The Quiet Coup (2009)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Many of the same ideas is said in the article.
However, I propose a different, radical solution. Get rid of the banking regulatory framework, stop bailing out corporations, and get rid of legal tender law. Do nothing. Let the big guys fall. Let the economy readjust themselves to the fact of reality.
At this point in our economic development history, the interventions were so vast and deep that we don't know which way is up and which way is down. Democratic governments have produced thousands of new laws that complicated business dealing. Then lobbyists can sneak some laws in that prop up industries. When an intervention does goes wrong, another intervention is put in place to solve it. If there is an urgent social problem, the solution is to make new laws to solve it.
Wouldn't life be better with a few simple business laws that everyone can understand and follow?
Yet, those government people and their special groups managed to mess it up by padding taxation code, punishment for firing union workers, and punishment for alleged racial discrimination.
The more complicated a system of rules is, the more potential for corruptions, opportunities for conflict of interests, and regulators getting away not doing their job.(Hence the saying, "when a law is made, the first thing that will be brought is the law.")
I don't think the solution is more democracy. Voters are not really rational, nor will they have much interest in defending themselves from the myriad of special interest groups that permeates and compete in the democratic institution. Political and economic education is hard when you have million of citizens worrying about their own lives and competition within their section. Now they have to worry about what the local government, the state government, and the federal government is doing with these mega-corporations. Then they got to worry about the local regulators with their code, and finally have to face an IRS audit every once in a while. At that point, it become rational to become ignorant because of the cost of educating oneself is higher than the potential benefit would provide.
Is there a solution? I don't know. But I am content to let the system fall apart since political will is not going to acknowledge the reality about the many deficiency in economic policies(Which cause mass distortion of incentives in market actors), and the system of perverse incentive that exists within the government itself.
However, I am pretty excited about emerging technologies and the effort of libertarians to look for non-political means to solutions, especially the "anti-capitalistic free marketeers" varieties.(No, it does not involve warfare, or election of officials, and you don't have to worry about rioting)
I would say it involves a lot of makerbots, creativity, entrepreneurship. It is building a better economic foundation that isn't found on lot of debts, lies, and kickback. From there we can build a new framework of rules that's very strong on the basic. A framework that doesn't suffer from the mass confusions of laws added every years. Eventually, an alternative society would emerge out of a network of entrepreneurs, their connection with the community, and their customers. That alternative society would co-exists side by side and seamlessly with the other society at large.
But it requires a lot of stratagems and making a right of exits unknown or seemly nonthreatening to officials. It's a difficult problem to solve.
On the other hand, we could try to found a new country on the ocean sea, which is known as seasteading. It is probably a pipe dream, but the seasteading movement got some very realistic and pragmatic people. These individuals look for economic efficiency and business models in their seastead. They aren't try to build huge utopias complete with casino, strip club, and all the extravagances.
Again, seasteading and new countries are seen as a threat. Countries get nervous when there is a new neighbor on the scene. They will try to destroy the threat. It will require a brilliant amount of political stratagems and common sense on the behalf of the seasteaders to fend off nervous nation-states.
If the seasteading movement succeeded, no longer will we be restricted to an industry of 200 governments, many of them are not any good, and the best is mediocre at most. There would be a thousand governments, and that mean real competition. Terrestrial government now have to improve services and efficiency or face mass migration from their citizens to thousand of little nations on the high sea. We might not even need that many, as evidenced with the appearance of Firefox, opening up and intensifying the competition in the browser market.
Anyway, enough talking for me. The solutions if anything, is probably going to be hard to implement. It's probably deceptively simple. It will probably make the population mad. It might be something completely unexpected, even to me. But there is one thing that I am pretty sure, democracies doesn't work.
(Sorry for the wall of texts)
There are many conceivable solutions to our present problem. But any of these would have to be put in place or at least tolerated by America's ruling elites.
