> The simple truth is that every government is at its core the
biggest, baddest gang in the land.
Were.
I don't know if you subscribe to the political analysis of Adam Curtis
but in the past two decades governments have been passing their power
to private banks, corporations, QANGOs and "non majoritarian"
think-tanks like it's a hot potato. The new breed of politicians are
not statesmen but revolving-door temporary managers who would sell-off
and outsource the whole country for personal convenience.
Other than a monopoly on violent power (which is vanishing fast in the
USA as private cops and prisons take over) it's hard to locate the
power of government sometimes. Even the military is dissolving into a
loose collection of defence contractors. In the UK our intellgence
services were more or less sold to Amazon.
The OP article seems dead set against anarcho-libertarianism but it is
by no means pro-government, or explicitly pro-democracy. With regard
to money and economics, from my moderately pro-government/state stance
I see the great mistake governments are making is giving up on cash.
Physical currency is an absolutely vital component of a stable
economy. Its very lack of instantaneous fluidity (it relative
inconvenience) means it acts like a capacitor to stabilise markets if
you can manage circulation and interest. Moreover, governments have a
strict monopoly on that, and physical currencies can take on many new
guises with modern cash technology. Abandoning that would be suicide.
If governments get into a battle to take the ground of purely digital
currencies against crypto, they will lose. They are making this
mistake in an attempt to gain legibility (surveillance). Ultimately
they will have to choose between surveillance and economic control.
And since the value of surveillance is massively over-rated I am
optimistic we'll pull out of the Orwellian misadventure in time.
Anyone genuinely interested in defending against the "ideology of
crypto" (as this article posits) should be investing in new cash
technologies (some of which I have mentioned in earlier comments
here). They should be promoting a plurality of diverse cash
equivalents (many of which can be implemented using cryptographic
technology - not necessarily block-chain).