Throne, Altar, and freehold

I have argued for Throne and Altar before:

Throne because a stationary bandit is better than a mobile bandit; Altar because we have to shut down open entry into the state religion: Harvard needs an Archbishop and a Grand Inquisitor to stop America’s officially unofficial state religion from holiness spiraling out of control into ever greater holiness.

But throne and altar has been tried, and has failed. How did it fail? The answer is, failed because of loss of freehold.

Freehold means that the peasant in his hovel possesses Kingly power under his hovel’s roof, which Kingly power the King has no right to mess with, even if the peasant abuses it.

That profits supposedly lead to increased investment and ensuing improvements in the standard of living assumes that investment is relatively frictionless. In practice, however, you need a thousand approvals from Washington, and the Washington bureaucracy has, Soviet style, strangled itself in its own red tape as a result of its efforts to manage everything and everyone, and is no longer issuing approvals in a timely manner.

The great centralization has been driven by the centralization of approvals. But this inevitably results in complexity getting out of control, because every decision has unintended consequences, which are dealt with by further ad hoc and often illegal decisions (as for example Obama taking legislative, budgetary, and judicial authority over Obamacare as Obamacare goes off the rails and starts driving into a ditch) which in turn have further unintended consequences, which leads to further centralization and further ad hoc decisions.

This this uncontrollable and unmanageable complexity led to the King losing control of his bureaucrats, hence the American and French Revolutions,

He [King George] has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.

But they did not abolish those New Offices, but instead created immensely more. So now the top bureaucrats are losing control, and you get anarcho tyranny.

Obviously a stationary bandit is better than a mobile bandit, and one might well conclude from this that the more absolute the King the better, that if he owns everything and everyone, he will have correct incentives. But the trouble with this solution is that no one rules alone. If he attempts to own everything and everyone, he claims more power than mortal man can exercise, and the power will slide through his fingers into the hands of a faceless horde of bureaucrats around the throne, who say “Yes your highness” while actually getting their own way, who endanger him and his heirs, and you get anarcho tyranny.

Too much power results in paralyzing complexity, resulting in insecure power. Hence anarcho tyranny.

So, he has to let some of this power be the personal property of people far from the throne – including the dangerously great aristocrats who gave King Louis XIV so much grief. When King Louis XIV disempowered the nobility of the sword, he found he had empowered the nobility of the robe, who devoured the monarchy. The further this power is from the throne, and the more it is the personal property of more numerous and less powerful individuals, the less dangerous it is for the throne. One great magnate, or half a dozen great magnates, is, as King Louis XIV found, a problem. A hundred or a million, not such a problem. The cure for the problems with aristocracy that King Louis XIV encountered was decentralization, but instead he chose centralization, which had fatal consequences for Louis XVI and his wife.

Instead of governors failing to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, low level bureacrats are failing to give approvals of immediate and pressing importance, and senior bureaucrats are utterly neglecting to attend to them.

This is the crisis of socialism. In Venezuela socialism takes the form of rationing and price and wage control, here it takes the form of Human Resources and Accounting, which are tentacles of the state inserted into every corporation, and the mere owners of the business are powerless before them, because they armed with laws that no one can comply with, that everyone is guilty of breaking, as fathers and husbands are castrated by family law that defines being a husband and a father as domestic abuse. Thus those that provide the capital have no power, those responsible for making payroll have no power, those that are responsible for closing deals with customers have no power, those responsible for delivering product to customers have no power, because all of them are criminals before the power of human resources and accounting, just as all fathers and husbands are guilty of domestic abuse.

And the ensuing crisis of socialism is paralyzing Washington, as two centuries ago it paralyzed Kings.

The Sun King had troubles with powerful aristocrats dangerously far from the palace, the nobility of the sword. So he centralized all power and emasculated aristocrats, turning them into bureaucrats, the nobility of the Robe, but as his heir was to discover, he had created dangerously powerful bureaucrats dangerously close to the palace. That was the crisis of socialism then, and it still getting worse, hence the great centralization.

No one rules alone, thus when the King attempts to gather all power in his own hands, he finds he has in fact gathered all power into the hands of dangerous powerful people dangerously close the throne. To fix this problem, the official Church need to remind the people that the God who commanded obedience to Kings, also commanded that Kings, like other men, should refrain from coveting that which belongs to someone else.

