From: IN%"bruceab@teleport.com" "Bruce Baugh" 26-JAN-1996 01:51:04.39
At 07:15 PM 1/25/96 EDT, "E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@mbcl.rutgers.edu> 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