How Decentralizing Institutions Will Unite the Left and Right

Via The Daily Bell

“Big government is the problem!”

“No, big business is the problem!”

What if their coexistence on such a large scale is the real problem? They each rely on the other for power. A corporation is a government creation, with legal definitions which protect it from market forces. And government laws and regulations are largely designed by corporate special interests.

It is a vicious cycle which arguably fits the definition of fascism. The government doesn’t own the means of production, but it regulates industry to the point that it might as well. A corporation can work through the government to make any law or regulation it wants which will give them an unfair advantage or kill a competitor. The government even directly hands corporations money in the form of bailouts, subsidies, and grants!

At this point, it is impossible to disentangle big business and big government. So when we talk decentralizing institutions, it is not just the government which needs to be split up.

Of course, many on the left seem to think the government is the institution needed to reign in big business. This is an absurd contradiction; government is what made big business the cronyistic monster it is today.

Likewise, we cannot expect the market to reign in government. Current market conditions prove the easiest way to turn a “profit” is by cozying up to the government, not by pitting your business against it.

But the left and right should agree that having a choice is better than being forced according to the whims of the majority. Or has the left learned nothing from the election of Donald Trump?

There is a dangerous meme on the left that government can solve all problems if the right people are in power. They claim the people control the government by voting, and that over the long run, the majority will do the right thing–as long as the left has control over public education, the media, and free speech.

But the right also believes a dangerous meme that business will always be properly regulated by market forces. But just like the voters, the consumers will not always steer industry in the proper direction. The main difference is that you can withdraw your support from business… in theory.

The marriage between government and industry makes voting at the ballot box or with your dollar a dubious solution. But the smaller and more decentralized institutions get–whether business or government structures–the easier they are to control.

Local business and local government will always be more responsive to voters and customers. The key is being able to withdraw support in favor of an actual alternative choice.

Unity Through Decentralization

The internet has centralized society more than ever before. Yet this unity did not occur by way of conquering armies and imperial empires. The internet provided a platform for natural order to emerge out of chaos. It is a place for voluntary interactions.

The internet–and technologies based on it such as the blockchain–provides the unity needed for modern communication, coordination, and economic transactions. The ease of forming voluntary groups allows decentralization of power to be a real possibility.

Kirkpatrick Sale is one leftist arguing for decentralization of government and industry. He recently released a book called Human Scale Revisited. This is an updated and slimmed down version of his 1980 book Human Scale.

The heart of Human Scale, then and now, is Sale’s judgment that “to save our planet and its civilizations…we must work toward a decentralization of institutions, the devolution of power, and the dismantling of all large scale systems that have created or perpetuated the current crisis. In their place, smaller more controllable, more efficient, more sensitive, people-sized units, rooted in local environments and guided by local citizens. That is the human-scale alternative.”

The more decentralized government gets, the more decentralized business will become. People have more control over smaller governments. People are less likely to support bailouts and subsidies for “special” companies when they can’t imagine that someone 14 states away is paying for it.

Already we have some degree of control over how large companies can get. I grow a solid percentage of the food I eat. I make my own soap, deodorant, and toothpaste. I gladly shop at thrift stores and flea markets. Local beer, and family owned restaurants are the highlights of my nights out.

The point of failure is that the government can still steal our money and hand it to failing car companies, crooked investment banks, and manipulative oil companies. They can still bar entry into the restaurant and beer industry. They can threaten me if I buy, sell, or trade goods such as raw milk with my neighbors.

Decentralize the seat of government, and the people can choose to not associate with governments which do such things.

If 50 countries stand where the United States once stood, we would have actual options and true competition. It is easy to move states to live under a better government–I already did it, from Massachusetts to Florida. But the benefits are still marginal with the overlords in DC.

Precedent

For 800 years, “surviving ups and downs and feasts and famines, [Lucca] was one of the most prosperous places on the entire Italian peninsula, not to mention the entire European continent.” That came to an end with Napoleonic imperialism, but its experience produced “Lucca’s Law”: “Territories will be richer when small and self-sufficient than when large and dependent.”

Perhaps in the age of communication, where anyone can be a journalist with their phone and good timing, we can hold war lords and pillagers accountable for their actions. Could early exposure of their crimes stop the next Napoleon, Hitler, or Mao? Small territories could remain free if the ever more connected people of Earth have lost their appetite for bloodshed.

