Re-federalize or die.

(August 4, 2020. No. Really.) Warming up the Never Trumper tepidarium may be premature...

This is wierd. Kinda what he’s doing. Interregnum notwithstanding.

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Re-federalize or die.

Warming up the Never Trumper tepidarium may be premature...

Robert Hettinga

Geodesic Culture

Anquilla, BWI

August 4, 2020

Kevin Williamson writes about the long knives coming out at the Never-Trumper table, where they’ve already carved up the Republican Party after Trump loses, arguing about whether to draw it, quarter it, and parade its pieces throughout West Virginia, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and North Dakota or merely suffer it to slave away, stoking the hypocaust’s fire under the tepidarium at the Bulwark’s brand-new Lincoln Wing...

Since a new initiative at National Review is all about reclaiming capitalism from the ash-heap of history, I’d like to flip this tractor-tire-sized coin and ask what happens when we win. Yes. I said win. I also said we. All of us, Trumpers and Never Trumpers, alike.

What happens when the people who signed the Against Trump article realize that all the steely knives in The Hotel Beltway just can’t kill the beast of national populism, that Donald Trump has actually caught the car conservatism has been chasing throughout living memory: A majority of both houses, the Presidency, even most of the judiciary, in Republican hands. All of them pointing out of the GOP’s now-shredded big tent.

What happens? Easy. Sell it. Sell it all. No. Really. Like the roads in the libertarian wheeze, sell everything that doesn’t kill people and break things, the only reason Locke says we have governments to begin with.

No, not to sell influence over the ramshackle failures of cryptosocialism, which is what post-war GOP government control degenerates to. That trick never works, Bullwinkle. No. Sell it. The whole tax-collector for the welfare state schtick was never gonna work. So sell welfare, too. It is, or will be, in our grasp to do exactly that, and it will work for the very same reason that centralizing anything fails anymore.

Mark Levin said after 2008 that it would take four or five elections to take the country back. It was ugly, but we’re almost here. Apres moi, the administrative state: Sell it. Sell it all.

And no, we can’t replay the end of international marxism either: A Jeffery Sachs equivalent marching through Georgetown creating yet another cis-Uralic oligarchy. We’ve enough government-created oligopoly in Silicon Valley without creating more to keep the country from tipping over.

So: The US must Re-Federalize or Die.

Instead of Ben Franklin’s graphic snake in pieces, each with a two-letter state abbreviation, we’re looking at a hydra, each head with a three-letter agency abbreviation. This time there’s a sword on the ground, waiting for us to use it. No moistened bint for us, no. Just pick it up and use it. Carpe Gladium.

So let’s talk about capitalism, though I think like much of our language these days, ‘capitalism’ is a Marxist neologism.

There’s actually a physical reason that the government, and all organizations, firms, if you will, had gotten so large and hierarchical throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and why firms are getting recursively smaller now, slowly, as Hemingway said about bankruptcy, and then all at once. Why economies of scale have turned into diseconomies of same, even in an age of perceived “Big-Tech” oligopoly. Why the monopolistic competition of late industrialism has seen an explosion of the ‘artisanal’.

I’ve been talking about this for a long time. In the old days I’d convene exposition class, straight out of a bad Starship Troopers movie. I’d drop names like Gordon Moore, Harold Green, Peter Huber, David Chaum, and Ronald Coase, and, yes, Bucky Fuller, but the short answer is probably in your hand and the device you’re reading this on.

Dr. Peterson’s lobsters are real. Communication in the absence of automated switching creates hierarchical networks. Starting with Napoleon’s heliograph, you could transact business in real time across vast distances, but expensive humans, with their crustacean-era dominance hierarchies, were still ‘switching’ the information; the most expensive ‘switches’ at the top of any hierarchy: Bandits, Warlords, Kings, Industrial Robber Barons.

