> My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits
There is no benefit from a political authority wielding entity which has not been provided by an entity that does not wield political authority. Therefore the political authority is not necessary for those benefits.
> Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it.
Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead.
> That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.
Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done.
> Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things.
This would assume that those energy forms restricted to specific geographic locations are not so restricted. This is not true.
> I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.
Most e-waste won't mine a block successfully in its entire life. If it could contribute to the peaceful destruction of the state, hard to imagine a better use it could've been put to, given the statistics.
> I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.
You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate.
> There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.
It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.
> One of the things that I don't understand about libertarianism. You abolish the government. Then what? x) Do they think nobody is going to step up and grab that power vaccum?
I don't think there is a 'vacuum' because people have a need for a boot on their face, that first the King put his boot on people's faces (which is now how it worked, it was a huge mixed bag), and then the govt must do it or else a strongman might do it again.
There is no 'power vacuum', just a need for certain societal order. How that societal order is provided is where all these things happen. Monarchies are 'a' way to provide that societal order (for national defense and other things for that matter). Similarly Democracies are another one of that. Imagine if you went to 900 BC and tried to install a democracy to the people there? Would it really work out? Would people happily rejoice? Or they'd lose their democracy to a King soon enough?
There is an argument that can be made that political systems people embrace, depends upon the weapon systems available to them [1]. That, printing press gave us the age of enlightenment (and Protestantism, which is a reversion of Christianity to the original text, as opposed to the Papal church), but the invention of (widespread) guns gave us the Democracy. Because earlier only a lifetime of trained soldier could fight but now the training of a firearm (to become lethal) can be acquired in a very short amount of time.
As an anarchocapitalist, in 2000s we envisioned private companies providing that societal order which allows us to get away with governments, and this was heavily criticized that this would just cause private companies to just become govts. But in 2010s, I can say that blockchain (and yes I understand the unpopularity of the idea) have the capability to create that societal order. In 2000s we always envisioned [2] that the free market money would look like Amazon Bucks or Walmart Bucks, but now we realize that with cryptocurrencies we don't need a single company but a decentralized network to do the same job.
1. Weapons Systems and Political Stability, by Carrol Quigley
> Citation needed. This institutionalized protection system is actually exactly how we got government in the first place.
I'm not even sure I understand your hypothesis here. In the absence of the organisational units that engage in the mass killing of their citizenry in order to sculpt their polities to the ideology which holds sway within their murderous structure, those people will still die because "reasons". Please expand on "reasons" here.
> But also, in the last 50 years
Nobody ever did anything wrong if you can arbitrarily timeslice it in order to make your case. And even there, if you look at the things done under colour of political authority in the past 50 years, you'd still be hard pressed to find a bigger villain on the planet. It just looks good in comparison to the preceding 50 years.
> Again you only speak in terms of costs and refuse to speak to or quantify benefits.
Because once again, no benefit provided under the banner of political authority has ever failed to be provided absent the banner of political authority. When the apparatus in question reduces to an entity that has a monopoly on force in order to compel people to engage in transactions that they otherwise would not of their own free will, it is hardly surprising that all of the good things that apparatus has ever provided might in fact be easily done by the free will of the participants in question.
> I reject the former premise and the latter isn't a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system.
You can reject it all you like, but you're wrong based on the mean economic output per capita vs their debt calculated at birth plus their lifetime cost. And that is indeed a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system, the former basically guarantees collapse, it is only a matter of time, therefore moving to a system not so afflicted of your own free will is access to an easy yield in the meantime.
> Respectfully disagree. The overwhelming majority of participants are just speculators.
The participants in question is not the reason I say it's clearly what a whole lot of people want, it's because of the amount of times the exact conversation we're having about destroying the state being the exact reason any given participant in the cryptosphere is there, including myself. There is indisputably a great degree of desire to do away with political authority.
> It is not the case that a government wields absolute power. I don't believe it's the case that there is no way to keep a government in check.
