anarchonomicon.com
An Epic length essay of mine in which I lay out my theory of history and why briefly summarized: The Age of the nation state is almost certainly coming to an end under the corroding forces of decentralizing military technology and institutional decay.
The future will not resemble post French Revolution centralized governments asserting their control over each other, but rather will slowly come to resemble the Greek City states (misnomer) or the Holy roman empire's vast network of thousands of polities and war making entities.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think you’re leaving out that everyone wants services from a ‘big state’- stable currency, long range security, access to markets on favorable terms, etc. And America has, quite helpfully, lots of medium sized governments with major economies attached which can fill the void- bigger state level governments.
The median outcome for the federal government’s decline into irrelevance is federal assets defecting to Texas, California, etc which then become regional hegemons and solidify into major countries on their own right by cannibalizing nearby smaller communities. The ‘civil war’ then looks like conflicts defining the edge of each SOI. In the long run this is probably likely enough that it would be foolish for bigger state governments not to have specific plans to capitalize on it. But it being particularly likely in the next decade or so as opposed to the US being in for a rough couple decades? Maybe. I think we probably have enough assabiyah to pull together through another major crisis or two, and if rural areas have increasing control by non-state actors the system can deal with it in practice. I wouldn’t count out balkanization when the social security bill comes due either, but I still think you’re looking at regionally hegemonic empires which happen to be smaller than the current expanse of the USA.
Well, part of the contention is that runaway government spending will destabilise the dollar.
However the details play out, the bottom line is the population is aging: the old people aren’t going to vote away their entitlements, and the young people/immigrants are going to become increasingly hostile to the idea that their labor is being siphoned into making sure boomers have a comfortable retirement. Yeah, yeah, maybe the robots will solve all this. But in the event that they don’t, this is indeed a recipe for instability.
This dynamic is only exacerbated in a world where young people increasingly feel entitled to comfy white-collar work, rather than anything contributing to real industrial productive capacity.
Whether things will collapse in exactly the way Kulak predicts, god knows. But something, sometime, is going to give. You can’t just indefinitely accumulate parasites on the backs of fewer and fewer productive people.
Notably, I did point out that 'big state' services can be provided by entities smaller than the current USFG. California issuing its own stable-enough-to-be-an-improvement-over-decentralized-solutions currency is not a thing California is likely to do, but it is a thing that California, and probably a dozen other states, are eminently capable of doing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link