Topic: End of Governments - page 3. (Read 6575 times)

We can't assume that you have enough money.

Yes, really. Somebody will sell, if I offer enough money. It all depends on how much I want to live in that neighborhood.

Perhaps you should try harder.

You can simply buy a house in that neighborhood? Really?

And conflation of analogies does not work. Let's assume that we're talking about a neighborhood in your fabled AnCap world. Now try again.

I can simply buy a house from someone in that neighborhood.

Even when you buy land, governments take a dim view of trying to set up your own rules on it. Even when you buy land from the government, they still think it's theirs.

Cyprus is in proble for decades due to 1 part being Turkish and 2nd part Greece. So nope not a valid example. Goevrmentas dont fall just like that, those things dont happen. Just take a look at Cuba, SSSR was comunist for decades. So try better.

That is not the fault of any government, and therein lies the fault of your argument. It is not any government's fault that no land is left for you to go play rebellious anti-government dreamer.

It's like you complaining that all the homes in a neighborhood are already owned by someone else and you can't move into a home in that neighborhood yourself without playing by the house rules.

You are wrong. Try harder. Find a government you like, and get on with life.

You don't even have to have a computer if you don't want to.  You are forced to choose a government.

When you are born you are automatically locked into a government.   You can move, but that is much harder to do than simply buying a new computer.   And most countries lock you out anyway.

Try again.

I have no idea what you are talking about.  I am talking about an absence of countries.

Yeah, it's called culture.
But you have to be carefull in comparing the evolution of things. The actual driving forces behind the changes can and do shape the path.
We, unlike nature, can think far into the future.

It's not pure evolution tho, it took libraries full of planning and adjusting.
That's nonsense. Ask them if it works like they hoped and you get your answer. But it is not always easy or indeed possible to turn hopes into reality. A lot of coutries are open source tho, so if the people have a better idea to make it all work (and make it work well and make the change without breaking everything) they can step up and other people will hear them. It is just not an easy task to run a country, never mnid doing so on a global stage.
I hope you realize the people suffering under those monarchies you talk of just didnt have enough food and clean water?
In reality most people these days are glad we got this far.
By the time people will be escaping from fiat there will be chaos all over because our complete world economy runs on fiat money.
What you propose is a destruction of modern life. It's not just a litte part of europe or asia that will suffer, it will be almost every nation in the world.

Lol, no. What will evolve for the first years is what you see in Mad Max. People brutally surviving and scaveging for energy.
There will be nothing and all production will stop.
If fiat collapses so does our world. It would be the equivalent of ripping out your veins. See society jerking on the ground? That's what you propose.
You mean that the companies that settle in saudi arabia and russia will be the big winners of the energy wars that are sure to follow?
Sounds like no change at all.
What you propose is just another form of governance and these councils you mention will start behaving like governments over time.
I mean, i can live in another country if i like their 'product' better right now! You don't need private corporations to have that.
The product of these councils will be shaped mostly exactly like that of governments because their task will be the same and the forces that play at those levels give it that shape. How would the USA look now if there was no Bell, IBM or Ford?
But then these councils will not be democratically corrected. So if you live in Bayer City and Bayer will have invented a chemical that makes you just love Bayer then there will be no one to stop them. Happy times, i'm sure.
If you think about it nothing can happen without change, wether its growth, shrinkage or frogs getting run over. You're arguing dynamics.
These councils will also be governments. They will just not be run by you but by people wanting to sell you something.
What is a country if not governed? What is a country if not united by one law?
Now it's getting bizarre.
You mean that governments have been useless for the past 100 years? Did you even look how things were 100 years ago and how the change from that was facilitated through government?
That's a fantasy dude. Governments were incredibly usefull during the past centuries.
And get your history right. WWI was started over a monarchy.
There was no current style government in those days.
The whole idea of governance changed in the past 100 years. Incredible dramatic changes. The lower classes got social and economic freedoms that were never ever possible before in known history and on that scale. That's what the last 100 years of governance did for you.
So i have no idea what the hell you are talking about.
No, and i think you don't realy get how the world works and why.

I agree with your overall observations, but i feel it has become more of a forced symbiosis than being purely parasitic.
The banking system has enabled a lot of things in society and removing the parasite may kill the host.

Creation always comes from destruction. This is the reality of things, throughout the ages, it is true today as it was 2,000 years ago.

I feel at this point I should point this part out;

We, as humans, have evolved, our physical attribute evolution stopped a while back, our intellectual evolution (depending on your research and beliefs, but lets not go there) is continuing to evolve.

Side by side with our intellectual evolution comes Societal Evolution.

