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Re: Cypherpunk Elitism
From: IN%"[email protected]" "Bruce Baugh" 26-JAN-1996 01:51:04.39
>At 07:15 PM 1/25/96 EDT, "E. ALLEN SMITH" <[email protected]> wrote:
> You might also find Robert Reich's _The Work of Nations_
>interesting.
As a short, elegant, powerful argument against statist thinking, I recommend
most highly Kenichi Ohmae's THE END OF THE NATION STATE: THE RISE OF
REGIONAL ECONOMIES. Mr Ohmae focuses on areas that have geographical and
social meaningfulness, on the scale of Hong Kong/Canton, Catalonia, the
Pacific Northwest, and so forth. He quickly makes hash of the idea that the
nation-state is a meaningful unit for modern economic analysis.
--------------------
Actually, Reich realizes this.... and (being a liberal) opposes the
various trends causing it. I can email people an interview with him that
shows his thinking on the matter. One point he makes is that nations with high
tax rates and high levels of social services (such as Canada) are losing
symbolic analysts to and gaining routine producers from nations with low tax
rates and low levels of social services (such as the US). Being a liberal, he
doesn't like this trend, and wants the US to raise taxes and social services
(without apparantly seeing that this will simply put the US in the same boat
as Canada, etcetera).
Cypherpunks relevance? First, anonymous digital cash will make it
awfully difficult to have those high tax rates. Second, this gives rise to the
phenomenon of anonymous digital cash usage probably being more common among
the economically and intellectually elite than among the "peons". They're the
ones with something to lose by the tax rates. I haven't had time yet to read
Dr. May's piece on Virtual Communities, but I have had the thought that
private anonymous digital cash makes such separation a lot easier. Reich
doesn't like people splitting off into seperate communities, and wants to
oppose it- like Christopher Lash, the late populist writer of _The Revolt of
the Elites_. Fortunately, anonymous digital cash makes such opposition a lot
harder.
-Allen