Tell that to the people of every tyrannical regime in the history of mankind. Perhaps they were just doing it wrong?
> Also, I don't think "someone else [having] the right to rule [us]" is a correct characterization of functioning democratic governance (even in a representative democracy).
How would you characterize it then?
> You have shown neither that the above is sound reasoning, nor that other frameworks are not.
What reasoning and "other frameworks" might you be referring to?
> And if 100 people decide I don't have a right to a spleen in a context without government, how does that go any better?
How is that relevant to what I said?
> But my point was deeper. One of the consequences of prohibition (of alcohol or drugs) was to remove government as a means of settling disputes for a group of people handling relatively large sums of money.
Why not say something like that then? :p Disregarding whether you've described a real problem, you seem to be suggesting that a government's decision caused a big problem, and therefore, government is.. good?
> Yes, precisely. And much like any technology it can be misused, poorly designed, poorly configured; and this can lead to frustration or harm.
This is just way out there.. :p But tell me, how exactly is government a "technology", how should it be "used", and why didn't we do so? :P
> Once again, that's not true. In a functioning democracy, governments are responsible to the people lest the groups with power lose it.
> In any system, the possibility of revolution serves as a partial check.
Again, I'd point to every single tyrannical regime ever. That "partial check" doesn't seem to be working too well.
Look, ultimately it's about how much abuse the general populace is willing to take.. before it's too late to do anything (see: North-Korea, USSR, etc).
Once there's a small group of "people" wielding power over everyone else, the people are guaranteed to end up suffering sooner or later. The ruling class keeps expanding and looting everyone else harder and harder, until you're.. say, in the US in 2014.
The US provides a prime example of what follows from a minimal, "Constitutional" government.
> Governments are also responsible to other governments, in some extreme situations.
Sooo.. War, or something? Well, maybe ordinary Canadians will rescue ordinary Americans from their government? :p "We must give America the blessing of Democracy! Now go forth and kill or be killed!" --> "Sir! Yes! Sir!"
> I'm not sure where you derive this ranking in which government is highest, or why only lower powers can be kept in check.
"Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Mao.
I'm sure you know how it works.
> Not always; when it's not, things suck even more; see, for instance, many parts of Somalia.
Again, it's all about the attitude of the general populace. If people accept that there's a ruling class bossing them around - even if it's a small one - it will grow and gain more and more power. The only limit to a government's growth is the attitude of its subjects.
The government fosters dependence on itself, through various social programs, health care, pensions and so on. Through the education system, the government conditions people into thinking it's absolutely necessary and beneficial, and through controlling the money supply, the government loosens the limits on how much money it can spend.
And here we are. Look at what the US has become. Note how the whole Western world's economies are going down the toilet too, and note how mass surveillance is spreading everywhere.
> Revolution is horrible, yes.
Yeah, and the thing is, without governments, there would be no revolutions! It's like, countless deaths could be avoided!
> I don't think "group of sociopaths in power hurting everyone" is a legitimate description of all government.
Would you settle for "looting everyone" then? That much is accurate at least.
> I happen to disagree that it is the only logically consistent position
When I say it's a logically consistent position, what I mean to imply by that is for people who think that government is an abomination, it is logically consistent for them to hope for the dismantling thereof. You, who most decidedly do not think that government is an abomination, as a lawyer, are logically consistent in thinking that it should not be dismantled.
> Much like a corporation is the legal stand-in for the will of the collective shareholders, a government is the societal stand-in for the will of the people at large.
Except that it most clearly is not.
> A society that tries to maintain no government, or very limited government, is at an unstable point. In the best case it will collapse from internal conflict but be left alone from there (e.g. Somalia, tribal areas of Afghanistan/Pakistan). In the normal case the society will simply be eventually overrun by those who choose to organize (e.g. USA vs. the Native Americans, Hitler vs. the appeasers), but a government will spring up again one way or another.