There have been various forms of ruling parties through the millenniums, either through Monarchy, Despotism, Anarchy, Tribalism .. the list is actually very extensive (http://phrontistery.info/govern.html). Though obviously only certain types relevant for this discussion.

We as a society, have evolved into a global society as various nations have intermingled, and this global society has evolved with its types of governance (e.g. when many monarchy's were overthrown they were done within a relatively small time period). As such we have slowly evolved to the current form we are in now.

The majority of the populace of the world do not feel it is working, similar to how a majority of nations didn't feel monarchy was working hundreds of years ago. The paramount questions are (as is being discussed very interestingly),

All the ingredients are there,

What remains is for what has been baked for quite some time to be finished cooking and released. (Translation: People over the world are getting more and more fed up, and when the key to release, (escape from fiat) is looming, it may very well present the key for society to evolve alongside the monetary system).

What will evolve? Multiple contractors seeking 'customers' with short or long term plans, what would attract them? (btw, on this note, I'd never sign into a 10 year contract, and anyone who did would be very foolish and advised against strongly. A 10 year contract would be shunned in favour of a 1 year, already making that 10 year contractor fail).

New government style parties that will allow existence of multiple 'private' contractors (aka, Councils) to develop more independently? Allowing contractors (councils) to attract new residents with their "my product is better than theirs, and we'll even pay for you to move here, if you sign a 1 year contract"?

Governments come and go, institutional change is a MUST for human societal evolution for evolution can NOT come without growth, and growth can NOT happen without change.

Will some governments resist? Of course they will. And they will stay stale, with a distressed populace desperate to escape their monoplized society.

Whilst a competitive country with a dozen competing contractors constantly strengthening themselves to provide a better service than their neighbour to attract you. And such a country as an 'overall' would grow, economically, scientifically and sociologically.
-----------------------

100 Years ago we reached the end of the usefulness of the current governmental style, the 1st World War was an extremely clear sign of that, and the blocking of science and scientists, the strangling of technologies and monies to the people. These are the signs that its times to change.

However, we did not know how, or what to ....

Do we now? Is what we dream better? Is change better? or is it better to keep our governments as they are until the end of time? And what powers would be needed to enact such a change? Will a new monetary system escaped from the fiat prison enable those with the will and the 'wealth' to finance and enact these changes with wisdom?

Well, we people get used to luxury. So we always want more. Even better if it's more then my neighbour. So yes, any form of civilization will dissapoint in this way. Social hyrarchies are as old as human history so it's not realy about governments either. We are social animals that have many social hierarchies. Government is just a refined and scaled up form of the topmost part of social hierarchy.
And in the end there is just not enough room for everyone to be at the top of the social hierarchy. We also decided to kindof ritualize the thing so that the top of the hierarchy can be better controled by the base of the piramid (democracy). Unfortunately that process is only partially successfull as there are big scaling problems with representation (of people).

But besides governments we have these multinationals that are also hierarchies but are usually completely non-democratic and operate for the purpose of profit. These hierarchies are fastly becoming larger than governments. They play on a larger field than any single country and they can bend around laws. In fact, they are taking over our lifes by controling ever larger parts of the mechanisms around us. In larger and larger ammounts they decide how resources get divided around the world.
Not people, not governments but multinationals that would sell your baby for profit. Not theirs, of course.

I finally understand the phrase "You can't have your cake and eat it, too."

Thank you so much   A little embarrassing I didn't get it until now, tho.

But by wealth, I'm referring to those with the visage of having the most amounts of political influence via lobbying and bribes.  From a philosophical point of view, their wealth is negligible to my wealth of another form, but when considering the powers that be in any government, those with the most Freedom-FunBux and therefor the most influence appear to be the wealthiest.

Can there never be a satisfactory government?  Is it designed to forever disappoint some and not others?  Seems better to avoid it all together, if that's going to be the case.

Wealth is relative.
The wealthy of 100 years ago (even kings and emperors) didn't have the cool stuff we have now.
The thing is that it never gets satisfactory.
We are programmed to eat the cake and so we can't have it.

Depends on what you want.  If you're wealthy, everything's peachy.  If you're not wealthy, it's not a lot of fun.  But as long as the wealthy can keep the not-wealthy in line by distracting them with political parties and celebrity news, we can keep this system going for the wealthy.

Even if one is to support government of any sort, nobody (except the rich, but I stopped counting them as people a while ago,) actually believes what we have now is satisfactory.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/capitalism-steven-pearlstein-and-morality

I've been reading this article about double standards in US economy: lower classes are subjected to competing with china workforce, while higher classes, say doctors, bankers and lawyers are protected from that same competition. The problem is you see, that higher classes tend to bribe or somehow otherwise influence the politicians.

