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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

I think you've missed the point of the article.

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...

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Carroll Quigley,who Bill Clinton called "his mentor", spent much of his great tome "Tragedy and Hope", http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Hope-History-World-Time/dp/094..., writing the history of the intertwined relationship of the ruling and financial elites. Skip the second-hand histrionics you may read about the man and the book, and go right to the source.

Jesus, do I have to quote from my own post?

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.

It was too long. For instance, I missed that quote which I would have replied to:

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.

It simply means that I am not going to play any political game with the system. I am not going to try any intervention into their system. The rules are too rotten. It's futile.

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.

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...

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