue of international relations. It's more of the domain of historians and so on. We're looking at the construction of states and their interactions between states and really what that means for the people who live in them. And there is certainly an economic aspect to it in what we'll see and what we'll find is that smaller states are more economically prosperous and that small states are what paved the way for Europe's prosperity. And then finally we'll look at a couple of the objections to a world based on small states and small communities. But let's start with just really defining our terms. What do we mean by decentralization? And in the political science literature, of course, we have different types of states. We have unitary states. We have federalist states. That is, you can have governments where absolutely everything really functions at the pleasure of the central government. And probably the most typical example of this would maybe be France, where the government in Paris really sets the boundaries of local districts and overwhelmingly is responsible for the legislation that governs the country. And there's not much sovereignty afforded to local government units throughout the country. At the other extreme, you might find a country like Switzerland, where you have a variety of cantons kind of equivalent to the U.S. state, which have a high degree of independence and sovereignty. And the confederation, the central government is very limited in what it can do. And has to afford a certain amount of independence then to these different districts. Now, so we can look at that and we can see that some states then right into their structure, a decentralized structure. You might have a constitution that says that we have some sort of, there are guidelines here that provide some powers to certain levels of government and some powers to the main central government. In some cases though, decentralization is just de facto because your central government is too weak really to impose uniformity on the country. And historically that's often been the case. And it's still the case in many countries today where there's a weaker central government that simply lacks the resource to go and ensure compliance from the regions and to bring them to heal. But all countries have some degree of this. And also we know that internationally there's decentralization as well. And we'll look at that in a little bit more detail. But being pro-decentralists, recognizing the value of decentralization as a means of limiting state power has long been baked in, built into the liberal ideology. And when I say liberal, I mean 19th century, 18th century liberal, what Americans call classical liberal now. Most foreigners would know what you mean by liberal. It means basically libertarian. Only Americans decided that liberal now means social democrat, which is really the proper term. If you want to describe a leftist who's in favor of the welfare state and so on, this is a social democrat. In a classroom context or an academic context, liberal just simply means people like Thomas Jefferson, people like Frederick Bastiat and so on. And so we find, though, that the issue of decentralization is a core concept for the liberals. And looking for a definition, we might go then to the Frenchman, Charles Montalembert, who was a 19th century liberal in the same school as Alexis de Tocqueville. Also, maybe even later, Gustave de Molinari and Frederick Bastiat as well. And he defines decentralization as the sum of quote unquote liberties, local and personal, municipal and provincial. And he was in favor of promoting these in all possible ways. And so what he's saying is that you've got other entities outside the state. You've got persons, of course, but you've also got local municipal groups, you've got religious groups and so on. And if we promote the liberties of these groups, we're limiting the state through that way. And by maintaining the integrity even of these different groups and having them's counterbalances to the central state, this can be very important as well. And another Frenchman, Benjamin Constant, who with only some exaggeration, some people have called the inventor of liberalism, he says, the interests and memories which are born of local customs contain a germ of resistance, which authority suffers only with regret and which it hastens to eradicate. With individuals, it has its way more easily. It rolls its enormous weight over them effortlessly as over sand. So we definitely want not just then independence and liberty for the individuals within a society, but it's also important that they be able to create these other organizations that the state hates, by the way, right? So any sort of local association, local group that has different ways of going about the world, different ways of thinking than the central government, the central state hates that and wants to destroy it. But it has an easier time of doing that if those organizations are reduced or eradicated and instead we embrace this idea of just individuals who have liberty and take away the independence of certain groups within the state. And that's generally what we see when we're talking about a state or a confederation or so on that's been reduced to a variety of Sovereignty's, whether it's a state or a Canton or a province or some other sort of group. The idea is that that group would serve as some sort of counterbalance to the power of the central state. And this is just simply typical for a lot of debate amongst liberals in the 18th and 19th century. Now this comes down to a historical view as well. There's this, of course, a long time prevailing myth that in the Middle Ages all of Europe was ruled by despots and theocrats who enjoyed almost total untrammeled power and they claimed total divine acceptance of everything that they thought should happen. And that it was only with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason and so on that people started to see that that government power could be problematic and we should limit it in some way. This certainly is not the way it actually happened. And Alexei de Tocqueville talks about this a little bit. Here's a passage from Democracy in America, the second volume. During the aristocratic ages which preceded the present time, the sovereigns of Europe had been deprived of or had relinquished many of the rights inherent in their power. Not a hundred years ago, so he's saying, 1740s. Amongst the greater part of European nations, numerous private persons and corporations were sufficiently independent to administer justice, to raise and maintain troops, to levy taxes, and frequently even to make or interpret the law. But what he's saying is that at some point in the 19th century then, certainly after the French Revolution, this began to be reversed and you started to get a larger bureaucratic state, more state centralization. And so he was lamenting that that was the case and saw these earlier aristocratic groups and religious groups and so on as providing a obstacle to the centralization of state power. And he says that the state has everywhere resumed to itself alone these natural attributes to sovereign power. In all matters of government, the state tolerates no intermediate agent between itself and the people. And in general business it directs the people by its own immediate influence. So he's in democracy in America part two he looks extensively at the issue of decentralization and how this is what really stands in the way then of total despotism. Most people recognize on a basic fundamental level that decentralization has value. We could consider for example a global system that was all one giant state. Well, if you ask them would think that was probably undesirable. And why we could it doesn't have to be a global state we could just look at something like say South America, why isn't South America all just one giant state. And why shouldn't it be a lot of people would identify that there are perhaps different regional interests and historical reasons why all these people shouldn't just simply be with within one group and if we look at the mechanics of it we could immediately see a big problem. We see that among the population of South America, Brazilians constitute very nearly 50% of all the population and like 49.8% or something like that. And so you can see immediately what's going to happen, right, whatever it is that interests Brazil as behooves Brazil, all they have to do is ally with one other country and they can therefore dictate policy to to everyone else in our South American Republic then. And so a lot of people recognize from the beginning that if they were to have any sort of self determination they were going to have to decentralize then the state and this was of course the original goal of many independence fighters in South America was that we're going to break off from Spain and have one large free state, but it didn't work out that way because there are regional differences and people recognize that and matters of language and matters of economy and industry and so on. So it doesn't make sense to simply shove everybody into the same country at the global level of course it would it would this would make very little sense you would have a country with a billion people like China or a country with a billion people like India. If these were governed on a one man one vote sort of principle, they'd be out voting everybody all the time, all of the Americas doesn't have as many people as some country some single countries in Asia so that's certainly problematic. One of themselves is being pro decentralization just because they think there should be many countries in the world but that's essentially what they are they're conceding that concept. Now we're here today to talk about radical decentralization though we can find lots of decentralization in various times and places and we can see that the liberals promoted it and so on. But what is it when it's radical. Now the phrase radical decentralization. As far as I know it's it was mostly used and popularized by Rothbard in just a few places. And it's something a little bit different. I think we could say that if we're to define radical decentralization it's a type of decentralization that is robust both in terms of the amount of sovereignty attained by each individual unit. The degree of its localism that is essentially the smallness of it or the population within it, not necessarily geographically small but small in terms of population. And you would probably need both of those concepts then obviously we can have states that have a high degree of sovereignty, which the United States for example, which has sovereignty in spades right and no other nation state really threatens us sovereignty in any way. And at the same time though this isn't a highly local sort of government, even if you take into account some of the federalism involved as well this is a huge state governed for the most part by five Supreme Court justices who then dictate to 330 million people what's constitutional and what's acceptable and what's not. That's certainly not radical decentralization. At the same time we could have a very high degree of locality. We could have a country that has lots of different municipal governments and lots of small units within it. But if they are essentially at the mercy of a central government in whether in a constitutional way or the facto way, then we wouldn't say that's radical decentralization as well. What we would have is a lot of real largely independent states, not necessarily totally independent they could be in some kind of loose confederation or some sort of association that's part of that sort but if we're going to say that they're mostly can do what they want, especially internally, and and there's a large number of them, then we would say that's a radically decentralized system. The international system today is arguably radically decentralized it depends on what you mean by a lot of states, it could certainly be much more radical. Now, the political scientists have a word for the international system and that is it's an anarchic system. Some people are familiar with this act as if there's anarchy just means chaos but within the context of academic political science it doesn't mean that at all. It means