Tag Archives: Decentralization

Secession Fever in Today’s America: What Would Lincoln Think? by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on February 27, 2020 | 1 comment

Lincoln prevented secession in America by going to war, but it’s an idea whose time has come. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

A February 19 article in The Washington Times announced that “Secession Fever Spikes” in five states where “conservatives” are attempting to escape neo-Stalinist policies of the Democrat Party majority there, now that the mask is finally off and the Democrats are the proud party of socialism and omnipotent government.  Long gone are the days when they hid their true beliefs by calling themselves “liberals” and their brand of fascism “The New Deal.”  They are now the party of the Green New Deal, the crazed, Soviet-style government plan to totalitarianize all of American society under the dishonest guise of “saving the planet.”  In other words, they are all card-carrying “watermelons” – green on the outside, red on the inside.

As soon as they took control of the Virginia state government, helped along with mega-donations by billionaire fellow totalitarians Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, among others, they immediately waged political war on the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution.  Their governor, Ralph Northam, is on record in a publicly-recorded video as supporting infanticide in cases where babies survive abortions.  That’s just for starters in the first month of their rule.

Virginia politics is now dominated by the heavily-populated D.C. suburbs composed of hundreds of thousands of deep state bureaucrats, government contractors, and Third World immigrants promised the riches of the American welfare state by the Democrats.  Most of the rest of the counties in the state have declared themselves to be Second Amendment sanctuaries.  Most strikingly, there is a “Vexit” movement whose goal is for those counties to secede from Virginia and become a part of more Constitution-friendly West Virginia.  The governor of West Virginia, Jim Justice, joined with Liberty University president Jerry Falwell, Jr. in a press conference at which they invited the more conservative Virginia counties to secede.  The West Virginia legislature is on board.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, History, Politics, Secession

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Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready, by Phil Torres

Posted on November 6, 2019 | Leave a comment

Like everything else, the capacity to commit crimes and wage violence is becoming increasing decentralized and individuals are becoming increasingly powerful. From Phil Torres at nautil.us:

Emerging bio-, nano-, and cyber-technologies are enabling criminals to target anyone anywhere and, due to democratization, increasingly at scale.Screengrab via The Future of Life Institute/YouTube

In The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum discuss a disturbing hypothetical scenario. A lone actor in Nigeria, “home to a great deal of spamming and online fraud activity,” tricks women and teenage girls into downloading malware that enables him to monitor and record their activity, for the purposes of blackmail. The real story involved a California man who the FBI eventually caught and sent to prison for six years, but if he had been elsewhere in the world he might have gotten away with it. Many countries, as Wittes and Blum note, “have neither the will nor the means to monitor cybercrime, prosecute offenders, or extradite suspects to the United States.”

Technology is, in other words, enabling criminals to target anyone anywhere and, due to democratization, increasingly at scale. Emerging bio-, nano-, and cyber-technologies are becoming more and more accessible. The political scientist Daniel Deudney has a word for what can result: “omniviolence.” The ratio of killers to killed, or “K/K ratio,” is falling. For example, computer scientist Stuart Russell has vividly described how a small group of malicious agents might engage in omniviolence: “A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one-or two-gram shaped charge,” he says. “You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: ‘Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.’ A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.” Manufacturers will be producing millions of these drones, available for purchase just as with guns now, Russell points out, “except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch.” In this scenario, the K/K ratio could be perhaps 3/1,000,000, assuming a 10-percent accuracy and only a single one-gram shaped charge per drone.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Governments, Morality, Science, Technology

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Globalization Just Peaked, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on August 26, 2019 | Leave a comment

There’s not much left out there to profitably “globalize.” From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

In Jackson Hole on Friday, Bank of England’s outgoing governor Mark Carney talked about a Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) that the world ‘must’ create, and I thought: that sounds as creepy as anything Halloween. Now, Carney is a central banker as well as a former Giant Squid partner, hence a certified cultist, but still.

He even mentioned Facebook’s Libra ‘currency’ as some sort of example for something that should replace the US dollar internationally. And that replacement is allegedly needed because countries are hoarding dollars. And/or “protecting themselves by racking up enormous piles of dollar-denominated debt.” Whichever comes first, I guess?!

I’ve read quite a few comments on Carney’s speech, but far as I’ve seen they all ignore one aspect of it: the current shape and form of globalization. See, Carney can see only one thing: more centralization, more things moving more in the same direction. Remember, he’s the man who with Michael Bloomberg in 2016 wrote “How To Make A Profit From Defeating Climate Change”. Aka things are worth doing only if they make you richer.

It’s a state of mind that works fine when you’re inside a system and an echo chamber, when you’re a central banker or a corporate banker. But there’s nothing that indicates it’s a useful state of mind when the system you’re serving must undergo change. What is as true when it comes to climate change as it is for changing the entire global economy. Carney’s got blinders on.

