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Notes -
And safetyist state. As humanity ages and becomes more neurotic and/or risk averse, I expect governments to have a greater role, as agencies for (a) extracting resources from working-age people and distributing them towards larger, older cohorts, and (b) protecting people against ever smaller risks and discomforts.
Since neurotic risk-assessment is often incoherent and irrational, role (b) could end up looking very weird. A random example: a state interior minister in Germany said, in reaction to the 2015-2016 mass rapes of German women by immigrants:
This man, who had power regarding the security of a large German state, literally said that unwholesome speech is as awful as sexual assault (maybe worse). And from a policing perspective, cracking down on people saying unwholesome things Twitter and Discord is a lot easier than solving rape, theft, or murder cases. The future could look very weird, because neuroticism is very weird, and rising neuroticism is the best explanation I have of safetyism. The safetyist state, like the welfare state, is rising out of democratic tendencies, but will change democracy into something unrecognisable to those who lived before it, and due to public choice reasons it may be as hard (for the forseeable future, impossible) to remove as the welfare state.
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