The Canadian Confederation was based on liberal ideas. In nature every person has the right to life, liberty, and property and these rights precede government. Classical liberals believed that governments, like Canada, were constituted by consenting individuals to protect these rights, and to minimize conflict in enforcing them. Confederation gave the Canadian state a monopoly on protecting individual rights and using force to do so. Liberals knew this authority was dangerous, so the ability of the Canadian state had to be limited in many ways, but we’ll focus on three: 1) limit the size and scope of government, 2) operate under known, general rules, and 3) be held accountable through democratic representation.The authority to compel obedience and levy taxes leads toward unrestricted growth. So, the Canadian state needed to be limited to things like external defense and the administration of justice; the types of public goods that liberals incorrectly believed markets struggle to supply. Anything beyond this was outside of Ottawa’s mandate. Canada was not created to redistribute wealth or regulate industry. The justification for confederation was to make private property and voluntary co-operation more secure. The Canadian state had to stay minimal because additional power increased the capacity for abuse and the greatest threat to ordered liberty is an unrestrained state.But even a minimal state requires further discipline. Individuals need to plan and they need their property to be secure. So, liberals demanded that government operate by known, general rules. Documents like the BNA act, the statute of Westminster, and the federal re-constitution in 1982 express this demand. A constitution is meant to fix the boundaries of authority and bind politicians to those boundaries which are derived from natural rights and pre-exist government. Legislation was meant to be general, equally applicable, and subordinate to a higher law. Courts were expected to enforce these limits. A liberal constitution is not a grant of power. It is a recognition of pre-existing individual rights and a set of constraints meant to keep the Canadian state within its mandate.Since the authority of the state originated in this “consent of the governed”, that consent needed to be renewable and reciprocal. So, it made sense that representation through democracy be used to select the delegates of the Canadian state. Regular elections and legislative confidence were intended to keep the rulers dependent on the ruled. If they aggressed against persons or property, or expanded beyond their mandate of protection, the people could withdraw their support. Liberals did not treat democracy as an end in itself or as a channel of unlimited authority. They believed it was an imperfect instrument for enforcing the Lockean bargain: that the state remains legitimate so long as it protects people’s rights and retains their consent.Now…none of this worked and that’s basically why we’re all here today. Alberta Separatists have many valid reasons to leave Canada but at its core its because a limited state is a utopian fantasy and that’s why confederation failed. The state possesses two features which no other firm in Canada has: a monopoly on ultimate decision making and the power to impose compulsory payment – tax. It faces no competitive pressure to keep its prices low or its quality high. It defines the scope of its services and the meaning of the rights it claims to protect. It is funded by compulsory taxes, so it grows without consent. There is no residual owner, so there is no long-term interest in restraint. All of this makes Canadian politics subject to the tragedy of the commons. Private property and voluntary cooperation become less secure. In this way every minimal state – even an independent Alberta – contains the seed of a totalitarian one.A written constitution does not restrain the monopoly power because the state itself interprets and enforces the document. Judges, legislators, and the executive are all agents of the same apparatus whose power the constitution is supposed to limit. Over time jurisdiction and residual powers expand to serve the central authority. Emergency powers turn a constitution into flexible policy. Individual rights become negotiable. We’ve seen it here. The problem is not poor drafting; the fact is that a state cannot be bound by rules it alone has the authority to interpret.Democracy does not check this expansion, it accelerates it. Politicians operate on short electoral timelines. The incentive is to transfer resources from less populous places – like Alberta – to larger voting blocs – like Ontario and Quebec – and also to impose uniform regulations whose costs fall disproportionately on places – like Alberta -, with benefits that fall on places like Ontario and Quebec. In this way, majority rule is in direct conflict with private property because unproductive people can simply outvote productive people and long-term capital can be sacrificed for immediate political gains. The liberal hope that democratic representation would re-enforce consent becomes inverted because democracy legitimatizes expropriation and centralization and elections replace longer time horizons with short-term opportunism. The result is the increased growth of the state, higher taxation, and more invasive regulation; the opposite of a limited government.We’ve all seen this phenomenon play out in the relationship that Alberta has with Canada. So, where do we go from here? The monopoly is the problem. Attempts to restrain that monopoly have failed in Canada for 160 years. They’ve failed in other places for much longer and they will fail in an independent Alberta. The solution is to eliminate the monopoly. Without the power to tax or to claim exclusive jurisdiction, agencies must attract customers by reputation, price, and reliability. This is what Alberta separation gives us, a choice in our political relationships. Further, we can all appreciate the arguments for privatizing things like education and healthcare, but that same logic extends to every state function including security, adjudication, and the money supply. Competing, private agencies must operate under the same rules of property and consent that govern every other economic relationship. The failed Canadian confederation was a liberal attempt to civilize a state monopoly, which can’t be done.Forget the constitution. No public constitution stands above private agreements. Legitimate rules come from contracts between consenting individuals and associations. When no agency for arbitration holds a compulsory monopoly, every adjudicator remains subject to competitive and reputational discipline. Even a highly restrictive constitution imposes general rules from above where rules would otherwise come from voluntary agreements, below, bottom-up, the true meaning of grassroots. Contract replaces constitution, arbitration replaces state courts, exit, competition, and secession replace elections.So, how do we get there? All public assets should be privatized by distributing shares to the people who funded them and rightfully own them – the taxpayers. Parallel institutions in security, adjudication, money, and mutual aid need to be established to reduce dependency on the central state. Perhaps most importantly, decisions about taxation and regulation should only take place at the very local level and only property owners and net tax contributors should be allowed to participate in those decisions being made – the ones who own the territory and the ones who fund the programs. Non-cooperation weakens the central state. Secession increases exit opportunities and competitive pressure. The long-term goal is the complete replacement of state monopoly. Democracy is not reformed; it is progressively displaced by property-based decision making. The goal is to create liberated territory rather than capture the existing political apparatus.Alberta’s grievances – the extraction of wealth, regulatory constraints, and the erosion of provincial jurisdiction – are not mistakes specific to Canada. They are the predictable behavior of democracy and state monopoly. Classical liberal philosophy hoped that by limiting the size of government; by having constitutional rules; and through democratic representation they could restrain the monster. The Alberta experience is proof that these hopes were misplaced. There is no perfecting a Canadian or American style of federalism in Alberta because no state can be permanently restrained. Secession is the right step. But it’s only a piece of the puzzle. Pursue decentralization. Build private alternatives in every sphere of the public domain. The liberal experiment in Canada has run its course and that’s why Alberta wants to separate. But an independent Alberta requires independent Albertans who follow the logic of private property and consent to their consistent end: a fully privatized civil society.This article was originally published on The Darcy Gerow Podcast.The post The Anarcho-Capitalist Case for Alberta appeared first on LewRockwell.