Repeating: Freehold means that the peasant in his hovel possesses Kingly power under his hovel’s roof, which Kingly power the King has no right to mess with, even if the peasant abuses it. That power is not the King’s to interfere with, even if the peasant is arguably mistreating his wife and his children. If the lord stops that peasant from mistreating his wife and children, pretty soon King George the Fourth gets cuckolded, as he cuckolded others.

The government cripples the power of the patriarch which has the side benefit that King George the fourth can get away with cuckolding and humiliating some aristocrat by screwing that aristocrat’s wife, but the courts quietly take his power away from him without anyone quite noticing, and the next thing he knows he himself is humiliated by inability to divorce or control the slut Queen Caroline, which humiliation turns him into a shadow King without real power, and his government then pisses on him, as he pissed on the aristocrats on whose power he depended.

King George the third had real power. When he told the Prime Minister William Pitt the younger to take long walk off a short pier, the King got his way and William Pitt lost his job. But when King George the Fourth failed to divorce queen Caroline, in the process letting everyone know he was massively cuckolded, the power of Kings was no more. It was often said that it had been a very long time since a King refused assent to a parliamentary bill, but is just Whig history, Whigs rewriting history to claim that they have always been in power. The reason that it had been a very long time is because until the refusal of the divorce of queen Caroline, parliament would never dare pass a bill of which the King disapproved, though they would sometimes refuse to pass a bill the King wanted. Whigs have been in power in America from the American revolution to the present, and in England from the attempted divorce of Queen Caroline to the present. Dating Whig power to the Glorious Revolution is a Whig rewrite of history. After the Glorious Revolution, the new King did a number on those that had overthrown the old King, with the result that Locke and the Lockeans fled into exile, and that lesson was taken to heart. The Lockeans fled, and their power did not return until Parliament denied the divorce of Queen Caroline.

Charles the first lost his head, but George the Fourth lost his stature of a man, which was more devastating to the power of Kings. If he could not control his women, obviously could not control anyone.

Centralization leads to complexity, complexity leads to crisis, attempts to fix the crisis have, because of complexity, unintended consequences, which escalate into further crisis, leading to further centralization, Hence Soviet Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Venezuela, and now America.

This is the crisis of socialism, explained in “I pencil”, which makes the point that no one actually knows how to make a pencil, hence socialist production of pencils will fail.

In order to manage complexity, you need walls, so that one man can make decisions without having his decisions mucked up by another man’s decisions. Hence, private property and local authority, the authority of the father, the authority the business owner, the authority of the CEO. And, not so long ago, the authority of the local aristocrat, who tended to be a high officer in the local militia, a major employer and landowner, and related by blood or marriage to most of the other high officers in the local militia.

Ideally all the consequences of a decision should be contained within those walls. Of course they never are, but if you try to manage all the externalities, things very quickly slide of control. Every attempt to manage the externalities has unexpected consequences, and attempts to deal with the unexpected consequences have additional unexpected consequences, because trying to control matters that have externalities connects everything to everything else, resulting in a tangle beyond human comprehension.

This, the management of complexity, is the central problem of software engineering at the higher levels, and the higher level software engineers have found solutions, but in politics, the solutions collide with who/whom, since any solution to complexity always takes power away from someone, and gives it to someone else. Further, any solution to complexity is going to take power away from the man who is supposed to be dealing with it, and who is failing to deal with it – going to take power away from the courts, the bureaucracy, from accounting, and from Human Resources.

Abusive fathers exist, but they are rare, because of fatherly affection, and fatherly knowledge of the particular circumstances of his family. Abusive family courts are absolutely normal. And now the same crisis is replicating with accounting and human resources, manifesting in Washington as decisions being pushed up to higher and higher levels, with the highest levels being overwhelmed, as King George was overwhelmed, resulting in the American Revolution.

