Part II of Interview About my Book "Free to Move" with Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin

It is now up on his Balkinization blog.

Yale Law School Professor Jack Balkin has posted Part II of an interview he did with me on his Balkinization blog, about my new book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.  Part I was posted yesterday, and is available here.

In Part II, we discussed a number of important issues, including how foot voting relates to the internet, the role of families and children in foot voting, and my response to Albert Hirschman's famous argument that exit rights are often harmful because they forestall beneficial uses of "voice" to improve existing institutions. I discuss several of these issues in greater detail in the book.

I would like to once again thank Jack Balkin for this opportunity, and for his insightful questions!

UPDATE: I initially failed to include a link to Part II. I am sorry for that oversight, which has now been corrected.

Comments

[Shamie Ervin iv]

If you grew up on Chicken Hill, or in Shiloh, or in Pisgah View, or Hillcrest, you were might near locked into living there or in another nearby slum for the rest of your life.

Voting with your feet is easy for you to say.

[Brett Bellmore]

During the Great Depression, people literally walked away from dead end lives with their belonging in a bag hung over their back. Next to that, those people have it easy.

[Brett Bellmore]

Hirschman's argument is kind of ghastly, if you consider it: Essentially that we should trap people where we think they can do the most good. About as clear an example of a violation of Kant's prohibition on treating people solely as means as you could ask for.

To elaborate on my comment on the first part:

Foot voting requires that there be a diversity of jurisdictions. If there aren't, then it's like regular voting with only one candidate on the ballot, futile.

But, if you have robust freedom of entry, not just exit, this conflicts with maintaining diverse jurisdictions, because jurisdictions can be freely entered by people who will deprive them of what made them diverse.

The chess club can't continue to exist as the chess club, if poker players are free to join it and convert it into a second poker club. Your freedom of entry takes away the ability of people to maintain distinctively different groups! It destroys the very thing that makes foot voting valuable.

Foot voting requires diverse jurisdictions, but the continued existence of diverse jurisdictions requires that there NOT be robust freedom of entry, that jurisdictions be permitted to maintain their distinctiveness by barring entry to those who'd erase it.

[Brett Bellmore]

Seriously, nobody wants to discuss this?

[Steve Brooks]

I will check out your book. I might write my own review for it. I hope you are interested to see it.