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KulakRevolt  7mo ago (anarchonomicon.com)   1949 thread views

After the State: The Coming of Neo-Medievalism and the Great Decentralization

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.

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Around 2030 all Americans are going to have to turn on eachother and carve that missing million out of their fellow citizen… This might be millennials becoming even greater debt slaves, this might be boomers kicked out of nursing homes to beg in the streets, this might be ethnic conflict to either make the white middle-class pay 2x the income tax forever, or a violent assault on the black inner-city to destroy the millstone of welfare America once and for all and free up millions in real estate in now usafe cities… This might take the form of a communist revolution, the confiscation of all real estate, and the forcing of Americans into work camps, this might take the form of the mass slaughter of Federal employees and IRS agents so that no federal insurance schemes can ever be paid out and no pensions because the government employees are dead… This might take the form of mass Euthanasia of cancer patients, drug addicts, and the non-working… Everyone who shows up at hospital and isn’t expected to be net profitable, axe em.

Why are any of these extreme outcomes more likely than say, governments inflating away their obligations like so many have done before?

I encourage you to look up what happened in Weimar. Women being paid out on their husband's life insurance in a some of money that wouldnt buy dinner for 1 night. Mother's prostituting their daughters to afford food, the elderly starving in the street.

"Inflating it away" would be an effective default on all welfare, social security, insurance, and effective theft of all bank account balances.

It would be just as horrifying and violent an imposition it'd just be the elite and government imposing 100% of the cost on the middle class and poor. Most likely it'd result in civil war

what happened in Weimar.

Their obligations were denominated in gold marks and hard goods, and were impossible to inflate away with paper marks?

Screwing over our creditors and beneficiaries, and the middle class and the poor in the process (and the rich, too: capital "gains" taxes on purely-nominal gains still takes a bite out of people who can keep less of their savings cash-denominated, and the second-order effects are going to suck for everybody) ... obviously all that wouldn't be a good thing, but it would at least be an option.

Hyperinflation isn't a obvious and necessary conclusion of inflating away obligations. It's what happens when the government effectively goes utterly bankrupt, and can't pay any of their obligations in real terms. If your governmental shortfall is only 30-50% you can print enough to have massive sustained inflation without turning into Weimar or Argentina. It's still bad for everyone, and reduces 90% of citizen's living standards drastically, but plenty of nations have survived running double digit inflation for a decade.

Notably, hyperinflation isn’t a death knell either- Argentina is still ticking. It’s a crappier place to live than it once was, sure, but no dramatic collapse.

As Simon Kuznets' saying goes, there are four types of countries in the world: developed, undeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.

The latter two have defied the expectations of economists the world over for decades, recently in particular, and as we are now learning with the consequences of ZIRP in countries that do not utterly control the supply of their real estate, policies that justify themselves by the fact that these exceptionally weird economies have survived doing them are at best audacious and at worst ruinous.

The USA is neither Japan, nor Argentina, and has its own specificities (some of which the OP points at) that would have potentially catastrophic consequences for the entire world if it hyperinflated the dollar. The world hegemon that guarantees all shipping lanes, whose debt is the reserve currency, festooned with the most powerful army ever assembled, not to mention a competitive nuclear arsenal, suddenly unable to pay real wages to its legions? The fall of the USSR would be a cakewalk in comparison.

And, as I’ve said below, results into balkanization into smaller, poorer, but definitely in continuity regionally hegemonic empires.

The minimum inflation to keep the government from default is likely far less than Weimar experienced.

Your particular alternative doesn't work for the stated case. Inflating away obligations works if your obligations are for a specific number of a currency that you control. But here what is being claimed is an inequality between the amount of stuff produced and the amount of stuff required; no amount of macroeconomic black magic will turn 1 kg of meat into 2 kg of meat or 1 kg of steel into 2 kg of steel. If you devalue the dollar by half and don't double the nominal amount of welfare, this is effectively the same thing as cutting welfare by half. If you devalue the dollar by half and do double the nominal amount of welfare, then it still uses the same chunk of your budget as it used to and this doesn't help you get out of the hole. Same thing goes for military spending, or for civil service salaries. Interest payments on existing debt are the only thing that can be gotten rid of via inflation, because everything that cashes out in some form of real good or service scales with inflation.

The experience is Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell and in Argentina since forever shows that the state can just say - fuck you we give you 10 cents on the dollar to their citizens and they will take it and the state won't disintegrate.

"Cut spending" is definitely a real solution to deficit, and one that Kulak straight-up noted. Whether doing so would be peaceful or not I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable to comment on.

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