Even if we suppose that child support and the family court does a better job that fathers, which is not the case, the courts are a threat to the power of the throne, and the patriarch is not a threat to the power of the throne. Undermining the power of the patriarch undermines the power of the ruler, giving us mobile bandits in place of stationary bandits. The emperor is in charge of the nation only if the patriarch is in charge of his family. If the patriarch is not in charge of his family, power will slide into the hands of bureaucrats too numerous for the emperor to keep track of, and too close to the throne to be safe. If King George the Fourth had been able to give that filthy slut Queen Caroline a good whipping and lock her up in the palace, chances are England would still be ruled by Kings. It certainly would have been ruled by Kings a good deal longer than it was. And in a society where he could do that, chances are that he would have found it considerably more difficult to sleep with other men’s wives, short of employing the measures employed by King David.

If you give up on coherent, coordinated, centralized control, and resource constraints are not an issue, then you could break up your problems among many of these boss-pyramids, but which requires one to accept the risk of independent ‘fiefdoms’ which could conflict, and anyone at the top only having reactive instead of predictive / proactive ability to resolve problems before they manifest in big issues or crises.

In practice, this is how the United States Government actually copes with the issue. The easiest way to end a war is to surrender, and the easiest way to deal with an unmanageable design is by not managing it, and letting permanent civil servants who spend their lives accumulating institutional and organization capital stay spun-up on everything to the human limits, and given very wide berth when it comes to effective levels of discretion in policy. What management flows from the top is precisely the output of the triage of strategic political priorities.

Surrender was the death of the Czars.

Software engineering, at the higher levels, (not mere programming) is the science of managing immense complexity and detail: And the well known solution is loose coupling, minimize variables of global scope, and especially mutable variables of global scope. Otherwise large systems develop out of control complexity, which is what is happening now to the federal government. Socialism is tight coupling at global scope, as for example Obamacare, Sarbanes Oxley, and Human Resources.

Tight coupling at global scope makes it impossible to control the top bureaucracy, as well as making it impossible for the top bureaucracy to control the mid bureaucracy. The King and president become powerless, hence the recent overthrow of Kings and the looming overthrow of any president that declines to be a puppet, and the citizens are victimized by anarcho tyranny.

Translating the software solution to the political sphere, this is a program of King, Altar, and freehold. Legislators get to legislate, rather than one million anonymous judges and bureaucrats, or better, laws are few enough and simple enough that the King can himself alone legislate. Recollect that the American colonists complained about his inability to do so. They wanted more laws, and boy did they ever get them.

Altar should mean that scientists have to settle their disputes by evidence, rather than by incorporating them into the state religion, because only the archbishop gets to say what the state religion is, and if scientists and professors engage in theological innovation, the inquisition should go after them. Peer review is generating official truth by consensus, which is theology, not science. Theologians are dangerous the state and need to be kept under tight state control, because they are apt to discover that they are holier than those that presently have power. If scientists get into theology, the consequences should be dire. The state needs to treat peer review by scientists in quasi state jobs as treason and heresy. If the conclusions of peer review seem superficially politically neutral, the scientists should lose their quasi statal jobs. If the conclusions of peer review imply that the scientists are holy and those in political power need to be holier, as the conclusions of peer review tend to do, as for example with animal fat, pollution, and global warming, the scientists should lose their heads. Scientists should not meet behind closed doors and generate conclusions on the basis of consensus and secret and anonymous evidence. When they do so, it destroys science for politics and endangers the state. That which endangers the state leads to insecure governance, resulting in rulers behaving more like mobile bandits and less like stationary bandits.

Recollect that the anti animal fat scientists, and global warming scientists, did not win the discussion by providing evidence and argument, but by having their beliefs officially incorporated into the official state religion.

The center needs to be stronger, much stronger, hence the neoreactionary demand for throne and altar, for a King, an Archbishop, and a Grand Inquisitor, but it can only be stronger if it abandons efforts to control more than a single man, or a small group of men, is capable of controlling. Freehold is the center giving up attempts to control stuff that it is unlikely to be able to successfully control – for example the family and accountancy.

If the King attempts to prevent the father, the businessman, the property owner, and suchlike from doing every bad thing that they might do, from doing all manner of bad things that a wise and good ruler should prevent and forbid, he finds he has not taken their power to himself, but rather granted power to a vast bureaucracy, dangerous to everyone, especially to himself, whose impossibly complicated activities make it impossible for him to control, impossible for anyone to control, impossible for the bureaucrats themselves to control. How many lives has the family court ruined with its ham fisted, brutal, unpredictable, and capricious exercise of power over people of whom they know nothing, and for whom they care nothing?