That's a normalcy bias, there have been many points throughout history with no centralised productivity extracting parasitic force initiating agency. In fact, the variant we have now with extremely high direct taxation on the incomes of almost all productive activity within a society is the historical anathema. Not only that, but this fails to take into account the methods of control the state actually uses to exercise control on its population, and that currency control was recently removed from their hands.
Agorism becomes a very real threat under these circumstances
As a nash equilibrium, an involuntary centralised productivity extracting parasitic force initiating agency is not at all stable. It stands to reason that it will only be able to maintain control by either force or fraud. Right now they're going with fraud, from the amount of discontent I see with the political state of the world I don't know how much longer it will last until they devolve to force.
> reads post with disclaimer that I’m not trying to make any overly virtuous statements, then makes reply about that anyway
Sorry i'm not a native speaker and i don't understand this sentence (promise i'm not GPT-3 ;)).
> What do you mean by abolishing power? Like some sort of anarchy?
Yes, exactly. As long as power is concentrated in some hands (authority), there's many incentives for injustice, and the attack surface to take over the entire system is much bigger. And when you have police, prisons and military to impose the rule of the few by force, you end up in the worst timeline we're currently in where we have an abundance of resources and yet screaming poverty, and our ruling elites keep on fucking up the planet even more instead of redistributing resources so that in the end our entire species (and millions of others) will be wiped out.
If you want to see how alternative political systems could look in practice, i strongly recommend to check out the zapatistas (and their caracoles) in Chiapas or to some extent democratic confederalism in Rojava (which is less centered on horizontal power and more centered better representation of multi-cultural societies [0]). While much of the world is seeing setbacks on political freedoms and economic justice, these two regions are going in the opposite direction.
Also, on principle i'm not opposed to some technology helping collective processes. But blockchain as we know it (PoW, PoS) is deeply flawed, and whatever digital system we'll come up with will never be as accessible and auditable as local public decision-making. I understand that public votes in a local-first world could exacerbate some inequalities locally (eg. with an oppressed ethnic/religious/sexual minority in a given commune), but i'm convinced the overall gains would far outweigh those downsides including for oppressed minorities (and can argue on that point if someone is not convinced).
The problem with Nation States is comparable to blockchain. Consensus building is hard but can be done with a limited set of peers (a commune) in which there are existing trust relationships. Trying to build a wide-scale consensus among untrusted peers is doomed to failure and in the best scenario results in "dictatorship of the majority" which is not a good outcome for minorities, and more realistically ends up with an oligarchy controlling much of the network. In that sense, i would argue DHTs and Bittorrent-like protocols are more anarchist than blockchain: there is a notion of global consensus (content-addressed storage enforced by cryptographic hashes) but neither the DHT nor trackers (who federate between autonomous nodes/communes) end up dictating what your local computing/politics should be like.
Does that make sense to you?
[0] Rojava is under constant military threat by Daech and turkish military, and the influential PKK while undergoing anti-authoritarian self-critique has decades of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist practice to deconstruct. Both point don't help to build true local democracy (anarchy), although i would argue the region as a whole is moving in a better direction than most Nation States around the planet are.
> I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective
The big incentive problem here is that democracies reduce the power held by private individuals. So (primarily wealthy, powerful) private individuals have an incentive to market the idea that government is inefficient to reduce the impact of decisions made by democratic choice.
This same conflict occurs throughout history. For example, the Magna Carta was a major concession of the power of the English King to lower nobility. There are always going to be people who dream of running their own fiefdom and see democracy as at best a nuisance and at worst an active impediment.
> A civilized government or corporation needs in some way cooperative with the people, that how you can attain taxes, profit , stability and trust.
In theory, sure, in practice, strongly disagree, but this would be too long a philosophical and political discussion to be had as a forum comment.
