323 sats \ 4 replies \ @Louferlou 29 Jan \ on: Manifesto of the Efficient State Movement bitcoin
The simple word "government"or "governance" gives me goosebumps. The fact their exists people that want to govern me seems unbelievable in the Bitcoin space... Don't statists in Bitcoin start to understand that the problem IS the government ITSELF, and not who compose it ?
There is not enough good faith, not enough good will in this world which will not transform any kind of government into a tyrannical one eventually. It is by design, if you base your regime on theft and violence the outcome will always be the same. Even the founding fathers of USA, have failed....
What we need is SHRINKING the state as much as possible, until it is so small that anyone can decide to opt out at will. This means that the State has to be dismantled to make place to free market based organizations including for education, security and justice. This is the goal that we must all envision, and aim to achieve, slowly, one step after the other. Any political engagement should be directed only to the realization of reducing as much as possible the State's scope.
This fight will never end of course as statist will always be there among us with their totalitarian impulses, and will try to nibble as much freedom as they can everywhere they go, whatever they do. But if we can make clear in people mind once and for all that the State is dangerous totalitarian organization of the past (like kingdom, empires, slavery and all this shit), we could gave us a big reprieve.
SHRINK THE STATE
I full agree on the mission to shrink the state, that's the end goal. Perhaps the name should be expanded to Smaller and Efficient State Movement so it's more clear that the "smaller" part of the plan is more important and upstream from the "efficient" one. We don't want efficiency at all costs, we sort of have this now and it's terrible as you keep pushing it beyond the limits.
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I wouldn't say that we have this now - the amount of bureaucracy is too much. Efficiency to me suggests a shrinkage in the size and power of government and faster time to implement policy. Decisions to make these changes should be made by citizens instead of representatives.
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On the point of "governance"... I think up from a certain point of growth in a society, people naturally want to delegate tasks to others. If feels like an extension of the division of labor concept which is at the root of our society's development. I don't really want to care about, for example, public road infrastructure, but I do want that handled somehow because it's beneficial to me and everybody else, so naturally there's a role that appears, which seems like a "public job", to handle that.
The current size of government across the world is ridiculous and ever growing, so there's something clearly wrong with the incentives there. But to say we need NO form of government (common handling of common issues for society) doesn't make a lot of sense for just everything. In my opinion, there are some areas which apart from a functioning free market, do need some sort of intervention and oversight - like transportation, housing, medical care.
The issue with government and democracy in general it its current form is that, much like bitcoin, doesn't scale very well to very large societies. Going back to ancient Greece there were let's say thousands of "citizens" in a town... now we're talking about millions. We need more tools to provide more transparency, one issue is that most government action is opaque and hidden from the public - if more would know exactly what is going on and what is their tax money used for, they would strongly disagree. I think in this respect bitcoin is very much aligned with the transparency concept and could provide benefits to common people easily figuring out what is happen with the money they give to the "state" (forcibly like now, or voluntarily hopefully at some point).
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