The ruler needs to accept that some of his subjects are entitled by right to do bad things, are privileged, have a property right, freehold, to do bad things, which he may not rightfully interfere with, that not every wrong has a proper political remedy, for if he starts interfering in matters complicated, numerous, and detailed, he finds he has empowered an incomprehensibly complicated and dangerous apparatus, dangerously close to the throne. Hence the family courts, the Khmer Rouge autogenocide, Obamacare, the Holodomor, Sarbanes-Oxley, and Venezuela.

Pol Pot had an entirely sound rationale for the Cambodian autogenocide. Most production in Cambodia was rice production on a flood plain. Thus one peasant’s ditching and diking to grow his crop tended to have a large externality on downstream peasants. Therefore, obviously all that ditching and diking needed to be done by a central plan. America’s finest academics agreed enthusiastically with this moderate agrarian reformer, and I still from time to time see this presented as an irrefutable killer argument against the authority and power of the private landowner to farm as he sees fit, by people unaware that they are paraphrasing an academic endorsement of Pol Pot. But somehow, strangely, this moderate agrarian reform by this moderate agrarian reformer did not turn out well. Nor has any other instance of socialism turned out well, though most are less disastrous than the Cambodian autogenocide, but people keep trying. The Cambodian autogenocide was exceptionally bad because bad planning combined with the left wing singularity. It was impermissible to notice that the plan was bad, therefore any bad outcomes had to be the result of treason and sabotage. And the search for traitors and sabotage ensued, while the total failure of the rice crop led to mass starvation that no one was allowed to notice. The same thing happens to some extent with every socialist intervention. Thus bad outcomes from child support and the family court system do not happen and at the same time also are the result of domestic abuse by husbands and fathers, requiring even stronger measures against abusers and deadbeat dads, which measures become ever stronger, as the ensuing outcomes become ever worse. These bad outcomes cannot possibly be the result of courts capriciously intervening in families of whom they know nothing and exercising powers over husbands and fathers that we would not accept them exercising over murderers? Similarly, any bad outcomes from Sarbanes Oxley are obviously the result of greedy businessmen engaged in fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion? If the government ever really got serious about making Sarbanes-Oxley work, most of the businessmen and their executives would be in jail, and, like Pol Pot’s plan to dramatically increase Cambodian rice production, it still would not work.

Power needs to be transferred back to patriarchs, even if some patriarchs abuse the power horrifyingly, for the family court and the ever growing collection of family services are doing a job that is increasingly horrifying in its evil and incompetence. And even if they were doing a fine job, their predecessors screwed King George and will screw whoever is nominally in power, with the result that we get ruled by mobile bandits rather than a stationary bandit.

The problem is that it seems to be increasingly impossible for key executive officers to delegate certain aspects of review and analysis. Even elite performers can only do so much in a day, and so, when divide and conquer fails to be a feasible approach, it creates a fundamental human bandwidth bottleneck with regards to scale and scope for any particular headquarters-level office.

The way this problem is coped with now in Washington seems to be, well, egregious delay. That is, the systems of prioritization and accountability for deadlines completely break down, and the senior officers end up constantly putting out the most immediate fires from the most senior and most angry counter-parties delivered outside the normal system conduits, and let everything else “for later”, that is, until they become anger-inducing fires too, or, hopefully, just go away (or are approved for inadequate ‘resolution’).

The end result being chaos and disorder: It’s easy to observe that high level staff are personally handling matters which ought to be below their pay grades

Yes, it would be great if everyone just got twice as much money and twice as many personnel, but the bottlenecks and key officer human-bandwidth limitations would still be there.

Been there, done that (in software engineering, not in running a country).

We have a saying in the software business: “Adding more people to a late project makes it later”

With the end result that the project with its newly bloated staff gets declared finished and pushed out the door in completely broken condition, like Obamacare and every Soviet four year plan.

We also know the solutions, which I have successfully applied.