Or maybe I am naive, and this period of relative, yet unprecedented, peace on Earth is only the calm before the storm. Tell me what you think in the comments.

The Useful And The Useless

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

The battle lines are forming.

You’re standing on the prow of an ocean liner cutting through the icy waters of the North Atlantic. A huge iceberg looms dead ahead. You’ve seen it for some time, but now it’s too close, and the liner too big and fast, to avoid the collision. You quietly make your way to the lifeboats, knowing they’re the only chance for saving yourself and your loved ones. Below decks, an orchestra plays a waltz and oblivious revelers dance.

Most people don’t foresee the world’s inevitable collision with the iceberg of unsustainable fantasy. When it happens, they’ll respond predictably, with panic and cowardice. Those who’ve seen it coming and moved to the lifeboats will experience their own roiling emotions, attenuated by recognition of the logic behind the disaster. While the forewarned have dreaded impact, many will also welcome it, in the way one welcomes an unpleasant medical procedure: let’s get it over with. The motive is not malice, but conviction born of experience that actions have consequences and there’s no escaping them. After seemingly inexplicable and interminable delay, consequences shall arrive, amplified by the tawdry stratagems that promoted delay.

It will come as a surprise to many, but governments cannot suspend reality. Their arsenal, when things break down, comes down to their arsenal: the capacity to coerce. Violence or its threat enables governments to exact compliance. Proponents of government power invariably see themselves exercising it. Once the ship hits the iceberg, it will be obvious that governments’ guns are not wands, freeing citizens from the necessity of producing as much or more than they consume. They cannot compel innovators to innovate or producers to produce. While coercive power comes from one end of a gun, none of the powers that produce progress (and the gun) magically materialize at the other end.

It is said that America is a society divided. True enough, but the important question is: along what lines? Crisis and social breakdown will provide clarification: it’s governments and their beneficiaries versus producers. In other words, those who don’t do useful things versus those who do.

Huge shifts in social mood and direction are presaged. President Trump’s election presages the coming division. Among the analyses of the election, few noted an obvious dividing line. Trump’s supporters by and large do useful things, or are angry because they’re prevented from doing useful things. They build, engineer, manufacture, plant, grow, operate, maintain, repair, transport, and sell the things we find useful or essential. When we ram the iceberg, their skills, brains, and adaptability will be sorely needed.

Politicians and bureaucrats and the millions dependent on them for their fake jobs, income, food, shelter, transportation, and medical care will find little demand for their skills, such as they are. The useful may well conclude that keeping them alive is more trouble than it’s worth. There will be those who are too young, old, or infirm to produce, but whom the useful will support out of friendship or kinship. However, it would be surprising if they felt anything but contempt for the faceless hordes demanding that someone, anyone, take care of them.

Take away the undeserved from the undeserving and you get a tantrum. Steal the earned from those who earned it and you get righteous rage. One’s a firecracker, the other a volcano. The game has been to impress upon the useful a moral obligation to support the useless, but the volcano’s about to blow, burying that obscene morality in lava and ash. Given the staggering levels of accumulated debt and promises, the useful know their talents, skills, hard work, productivity and futures have been mortgaged for the useless. This is the salient and intractable social division. No reconciliation is possible between the useful and those who believe themselves entitled to their enslavement. The Trump fissure will become a yawning chasm when the Good Ship Profligate Government collides with the iceberg.

Centralization serves the needs of government and its dependents. Honest production and exchange require little government, perhaps none at all. Those who believe current arrangements should persist have to believe that the useful who support those arrangements will provide more and more while receiving less and less. The implicit premise has to be that when it all finally breaks down, the useful can be brutally subjugated—but kept producing—while receiving nothing more than their subsistence. Slavery cannot support the police state necessary to impose it, much less a modern economy. Those who believe any outcomes other than destruction and death are possible are delusional. If those are the outcomes they anticipate and desire, they’re homicidally and suicidally psychopathic.

Governments will have their surveillance apparatuses, police, militaries, prisons, torture chambers, concentration camps, killing fields, and the like. The useful will have their minds. Totalitarian accounting is daunting. All that money going out for suppression, so little coming in from a populace whose best and brightest have been imprisoned or murdered, or who produce the minimum necessary to survive. The day comes when the policeman, soldiers, and guards can’t be paid with anything of value and all hell breaks loose. Or, less colloquially, centralization gives way to decentralization.