in fact in many cases a large system that has its own legal system and very set in commonly followed ways of acting among the independent entities. And this is what the international system is right now we've got about 200 odd countries that are all at least technically sovereign but many of them are in fact sovereign in the fact that they can do what they want without a whole lot of interference from another state now yes the US and other major powers try to interfere in a lot of cases, but we do have mitigating factors there such as international law, and the fact that especially in the modern world invading and bombing other countries back into the Stone Age has significant cost to it especially if those people are your trading partners, and if it makes you a pariah state among other states. So there are limits on what just powerful states can do in the international system, and we would definitely say that this is an anarchic system and one that is certainly decentralized. Radically so, arguably it's less radical now than in the past. And if we look then at what it was that made Europe rich. We come upon the theory of the European miracle. And this is a this is a theory among historians who wanted to go in and they wanted to see why is it that Europe, which had been this economic backwater in in the early Middle Ages, and had seemed very primitive and unimpressive compared to say the great empires of the East, especially China. How is it that just 500 years later, Europe was this major massive economic power that could easily dominate entire continents elsewhere and so on. And one reason given for this is that it was due to Europe's radical decentralization that existed throughout much of the Middle Ages. And we go back to that myth was this idea that Europe was dominated by the Catholic Church and it was all this one huge theocratic state and so on and that of course wasn't the reality at all which really had was a system of hundreds of small principalities where really the church tried to exert its influence over these states but usually failed considerably, because of course the locals in these places had their own interests the princes had their own interests and resisted. So you had a constant back and forth you had a tension between the religious authorities and the secular authorities and the civil authorities and other groups as well. And this led to a situation where you never had any single state that dominated the region. This was very much unlike China and unlike the Islamic world where you had much stronger states who were able to exert a lot of influence over a smaller number of states. And so historian Ralph Raco who he's got books in the bookstore here I highly recommend them and was long and associate of Rothbard, certainly one of the best liberal historians. He examines the issue of the European miracle. And he sums it up this way says although geographical factors played a role. The key to Western development is to be found in the fact that while Europe constituted a single civilization. Latin Christendom, it was at the same time radically decentralized. In contrast to other cultures, especially China, India and the Islamic world, Europe comprised a system of divided and hence competing powers and jurisdictions. And have you ever seen a map of the Holy Roman Empire, which by no means really any sort of unified district in no way a nation state as we think of it today. It was just a countless number of tiny provinces and principalities and so on where you could easily travel from one to the other. What did this mean in terms of daily practice well an example that Raco would give would be something like this. I am a merchant, and I live in my I run my operations out of a small principality that's on the Rhine River in northwest Europe. And the prince in my region where I am he decides he's going to raise taxes considerably. And so what am I to do. Well a lot of modern people under democratic theory and so on say oh well you need to put get together an interest group and maybe you can go to the legislature and ask for a different law and all that sort of thing. But that's not the way it worked at all the easiest thing to do in many cases was simply to move your operation slightly down the river. And these principalities were so small. You this was quite feasible you didn't have to leave Europe you didn't have to pull up everything and move hundreds or thousands of miles away. You could simply move to a neighboring district in many cases where you might have a prince who is very glad to have you as a merchant who could then bring wealth into his district. And this would be contrasted with China, whereas in China, if you had a problem with some law passed down by an imperial bureaucrat or the emperor or so on, where could you go. You could leave China, but what did that require that requires you possibly to move hundreds if not a thousand miles away. Also, you were going to have to go someplace you're going to have to learn a completely different language you're going to have to go to someplace where civilization was totally different. I think that moving of course from one country to another is a big cultural change today you can only imagine what it was in the year 1300 and so on. It was enormous. And in Europe, however, that wasn't the case. If I moved down the river they quite possibly speak the same language. And even if they didn't speak quite the same language still the educated classes spoke Latin. So I could at least then conduct business to some extent and then learn the local language was probably related in a similar language. Anyway, and then of course they had the same religion to most likely. And so I didn't have to change my religion, which of course you would have to do if you switched empires or something like that in in other parts of the world. So you can see then how the cost to escaping one jurisdiction is much much lower in Europe than it is in another place where you got to change religion language, everything leave your family behind maybe even leave your property behind because this empire was strong enough to prevent you from taking your property with you. And of course, all of these events then conspired to create a system where European princes were afraid really, in many cases to really impose themselves and extract taxes in a draconian way because they thought people would simply go away then. And from a historian, Jean Bechelaire, he says, the first condition for the maximization of economic efficiency is the liberation of civil society with respect to the state. Capitalism owes its origins and raison d'etre to political anarchy. So Bechelaire is talking on the European miracle here as well. He's saying that if you want to maximize economic efficiency and growth, you need to limit civil society. And how do you do that? Political anarchy. That's really the key. Now, and then so to really just drive home the issue of another raco quote here where he says decentralization of power also came to mark the domestic arrangements of the various European polities. Here feudalism, which produced a nobility rooted in feudal right rather than in state service is thought by a number of scholars to have played an important role through the struggle for power within the realms. And princes often found their hands tied by the charters of rights like Magna Carta, for instance, which they were forced to grant their subjects. In the end, even within the relatively small states of Europe, power was dispersed among estates, orders, charter towns, religious communities, cores, universities, so on, each with its own guaranteed liberties. So this wasn't like planned ahead of time. This wasn't hey, let's let's create a little kingdom here and we're going to we're going to write everything out and who's got what rights and so on. This was a process that took place over centuries where you might have a group of bourgeois merchants in a city who then began who gained enough political and economic power to get start to demand their rights. And they got something written in for them into the charter that gave them their own city in town or they could live by their own laws and so on. And this compounded over time where he ended up with a complex system of different rights and different privileges and so on that ended up really sapping the power of the central state. Now we see this can this these advantages continue today there's a there's a significant research out there showing that small states today that they do better that their GDP per capita is higher. That these states are more flexible more versatile. Even the World Bank admits this in some studies. In one study we can see that the World Bank includes quote controlling for locations smaller states are actually richer than other states in per capita GDP on quote it is true that because of their small size these countries can be more susceptible to volatility when there's an economic collapse and so on. But quote their openness pays off in growth. And we've seen other studies where this applies even in Africa where smaller African states are more open they have more free trade and they're more able to deal with economic crises and problems. This isn't due just to the economic issue as well but you can see how in a smaller state you would have left less in conflict among different ethnic groups and so on. So they of course opponents of central of decentralization claim oh well any country that gets its independence and so on it will immediately close its borders and raise tariffs and so on there's no there's no evidence to support this claim. At all what they always do is point to like someone weird exception like North Korea or something like this but when we look out there and examine the world as a whole clearly the preponderance of evidence points to the fact. That's small countries are more likely to be open with smaller taxes and in fact other research has shown that small countries benefit everybody even the people in the large countries because what you get then are small countries that are neighboring to large countries the small countries want to attract capital because large countries are able to attract capital because they're large they have in the era fiat currency. They have larger economies trading in that currency. There's economies of scale that take place in larger countries and so on.  And this is why you see EU officials and people like Angela Merkel complaining about how we need tax harmonization. They want to pass legislation that requires all countries to have more or less similar tax rates. Because if we let if we keep letting the Irish or the Slovenians and so on setting their own tax rates going to set them low because they're going to want to try to compete with the larger states and we can't have that so we need to set similar tax rates everywhere. And this is because they recognize smaller states are they're kind of a thorn in the side of the larger states because they're always searching for ways to actually appeal to the merchant class. And there's lots of other ways that we can look at the ways that small countries are better. Lots of measures and there was a recent book that came out by a person named Frank Buckley called American secession. And there's a section of the book has that he does a lot of regressions and so on trying to find out what are the benefits of small states. And you take that those regressions with a with a grain of salt but I think they can be illustrative of things. And he concludes after running a bunch of these that smaller quote smaller countries are happier and less corrupt. They're less inclined to throw their weight around military mirror militarily and they're freer. If there are advantages to bigness the costs exceed the benefits bigness is badness. And you'll notice a lot of the time when we see all these lists of the world's happiest countries and the world's freest cleanest countries safest countries and so on. It's usually a country like Norway. And of course what they immediately say oh it's because Norway is a socialist country which isn't even true. But they don't consider the Norway is five million people and that this would be this is the same size as say Colorado or Minnesota. If those were independent countries these are