Unfortunately, applying these solutions in politics, rather than code, runs directly into who/whom. Instead of saying “You cannot access these variables because they are out of your scope” and expect the compiler and source control to enforce that, you have to say “You have to respect Joe’s authority over his own domain, even though there are externalities so that what he does hurts other people”

To manage complexity, it has to be broken up into smaller bits, with walls between the bits, so that one man can plan and organize without his plans being fouled by another man’s plans (and it always is men, women are great at detail, but when the plans get larger, they get lost in detail). In software, these walls manifest as restrictions on one’s access to private variables, typically no access or read only access to immutable values, shared nothing message based multiprocessing, Google’s protobuffs, Git’s immutable versions, Rust’s temporal variable scope, and suchlike. Google’s protobuffs are a metaphorical door in a metaphorical wall with a metaphorical security man checking visitors in and out. When it comes to politics, rather than software, these walls manifest as actual walls, also as actual security men with actual clubs, stun guns, and actual guns, guard dogs trained to attack strangers on private property without waiting for human permission, not to mention walls in the less visible and physical form of power and privilege.

The guard dogs are not producing anything directly, so to the good progressive bureaucrat they look like a net loss of utility, inflicting harm on poor people to benefit rich people, but what they are doing is subdividing the problem of production and consumption into smaller and manageable pieces, making it possible to plan and organize.

The guard dogs are keeping the problem of social cooperation and collective action down to something human minds can manage.

When you restrict homeowners from shooting burglars, suddenly and strangely, your administrative apparatus grows out of control.

You take down Chesterton’s fence, and everything starts interacting with everything else, resulting in unmanageable complexity. One ad hoc solution to one problem causes a dozen other problems, and the ad hoc solutions to those problems cause several dozen more.

And you wind up shipping completely broken software, and Venezuela winds up starving the masses as a result of their efforts to guarantee the masses food.

To make complexity manageable, you need walls, metaphorical walls like Chesterton’s fence, which are apt to manifest as actual physical walls, which break big problems of organization into smaller problems of organization, problems small enough for the privileged man in possession (and it is always a man, and usually a white man) to comprehend and deal with. These metaphorical walls hurt people, and their purpose is not obvious. What is the harm in taking them down, in order to feed the hungry and heal the sick, rather than siccing savage guard dogs onto the hungry, the weak, and the frail?

Well, Venezuela shows you what the harm is.

If you want Ann Coulter to be able to buy health insurance, a doctor needs to be able to sic a savage guard dog onto an hiv positive gay drug addict with multiple stab wounds, who is seeking urgent medical care but has no money to pay for it because he blew all his money and assets on drugs: Because if you try to make sure the broke hiv positive gay drug addict with multiple stab wounds gets medical care, you wind up with a labyrinthine, complicated, and out of control bureaucracy telling the doctor whom to treat and how to treat him, and somehow, strangely, neither Ann Coulter nor the hiv positive drug addict gets actually useful medical care.

What we are today seeing in Washington is a generalization of what happened with Obamacare and Venezuela. Everything that is causing people to starve in Venezuela and be deprived of medical care in the USA was done to feed people in Venezuela and give them medical care in the USA.

And any attempt to back out of it is quite correctly and entirely accurately denounced as likely to cause people to starve in Venezuela and cause people to be deprived of medical care in the USA.

The reason for this seeming paradox is that urgent ad hoc measures to achieve highly desirable and beneficial ends cause tight coupling between components, tight coupling makes the system complex beyond human comprehension, resulting in unpredictable and unexpected outcomes, unintended consequences, resulting further urgent ad hoc measures.

In the case of Obamacare, the chaos and disorder is causing people to go without medical care, in the case of Venezuela, to go without food or basic medicine. And any attempt to restore order involves restoring privilege and authority at the expense of feeding people or giving them medical care.

For example, if you want people to have food in Venezuela, you have to stop worrying about the rights of hungry people, and start worrying about the rights of bakers, farmers, businessmen, and merchants. Similarly the problem of violence in American schools. Time to start worrying about the rights of fathers, the lack of strong men in education, and the excessive presence of young filthy sluts and disgracefully aging cat ladies in education. Fixing the problem involves removing state interventions that were intended to fix, and do in fact fix, entirely genuine and important problems – albeit these problems were in large part caused by earlier state interventions also intended to fix entirely genuine and important problems.