To what depths governments will descend and how long they will survive as agents of repression is unknowable, but their dissolution is foreordained. They cannot commandeer the resources necessary to sustain the current level of tyranny. The useful will vote with their feet and if that’s not possible, bullets will be their ballots. They will establish enclaves and protect themselves from the tantrums, chaos, and depredations of the useless. (Useful in such a context may require nothing more than a willingness to work hard.) The useless depend on the useful, who of course don’t need them at all. The useful will eventually triumph, if the species survives (not a sure thing). Tragically, the butcher’s bill is likely to be exorbitant.

"Solutions Abound" To Crush The Crony Cartels

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Rather than bemoan the inevitable failure of centralized "fixes," let"s turn our attention and efforts to the real solutions: decentralized, networked, localized.

Those looking for centralized solutions to healthcare, jobs and other "macro-problems" will suffer inevitable disappointment. The era in which further centralization provided the "solution" has passed: additional centralization (Medicare for All, No Child Left Behind, federal job training, Universal Basic Income, central banking "free money for financiers", etc.) have all entered Diminishing Returns.

The systemic costs of centralization--corruption, cronyism, soaring prices, declining quality, over-reach, insider rackets, regulatory capture by corporations and oligarchs-- are soaring as the benefits of centralization plummet.

ObamaCare was the penultimate flowering of centralization: every self-serving healthcare cartel and racket had a say in the centralized sausage-making, and the results were entirely predictable: highly profitable to the healthcare cartels and rackets, and soaring costs that rendered the program unaffordable.

ObamaCare institutionalized staggering distortions, profiteering and injustices, as those who didn"t qualify for a subsidy were ripped off to pay for all the skims and scams: meds that went from $3 to $600 overnight, etc.

All the sound and fury around a centralized one-size-fits-all "solution" signifies nothing--the solution is decentralized and local, not federal. Centralization of power, capital and control paid big dividends early on--central governments corralled the productive elements of the nation to wage wars, and capitalists forged immensely profitable integrated supply chains that fed centralized production facilities in which iron ore entered the plant and finished automobiles exited.

The benefits of centralization outpaced the costs: this was the boost phase:

The returns on centralization diminished in the waning years of the 20th century, and are now in free-fall. Whatever has been centralized--federal jobs training, federal takeover of the mortgage market, federal takeover of student loans/debt-serfdom, central bank policies that favored the super-wealthy at the expense of the bottom 95%-- have been disastrous wastes of irreplaceable time and political/financial capital.

Fragmentation is feared by the Establishment of rackets and insiders for the very reason that fragmentation is the solution. Who loses when people wake up and abandon the centralized rentier skims, scams and rackets? Those who own and control the rentier skims, scams and rackets.

Solutions abound, but they are at the local level: cities, towns, counties, communities and neighborhoods.

Rather than bemoan the inevitable failure of centralized "fixes," let"s turn our attention and efforts to the real solutions: decentralized, networked, localized.

California, Nestle, And Decentralization

Authored by Antonius Aquinas, annotated by Acting-Man"s Pater Tenebrarum,

Goodbye, Socialist Paradise

Nestle USA has announced that it will move its headquarters from Glendale, California, to Rosslyn, Virginia, taking with it about 1200 jobs.

The once Golden State has lost some 1690 businesses since 2008 and a net outflow of a million of mostly middle-class people from the state from 2004 to 2013 due to its onerous tax rates, the oppressive regulatory burden, and the genuine kookiness which pervades among its ruling elites.

There has been a remarkable reversal of flow of people and businesses – but California’s ruling elite seemingly remains utterly clueless as to why this is happening and/or doesn’t seem to care. When people and businesses flee from such a well-developed region with such a favorable climate, one should realize that something is probably very wrong. Here is a link to a comprehensive study of the flight of businesses and a million middle class people (net) since 2008 (PDF).

 

A clueless Glendale official is apparently unconcerned about the financial repercussions of Nestle’s departure saying that it was “no big deal” and saw it as an “opportunity,” whatever that means!

