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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Notes -
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.
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