I am somewhat loathe to post this, as it is a cop-out, but it may be useful to some.
Relevant resources to review and incorporate into any formal treatment of my theories. I don't have time to do that now; too busy programming.
I envision local, townhall direct hands on government (where you know every body within your Dunbar number limit) will be the surviving and thriving form of limited government that I envision will be enabled and sustained by the paradigm I promoted in my prior 3 posts.
I can dream can't I?]
It is a beautiful dream.
Unfortunately, I also have a hard time envisioning this scenario lasting very long due to the same "too many chiefs and not enough Indians" problem (local governmental bodies being the "chiefs.") Local governments won't always agree with their neighboring areas. State governments were formed with their own sets of laws as a solution to this problem. The previous alternative was to invade your neighbor and subjugate them to the will of your local government while abolishing theirs... There is also the issue of international arrangements and treaties.
The fledgling
Knowledge Age makes this more plausibly sustainable, because we no longer need geographical economies-of-scale, because
the economy becomes dominated in economic value by virtual work and production[1]. For example on dilution of the geographical aspect, we will no longer need eminent domain to construct intrastate and interstate highways through communities, because we will have flying cars and besides we don't need to physically travel to work. Even commerce can be virtually delivered with 3D printer designs downloaded and printed locally instead of physical shipping.
The salient generative essence point is as always to eliminate the valuable collectivized resource which is the source of the contention and corruption.
It is simply impossible to fund those horrific outcomes if there isn't a collectivization of the taxation and regulatory resource. Repeat that sentence over and over again, until the profound causal generative essence point sinks in...
If you put a big pot of honey in front of the free market, the free market will use game theory to try to steal it. ... Only eliminating that collective resource can solve the problem. This is also Armstrong's mistake when he calls for collectivized reform as a solution.
The
Knowledge Age devalues everything relative to the value of virtual Knowledge work (production)[1]. Thus local communities will become more of competing venues where constituents can vote also with their feet, moving to communities whose politics and polices suit their desires.
It is easy for government to crush or at least severely suppress an anonymous currency in the physical economy. Attaching long prison times for accepting payment in said currency and then sending out lots of undercover agents who try to buy things would do the trick.
It is in the digital realm, however, where the seller does not have to physically deliver goods but can anonymously deliver data/analysis/programming that anonymity becomes very difficult for governments to deal with. The thesis is that overtime this digital/knowledge economy will grow to dominate the overall economy while the physical economy progressively shrinks into relative insignificance.
I've heard of this potential scenario before and I'm happy to say that the government can't do that so easily in the US or in other armed societies... In the US, financial expression is protected under the First and Fifth Amendments. Spending money is a form of speech, and money is a form of property when possessed. Money is any medium for the exchange of value... If the government made a law criminalizing a lawful form of expression (not causing undue harm; yelling "fire" in a theater, slander, etc...") it would simply cross the line into totalitarianism and make anonymity that much more desirable. The government is just a group of loosely associated individuals following orders from somebody higher up the chain; it's not likely the government would be able to enforce the unconstitutional law without weakening itself...
Agreed (but not necessarily on government employees being disloyal since they won't bite the hand that feeds them). The government is much wiser to co-opt a popular trend than to attempt to ban it as they did with Napster (which only lead to more decentralized P2P sharing apps) or
state governments are trying to ban now sharing websites.
So the key is to make a crypto-currency popular and incapable of being co-opted. Bitcoin and Monero are not capable of this.
[1]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6082580#msg6082580I am happy to inform that Eric says I am not banned as long as I can remain respectful and has allowed my input to be considered. I posted another summary of my idea.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479608Thanks. A refutation would be more helpful.
The point is about the relative value of the autonomous knowledge (capital) economy versus the vertically integrated (monetary) capital economy. As the autonomy of creation increases in both granularity and speed-to-market (Linus principle of "publish often"), the number of nodes of sharing increases and the value of that knowledge sharing network increases by the nodes squared. We have chart confirmation of that law with the history of the Bitcoin price.
Specific example would be sharing a 3D printing design, and others autonomously iterating on that design. The design is open source. Music compositions, medical art, etc.
Thus the vertically integrated economy falls in relative value. How can you reason that we will pay the same or significantly for something produced by the economy that will be worth relatively much less than it had been?
With mass production, the value-added of the knowledge input was amortized over the capital cost of the factory and millions of produced copies. Thus the knowledge networking value was insignificant. Whereas, when knowledge can directly create with near real-time publishing, the knowledge networking value increases by the square and outstrips any startup costs. Moreover, incremental edits amortize the startup costs over many knowledge networking connections, and the value is the square of the connections.
The key is that open source knowledge is always changing and the knowledge workers benefit from autonomously iterating each other's designs, because the value of the network increases by the square of the participants who share. Metcalfe's (or Reed's) Law is at the heart of why sharing creates more value for all participants. That is not saying all nodes connect with all other nodes, rather the value scales proportional to the square.