small countries. Sweden has around 10 million Denmark has under 10 million. These are small states even in the US context. And so maybe the smallness has something to do with it. Buckley would claim that yes. I mean obviously we know it's not because they're allegedly more socialist. Now so how would radical decentralization actually work in real life so we can accept that smallness is good that we need more small states. How was that actually achieved. Well fortunately Ludwig von Mises provides us with a blueprint for this he was very concerned with self determination. How do we avoid conflict between different ethnic groups here. Mises was especially concerned with different language groups partly because he was consumed with the issue of the world after World War One where they were redrawing the lines on the map to to well Polish speaking people go here and German speaking people go there and so on. Mises was very familiar with sort of conflict that arises out of those sorts of conflicts and he he basically said here and here's how you do it. This is how you get smaller countries and you do it in a in a just and reasonable way. The right of self determination in regard to the question of membership in a state. Thus means 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 freely conducted plebiscite that they no longer wish to remain united to the state in which they belong at the time. But what but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state their wishes to are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars unquote. So he's recognized that there are lots of different places in the world where you have people of different ethnic language whatever economic interests and so on and they're all shoved into a single state together. That's going to lead to civil wars can lead to unrest can lead to problems. What's the solution to this. You let the people in that region take a vote and then if they want to leave you let them leave certainly don't fight a war over it. And he goes on though this isn't just for big areas. If it were quote if it were in any way possible to grant this right of self determination that is this right of succession to every individual person it would have to be done. This is impracticable only because of competing of compelling technical considerations which make it necessary that the right of self determination is restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country. So Mises coming out right here and saying basically that theoretically anarchy where you had just a small single family theoretically could then vote to leave your nation state or failing that maybe a small village maybe a neighborhood. And he sees that there's really only a practical problem to this that because of economies of scale and some other issues. There's a group of people large enough to actually administer some sort of district or some sort of province. How big that is well he probably imagined that was actually really quite small looking at the context in which he's writing we're certainly not talking about something that required 10 or 20 million people. You could be looking at 50,000 people which in his book human scale Kirk Patrick sales says that this is the correct size for any state is 50,000 that the entire world should be city states composed of 50,000 people and anything larger than that is absurd. And it could no way reflect the will of the people who live there. And so what does that mean that just means you have a system of where people are getting together all the time determining do we want to be part of this nation state. And if we want us to see it from what we will and will hold one of these freely elected plebiscites and the right of self determination dictates that you let us do this. And what this means then for the the issue of really limiting state power is that we need to recognize what happens then when a large state breaks up into smaller pieces. And what this means is that we almost certainly want more states. Well, the more states there are the more choices you have. So what Mises was trying to accomplish with his his strategy of having different groups break off from larger states or join other states is that people are actually able to engage in some sort of choice. And this then reduces the amount of monopoly that each state is able to exercise over people. And there are some objections raised against this. The problem is what if you have some people in that district who voted no they didn't want to leave the answer that of course is then more succession to break that leaving district into smaller districts. So say California votes to secede from the United States. Clearly you're going to have some people within that region that voted no because they wanted to stay in the US. Some people argue well you can never have succession because of that because there are always going to be some some minority vote. The answer doesn't lie then and forever prohibiting succession and just ending decentralization the answer lies then and allowing then California to break up into smaller pieces than the people in those areas can do what they want. Now of course there's mixing of population in certain cases, but there's really only so much you can do with that. What do you say just that whoever's in the minority then is just stuck or whoever's in the majority then just gets to dictate everywhere always. Whoever's in these places at some point you have to recognize that just the status quo borders everywhere are not ordained by God. And that it could be that these do not suit the arrangements and that some people might even have to move in order to take advantage of the freedom offered by other neighboring jurisdictions. Now this is then enhanced by the option of having more states. So let's think about it. We've got the United States and it's all one big state. If we divide it up into two now I have more choices. So if I live in live just west of the Mississippi so I live in Kansas and I decide that Western America this new Republic is very oppressive to me. I'm going to move to eastern America now. So I can do that. I just have to move across the Mississippi River. Let's say that's now the border. Now what do I have to do to make that move? I don't have to move very far. I might still be able to move close enough where I could even visit my family on a regular basis. I don't have to learn a new religion. The climate isn't significantly different. If there's some level of freedom and trade I can even continue to trade with a lot of my old customers. There's a lot of advantages to that. It's exactly what we saw in this earlier example from Europe. In that I don't have to leave the civilization. I don't have to change my religion or anything like that. I simply now need to move slightly across this new border that's been created. Now then what if we take those two states and we break them up into four. Now whatever state I'm in I have three other choices that are relatively nearby with same language and same culture as basically practice. And you can see where it goes from there. The worst possible situation of course is one single global state where I have no other choices at all. And this is the perfect state since the state is founded on the idea of creating a total monopoly over the means of coercion. If there's only one single state I've finally attained that monopoly. In a world where there's a multitude of states that monopoly is never really quite achieved. And so there's no really true states in the world in the true pure form because you can move to a certain extent. However states raise the cost of doing that so it's difficult to do. So as long as the United States remains one single state and I want to leave. I've only got two other choices really in North America. I can move to Mexico or Canada. If I go to Mexico I have to learn a new language. If I move to Canada I still might probably have to move 300 400 even a thousand miles away and so on. And that's just that's a pretty high cost that imposes on me. And that's of course if Canada will even have me which they may not. And but what we do know from our earlier empirical evidence is that a large number of smaller states is actually more open to movement within those states because they're always trying to attract more capital. Especially people from the merchant class. So the key here is we want to bring about more choice. We want people to be able to look out there and see oh well there's five other choices just within 500 miles that I can move to. And so if we look at decentralization in the context of how do we move toward a more anarcho capitalist society toward a more true free society. The answer lies then in creating a lot of states 200 globally as far too few. Now a lot of people say well then we you know we need to reduce and secede down to the individual level there should be seven billion states. OK that's a fine ideal. But it would be a massive improvement just if we had a thousand states instead of 200 or 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000. That's still a lot of people per state if you divide 30,000 into seven billion. Right these aren't like tiny tiny jurisdictions. However the amount of choice you would have would be significant. And then of course once you start to get down to a certain micro level. At some point the state really ceases to become a state and is more like a homeowners association or something where you're simply living within a district where you have considerable influence and say. And if it's just no big deal to leave and go to a neighboring district is this even really a state in in the way that we think of it. Because its powers been so curtailed at that point. Now a lot of people will continue to complain. Well yes even if I had a hundred choices nearby though there's still going to be people there that I don't like and it's not going to be a perfect situation for me. And so really I should be able to just have my own state where I do whatever I want. Well now we're just well into complete fantasy land right this isn't the way the market works. If you want to go out and buy a car unless you're fabulously wealthy and can have a custom car built from the ground up you're not going to be able to get a car that suits you in every conceivable way. When you go out and you look for a car you're going to try and find the car that's least bad that suits your needs it has the amenities you want and sometimes they're not going to be mixed together. Because those people who produce cars they're creating cars in a way that suits their production facilities that which they think will sell to a large number of people which will appeal to most people. But maybe those mass produced cars that appeal to most people don't appeal to you. Well too bad. I mean you just you can't have everything you want in life and the same is true of communities if we were going to choose among those communities. The more choices you have the the better the odds are that you can be able to find one that suits you in terms of your religion your worldview your habits your family type your sexual orientation all of these things. There's going to be probably something that suits you relatively well. Now what this means then is that those communities are probably going to have people in them that want to preserve to some extent a certain type of community that they like. And this takes us then to the issue of the the covenant community and this is something that Hoppe discusses and start with a quote from him. So we can imagine one of these very small states the Republic of Pasadena for example where this is just about 80,000 people or so. And we all live in this community and people come and go but if you move there it's probably a deliberate choice. This is small enough where after a while people who stayed people who came this was something they did on purpose they weren't just born there and grew up there.  