A civilized government doesn't need to be cooperative and nice with people, with their monopoly on force, overwhelming power over the individual, not to say it doesn't really care about you, in a country of tens or hundreds of millions of other people. You literally are just a statistic. Its only problem is if a huge majority of people rebel against it, but there is a very efficient way to avoid that: control of mass media and... psyops. Why would you rebel against the system when you're brainwashed it is efficient, friendly, and you have the power to change it? How would you organise against it, when all our lives are based on the Internet and technology that is easy to monitor?
> I think we may have a different view on what the purpose of a government is.
Perhaps. I also suspect that we have a different view on what government actually is.
> Would you be ok with the military forcefully entering a tech company, pointing guns at the employees, and forcing them to do something?
I think representing all actions of government as being the equivalent of this is reductionist to the point of absurdity.
From my point of view, there will always be (and has to be) rules about how we interact with each other. The question is who will develop and implement those rules. Call it a necessary evil if you wish.
I prefer those rules be developed and implemented by us, collectively, because then we have at least some amount of influence over the process. If it's not done that way, it will be done by powerful entities such as corporations (or, in a maximally degenerate situation, warlords or mobs), where we have little to no influence over the process.
> It occurred to me that governments are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I've been thinking this for quite a few years now.
>the Twitter mob is deciding who to banish. It's a form of democracy, I guess - but one without any checks or balances or regulations.
Or swarms of bots shaping public opinion run by just a few people? As long as Govt's allow encryption, over the telecoms networks in their countries, the sooner govts become irrelevant.
> Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary.
I think the fact that 7 billion people live overwhelmingly under a multi-hundred-year improving standard of living [1], leveraging low-friction global trade, commerce and communication in among the most peaceful period in human history [2] is a pretty clear indication that government does in fact work.
Is it perfect? No, nobody will say that. But of course the solution to problems in any overwhelmingly complex system with a long track record is not re-invention but continued optimization. [3] Takes a long time to turn a big boat, and anyone promising you otherwise is selling you a crock.
> Economists have long accepted that individuals and society have vary different short term costs and bennifits for the same activity.
That makes no sense whatsoever. Individuals are human beings, societies consist of individuals.
A society is just a concept, it does not act in any capacity. All action by humans is carried out by individuals, regardless of what organization they represent. No activity whatsoever is carried out by societies, because they can't. They're just concepts, after all.
> Abstractly it's the basis for having governments in the first place.
Considering the above, I guess it's now clear that we shouldn't have governments at all?
I'm not trying to be snide or sarcastic. That is actually my position, but for other reasons. For starters, governments are based on coercion, and coercion is immoral. Hence, governments are immoral, and should not exist.
> When there are conflicts between people we need to somehow resolve them, and a systematized way of doing that is called government.
Certain governments seem to making, not resolving conflicts between people. And they purposefully make these said conflicts in order to generate profit for tiny segments of the population. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, [...Iran?].
I get your initial point, but the past century has shown that democracy needs to be direct and NOT delegated. Algorithms and distributed blockchains could very well facilitate the dawn of a more decentralized and democratic world.
>Government is all about restricting what you can do (don't steal, don't kill, etc) under the banner of providing for other members of society (provision of safety, protection under the law, etc).
No that is not what government is all about.
The just purpose of government is to coordinate usage of communal property, for the general betterment. So levying a split rate property tax, to pay for national defense, would be a just exercise of government power, because the average person is better off with a portion of land rents being spent for this purpose, than the land title owners collecting this portion.
Where there is justification for the government using force against an individual, it is in subduing and punishing those who who violate people's rights. Banning theft is okay. Banning marijuana usage is not. This is basic non-aggression principle stuff.
>where there isn't, and you don't happen to have enough wealth to survive.
Then I either ask for help or resign myself to my fate. Robbing people cannot be justified, and legalizing such a solution is not sustainable.
