CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: As party politics perish, people power is born  Sun Oct 28, 2012 3:31 am | |
| ‘Things can’t go on like this!’ say conservatives. They have a point. Governments throughout the West have outgrown their capacity. Their treasuries are empty, their voters restive. Unable to squeeze more revenue from their citizens, they have taken to taxing the one constituency that can’t complain: future generations. But there comes a point when even the credit of what Shakespeare called ‘your children yet unborn and unbegot’ runs out. Things can’t go on like this.
So what next? This is the bit that many conservatives are vague about. But not Douglas Carswell. He makes a point that is so obvious that only the pessimistic predisposition of some Rightists prevents them from seeing it.
If things can’t go on like this, they won’t. If the government can’t grow any further, it won’t. If the state can’t assume new responsibilities, it won’t. If the machine is broken, it will splutter to a halt.
At the very moment that government action reaches its limit, says Douglas, technological change renders it redundant. The Internet puts into the hands of a private citizen information which, 15 years ago, an entire department would have struggled to compile. The revolution in communications is cutting out the middleman.
Douglas draws on his experience as an Essex MP (an incorruptible Roundhead, he is the authentic voice of that radical county). He describes how state restrictions on building in part of his constituency, imposed by a quango concerned with flooding, created one of the most wretched places in England. He remarks on the way in which certain forms of constituency casework – lobbying on the creation of a school, for example – disappeared once campaigners could network directly with one another. He explains, in practical rather than theoretical terms, why state action tends to be the problem, and private initiative the solution.
Douglas knows at first hand that large parts of a politician’s work are no longer needed. How long until that logic is imposed on government ministries?
The Internet has cruelly exposed the gap between our dealings with the state and our dealings with everything else. When we want to read a book or reserve a hotel room, we expect to do it with a few mouse-clicks. Compare that to the experience of getting permission to extend your garage or trying to place your child in the school you want.
It’s not only politicians whose role is changing. All sorts of professions will be opened up. How much longer will we need solicitors when we buy a house? The relevant forms can be easily enough downloaded. The symptoms that your GP looks up online can now be investigated by you directly. Why pay a TV licence fee when you can, in practice, put together your personal television schedule?
It’s the government agencies, though, which will be the most resistant to change since, unlike other professions, they can legislate to preserve their monopolies.
Then again, the apparat might not get a choice. The mobility of individuals and businesses is creating competing tax jurisdictions, and thus downward pressure on rates. As taxes become flatter, and can no longer easily be loaded on some targeted minority, revenue will stop growing. At that stage, the state, too, must stop growing, and liberate some of its employees to do work in the sector that produces, rather than consuming, revenue.
Read this book and be of good cheer. Things can’t go on like this.
https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/the-end-of-politics-and-the-birth-of-idemocracy-paperback
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100186768/the-death-of-politics-and-the-birth-of-idemocracy/ |
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RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
| | Subject: Re: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: As party politics perish, people power is born Sun Oct 28, 2012 3:47 am | |
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