How to make the government resilient to this? One way is to only let wealthy folks into politics. But the newly chosen politicians (industrials, bankers, doctors) will stil protect their own interests and wealth. Put Warren Buffet for a president and you'll see some bailouts!

Other way around this is, of course to disband the government...

Thanks for this. Good reading.

Hey, all they have to do is bombard the country with Windows ME, right?

Well, these have been tried out in many forms in the past and it turns out humans are pretty bad at self government. People have to operate along certain psychological lines (because of our specificness) and the social dynamics of human groups prevent fairytails like the one in the video from actually occuring in stable form. It is just not how human groups operate on a psychological level.
But what if you signed a 10 year contract with that company to get their service cheaper? As if companies have no means to financially or emotionally bind people to them.. Just look outside and see how (large) companies operate on this relatively peacefull battlefield of an economy. Then imagine we give them the power to police themselfs.
You make the mistake that every human can choose how their life will be. It's just not that simple. Most people don't make a choice of living somewhere purely on rational choices. If it was like this then i bet there would be no 3rd world countries and almost everyone would live in the west. People don't get to chose most of the time so its better not to pretend they will have a real choice i a different situation. There are many (legal) ways for taking someones freedom and most of these are not obvious.
Even in a free market comanies can be too powerfull. You assume that competition will assure that noone will become dominant. But that is just a fantasy. There are many ways for companies to become bigger than others and a lot of those have nothing to do with actual economics. Important things like geographical conglomeration of these companies will have a strong effect. You get neighborhoods controlled by separate firms untill the whole city will be controlled by just one company. This is because the service becomes cheaper for the top dog so they can offer that service cheaper and people will go for it.
And even better, those pesky checkpoints between the neighbourhoods are gone! Hooray! But of course by then you have sold your soul to the biggest devil.
Security services are just another natural monopoly so the majority of people can always be persuaded to take the cheaper (more monopolistic) service.
I claim that it would not be better than what we have now. In fact, i'd wager it will be far far worse.
Security should never be at a competing edge within a society. It will lead to escalations.
The whole idea of an open monopoly is so that everyone knows they should play nice or face the consequences.
It is litteraly the glue that holds our society together.
Competing security forces will give a lot of unrest and insecurity (the consequences of the separate laws of the companies will first have to be evaluated) and noone actually knows how their laws will hold up against other firms laws.
It would be bedlam. People would have no clue about their current and future situation. (what if the negociations don't go well and we get into a war with the other security company?).
Seriously, All he proposes is to take the big dominance fights right back to our streets. It's like microcredit of militance.
You'll get houses with tanks in front because they are secured by company A in a company B neighborhood.
It Would Be A Mess.
You don't seem to realize that competing over security means getting the other guy out when he doesn't want to leave. And if he doesn't want to leave you kill him. That process will not change with these new security structures.
Moreover, they all will have a different idea and you can be sure that many potential dictators will seek the leadership jobs in these companies just to prove how good they are.
And gain, companies just have one incentive. Money.
If they can use 'security' to keep you inside so you can work for the factory that pays underhand money to your local dictator then that is exactly what will happen.
You DO know there is decades of research gone into how to keep people complacent, don't you?
Why do you think north korea is acting like it is? It is one big security firm and the people cannot get out. Try competing with that.
The bizarre thing is that those people actually at some point had a choice about how their local security force acts.
In the situation mister friedman describes the firm with the largest 'security' force will have the better negociation position and their 'laws' will prevail. People will conglomerate around them BECAUSE the have more guns.
It is realy unthinkable that security firms, consisting of human beings with human emotions, will be able to compete in a civilized way. Security is about domination.
The dynamics that are proposed by the video are completely synthetic and need to be kept in check or they will not exist. But who is going to enforce these dynamics? Who will prevent a war between competing factions? Who will prevent a 3rd firm taking advantage of that situation and take over both competing territories so they can offer cheaper service to their sheep?
What if a certain firm has most of its customers in a region that has no resources? Will they go to war with other firms to secure resources? And how is that different from the current situation?
There are just too many things intertwined with this notion of security and however cute the proposal is, it is pretty amazingly naive.
The world, and people in general, just doesn't work like this guy thinks it does.
No ammount of free market will change human drives. His ideas only give you the temporal ilusion of things being ok. But this too will escalate in  dog fight and we will be in the same situation we are now only with governments replaced by private military corporations. Thank you mister friedman. :/