Communication in the presence of automated switching -- computation (Moore) -- creates geodesic networks. ‘Geodesic’ looks like those goofy domes made of pipes that hippies liked to make in the late 1960’s (Fuller). Or the internet, when you look at it on a map, as Peter Huber observed in the mid-1980’s for a report he made to Judge Harold Green after the AT&T breakup. Geodesic networks, and financial cryptography (the lock icon when you use your credit card) reduce transaction costs, and thus firm size (Coase). The cheaper the switches (microprocessors, look in your hand again, remember Moore?) the more geodesic the network gets. Sing along with Huber: Moore’s Law creates geodesic networks. And, the more secure the networks are, the more financial cryptography you use, up to and including moving money, securities, and other asset titles across the network (Chaum, but not necessarily ‘Nakamoto’), the lower transaction costs are. The cheaper it is to do business. Lower transaction costs mean smaller firms: the fundamental theorem of microeconomics (Coase).

So, it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to make a firm these days. Thus it’s cheaper and cheaper to make a country. That sounds awful. Nicholas Negroponte, before Jeffery Epstein didn’t kill himself, used to predict ten thousand countries in a hundred years. I joke about letting ten thousand countries bloom, and it’s dark humor, just like Mao meant it. We’re looking at maybe three countries in thirty years where the US used to be, Podesta is already talking about New York and California seceding if the President wins again. So thirty U.S. countries in a hundred years. Not for nothing do Michael Vlahos and John Batchelor talk every week about living through a civil war and not knowing it. Slowly, and then all at once.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The fundamental point of the U.S. Constitution is decentralization. The country was born geodesic to begin with.

But, as industrialism proceeded we got more and bigger information hierarchies. Firms. Economies of scale. Wilson, spit, noted this, so did von Bismarck. Both demanded expert control of bigger and bigger government, creating a taxpayer-funded, taxpayer-educated elite, operating large hierarchical organizations. So did J. Pierpont Morgan, who talked about ruinous competition. It makes sense because there is only one path for information to follow through a hierarchical network. Chain of command. Morganization.

Not so much anymore. The violence business, ‘defense’, we named it in the late industrial era, now talks about jointness, and special operations, and asymmetric warfare. The mesh and the net. Geodesic warfare, in other words.

I can hear Robert Nosick hiding now. His economies of scale argument for the existence of force monopoly doesn’t work anymore. As we’re seeing, force markets are no more monopolistic than any other.

It’s easy to call terrorism geodesic war, though in an industrial era, it’s more public relations than anything else. The North Vietnamese Army would tell you that. These days, it’s all about smaller ‘firm’ size, but Antifa and Black Lives Matter are mere atavism. Like the Viet Cong for the NVA, and the Ku Klux Klan for the Democrat Party, or Al Qaeda for the once and future Caliphate, they’re just front organizations. Cultural Marxism, like all Marxism, is ersatz enlightenment lipstick on a feudalist pig. Saul Alinsky might have even heard of Bucky Fuller, but he wasn’t listening. Actually, Bucky Fuller wasn’t listening to Bucky Fuller. His ‘world game’ would have made a Soviet production commissar blush.

All the fun’s on our side of the house, though. Almost years ago, Rhys-Mogg The Elder and Walter Wriston used to talk about the Sovereign Individual, so does Jordan Peterson today, so do more than a few of Kevin Wilson’s ‘wack-a-doodles’. Also in the 1990’s, Cypherpunks like Tim May talked about Crypto-Anarchy, not to be confused with cryptoanarchy :-). And, yes, Julian Assange was on the cypherpunks list too. A lot of us were. I’ll cop to ‘wack-a-doodle’, myself, if that helps. Lord knows I’ve hung out with a few. Still do. Even played one on the internet.

And, so, here we are.

Is the US slouching toward Bethelem? I don’t think so. The US was designed, as we all know, without a center to begin with. It was highly decentralized. Geodesic, even. It can devolve, in the U.K. sense of the word, quite handily, with few effects, no broken eggs at all. Because it won’t be a counter-revolution, much less a revolution. It’ll be a reversion to the designed mean. Sure they'll put up a fight, they're doing it now. But it'll be like fighting Monty Python’s Black Knight. ‘Tis only a scratch, they'll say...

After Trump wins, the GOP should do more of what he’s been doing for the last four years by executive order anyway: pick up the sword, lop off a head of the hydra, and sell it all off, for whatever he can get for it on the open market.

Refederalize or die.