So Hoppe says all land so in this covenant community in this very small state in this neighborhood in this place where we entered it and we may be signed a contract that said we're going to live here because we like it because it suits our needs. Quote all land is privately owned including all streets rivers airports and harbors with respect to some pieces of land. The property title may be unrestricted that is the owner permitted to do whatever he pleases with his property as long as he does not physically damage the property of others with respect to other territories. The property title may be more or less restricted as is currently the case in some housing developments. The owner may be bound by contractual limitations on what he can do with his property which might include residential rather than commercial use. No buildings more than four stories high no sale or rent to unmarried couples smokers or Germans for instance. Unquote so you can see how this of course works with homeowners associations. Now when you start telling people that oh yes well in a covenant community based anarchic order it'll be someone like homeowners association. Well everybody hates homeowners associations right because for whatever reason they don't want to read the contract and they don't want to be held to these these voluntary rules that they signed on to and they think later that they should be able to do whatever they want. But if we were to be living in a system where you had you had communities to choose from and you had to pick one that best suited you chances are you're probably going to have to ascent to certain rules that are in there. Now you may not like those rules and that's why the key is to have other choices but we we could see what the point hop is making here right say you move into a community and your neighbor.  You might find that objectionable. I mean I often when I give talks every now and then to groups of people who fancy themselves libertarian and so on. I asked them how many of you would be perfectly fine you believe in private property right how many of you would be perfectly fine with your neighbor. Just having a crack house next door and just running a car a dealership out of his driveway all hours of the night right that's his property. Don't mess with it right. Some people in the audience maybe pretend like they have no problem with them but I don't believe them. I think I think all of these property rights loving people they don't like that that concept they recognize there's some way to deal with that. A lot of people deal with that with homeowners associations in many cases but you could have a more broadly envisioned community as well. Something that we would call a city or municipality or a city state that would have its own internal rules the key to the freedom in that case is that you would have other choices you would have ease of escape. And of course some way of affecting the rules once you're there and it's not like these are just static jurisdictions where the rules never change. But it would be certainly not a state in the way we think of it today with huge frontiers and 100 million people and escaping is very difficult. And so this is what we're thinking of when we imagine read that read radical decentralization small number or a large number of small states where you can influence what happens. But which it's based more on private contract and a deliberate choice you make to live there. Now there are other some other issues here that are important as well Rothbard spoke of radical decentralization as a type of national liberation. And he uses this he uses this in the context of the American Revolution which writing in conceived in Liberty talks about the American Revolution is the first successful war of national liberation. He had these Americans who weren't quite British who wanted to do their own thing and they threw off the chains of their rulers through succession they were decentralizing the world when they fought to to get 13 new independent colonies through the Revolutionary War. But then he applies a similar he was nothing if not consistent on this issue and he applies similar analysis later at the end of the Cold War. Well, he was of course totally in favor of massive decentralization on the ruins of the Soviet Union and he wanted all the old states of Europe that were behind the iron curtain to then be removed from the old Soviet block and granted independence. And one issue was the Baltic nations and something that drove him bonkers at the time was the fact that the establishment in the world at the time was greatly opposed to decentralization the New York Times and all the usual suspects. They didn't want the Baltic states to secede from the Soviet Union or talking about Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia up there northeast of Poland. And these are countries that had suffered horribly under Soviet domination and they were talking about leaving the Soviet Union but the the Times and the people in the the Bush administration so well you can't have that that's just anarchy if you just let let these people leave and what will turn it into a democratic state and then the Russians, everyone all the citizens of the former Soviet Union can vote on what should happen and so on. Well of course Rothbard pointed out which way that would go right you can imagine if the Baltics were still in some sort of Russian Federation today how would each vote go with the 5 million people live in the Baltics be able to have any influence over the 100 million in the rest of Russia it would be absurd. And so Rothbard sums it up this way dripping with disdain for the very idea is kind of summing up the New York Times position. Oh the Baltic nations are part of the Soviet Union and therefore their unilateral secession against the will of the majority of the USSR becomes an affront to democracy to majority rule and last but far from least to the unitary decentralizing nation state that allegedly embodies the democratic ideal. And so a lot of people when they when they oppose decentralization it's not just on the grounds that they think the state should have more power and they don't want people do in their own thing. They believe this ideology of the fact that we don't need decentralization because we have democracy and people will just vote, but as we discussed already in the in our South America example, once you start to do that, what do you do with the problem minorities they have no way of asserting any sort of independence or self determination and so on. And that's why Mises wanted these groups these minority groups to be able to break off. And the last issue the last objection is the issue of foreign policy. And you can see this in any comments on any articles that we might run about read radical decentralization and the benefits of small states. And they always say oh yes well small states might seem fine until you have a large neighbor who decides to just conquer you. And there's some good research showing that this really is in fact not the case, because richer states do far better in terms of military than than is really thought and it's better to be rich than large. In many cases also just the historical record shows. This isn't true right why didn't the United States just conquer Canada. Long ago why have Canada and the US been at peace since 1815. And why doesn't the US just conquer Mexico. There's a there's a cost to conquering other countries, and you can become a pariah state. It sets the status quo, better to just dominate it if you can. However, in research done by political scientists named Michael Beckley. He's done some good work on military efficiency. And he does a fair amount of empirical research looking at has have small states. How have they performed against larger states. And he shows lots of examples. One chief example being Israel. For example, this is a small state surrounded by enemies that does really quite well in terms of defending itself. People say oh well Israel depends on the US as its sponsor and its defender. But that doesn't defeat our argument. It simply shows that some small states are extremely effective at using somebody else's resources to provide defense for themselves. I don't see how that's great for Israel. That's really that shows their success as a small state. And you have a similar issue with the UK. In fact, since the UK ceased to be a great power, they've relied significantly on their alliance with the United States to really promote and defend their interests. And so they've been able to really extend their power as a medium sized state, really not a small one. But say they were much smaller, they would still be able to rely on the US because of cultural and economic bonds between the countries. So there's another. Why isn't the US conquered the United Kingdom, right? There's a small state where we just take it over and make it the 51st state and so on. Well, there's reasons that doesn't happen. So if you want to look into more of this, I would recommend Beckley's work where he has historical examples as well. And he says per capita GDP is actually every bit as important, if not more so than total GDP. So when you're looking at a state like China, yeah, China has total GDP that's very high, but their per capita GDP is very low. So they're not actually nearly as powerful as you suspect they are because a country that produces a lot because of a large population also consumes a lot. And if you start then siphoning off resources to wars of conquest and so on, that brings further down the per capita consumption. And now you've got civil unrest and a starving population on your hands. And that threatens the actual existence of the state.  Obviously not the case since there's lots of small states in the world, but also we can see that some good empirical research has been shown that this just simply isn't the case and there's good reasons for that. So that concludes my talk for today there's a, I would certainly encourage you to look deeply into both the, the analysis of current small states and how they perform their richer, the historical conditions that led to Europe, and its prosperity which was rooted in the small states, and, and maybe examining further Mises is explanation and strategy for bringing about a world of more small states and how it's significantly more just than the current situation we have so thank you very much.


Alright, today we have a CES half-profile or half-burel-profile half-cylinder. There's the key. There it is, running with the key. Everything works great. Locked up.  The thing's too special. Eyes and nose. We'll see what happens. Now we just need to pick attention wrench. Not that one. Tenser in. I'd like to go that way. Wow, index finger in use. Look at that. There's a rare luxury. Of course I'm unabashedly trying to get it into a false set. If it wants it. There it is. No false set, but open. Maybe the false is a sign that it's not doing the right thing for me. Let me know. There's the block. What a focus. CES. Five pin. One, two, three, four. Wait. No. One, two, three, four, five. Five pin. Your profile, half-cylinder. Not bad. Ficked up. This is Alex. Thanks for watching. Have fun, and please keep it legal. Cheers.


Classical conditioning folks, we're going to go with a neutral stimulus. So let's back up a little bit. Let's talk about how this whole thing classical conditioning works, right? So we start out with an unconditional stimulus, one that elicits a response, basically a reflex. So with classical conditioning, we're going to modify reflexes. Well, how do we modify reflexes? We simply take things like neutral stimuli, that, right, is a neutral stimulus, and we pair it with an unconditional stimulus, right? So an unconditional stimulus, meaning one that elicits a response that you didn't need to learn anything about. So I don't know, like pepper in the eyes or something, you're going to sneeze and do all that stuff. That's an unconditional stimulus. So we could pair this with the pepper. We could do this and then brag it, go, and I could, this and this, and then all of a sudden this, the moment this neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditional stimulus, it's no longer neutral. We call it a conditioned stimulus or a conditional stimulus at that moment, right? It usually takes quite a few pairings in order for this to establish some power, all right, in order for this to produce the conditioned response, which in this particular case is probably a sneeze. So the neutral stimulus turns in to your conditioned stimulus after one pairing with your unconditional stimulus.