>once they start to be replaced by computers / robots the changeover is going to be astonishingly fast, so you're going to have an awful lot of them hit the job market very quickly, worldwide, and most importantly d) they're not particularly well paid so they are unlikely to have a whole lot of wealth to invest.
Then they better start saving now! Their financial situation cannot be made someone else's legal responsibility, or else you create a political system where political activism can net you resources coerced from others, and one where the consequence of your irresponsibility can be passed on to others against the other's will. It totally perverts capital allocation and incentives, and is rank authoritarianism.
>Lots of announcements of huge layoffs across multiple industry sectors but almost no announcements of large job creations
There are always huge layoffs in an economy with hundreds of millions of people.
Statistics on large scale trends contradict the OP. We have seen unprecedented automation over the last 40 years yet today in the US the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been since 1963. Similarly all around the world over the last 30 to 40 years we have seen rapid automation and hundreds of millions of jobs being replaced by machines, yet there has been massive growth in the total number of jobs, increases in wages, and improvements in standard of living, over the same time span.
Anything less than statistics on global trends in employment is totally invalid as evidence for technological unemployment, and unsusprisingly, the author provides none.
> Well if nothing else, your points about corruption are arguments against government in general :-) Decentralize power back to the people themselves. If I have no power over another, then my corruption affects only me.
Tragedy of the Commons is what occurs then as well as an inability to defend oneself against those who use force.
Go move to some country with essentially a nonexistent government and see how this works out for you if you genuinely believe I am wrong.
> However, corruption at the local level affects a limited number of people, and since local politics are easy to influence, they can be changed. Local politicians get into criminal trouble all the time, so they are not immune to the law.
So your argument is to make it cheaper, easier, and dismantle the checks and balances by defunding the enforcement mechanism at the federal level?
Seriously? Do you not understand that logically plays out until the local politicians are unable to be held accountable to a higher authority?
> The other side believes government cannot be improved because government itself is per se bad.
I agree - it's clear that the social democrats and other leftists would clearly like to remove government entirely and achieve a stateless society.
Or did you mean the right-wing libertarian types who want to have no government so they can own nukes?
These analogies are just silly and not really the point - the goals don't really matter to the point. The point is that when there is less perceived legitimacy of government, people are more willing to look for other options.
> End of the day, the sovereign state possesses ultimate power. For awhile some people felt that Bitcoin, et al made them immune to the authority of the state.
Well, one could argue that we, the people, want the sovereign state where there is some degree of social contract going on, to have that ultimate power.
Putting that power into a system that was designed by humans and almost by design can't be democratic and at best is meritocratic, is a very likely path to a Kafkaesque world.
> Centralization is so useful that people will create it wherever it does not already exist.
Any evidence to back up that claim?
> Given that centralization is so useful, and people want it so much, it should not be resisted. We would be better off if the effort being put into decentralization was instead put into better centralized services that respect user privacy.
OK. So, given that centralization is so useful, and people want it so much, let's put a dictator in power. We would be better off if the effort being put into elections and parliaments was instead put into better dictatorship that respects human rights.
> The argument is not that the government doesn't provide utility, it's about recognising the possibility that there may be other, better ways to deliver the same or better.
You are free to make that argument, but asserting the conclusion and asking leading questions isn't an argument.
FWIW, we've already, extensively tried the idea of not having a State with a monopoly on force and instead managing the world through private property rights and contractual relationships without the State imposing limits on such relationships to address power imbalances, etc., it's called feudalism.
There is no benefit from a political authority wielding entity which has not been provided by an entity that does not wield political authority. Therefore the political authority is not necessary for those benefits.
> Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it.
Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead.
> That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.
Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done.
> Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things.
This would assume that those energy forms restricted to specific geographic locations are not so restricted. This is not true.
> I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.
Most e-waste won't mine a block successfully in its entire life. If it could contribute to the peaceful destruction of the state, hard to imagine a better use it could've been put to, given the statistics.
> I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.
You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate.
> There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.
It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.
reply