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KulakRevolt  7mo ago (anarchonomicon.com)   1951 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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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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