Everybody forced here ripping 22 23 of city and basketball hobby 12 bucks case number 20 I'll show the random results again. You can find him anytime elitonsportscards.com y'all. All right, let's do it Let's do it. We got football coming up after this Jose football also doubt tonight Natix Live is where you can find more PYTs for tomorrow morning or morning There is no personal schedule. They start after group breaks tonight If you do order now keep in mind everybody it will not rip tonight. It'll rip tomorrow night after group breaks already plenty of orders in the Personals queue So we'll probably start personal's 12 30 a.m. At the earliest I would say 12 30 a.m. Eastern hardaway hero Roddy There's a towns number to 10 10 of 10 of the towns for the wolves You guys see the wolves retro unis they came out with today They look sick and an Edwards out of 35 Minnesota orbital Wolves doing well here About some more. How about some more at a 149 wolves auto is Jalen Noel at five dollar? Oh, man I'm getting bribed with five dollars Yeah, there's been people waiting for At least a couple days I would say and a James worthy to 50 on the auto for the Lakers Well, they're there. There's some of the cleanest unis in the league now The wolves retro is that they came out with Good rape box for the wolves So Han base Horford we've got a Stephen Adams going out to the Grizzlies out of 99 And we've got so Han rookie to 75. Don't mess with a so Han the orbital insert Chima okie otto the 149 Orlando And a redemption come on big name big name big name Luca Donchich matrix material auto electric edge yellow yellow anybody there Mavs all right Doing well Good case so far some low numbers number nice rookie Luca Donchich Here he's good but not There's a purple mark Williams Hornets rookie nice a uniform color match right there. It's a 99 Then a Loravia Grizzlies the 50 we got Giannis or not. Yeah, it's an ASUS a 25 on the auto I'm gonna say I think you on us and sign for a little while now the nasus auto to 25 from Milwaukee And Grand Hill number to 10 on the Pistons volcanic auto with Some of the best uniforms in NBA history that he's wearing right there Pistons horse logo righty. You got a Steven Adams Number to 99 for the Grizz and a D'Angelo Russell to 10 for the Lakers Redemption it's gonna be Isaiah Mowbley Cavaliers rookie Jersey, Inc. Electric etch a green and a great hit here We've got to 99 rookie Jersey auto for Houston Jabari Smith, Jr. Heck yeah, Houston 57 of 99 Castle a rookie Westbrook a Tyree smart and rookie Jalen Brown on the purple to 99 for Boston and a Tunnel vision green Sixers hardened to 25 got sixers out of 50 is neying on the auto.  There'd be a code there you go to All right here and you redeem it basically and once they once the manufacturer gets the redemption They'll send it to you and a 75 is a Johnny Davis rookie auto for the Wizards Yeah, they're obviously not ideal a lot of people just like obviously it's in place of an auto And you have to wait a while like I just waited I Just waited I would say 15 months to get one from tops Sometimes they're immediate sometimes you get it literally like a week after you redeem it And sometimes it can take a long time and there's been issues with them before Where people don't receive them or like the player the player won't sign. You know what I mean? So Jane the Williams thunder rookie God D'Angelo Russell to 50 for the Lakers Yeah, it is basically an IOU got Davis out of 99 for the Lakers Rod Strickland Wow Rod Strickland auto for the Wizards to 75 nothing we hit some Rod Strickland autos tonight and of 75 Keegan Murray Rookie Jersey Autograph for the Kings This case has been great through six boxes Keegan Murray with that purple color match as well. We'll get that one in a mag Cut long you'll not go into a mag unfortunately got orange Tobias Harris for the Sixers out of 50 and A Trey young out of 99 for Atlanta I mean he was definitely live and like Obviously flawless and what was the eminence 249 Rockets on the auto Josh Christopher and a Blake Wesley rookie Jersey auto 13 of 75. I think especially with International players and I needed the states a ton Outside of like when they're playing or like doing things for that for the NBA organization. I Think it's a little tougher a lot of the reactions you'll see will be Non-Americans essentially He signs a decent amount though. There was a timer his redemptions took a while. I think they've gotten a little better with them I think it's Williams, but don't quote me on that and I don't know. There's sometimes for certain players.  I don't know purple BAM out of 99 for the heat and a Neon flood Dirk Novitski for the Maverick short print Zubak 1099 on the Clippers auto 250,000 what's 250,000 Chris give away money got colloquial rookie auto out of 149 for the rock for the Raptors There we go, we'll drive We'll be in the black Hyundai blaring some margaritaville Ryan Rollins rookie that is a norm Powell Orange to 70 to 50 and a J. Nightie on this supernova number to 75 for the pistons nice Ivy My what's up, buddy? It's a 99 Cavs auto Danny Green and heat to 75 Ricky dual Jersey on Nicola Yovitch All right Harrison Barnes number two ninety nine for the King's and an orange Marjan Bochamp bucks the 50 48 Nick's auto to 149 and E. J. Ladel the 75 Ricky dual Jersey auto for the pelicans Down to the last cent We're gonna want to keep that one Okay, I was wondering God that's a big one hold on to that one yeah Got tunnel vision nice Ivy green green Ivy to 25 Pistons and a green Jabari Smith junior orbital great inserts for those rookies Pistons Rockets nice stuff It was one Garuba Rockets auto to 149 and a bulls. I had a sumo auto to 149. All right. It was my jang a Miles Turner on the blue to 30 for the Pacers got a Volcanics short print die-cut James Hardy for the sixers. I'm less Sean's about that one. He's so good at it He enjoys it the most Five of five Nick's auto Bob McAdoo number to five nice McAdoo Trying to go to Matt McDonald's here And redemption is Andrew Nemard Ricky Jersey Inc for the Pacers. That's a pretty solid case actually a few teams It really well. I wish I was somewhere spaced out, but there was some there was a lot of hits That's for sure a lot of a bigger ones to do a recap here. All right Pacers redemption Andrew Nemard Got for me a Jovich Johnny Davis Okiki Noel Josh Christopher Coloco the Sunmu Garuba Zubak Green Strickland Lake Wesley E.J. Liddell James Worthy George's Nyang Thanesis onto the Kumpo Grants Hill the 10 Bob McAdoo to five and Cavs Ricky Jersey Inc. Etch Green redemption is Isaiah Mobley Get a very nice. This one didn't fit in Mag cut long, but it was very nice Keegan Murray to 75 Ricky Jersey auto for the Kings of course Jabari Smith Jr. Out of 99 for the Rockets is gorgeous and Maverick redemption Luca Donchit's Matrix material auto electric etch yellow. I think that yellow is the 10 It may be different with Luca and you may want to check the checklist is that the double check me But that's honest obviously a monster either way congrats to the Mavericks. Thanks again everybody moving on now to mosaic


Hello, this is Laptop Media, and today, we will show you how to open the Acer Predator Helio 16 and what's inside of it. To get inside this machine, you need to undo 10 Torx head screws. Use a T6 screwdriver. After that, pry the bottom panel with a plastic tool and lift it away from the chassis. Please remember, it would be of great help to us if you just hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. That would motivate us to make even more and better videos for you. Here, we find a 90 watt hours battery pack. It lasts for 6 hours of web browsing, or 5 hours and 30 minutes of video playback. To take it out, just unplug the connector from the motherboard. In terms of memory, you get 2 Sodom slots, which work with DDR5 RAM. As for storage, there are 2 M.2 PCI-EX4 slots, which support Gen4 SSDs. For cooling, you get 2 heat pipes, shared between the CPU and the GPU. There is one more for the processor, and 2 more dedicated to the graphics card. Then, for heat sinks and 2 fans take care of heat dissipation. In addition, there are a couple of heat spreaders for the VRMs and the graphics memory. If you'd like to see more disassembly videos of the latest notebooks we would highly appreciate if you hit the like button and subscribe to the channel.


The NPN transistor structure is composed of three regions. It has a heavily-doped region of n-type material called the emitter. The emitter is very rich in free electrons. There is a base that is a narrow region composed of lightly-doped p-type material. It has a few holes that are mobile and capable of carrying electrons. The collector region of n-type material is not as heavily-doped as the emitter, but it also has free electrons. Most of the emitter carriers diffuse through the thin base region because they are attracted by the collector region. Some of the electrons are attracted by the holes in the base region and will move off through the right side, shown here. This is a very small amount compared to the current moving through the base into the collector. In an NPN transistor, the emitter current is the sum of the collector current plus the base current. So if you have 100 milliamps at the emitter, you will have 99 milliamps at the collector and 1 milliamp at the base. An important characteristic of a transistor is something called beta. Beta is calculated by dividing the collector current, IC, by the base current, IB. So in this example, beta would be equal to 99 milliamps, the current at the collector, divided by 1 milliamp, the current at the base, giving a beta of 99.


