The sovereign individual: how to survive and thrive during the collapse of the welfare state8/25/2023 ![]() A crucial part of this change will become about because of the effect of information technology in liberating the holders of wealth from expropriation though inflation. This new form of money will reset the odds, reducing the capacity of the world's nation-states to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual. As cybercommerce begins, it will lead inevitably to cybermoney. Now the advent of the Infomration Age implies another revolution in the character of money. With democratic decision-making, the nation state could exercise power much more completely over millions of persons, who could not easily cooperate to act collectively in their own behalf, than it could in dealings with a much smaller number who could more easily overcome the organisational difficulties of defending their concentrated interests. Democracy as a decision-rule proved to be an effective antidote to the ability of the wealthy to act in concert to restrict the nation-state's ability to tax or otherwise protect their assets from invasion.Democracy facilitated domination of government by its "employees", thereby assuring that it would be difficult to curtail expenditures, including military expenditures.Democracy proved sufficiently compatible with the operation of free markets to be conducive to the generation of increasing amounts of wealth.Incomes rose sufficiently above subsistence that it became possible for the state to collect large amounts of total resources without having to negotiate with powerful magnates who were capable of resisting.There were rising returns to violence that made the magnitude of force more important than efficiency as a governing principle.Summary of reasons the nation-state succeeded over the last two centuries (p132) The growing importance of technology in shaping the logic of violence has led to an acceleration of history, leaving each successive transition with less adaptive time than ever before.Corruption, moral decline, and inefficiency appear to be signal features of the final stages of a system.With the possible exception of the early stages of farming, past transitions have always involved periods of social chaos and heightened violence due to disorientation and breakdown of the old system.Transitions to new ways of organising livelihoods or new types of government are initially confined to those areas where the megapolitical catalysts are at work.They are not undertaken by popular demand, but in response to changes in the external conditions that alter the logic of violence in the local setting. ![]()
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