Disclosure: This is a long post and pine has obtained fresh coffee from the world to my secret underwater volcano HQ! So you have been warned. Thoughts about the Mind, Society and platypuses (always) are involved.--The government has unintentionally created an unusual alliance between several different cultures who usually don't communicate much directly.-> Drug Smugglers-> Hackers and Cypherpunks-> Financiers and TradersAnd other smaller groups I have not mentioned here. As it turns out, we all have a great deal in common as we have been discovering over the last few years. I call this the Association of Aquatic Mammals because I like otters, beavers and platypuses. The Bushmen think of them as being people, but in different shapes, and I like this older view of sentience, it is closer to the truth than childishly making a crude division, a mostly arbitrary division between us and the other animals. After all Science tells us we're one big (squabbling) family genetically and I've always thought of my pets as defacto members of the family which is why I respect and love them so. They are like small humans in fur coats! Being fluffy and cute is a major plus :) Can't understand why people think human babies are cute, I think they're lying, they look as ugly as anything I can think of, even baby vampire bats are cuter than they are, the parents must be on drugs (hormones) or something. --I think that this AAM association shall become increasingly important in the 21st century. Basically they are all information arbitrageurs of one kind or another with the common goal of circumventing the State so they can get on with their lives and make the machinery of the world tick over.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArbitrageTo be any kind of arbitrageur is to be the human equivalent of an airport. You funnel information between people in such a way that helps others on their journey. You exact a levy of some sort as an interdisciplinary person and the division of labor expands for others. The division of labor concept is as important as evolution theory but less people grasp the meaning of it.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labourIt is worth quoting the Pin Factory realization in full, in case somebody hasn't heard of it before:QuoteTo take an example, therefore,from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations Governance, done properly (acting as airport), is supposed to achieve the same thing, which is why Capitalists and Socialists are at war like cats and dogs. Really we are very similar people, but we seem very different because we are competitors. It should be noted some types of capitalists and socialists are parasites, they exact levies in ways which are simple forms of theft like some kind of samurai class e.g. counterfeit drugs, taxation without representation. This is of course, dishonorable no matter your ideological persuasion.The government on the other hand is our Inland Empire (not Cali!), it is away from our rivers and tributaries. Those people are an entirely different species (I imagine them as mostly termites, ants, bees, other social insects, but I wouldn't think of them as Socialists really, they won't have thought about anything so abstract) to us ideologically. They have never seen the water, river or the sea, and cannot comprehend it due to being unimaginative, cynical or narrowly self interested. They receive the fruits of trade through taxation but don't understand the source and don't much like to. For them the source of food is the factory. Their Capitalism is effectively a Cargo Cult. That is essentially Statist capitalism (Fascism) or Statist socialism (Communism) in a nutshell:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_scienceSome of this is partly our (productive capitalists) fault, because the downside of the division of labor, which is the primary mechanism for wealth creation that Capitalism employs is that people start to think too narrowly, become inflexible in their minds. H.G. Wells would call this a Morlock vs Eloi distinction. Eventually the Morlocks are forced to eat the Eloi because they're turning into idiots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorlockAdam Smith was the inventor of Capitalism and he noticed this propensity pretty much immediately:QuoteThe man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations They start to outsource their decision making on a wide selection of issues to the State because it makes their lives easier (at first), and only when they do realize what they have lost do they complain. But really it is our fault the State has become more cancerous over time. It is the intellectual equivalent of eating an extra hot dog than you should every day, eventually the effects build up. State departments are like the accumulation of lint from millions of minds. This isn't necessarily efficient in much the same way the original scientific theory of a hollow world is not a good explanation for the data.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_EarthAs Hayek would imply, state socialism is not merely incorrect, it is profoundly unscientific. It reeks of scientism.Take the environment for example. The issues involved are complex or involved so we outsource the decision to somebody else. Then we complain our taxes are too high. You cannot have your cake and eat it. You have to actively CREATE or at least support solutions that are scalable (like the Cypherpunks) that solve the problems, otherwise you're paying a tithe to an institution that ultimately at the macro level has no real incentive to solve actual problems, merely to maintain them to keep various wolves from the door. This is referred to the Principal Agent problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problemThe State can, despite much anarchist complaint, does or did serve a function. The State rarely interferes out of malice except in times of war. The central problem is that it cannot evolve, has no process for doing so. Then the State produces so many "vestigial limbs" because of that.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VestigialityUnlike many fellow libertarians I don't hate the State per se. Usually. I just think it has served its function and now we need to replace it with Ceps (Common Economic Protocols, a generic term I borrowed to describe things like Bittorrent, like Bitcoin, like TCP/IP and so on). Slowly over time we can develop new systems that replace what were originally State functions. Anything else shall leave us in the quagmire, left in the swamp of inept governance with the ROUSes taking bytes out of us.http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=R.O.U.S.The citizens of this Inland Empire attribute their existing wealth and future progress to twitching magic sticks (cough), Ahem, I mean interest rates and taxation levels. This is an modern update of an exercise in pure numerology. They conflate abstractions for the real things, the flow of money with wealth generation.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NumerologyWealth for a population and probably an individual as well boils down to the simple question: Do you have more options than before?Capitalism is, metaphorically speaking, like the river. It is composed of private property and the price system, which together act in concert in the same way as your arteries and veins carry blood throughout your body, except that Capitalism is fundamentally an information network. Banking was originally after all, essentially an analog + highly simplified exercise in creating a prototype of the Internet for adding and subtracting numbers for people over long distances.The Inland Empire is steadily deteriorating although most of its citizens cannot see that. It's an elephant problem. Each political party ascribes a different, sort of correct, but also irrelevant theory to the causes.