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Is It Time for America to Break Apart? by Boyd D. Cathey

Posted on July 29, 2019 | 1 comment

It is way past time for the US and other superstates to break apart. They will do so by choice or by circumstances as devolution and decentralization are already rendering mega-governments obsolete. From Boyd D. Cathey at unz.com:

There is a question that increasingly arises, uncomfortably, in our conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with family, after church on Sunday, with our email messages to friends and associates. To watch any amount of television news these days, to switch back and forth between, say, CNN and Fox, and to listen to their interpretations of any event or issue, no matter what, that same question clambers in the background like an unchained wild beast:

What has happened—what is happening—to the geographical entity we call the United States, to its people, to its culture? Does it not seem like the country is coming apart at the seams, in just about everything, from its once-established moral base in a more or less historic Christian framework to its very vision of reality, of what is real and what is not?

Millions of “woke” social justice progressives now control the Democratic Party and most of our media; they dominate our entertainment and sports industries; they push for open borders and what amounts to “population replacement” of natives by illegal aliens; and they have a stranglehold on the near entirety of our educational system, from the primary grades to our colleges.

Each year those institutions turn out millions of freshly-minted automatons—intellectual zombies—who think like their unhinged teachers and professors have trained them, and who then take up responsible positions in our society and increasingly support and vote for a type of veritable madness which, like an unstoppable centrifugal force, is tearing this country apart, creating unbridgeable divisions that no amount of misdirected pleading or faux-compromise can repair.

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Posted in Collapse, Government, Politics, race relations, Trade

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Which Nations Will Crumble and Which Few Will Prosper in the Next 25 Years? by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on March 21, 2019 | Leave a comment

Decentralization runs contrary to the centralizing trend of the last century or so and is steadily gaining strength. The smart money bet is that very few governments will survive it. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Adaptability and flexibility will be the core survival traits going forward.
What will separate the many nations that will crumble in the next 25 years and those few that will survive and even prosper while the status quo dissolves around them? As I explain in my recent book Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic, the factors that will matter are not necessarily cultural or financial; being hard-working and wealthy won’t be enough to save nations from coming apart at the seams.
Here are the factors that will matter in the next 25 years:
1. The ability to engage and survive non-linear change, which is rapid, unpredictable and systemic, as opposed to linear change which is gradual, predictable and limited in nature.
None of the current political systems are decentralized enough and adaptable enough to survive the non-linear era we’re entering. As I explained in What If Politics Can’t Fix What’s Broken?, the politics of centralized compromise and incremental, top-down adjustments are wholly inadequate to dealing with non-linear disruptions.
2. The nations that cannot jettison their parasitic elites will fall; the few that find the political will to jettison their parasitic elites will have the wherewithal to survive and possibly even prosper as the global status quo collapses around them.
The problem, as we all know, is the parasitic elites rule the centralized hierarchies of wealth and political power, and they will cling to power even as the nation they rule crumbles around them. The hubris, complacency and greed of the ruling parasitic elites is near-infinite; the idea that the political and financial structures that they dominate will not survive simply doesn’t exist in the parasitic elites, with the exception of a few outliers who are constructing remote bugout compounds with landing strips etc.
Unfortunately for these outliers, they can’t escape satellite and drone imagery, or the loose tongues of employees, contractors, etc.

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The Sheriff Revolt on New Gun Laws Shows Why America Needs More Decentralization, by Justin Murray

Posted on March 12, 2019 | Leave a comment

The structure of the United States is archaic. From Justin Murray at mises.org:

Recently, a dozen sheriffs in Washington State announced that they would refuse to enforce the newly passed referendum 1639 which raised the legal age of purchasing a firearm of any sort to 21, expanded background check requirements, increased the waiting period and mandated weapon storage when not in active use. Predictably, political proponents immediately threatened these sheriffs, who were hired to enforce county, not State, laws, with legal action. Of course, when I say passed, what I really mean is that 14 of 39 counties in Washington decided the referendum was a good idea.

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Based on actual voting patterns, the victory of this particular bill can be almost entirely explained by the margin of victory in King County (506k), where Seattle is located, which accounted for 87% the margin of victory of the State-wide referendum (580k). This is a common phenomenon in many States that have a large single urban population. Another classic example is New York and the political dominance of the City in State-wide politics.

What the refusal of the 12 county law enforcement officials is doing is voicing displeasure with what amounts to a distant population dictating how they’ll operate in their own homes. Why are people in Seattle, who may never even set foot on the Eastern-side of the Cascades, let alone actually make that region their permanent home, imposing law on residents of Omak?

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The Southern Critique of Centralization, by Donald Livingston

Posted on January 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

Decentralization is the wave of the future. The question is whether it will be fairly orderly or chaotic. The latter is the betting favorite. From Donald Livingston at abbeyvilleinstitute.org:

The Southern political tradition, in practice and theory, is one of its most valuable contributions to America and the world. The one constant theme of that tradition from 1776–through Jefferson, Madison, John Taylor, St George Tucker, Abel Upshur, John C. Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians, Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, down to the scholars of the Abbeville Institute–is a systematic critique of centralization. Nothing comparable to it exists elsewhere in America or in Europe.

