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antipope.org
antipope.org
Generally trying to pare down the size of the state, given it's own natural processes cause it to increase, would seem necessary simply to achieve homeostasis. In the last century the long term tread has been strongly on the side of increase but it can't always be or eventually the tax burden would reach unity.
The political side of this is very transparently Scottish left wing. "... among the UK's conservatives we see an almost masochistic addiction to cuts in public spending" the phrase "masochistic addiction" is a current Labour talking point. The actual cuts amount to 2.2% of GDP by 2014-15 added to the the 4.1% Labour had already set.
Humans seem to manage complexity by creating categorizations/abstractions until it's reduced to a workable amount. This can lead to a kind of fractal experience where zooming into any area presents the same seeming level of complexity as the whole did.
If you haven't made that particular zoom it's tempting to assume it's as simple as the assumption makes it look. "It's just" or "it should be easy to" are phrases that computer programmers are fairly familiar with and aren't overly fond of.
The political side would seem to be that if there's a lot of embedded complexity in pretty much anything then trying to change something, replace it with something cleaner or clearer, is going to be far harder than it would seem. Without trying to make the same mistake Stross did, President Obama and the disappointing gap between rhetoric and reality would seem to be a current example.
Are you perhaps misinterpreting his post as a question of how far the state can be pared down (given your second paragraph)? Because that's not the question; the issue of government size is nearly tangential and just parenthetically touched on. The question is the minimum size a society can be at our scale of sophistication. One could then speculate about how "governmenty" that society would be but that's really a separate question.
This is really an engineering question, not a political one. Since we're asking about the minimum, we're pretty much assuming that the component people have the optimal organization and the exact details of that organization don't matter to the answer much.
I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us — namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.
Let's take a look at the superficial structures around us..."
He presents a characterization, says these ideas are delusional because, then leads on to his observations. It's not unreasonable to think he was making argument.
The straw man he creates is equating anyone who wants to reduce state expenditure as wanting or believing in an over-simplified world.
That said, the characterization was insulting to anyone on the right, and about half seem to have taken it as their main takeaway and about half seem to have passed it straight by. So that might be why.
He successfully defeats his straw man. But aside from the conservative groups it's not a correct characterization. Generally trying to pare down human resource extraction, given it's own natural processes cause it to increase, would seem necessary to achieve homeostasis. In the last century the long term tread has been strongly on the side of increase but it can't always be or eventually we'll run out of stuff to extract.
The public sector was completely out of control - with some fantastically good services but also a lot of people doing very little and getting paid far too much. This has been embarrassingly bad in Scotland - where Charlie and I both live.
A wild card that I'm not sure has been tested is how much you could get away with recreating solely from published materials. Given some smart people with a university-library-quality set of books (and let's say a good index), how many of them and how long do you need to go from stone-age to iPhone?
I don't actually understand why the same people (in general) will assert ecologies are extremely complex and we shouldn't meddle without being very careful to understand the effects, and at the same time think that the market is manageable from the top down without unintended consequences on the same order as the intended ones.
That's the part that reminds me most of the ecologists: a belief that we're fortunate enough to live in a universe perfectly constructed such that these complex dynamical systems (economies, ecologies), if only we'd stop mucking with them, would live on in magical harmony, aligning with normative notions like "merit" and "balance" and whatnot. I tend to view them both, instead, as difficult to analyze, hugely complex systems filled with all sorts of weird attractors and unstable states, which won't necessarily result in particularly great outcomes whether left alone or not.
In short, I agree that most of the people who claim to know what will happen if you intervene in a market are naive (i.e. unintended consequences are likely), but I also think most of the people who claim to know what will happen in a free market (e.g. that it will reward merit) are also naive. And most libertarians I've met fall into the latter category.
Social Security is vastly simpler than the various schemes proposed to privatize it, for example.
If you're going to say "look I just want it that way because that's my ideological bias", that's fine. But don't pretend there's some objective measure involved here.
However, social security also has enrollment forced under thread of punishment. Social security has a clear negative impact on free enterprise. Social security embroils the government in private matters for which government's involvement simply limits liberty with no other benefit to social welfare. Social security is less effective than other solutions such as defined contribution retirement packages, IRA, individual savings when coupled with strong community support and a basic welfare program.
It is also the tools we need (I don't even dare think about the complex physics that has to be mastered to make the microprocessors that enable me to encode bits that can be sent halfway around the world so you can see this comment), the tool required to built those tools, the food we eat (easy to make perhaps, but it needs to be brought and sold, transported, stored and finally sold to us consumers), etc.
The interconnections in this world are truly mind wrecking.