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephantIt is simply collapsing under its own weight. It takes up such a huge portion of the economy that it has reached a saturation point where further growth only generates diminishing returns. The concept of the USA or UK getting +6%-8% GDP growth per year is laughable, but that's what we used to get and that's what we need. This business of "developing" and "developed" countries is an illusion. What venture capitalists like Peter Thiel call "vertical growth" isn't a mirage, it just takes a particular environment or BBC - Brains, Balls and lots of access to Capital. As insects, they are not brave or large enough to comprehend the scope of any impending calamity. Instead they compete to create Ostrich theories such as "fiscal stimulus" or "austerity" to comfort themselves. These are extremely simple ideas that will not work in a society this networked. Ceps will accomplish real change but they are such a bold step that most intellectuals overlook them or prefer to ignore them in favor of "real life stuff". The world is a big place and it is hard for any of us to see the big picture. The most introspective members of the Inland Empire are in the business of creating a modern version of the Hydraulic Empire. In fact there is a lot in common between the Association of Aquatic Mammals and the intelligentsia of the Inland Empire, they are the Cain and Abel of mankind, closely related because they are in the business of information but in direct competition.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empireIn this empire, they intend to directly use the flows of information throughout the world to build a power base. This is terribly old fashioned and quite disappointing. I thought the NSA had people of BBC caliber but evidently they would prefer to cynically munch on Eloi than think outside what is in this case literally a (black) box. In the 1950s Americans were at the cutting edge of intellectual prowess, expanding free markets, inventing cool new types of music and visiting space rocks, but apparently all those people died and now our modern Harvard B-school students are feverishly designing new ways to sell spicy chicken and we have dubstep (the end is nigh, you heard it here first). It serves a reasonable purpose in of itself I suppose, but it's also kind of pathetic that the best people are doing this. A huge misapplication of brainpower. The only cool new thing seems to be unconventional gas/oil extraction.So the informational hydraulic empire is why that Ziggurat in Utah is being built, that is why the central banks exist. That is why our society is increasing becoming under surveillance. It is the modern version of the Egyptians Gaza Pyramid. Using a building to dominate the thought processes of a society and make people compliant is not a new concept, this is just a literal minded interpretation of the concept. It is a drastically scaled up version of a peacock's tail feathers. It exists to indicate the pecking order we're supposed to accept. The builders may believe they are building a temple for a Godly function (national security!), but the long term practical use of such developments is always suppression, to have one view of the world to dominate. So it is, so it has always been, there is nothing new under the sun.Let me be clear. This is a Religion. The State IS a Religion. I am not using a metaphor. It is a belief. It has replaced the Churches as the primary belief mode in modern society. The State is a largely unconscious attempt to make a model of the real world, to put a design on the chaos and randomness of reality. Because its model of reality is just too simplified because human society has become more complex, it seeks many "sacrifices" from the general population, and (usually) unconsciously seeks to suppress any further developments in complexity and the division of labor by manipulating the tax rates, "allowing" economic growth by changes in interest rates. Put crudely, the State is like the large number of mediocre kids in class who collectively hold the rest of us back. Both the slower learners and faster learners would benefit more if they went their separate ways due to Ricardian Law of Comparative Advantage.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantageAlthough centralization and the standardization it brings is often superficially impressive e.g. marching soldiers and tranches of schoolchildren marching off to work, it naturally inhibits diversity. Marketplaces are very diverse places and they encourage more of it, that is why technology and capitalism are so tightly bound up together. The AAM practically genetically understand the importance of accepting randomness over order but it's important to understand what others find it an impossible ideal. To them a well ordered world is a working world, which is why intellectuals, engineers and other technocrats are so attracted to placing their "ultimate designs". I think Hayak calls this the fatal conceit.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_ConceitQuoteThe man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. Adam SmithAstute readers or students of communism will notice there is an inherent paradox in the concept of the division of labor causing a problem (ineffective governance), which is then according to pine solved by more division of labor. That's not just a paradox for pine. It's the paradox of civilization itself. Society is like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, we have to move faster and faster just to keep up so our civilization doesn't fly apart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesisEther we shall stagnate like the Chinese Empire, our Western civilization repeatedly butting its head against some invisible barrier to progress, or we shall break out of this malaise by adopting new forms of politics and economics. Capitalism we know works and is scalable, we know we can evolve it to suit our purposes, it has proven itself adaptable. It's time then for the government to go. It don't work no more. Governance needs a fairly epic upgrade and we don't mean more of the same.So join PGP Club. Its program makes more sense than your governments. It's more important than having a gun in your cabinet in case King George turns up again or any interpretations of the Constitution with the recent violations to it and continually putting up with various outrages to commonsense pretty much everyday. Knowing crypto is going to be the pivot on which your economic freedom depends in the near future. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CypherpunkIf you really want to, you too can be as annoying as Julian Assange! There is a good article here on recent trends:http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/tk_5_partner_15/http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/7/4036040/cypherpunks-julian-assange-wikileaks-encryption-surveillance-dystopiaIf you can get past the cheap shots at libertarians in the Salon read it's a good one. We're seeing the same things. I think it's past time the libertarians of left and right realize they have far more in common right now than any other time in history I can think of. It is time for a Compact. It's probably the only way we'll get out of this together alive unless you have extraordinary faith in Congress to solve the problems.So join our secret darknet secret society :)Join PGP Club, and if you are a member, help others to join it too. It sounds too simple to be true, but simple things can make a big difference.The Silk Road is doing a magnificent job pointing out the Emperor has no clothes. As for Bart Chilton he has a tiny penis.