As a seperate point, I think it should be on the nation (or clade or patchwork city) to provide food, medicine, etc. to its people, which is a progressive idea. Sort of like Moldbug’s idea of a nation wanting to have good customer service, but moreso.
Good customer service from government is such a strong concept. Yes, it would be nice if the teller at the DMV was nicer, but the underlying problem is that government’s role in society is to provide things that don’t have a willing seller (quasi-universal free education for children) or don’t have a willing buyer (prisons, driver’s licenses).
I’m not sure that competition for citizens is likely to improve the quality of either of those services. The issue is obvious for coercive government acts, but moral hazard issues would be a serious drain on social services if free migration worked the way Moldbug suggests—I suspect that is one reason why Moldbug explicitly expects some patches to have much lower social services than provided by current governments in the West.
You don’t need to go around looking for flaws in Patchwork. It’s Moldbug’s one big utopian crackpot moment. IMO there’s literally hundreds of reasons (chief among them being how easily humans can be misled by “free-market” manipulation) why most patches would devolve into really ugly, totalizing and rather stable corporate slavery (think singing the Wal-Mart anthem every morning and needing amphetamines just to get ahead), gradually resort to mind control technology, or just stay poor despite the law of comparative advantage because they started out as a collection of outcasts.
OR, in the extremely unlikely event that it all went fine and humanely, it could create so much wealth and peace that the elites would be drawn to Universalism simply as an attractive value/goal system (shaped like the forager mind, not like a ruthlessly efficient machine), and dismantle the borders and such. Or something else. It is really so poorly thought out that it’s not worth criticizing, except as mediocre science fiction.
(of course, given any kind of singularity it’s all rather irrelevant)
I strongly disagree with this. Also I had to check out what a Bircher is:
The John Birch Society is an American political advocacy group that supports anti-communism, limited government, a constitutional republic[1][2] and personal freedom.[3] It has been described as radical right-wing.
That’s ridiculous.
Moldbug doesn’t approve of constitutional republics! ;)
As a seperate point, I think it should be on the nation (or clade or patchwork city) to provide food, medicine, etc. to its people, which is a progressive idea. Sort of like Moldbug’s idea of a nation wanting to have good customer service, but moreso.
Good customer service from government is such a strong concept. Yes, it would be nice if the teller at the DMV was nicer, but the underlying problem is that government’s role in society is to provide things that don’t have a willing seller (quasi-universal free education for children) or don’t have a willing buyer (prisons, driver’s licenses).
I’m not sure that competition for citizens is likely to improve the quality of either of those services. The issue is obvious for coercive government acts, but moral hazard issues would be a serious drain on social services if free migration worked the way Moldbug suggests—I suspect that is one reason why Moldbug explicitly expects some patches to have much lower social services than provided by current governments in the West.
You don’t need to go around looking for flaws in Patchwork. It’s Moldbug’s one big utopian crackpot moment. IMO there’s literally hundreds of reasons (chief among them being how easily humans can be misled by “free-market” manipulation) why most patches would devolve into really ugly, totalizing and rather stable corporate slavery (think singing the Wal-Mart anthem every morning and needing amphetamines just to get ahead), gradually resort to mind control technology, or just stay poor despite the law of comparative advantage because they started out as a collection of outcasts.
OR, in the extremely unlikely event that it all went fine and humanely, it could create so much wealth and peace that the elites would be drawn to Universalism simply as an attractive value/goal system (shaped like the forager mind, not like a ruthlessly efficient machine), and dismantle the borders and such. Or something else. It is really so poorly thought out that it’s not worth criticizing, except as mediocre science fiction.
(of course, given any kind of singularity it’s all rather irrelevant)
“Crackpot moment”? Moldbug might have lucid moments, but Bircher crackpottery is the mainstream of his political writings.
I strongly disagree with this. Also I had to check out what a Bircher is:
That’s ridiculous.
Moldbug doesn’t approve of constitutional republics! ;)