The stampede of businesses out of what was once the most productive and attractive region in all of North America demonstrates again that prosperity and individual freedom are best served in a political environment of decentralization.

That the individual states of America have retained some sovereignty, despite the highly centralized “federal” system of government of which they are a part, has enabled individuals and entrepreneurs living in jurisdictions that have become too tyrannical to “escape” to political environments which are less oppressive.

The routes people aspiring to become small businessmen in California can take….

This, among other reasons (mainly air conditioning), led to the rise of the Sun Belt as people sought to escape the high taxes and regulations of the Northeast to less burdensome (and warmer!) southern destinations.

This can also be seen on a worldwide scale.  The US, for a long time, had been a haven of laissez-faire economic philosophy, which, not surprisingly, became a magnet for those seeking opportunity and a higher standard of living.

No longer is this the case as increasing numbers of companies and individuals are seeking to avoid American confiscatory tax and regulatory burdens and move “offshore” or expatriate to more favorable economic climates.

2016 state income taxes – to this one must add a more than 8% sales tax in California, all of which comes on top of federal taxes, plus onerous regulations and extremely litigation-happy “activists”. The only area in which California’s citizens got lucky (via referendum) are property taxes. On the other hand, the state has become extremely real estate bubble-prone, and low property taxes are probably not offsetting the drawbacks of the enormous, malignant housing boom-bust cycles the population centers are experiencing – click to enlarge.

Decentralization – the Key to Liberty and Progress

The idea of political decentralization as a catalyst for economic growth has become a part of a “school of thought” in the interpretation of how Europe became so prosperous compared to other civilizations.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe for centuries was divided politically among numerous jurisdictions and ruling authorities with no dominant central state on the Continent.

The multitude of governing bodies kept in check, to a large degree, the level of taxation and regulation.  If one state became too draconian, it would lose population to less oppressive regimes.

Just as important, Europe’s governing system was aristocratic and monarchical which has proven to be far more conducive for economic growth than democracies.

Germany shortly before its unification in 1871 –  a patchwork of competing small states. Note that this was well after an initial wave of consolidation and centralization – a century earlier, Germany actually consisted of more than 370 independent territories! We previously discussed why highly decentralized polities are the best possible political dispensation for the common man and how extremely conducive they are to liberty and the progress of civilization in this brief missive on secession.

Map via genealogy.net

While the economic oppressed can escape among the various states, there is no avoidance from the wrath of the federal government unless through expatriation and that option has become less viable with those leaving still subject to tax obligations.  This, fundamentally, is the crux of the problem and has been since the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789.

The chance that a totalitarian state such as California or the Leviathan on the Potomac would actually reform themselves or relinquish power through legislative means is a mirage.  Nor will revolution work as revolutionaries while appearing altruistic, typically get a hold of the machinery of government to plunder society for their own self interest on a far grander scale than the supposed despots which they replaced!

The only viable option for the productive members of society to seek redress of state oppression is to argue, work, and eventually fight for political secession and the fragmentation of states as much as possible.

Decentralization is the only hope for those opposed to the modern, omnipotent nation state.  Moreover, any notion or effort to salvage the current centralized political system must be abandoned.

After Donald Trump’s election, many on the political left in California have begun to talk about secession – normally an idea libertarians (and some conservatives) are more likely to be sympathetic to. One thing the presidential election showed quite clearly was that regardless of the winner, about half of the US population was always going to be deeply unhappy about the outcome. In a patchwork of numerous completely independent territories, people would be free to move to whatever area had the political dispensation they preferred. We confidently predict that socialist experiments would be few and far between if they had to depend entirely on voluntary participants. It should be no surprise that Europe’s socialists are all in favor of centralization and “harmonization” (the latter is new-speak for “let’s introduce the most onerous taxes and regulations everywhere, then no-one can escape our clutches”).

 

Conclusion – The Ideological Battle Comes First

Naturally, before the breakup of the nation state can become a reality, the ideological case for political decentralization must be made.  Public opinion must be convinced of the superiority of a world consisting of many states.  Such a cause, however, will be considerably difficult after generations have been raised and made dependent upon social democracy.

When Nestle and other oppressed businesses and individuals can easily escape the clutches of totalitarian entities like California and, more importantly, the most dangerous government on the face of the earth for freer destinations, then will individual liberty and economic growth be assured.