The problem is that the ruling elites today have thrown their interests in with the financial elites. They don't get that the game is over. Until that happens, we'll have the same old game supported by more federal intervention. You notice for example, that the crisis intervention were exactly the same under Bush and Obama.
The scary thing is that the US has more resources than any other country in history so this country's rulers can and probably will play the losing game of financial manipulation till things are really, really screwed up for the world (as now wasn't bad enough - now is bad but not bad enough). This last crisis was the dot-com crash writ large. The NEXT crisis will be this crisis writ large indeed...
I don't know. But I am content to let the system fall apart since political will is not going to acknowledge the reality about the many deficiency in economic policies(Which cause mass distortion of incentives in market actors), and the system of perverse incentive that exists within the government itself.
What exactly is meant by letting the system fall apart? The economy is the system that keeps you fed. You as in yourself. As in your family. As in your friends. As in the people who live near you who will also be driven to desperation. As the solutions you pondered had intended, we have to minimize the human cost of fixing our problems -- as we are those humans.
Authorities don't like to be challenged. They don't like their rules to be questioned. They don't like people to make their own "right of exit". To them, not following the "rules of society" is a threat.
If you understood that, than you see that I don't see the government as a vital machinery of some sort. It exists by force. It's the modus operandi of all governments.
All the solutions that I proposed is exactly opposite of that. My first solution is counter-economic on a purely voluntary scale. Seasteading moving to a location where you won't be harassed by authorities. It's non-violent, and non-coercive.
That's an ideology in itself.
But I do not expect governments to sit idle. They will certainly will not approve of a voluntary charter city created by libertarians. They did it in the past and will do it again.
Think of Snow Crash. In there, they have various enclaves and franchise area such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong". But the US government itself is rotting away. Inside, jobs are mere make-works. They have surrendered much of their terrority to various entities and corporations. Then they just get ignored by everybody.
I want them to make ineffective government systems irrelevant, or at least co-existing, and competing. I want a world where rules are being optimized, instead of become a source of corruption.
Then, we can finally escape the dangerous race of technology versus government decay. Either technologies elevate us to singularity status, or the government causing systemic collapse and we're back where we started, or worse, nuclear annihilation.
Well, I'd kind of agree with that last part .... it's race.
But keep in mind that what we have to do is navigate the very dangerous in-between-times that are coming ... keep in mind that novels can make the process of decay and collapse seem OK. The reality can much more horrific. Ever research the things that happened at the end of WWII. Whole nations (Poland, say) uproot and moved, with a fair portion of the people DEAD as a result. The end of the Roman empire wasn't pretty and people much less dependent on really large scale structures like food distribution networks then (food ... survival, as gp said).
I mean, unlike in a novel, the US government has not become less controlling as it has become more corrupt. Just the opposite...
Life would be better with a few simple laws that everyone could understand and follow.
On the one hand, some laws are complex because they deal with a complex reality. You want free speech, but you don't want libel, but you do want robust debate over potentially libelous issues, and you don't want copyright infringement, but you do want fair use . . .
On the other hand, some laws are complex because the people writing them don't pay any penalty for their complexity. Nobody expects to understand laws, so nobody complains when they can't.
And on the third hand, complexity isn't always that hard to boil down for people. I often encounter code with about 60 lines of legalese in the header. Blah blah proprietary software blah blah authorized personnel blah blah etc. One of my favorite encounters was with a piece of code that replaced that header with something reading, roughly, "Hey you! This code belongs to XXX Company. If you need to use it, you need their permission or you need to destroy it. . . blah blah blah . . . . Make sure anybody you show it to knows this stuff."
I thought, awesome. Why don't my EULAs have a paragraph like that?
Rule of law was a good idea. It's still a good idea. But next revolution, we need to implement a scheme incentivizing the creation of clear, simple, just laws. Might not always be possible to get all three, but I've got to believe we can get closer.
I agree there are problems inherent to democracy and it would be nice to try to solve them.
How bad can it be with the types of technologies available today?