Five and a half to play eight-point game chance getting under two possessions reverse layup Cam Harris from Montague, right? Even better when Steve Jones says it to possession game 68-62 just


To introduce Hannah Darlin, she's a Professor of Midwifery at the University of Western Sydney. She's also the National Media Spokesperson for the Australian College of Midwives where she deals regularly with media on midwifery issues. Over to you Hannah. Thank you Jane and this is one I've only done on Midwife and I love Patricia because I can't stand technology. And I have a good set of hands and they always seem to work. So thanks everyone for being patient and if you didn't hear what I said before, Happy Midwives Day and I think this is a very exciting day and I'm going to tell you some statistics soon that will show how important this day is for getting the role of the midwife out into the public. So why do I think that we need more political midwives now than ever before? I don't know how much you caught of what I was saying before but so much is happening in the world today that affects midwives. So many good things and some things that are worrying and taking us back. It's really important that we're not apathetic with the good things and that we push them forward and it's really important that we don't give up and we don't fight the injustices that are also sometimes being leveled. So if you look at the definitions of... There are people here saying they can't hear. I hope that's working all right. If you look at the definition of politics, it's manoeuvring for power in a group and that's essentially what politics is. It's about manoeuvring for power in a group and you only have to watch children in a playground to realise we're hard-wired to manoeuvre for power in a group and midwives are no different. But in many ways we have a bigger job ahead. We have a bigger fight. We have a harder road because we are dealing with women's issues and we are predominantly women and we're dealing in a world where, unfortunately, childbirth and women in their facing society are often not given the importance that they should be given. So I want to begin by this concept that politics can be good, it can be bad and it can be downright ugly and politics can be used to take us into the future and that, of course, is the politics we all should subscribe to but politics can also be used to keep the status quo and we have to be very wary of the use of politics to hold things firm in order that there would be certain groups that would continue to have the power that they need and politics can also be used to take us back into the past and we also need to be very, very wary of that. One of the things that I am most concerned about is that midwives often feel a sense of giving up, a sense of helplessness, a sense that they can't do the work, change the world. Well, of course, alone we can't. But I love this quote from Mother Teresa, while we can't change the world alone we can cast the stone across the water to create many ripples. And the thing about casting stone across the water and creating ripples is you never know where those ripples land and what distant shore that has an impact. So I just really want to encourage midwives not to fill this up, not to give up. Remember, if you cast your stone and everybody else does, eventually those ripples will reach some distant shore. The other thing I think that's actually critical is that we often think about painting the world but nobody thinks about painting themselves, as Leo Tolstoy said. And that's very famously done. He said, we need to be the team. And I find it fascinating, and I've been doing a lot of research where we've been interviewing midwives and then actually observing their practice, their ethnographic work. And what I find fascinating is that midwives have what I call an international rhetoric. We all know what midwives should do. We all know the mantra. We all know how to answer the right way but what midwives say in an interview or in a focus group and what you then feel practice are very different things. And there is this sense that often midwives understand the right way to be and the right way to act and the right way to be critical. When they get into the huge machinery of the metallurgy system and all of the power play that goes on there, they revert very quickly to being part of that system. So doing the change takes an awful lot of time. It's like I had a wonderful paper on the importance of midwives being political. And he said that midwives' roles were diminished over the last century, not because of their failure as caregivers, but because of their failures to respond to the political challenges they face. And I think if we look back over the last 300 years of history where midwifery really lost the role and presence in maternity care, it wasn't because midwives weren't doing a good job. It was often because they were not educated, they were not connected, they didn't work together and frankly they'd never had to face this before. So responding to the political challenges that we face is absolutely essential. We are going to take this. The other thing that the clerk said is we need to recognize the importance of political awareness and activity. It's midwifery to survive and prosper. And one of my kind of things that I've learned during politics, particularly over the last 15 to 20 years, is every time you get a win, wait for the backlash and plan for it and be strategic. Often what happens in midwifery is we get a win and we celebrate, which is great and we should, but we do not think about what is going on in the background that could potentially be trying to destabilize that win. But always be prolific and aware and active. So I just briefly want to talk about a study idea that was published in birth. And I put the rest of this up earlier, but I will also put it up again just now so that you can get it if you want to read the full paper because I'm obviously not going to give you all of the dancing in the paper. But I did a study where I looked at what was said about midwives, midwifery and midwives, obstetricians and obstetrics and births over a one-year period on the Internet in web-based news reports. And I analyzed using a quantitative content analysis what was being pulled out there into the public about our profession. So I won't talk about the birth aspect, that was a massive one, but I'm going to talk about the study that was published one year on midwifery from 2006 to 2007. And in that time I ended up with over a thousand alerts that were to deal with midwifery and obstetrics. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the things that came out of that. But what I like so much about this slide, I don't know if you can spot what's going on and please type it in if you can spot it. But this shows the numbers of midwives and obstetrician alerts coming through for the different months. And the dark blue is the midwife and the light blue is the obstetrician. Do you notice something happening in May and what do you think might be actually happening there? So there is a big spike in midwives and you can see that the month of May is having huge impact. Now some people have written Mother's Day. Yes, Mother's Day has some impact, but remember I was looking for midwives and midwives and midwifery as the key. So this is IMD. This is midwives day. This is widely reported around the world and this is the impact that we have from this day. And what I found when I did the analysis is the most positive depictions and the most powerful language in the media reports came out in May. So having midwives day can add it because you have this massive impact. And as you can see, it's fairly similar to midwives and obstetricians in the different months in the 50s. If you look at the countries, I think this is really interesting. I wrote it down into the country for 1,000 media news reports and you can see some interesting trends going on here. Obviously the new apps have the largest. They are the inventors of the Internet after all and the most average users. So look at the contrast between the numbers of reports on midwives and obstetricians related to some of the countries. What else do you see here? You see in the U.S. a very big dominance of obstetrics in the media reports and much less midwives reports. And you see in the U.K. where midwives is very strong that the majority of the reports are around midwives. In Australia where we're getting stronger, we're starting to become neck and neck and we want to repeat this study and start to show how as midwifery changes in its power and presence, those are the numbers of reports. Canada, again you can see midwives now becoming very strong and leading ahead. New Zealand, where midwifery is very strong, absolutely midwives now lead. And I think this is fascinating because this also shows that the media both reflects and creates opinion and when midwifery is strong, midwives actually dominate in the media. The same things that came out of the study when I looked at the midwives, midwifery and midwives themes, where the largest theme that came out was mainstream midwives. This is on models of theft and the rise of midwifery stories. And 28% of the stories reported were that. And the next largest theme was what I call the Cinderella of maternity care. The workforce and industrial issues. And following that came a theme that I called the living and abiding with your hand time. These were funding issues, insurance and legislation. And then weighing down at 8% of the media reports came the theme after the experts. And I wanted to keep that 8% in your mind when we go and look at the obstetricians. And then at 10% we found out that midwives interestingly most of these came out on midwives deaths. And unsafe midwives... Hannah, Hannah, Hannah. Hannah, sorry to interrupt you. I'm still getting a few comments about the audio. So can I just ask you to turn your webcam off now and hopefully then we've done everything we can for the audio. Thank you. I think that's a part of the answer in here. Okay, that again. All right. So unsafe midwives was around 6% of the reports. And then the art of birth was around 2% and then other things that I really couldn't categorize. And so when you look at this and you actually look at the quantity of reports around the different things, you can see that there's a lot of emphasis here on midwives yet rising and articulating what they're doing, but also a huge amount on the fact that midwives have a huge workforce issue and that midwives have huge industrial and regulation and insurance restrictions. And then way down, much lower comes the expert midwife and recognizing midwives. If you look at what that all kind of came out of saying is that midwives are gaining acceptance of their seeking recognition. If we look at obstetricians, do you remember where midwives sat when we had the RC expert? Well, we sat at about 8%. It was the number one category for obstetricians after the expert. And these were midwives. These were reports around obstetricians who were doing lots of research and very much being consulted as the expert. The next was Dr. DeHiroz amongst us and this was an announcement and award. You might remember from midwives that was 7%. And then it was obstetric workforce. Then it was around reports of trending care and new technologies that obstetricians were engaging in and some of them were quite scary. They're disappearing obstetricians following now. So what I want to do now is just tell you how different that is to the midwives. If you think about where the midwives issues were most dominant in the media here, clearly the obstetricians are seen as the experts as heroes amongst us. And then followed on by the fact that there are some workforce woes. But again, very, very dominant was the fact that they were experts boarding news frontiers inventing technologies. So now as contrasts those with the midwifery