I have no witnesses I know of to what I’m about to relate, so you can believe me or not.

I once had a conversation at a science-fiction convention with Isaac Asimov, whom I knew advocated a one-world government. Isaac knew I was a libertarian science-fiction writer.

I asked Dr. Asimov, “If you can’t get a one-world government, would you settle for a world anarchy?”

Dr. Asimov replied, “Yes.”

UK Brexit Ballot

I write this right after the British people in national referendum voted to extract the UK from its decades-long immersion in the European Union. I suspect when Britain joined the EU they saw the advantages to border-irrelevant trade, travel, and freedom of migration with European countries. Instead what they got was an overriding bureaucracy and a mass influx of Muslims to a country that still has an established Christian Church and a Christian monarchy.

I’m a libertarian. I’m entirely for doing away with national borders that restrict the free movement of people and trade goods. But I understand entirely why the British people thought the European Union tyrannical. My own country came to that same conclusion in 1776 regarding a British monarch and parliament.

Today when governments make trade agreements it’s called “free trade.” It isn’t free trade. It’s an expansion of mercantilism, by which one national power historically used troops and warships to install economic monopolies on other nations.

The European Union is a trade cartel and an aggressive multinational bureaucracy with a fiat currency not backed by any real commodity.

In theory I favor knocking down barriers to free migration and free trade. But I also favor the principle of eliminating, weakening, and decentralizing statist power to whatever extent possible.

In a politicized world that is not free — and in which there are vast affiliations of nationalists, ethnic groups, and religious identities — there are often nothing but conundrums for people like me who just want more freedom for as many people as possible.

Which is why I see the British exit from the European Union as a good thing. I see it as decentralization of power.

Whether the British people use that decentralization of power to submit to a more-localized oppression, or to institute a new era of real free trade and cultural values based on their historic expansion of enlightenment-based human rights, is something I will just have to wait and see.

I favor world freedom, which I believe comes about by recognizing, as did a universalist document written in 1776:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
–The Declaration of Independence

My British friends, you have just voted to be American. Facing toward the future, I hope you adopt the above principles better than we Americans have.