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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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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.

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