scenes, but what really came out was obstetricians have both recognition and acceptance, whereas midwives increased and have not got that recognition yet. And then I contrasted those native scenes and you can see clearly the artsy expert obstetrics are seen as vastly more important and good to go to after expert advice. The workforce issues, midwives still outdrift obstetricians, but there was some similarity. But again, huge differences in public recognition. And what I found interesting is that what really showed how recognized doctors are is even if their daughter got married on the weekend and they got reported. And this is telling us that obstetricians are seeing as very important in society. Litigation was fascinating. Litigation was neck and neck. There was one report in both groups. However, what was absolutely fascinating was the way those reports were put forward. With midwives there were three that were serialized. Two of which were not midwives. They were non-midwives. But serialized and stationalized sometimes you felt you were reading a novel. With the doctors they were all individual cases. They were written very objectively and often ended with, well, he was a good doctor and he made a mistake. So even the language used to report these things have huge impact. And then you can see the massive issue going on with the recognition of midwifery with funding, insurance and legislation. And this is a lovely quote that comes from a Canadian study. And in this they talk about, the whole situation reminds me of a long hard labor like my first born. Midwifery has been in second stage for a long, long time. Midwives and consumers have been working really hard to support this birth. But everyone knows pushing is hard work. And that moving from acceptance to recognition is hard work. And for many midwives around the world I think we are in second stage and we now need to bring out all of our skills to get us through the birth, the profession and to move us from acceptance as we increasingly are to recognition. So I call this getting on with the birth or fighting the midwisitation of our profession. And there is an enormous amount of evidence that actually midwifery, one of the most ancient professions in the world has progressively through the last 300 years been demigrified. Demigrified. So even though this is not a word and you can't put it on your scrabble board it's my little kind of capturing of what I think is going on. So how do we fight the demigrification of the profession? And I think the first one is yes, moving into recognition is a key and how do we do that? So as a researcher, of proficient, of very much seen as the expert research is fundamental and as a researcher being able to ask questions that only midwives will ask is the only way we are going to show midwifery because of proficient I'm going to ask questions about how midwifery works and very much in the last decade, in two decades we have seen the rise of fantastic midwifery research getting to the media. We've seen it start to shape policy and it's in that says I can't speak more strongly about the need for midwives to get research active and to support research and to get involved. We need to reframe our profession. There's a lot of bad media and press that goes on. Unfortunately the media is very attached to the negative and we need to be very strategic about getting good stories out there and that's often the mistake we make. We need to show that midwifery is relevant. If you look at what goes on in the media it's either home birth and it's the disaster or it's the elective caesarean women requesting it and it's as though 98% of the population and what actually happens in maternity care is not even understood or reported and this makes women out there often think I wouldn't want a home birth so that's not relevant to me. Midwives are associated with that so midwives are either depicted as being associated with home birth and completely outside the system or very much subservient to the obstetrician in the system. So we have to be very careful to make sure that women understand and the public understands that every woman needs a midwife and some women need an obstetrician as well. Oh, how do we do it? Well, hanging on to what we know can only ever be a short-term strategy and I love this picture of the polar bear putting the iceberg that's quickly melting under them and as time changes and issues affect us we have to learn to adapt to midwives. We have to learn. We are so clever. You look at midwives in the birth room while they recognize a woman in a situation where she's blocked or mentally blocked or that position isn't working we're starting to wonder if we're so inventive we need to bring this out with politics and be flexible. And the question I'd ask today is do we believe in what we do? And I often say this to my students do you believe that you are in one of the most magnificent and fabulous professions on earth? Do you truly honestly in your heart believe it? I can honestly say that I do not think there's a greater profession on earth. There's nothing ever else that I've ever wanted to do. Do you believe that every day new changes change lives? Do you believe that you are important? Because if you believe that you'll go outside and you'll go into the world and you'll go into your care of women telling them. And I think the way many midwives practice and many of them attitude tells me that they actually do not believe that what they do is important. I love this quote from Henry Ford and he says, coming together is the beginning fitting together is progress working together is success. And one of the greatest things I see midwives failing at is that we're not really good at all coming together and working as one. We're not good at trying to put aside some of our patterns that we will not be flexible on. We want it to be only our way and we want our issue to be listened to. Instead of coming together and working on the key things that are going to get us together. My great group, Plea with You would do. Yes, we need to come together and today we're doing that around the world. It's fantastic. We need to then keep together even when it's hard and issues sometimes divide us. But ultimately we will never ever change the profession in midwifery if we do not work together. We're not doing that because without women obviously none of this is ever going to happen. So while we're ready for the challenge because of course we've changed while we get new and exciting opportunities it also can destroy all we hold dear and learning to be flexible in politics learning to negotiate learning at times to compromise of how that is to do is the only way actually we will survive. Another quote from Dick Burke said while health reform influences midwifery there really is ever the focus of the debate and they run the danger of being victims of unintended consequences. And you only have to look at what's happened in Australia to realise that while yes there have been some health reforms that have been great for us there have also been some reforms that have had unintended consequences for us. And one of the consequences of unintended reform is of course around the world there has been an issue with insurance behind birth and decline. That has been a result of more global changes in how insurance is provided but also in what health registration bodies require and it's had the unintended consequence of impact seriously on private midwives and their insurance. So we must always be aware so every time a policy comes out in health every time something is at foot think about how does this impact midwifery? We don't rank highly on health agenda but we need to make sure that we are aware and we make our voice come out there and identify issues that are done also. It is really simple if you're negotiating with governments if you're trying to get a point across if you're trying to make a policy relevant argument think it's simple there's two things governments interested in money and votes and that's it. So everything we do, motherhood statements they're not going to help the government we should be thinking about how does midwifery save the government money and how does midwifery save its votes and the best way to do that with the voting is to make sure that consumers are the ones that are up front and working strongly and we need to make sure that we have data that documents the outcomes of midwifery care and we've got some very smart researchers who are now doing that we need to make sure that data is of interest to policymakers and we need to make sure the findings are communicated in a manner that the public can understand and these are things that I think midwives actually are very good at because we are good at taking very complex concepts in medical care and simplifying them and making them much more understandable to do this when we deal with government as well. So how can you as a midwife become more political? Well you need to have a voice and I cannot say more strongly you need to join your professional organization and get involved. So ICM as the national body that represents midwives every country if you don't have your own national association as part of ICM then please get one happening there is nothing more powerful than when a group of midwives get together get a name, get a position one of the greatest things is that you can do things like common in the media whereas an individual midwife in a hospital can't stand up and criticize what's going on within her organization. She has to have another person who is in a professional organization to be that voice. Get on to team committees. People often complain to me about policies and procedures and I say well get on to the same policies and procedures the only way to make it happen. Learn to network. Learn to communicate with models of midwives. Learn to get others on board. The ability to connect with women's groups with different organizations with obstetricians, with psychologists and social workers if we can bring everyone together around team issues will be much more powerful. Press releases we use a lot and they're very good at strategic strategies with getting out certain messages. One of the things I found most powerful is that how to get into journalists. So if you have an important message to come out on, you have a publication coming out get on to a good journalist give them the story the day before the publication comes out and target them and that way you will often end up with far more effect than waiting for a publication or a press release. Try to get the optimal moment knowing that you don't put out anything in the media on Friday because it will die over the weekend. Monday is a good day. Learning how to get your message out at optimal time. Local lobbying is really essential and this is something I think midwives are learning better skills at but making sure we have lobbyists making sure that we have got the skills and the people there who are placed to put out positions. I haven't got time to talk much about the media and my passions. I've spent the last 15 years being a media spokesperson and I can assure you that the media does care but a little for a short time. The good thing about our profession is mothers and babies lend themselves to media coverage. I often say I'm really glad I'm not a podiatrist and that in trying to sell a ham at home we have got cute babies and gorgeous mothers but the media can also crucify and sanctify midwives so be very aware. The media is not your friend you have to get very strategic at how you use it. Media relations take an enormous amount of persistence and sensitivity and to banquet is very interesting. And knowing that there's a time to talk and a time to shut up I once responded to everything I now learn not to respond to. Sometimes you actually do need to hunker down but you need to let it pass. In the olden days we say that today's news paper is tomorrow's