-
@ Agoristo⚡️
2024-11-11 20:53:28
I recently listened to a debate between Dave Smith and Andrew Wilson, during which they had a disagreement about government power dynamics: https://www.youtube.com/live/YqIaiQ-aK_s
I'm just sharing my thoughts here, not providing a study or any proofs. Take it all with a grain of salt, tell me what you think, and I'm happy to develop my own thinking further with conversation.
It stood out to me that they couldn't agree about whether the problem with government is a concentration of power, or a decentralization of power and responsibility. It was very interesting because I thought that they both had good arguments.
I've pondered it off and on and this is what I've come to is a synthesis of the two perspectives:
1. Centralized governments become so big and powerful because they promise to take responsibility for actions and outcomes that would otherwise fall into the purview of the individual. Individuals agree to trade their liberty for the promise that their needs will be provided for.
2. Centralized government agencies cannot possibly manage this task at full scale, but in their attempts to do so have set up large bureaucracies which have the inevitable effect that responsibility to carry out these tasks becomes diffused across the organization.
These agencies are rarely able to demonstrably prove that they improve the lives of the people they are supposed to serve. The best that these agencies can hope to provide is some statistic that shows that they serve the greater good because they can never hope to take full responsibility for the well being of even one individual. Then, of course, there is the incentive problem by which the agency needs the problem it is supposed to solve to persist or even get worse to keep salaries funded.
I contend that the only workable solution is to return the responsibility for improving the individual's life to the individual him or herself. Sound money is an important step toward this, as it doesn't allow for bloated budgets for projects that never get solved. But it does give the individual hope as they are able to see the value of their savings increase over time. This incentivizes the individual to economize better now in anticipation of better outcomes in the future.
We shouldn't wait for Sound Money to be the standard, even is Bitcoin, the soundest money in existence, is ascendant. I believe that efforts should be made to encourage more long-term thinking and planning, so that more people will be ready to switch to that standard on their own initiative. This helps to establish the foundation of a strong culture of personal responsibility and meritocracy, which in turn will lead to greater self-governance and decreased reliance on external mechanisms of governance such as the modern nation state. I don't believe we'll get 100% there purely from switching to a Bitcoin Standard, but we can at least begin to converge on that vision.