A criticism of centralization presupposes that decentralization is a good thing. But why is that? The answer is complex and requires viewing what was happened in 1776 from a trans Atlantic perspective. The Declaration of Independence is merely the American version of a conflict that had been going on in Europe since at least the 17th century between the emerging centralized  modern state and a revived interest in  the classical republican tradition which goes back to the ancient Greeks.

There are four principles to this republican tradition: First, republican government is one in which the people make the laws they live under. But, second, they cannot make just any law. The laws they make must be in accord with a more fundamental law which they do not make but is known by tradition. Third, the task of the republic is to preserve and perfect the character of that inherited tradition. And finally, the republic must be small. It must be small because self-government and rule of law is not possible unless citizens know the character of their rulers directly or through those they trust.

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Decentralization Is the Solution to the Government Shutdown, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on January 20, 2019 | Leave a comment

Ryan McMaken is correct as far as he goes: decentralization in government would be a wonderful thing. Not much analysis, though, on why centralization occurs (hint: it’s in somebody interest for it to occur), or how decentralization can happen. From McMaken at mises.org:

The partial shutdown with the federal government has helped, perhaps more than any other recent political event, to illustrate some of the biggest problems that come with centralizing an ever-larger number of government activities within a single, centralized institution.

Were the US government more decentralized, we’d not now be facing a nationwide systemic failure that has continues to cripple the private sector in many ways.

Held Hostage by a Shuttered Regulatory State

The federalization of resources and regulatory power over the past century has created a situation in which numerous industries depend on licensing and regulatory approval from federal regulators to function. And yet, thanks to the shutdown, these industries can do little when facing a federal government that imposes mandates, but won’t provide the agency “services” necessary to allow agencies to function under those mandates.

For example, As The Washington Post has reported , those areas where the federal government has a large regulatory footprint — such as Alaska — are at the mercy of politicians thousands of miles away.

Most (61 percent) of Alaska is government land managed by five different federal agencies, according to the congressional Research Service. The state’s main industries, including fishing, tourism and oil and gas, all depend on the day-to-day actions of federal workers and regulators.

The fisheries have so far avoided major disruption, despite a few close calls. Most boats are still getting by on licenses and inspections which occurred before the shutdown.

But time is running out. Major commercial boats are required to carry onboard observers to monitor their catch. But when they return from a trip, those observers must be debriefed by the National Marine Fisheries Service — and it’s not holding debriefings during the shutdown.

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2019: Fragmented, Unevenly Distributed, Asymmetric, Opaque, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on January 8, 2019 | Leave a comment

The powers that be desperately want to keep the rest of us in the dark. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Add up Fragmented, Unevenly Distributed, Asymmetric and Opaque and you get a world spinning out of centralized control.

Here are the key dynamics of 2019: fragmented, unevenly distributed, asymmetric, opaque. Want to know what’s happening with inflation, deflation, recession, populism, etc.?

It depends on what you own, when you own it, where you own it and its relative scarcity and stability–assuming you have trustworthy information on its scarcity and stability.

By ownership I mean all forms of capital: cash, tools, skills, social capital, trust in institutions, etc. Whatever forms of capital you own, the returns on that capital and its relative stability depend on the specifics of context and timing.

Will there be deflation or inflation? The right question is: Will there be deflation or inflation in my household?. In a rapidly fragmenting economy and society characterized by opacity, asymmetric information and unevenly distributed results, generalizations are intrinsically misleading / false. The only possible answers arise in a carefully limited context: my household, my neighborhood, my industry, my company, etc.

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Hayek’s Case for Decentralized Communities, by Allen Mendenhall

Posted on November 27, 2018 | Leave a comment

After centuries of increasing centralization, decentralization is the wave of the future. From Allen Mendenhall at lewrockwell.com:

This talk was delivered at the Abbeville Institute’s conference on Secession and Nullification in Dallas, Texas on November 10, 2018.

My talk today is about decentralization and epistemology. At the outset I wish to disclaim any specialized expertise in this subject. I’m a lawyer by training who loves literature and earned a doctorate in English. It would be a stretch to call me a philosopher or a political theorist, hence this anchoring disclaimer to prevent me from sailing too deep into philosophical seas.

I have divided my argument, such as it is, into two parts: the impersonal and the personal. The former is a philosophical case for decentralization; the latter involves private considerations about intimate human relationships around which communities of common purpose organize and conduct themselves. In the end, the two approaches are mutually reinforcing, yielding, I hope, benevolent and humane considerations. Presenting them as separate, however, signals to different audiences whose tolerance for appeals to feeling may vary.

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