fish wrapper but we of course can't say that anymore so those of us who are younger don't see the old fish and chips wrapped up in the news. But the thing about the media is the case in Spain is short and negative stories will pass and sometimes you need to learn when not to. I haven't left consumers to laugh because I don't think they're important. And none of the changes that have happened in Australia I know in New Zealand and in many other countries would have happened if we had not had powerful women jamming out further under their parliament house with their signs not being a parliamentarian. And so consumers are essential and I find it fascinating that the more oppressed midwife groups is within a nation often as strong as a consumer group but the easier it all is often the less prominent a consumer group. So my advice to you would be if it's good in your country and I know there are countries where it's good but the Netherlands is one but we know there have been a lot of changes there recently but don't ever let go of the importance of consumers because it will never remain good. There will always be forces that will try to make sure that midwifery does not have the power. So consumers are essential and midwives are going to need to work together. And if you're listening to this and saying well I'm not going to go into the media and I'm not really into politics and I don't do research on a clinical midwife well I think if anything can take away today is that the most powerful political act that occurs every day around the world is the way midwives are with you. There is nothing more powerful than the way you are with a woman whether it's in an anti-natal visit whether it's during the birth or whether it's in the postnatal period. We can change the birth world one birth at a time. When you hear women coming out of birth with serious trauma when you hear some of the things that midwives expect of them when you see some of the treatment from midwives it makes you feel terribly bad and ashamed of your profession at times. It also makes you realize that it takes one midwife down living one woman who then goes out and tells all her friends and relatives about that care to show that that is an incredibly strong political act. So if there's none of those other things you feel you can do remember that every time you're with a woman you have the opportunity to perform the most powerful political act in the world change the world one birth at a time. And I want to end there and with I guess the strongest message which is some of this lovely Kenyan proverb that sticks in a bundle are unbreakable. Now if we stick together and if we work together and I include women and midwives in that if we ask to teach it if we learn to take a deep breath when we want to laugh back or we want to defend our particular territory if we learn when to be public about what we agree on and private about what we don't agree on if we learn how to handle the media if we learn how to get the best people forward to do that if we learn how to make sure we support our researchers not criticize them or not make fun of research if we learn how to do that and all work together we are unbreakable we're a large number in the world we have the greatest impact on women's lives every day we have it all but sometimes they don't understand why we all dissipate and not support each other and not go ahead strongly together. So that's really all I had prepared and I want to leave them the opportunity obviously for questions now. Thanks. Thank you so much Hannah I think that's an amazing way to start the conference you know raising the profile of Midwifery getting the message out there getting politically active and sticking together what a fantastic message so I would like to ask if there are any questions from the room perhaps you could raise your hand if you would like to use the microphone or we can respond to typed messages as well so thank you very much for that I'll just put up that paper again for people if they wanted to read the whole thing that's now published in the but all the quotes are in there and that's really very interesting reading. I can't actually see any questions coming there but everyone's making wonderful comments about what you've said. Yeah somebody's made a comment here Lisa Kennedy, thanks sticking together we're not good at this it's our big downfall in Australia I agree I think you know in Australia we powerfully searched ahead a couple of years ago and it was the first time that so much fell into our land and the opportunity for me to really have that recognition and we worked brilliantly with consumers but sadly yes there were factions that you know within that group they didn't agree and I think in some ways we took the power out of our potential I don't think we've learned I know I'm a Polyana I'm a big believer that you know sometimes the tough times in life teach us the greatest lessons and I certainly am wiser in the result of that time but learning sometimes to be humble and learning to you know listen to each other and also talk to each other sometimes the conspiracy theories that arrive because we've heard something and we haven't actually gone and addressed it with time so one of the greatest lessons I look at places like the U.S. and in their Humber Summit that they ran a couple of years ago and what they did is they came into a room which is phenomenal for the U.S. when you think of if there is a nation with more politics going on around maternity care it's that one but they got all of the people all of the stakeholders in a room and they said let not debate whether or not Humber says let not debate the statistics let's talk about how we're going to make it happen safely well it's totally changing gender so rather than fighting rather than that public animosity that sort of came out they came up with a fantastic statement and got that read into their their senate that said well we can live with this and I think as midwives we need to do a lot more of that there's a question there Hanna about whether midwives should be members of the maternity coalition your advice on that well I am I love the maternity coalition I think it's fantastic I guess there is a level in me that's cautious too because I do I do see the value of consumer led and consumer only groups I do think there's a value in that because I think unfortunately sometimes consumer groups are dismissed because they are seen to be ingratiated with midwives and therefore following a political agenda I think that the way that the organisation in the UK in particular the National Salvers trust the NCT has done it is brilliant I think that the way they have strategically got people on all of their committees involved in all of the policy decisions is wonderful but at the same time there needs to be a forum for midwives and women to work together I still like to think of consumer only organisations but I think there's also a place for being able to think I've just given the microphone to Denise she wants to ask a question so Denise you can sleep now I don't think her microphone can be working if anyone else has any questions raise your hands or type them hello is it working now yes it is absolutely I didn't have a question I just wanted to share with people about the maternity manifesto in New Zealand which is a combined effort with maternity service consumer council people and others to try and put some maternity issues on the political agenda here and we've created the maternity manifesto where people can come and sign up as individual and group supporters and we have something like services to support including the college of midwives and then maternity service consumer council and others are taking this to the politicians in fact next week on the 20th we have an appointment with the labour health spokesperson and we've talked to the Greens and we've talked to Maori Party a little harder to get to the National Party at the moment but anyway thank you thank you for sharing that excellent it's wonderful I just want to make a comment on New Zealand you know I really do think that if we have a microcosm of excellence in New Zealand today and I think many of us can take important lessons from that yes definitely agree we just have a couple of minutes left until 10.2 if there are any other questions Alcora I'll give you the microphone coming from Australia you know I thought New Zealand was a microcosm of excellence and it is in that women have access and so forth but if you see the maternity manifesto you'll see that 70 odd percent of the women what would you recommend people do where they locally live as far as becoming more politically involved do you recommend that people write their local I think we've got a question I'll answer the last one because it was we had certain cases in Australia where people ran for Parliament and ran for the Senate and I think it was fantastic particularly when the media got hold of it they got quite a lot of attention around women's issues and midwifery issues and they also got noticed when they started to negotiate with politicians about selling their seats because they didn't get a number to get a seat themselves so I think we have to go at many many levels we have to tack at many levels going into Parliament and negotiating and then there are those that are still fantastic at telling themselves for the gates of Parliament and I actually think there's a place for it all where I think we fall down is when we who are in Parliament get criticised by those who are coming to the gates and when those come to the gates criticise and then we divide so let's see a place for all of that and everybody with their individual skills they have to then be politically active and I think there's absolutely a place for midwife to get into official politics in Government Okay we'll just take one last question from Beth Ann I'll just give you the microphone so you have the microphone now okay we're unable to hear the question there and we've been told by the organisers that we need to finish up now so once again thank you Hannah have you got any parting words there's a comment here that says midwives are terrified of politics I agree I don't understand that midwives are also terrified of feminism and yet we're here to cover it so I think we just encourage each other that it's actually not that harm it's really exciting and the way that I get over my nerves in dealing with some of these things is I think of it as a giant test game that's all it is and if you're getting knocked out at one point well you need to be strategic about staying in and another so just think of it as a giant test game and when all of that fails just remember what it's like to be in the room with a woman sitting there is nothing more powerful nothing more worthwhile fun than that and it'll give you the strength Thank you very much thank you and thank you everyone for listening


It means a lot when we're learning about the past to go to the places where some of these events happened. So I love Rokeby for that because it's the land where people were seeking freedom, where the students can feel how we in Vermont are on a corridor that was part of the path to freedom. And they can feel it when they're in the bedrooms where people slept as they were on this long journey and they can look at the beds and they can think about that and it just makes it so much more real to them when they're in this place. So I love Rokeby for the beautiful place that it is, the the grounds and the house and how that helps the children really imagine and live into this history. To other teachers, I would say we have this incredible little hidden gem in Ferrisburg. It's so close. It's really worth the bus or car trip to get the students there and out into the open air, into the museum, into the house and really help them feel how history is not done, but it's still living and Rokeby really helps the children experience that.