Decoupling in the social order, much like decoupling in software, involves privileges and restrictions. You have to restrict some parts of the code from doing things, in order that other parts of the code are able to do their stuff with predictable consequences, and in the social order these privileges tend to fall upon affluent white males, while the restrictions tend to fall upon women, especially single women, children, and NAMs. In Venezuela, the privileges will fall upon those least likely to be hungry, and the restrictions upon those most likely to be hungry. Which those most hungry will resent, failing to connect these measures with the counter intuitive outcome that when they are applied, the shops mysteriously and coincidentally have food on the shelves for a change.

Order means that people can reason about the consequences of their actions – which they cannot do if a large part of the consequences are how any one of ten thousand meddlesome bureaucrats might potentially respond.

This is the crisis of socialism. In Venezuela socialism takes the form of rationing and price and wage control, here it takes the form of Human Resources and Accounting, which are tentacles of the state inserted into every corporation, and the mere owners of the business are powerless before them, because they armed with laws that no one can comply with, that everyone is guilty of breaking, as fathers and husbands are castrated by family law that defines being a husband and a father as domestic abuse. Thus those that provide the capital have no power, those responsible for making payroll have no power, those that are responsible for closing deals with customers have no power, those responsible for delivering product to customers have no power, because all of them are criminals before the power of human resources and accounting, just as all fathers and husbands are guilty of domestic abuse.

And the ensuing crisis of socialism is paralyzing Washington, as two centuries ago it paralyzed Kings.

The Sun King had troubles with powerful aristocrats dangerously far from the palace, the nobility of the sword. So he centralized all power and emasculated aristocrats, turning them into bureaucrats, the nobility of the Robe, but as his heir was to discover, he had created dangerously powerful bureaucrats dangerously close to the palace. That was the crisis of socialism then, and it still getting worse, hence the great centralization.

Cannot delegate, because delegation assumes decoupling of the components. If Pharaoh allows the Israelites to not make bricks because straw has failed to arrive, then he is going to have to allow the intended recipients of the bricks to not build. Of course in due course the building falls down, but before it falls down Pharaoh has more urgent fires to fight.

It is spaghetti code – if you add more programmers to the team, they will subtract from the productivity of the other programmers, not add to their productivity. And if the lead engineer delegates, he will get less done, because of the ensuing fires he has to put out.

If you have ever tried to hit a late deadline by adding more people to the team, this should be entirely familiar to you.

The problem of spaghetti code, and the problem of parallel processing, is the same problem as socialism. If Pharaoh delegates the straw issue to Moses, he shortly thereafter finds the scroll of Ipuwer in his intray, detailing a dozen more crises each more serious than the one he delegated to Moses, because Moses broke a dozen other modules in the course of fixing the module he was assigned.

And, in trying to administer a state, rather than organize code, not only hard to structure it that way, but such structuring is bound to step on the toes of the low part of the high/low coalition, because that is the part that creates disorder and fails to create order. In the computer language Rust, you have restrictions on what you can do with variables that were created in a different context, which is mighty handy for the engineer who is responsible for that context. He knows the other engineer cannot screw his code. In the social order, the equivalent is denying fatherless children access to food and medical care. Which means the patriarch knows that his wife and her social worker cannot screw his family.

We see collapse of decision making in the federal bureaucracy, with everything being pushed up to the highest level when someone sufficiently powerful gets sufficiently angry, and everything else sitting in the too hard queue and not getting done. The federal government is becoming severely dysfunctional, as it takes on responsibility for everything everywhere in the entire world and attempts to regulate every person’s every action.

The initial seed of Silicon Valley was Shockley. Every transistor everywhere in the world is built by an engineer who learned it from an engineer who learned from an engineer who learned it from Shockley. Hence Fairchild and fairchildren. That is why they call it Silicon Valley, because the fairchildren worked in silicon.

But as those engineers spread over the world, the underlying natural technological force was decentralization, not centralization. From 1980 onwards, Silicon Valley was no longer running on Shockley and the fairchildren, but running on the Silicon Valley exemption, that Silicon Valley was allowed to practice meritocracy that was being suppressed in the rest of America.

Then, quite recently, the Silicon Valley exemption began to evaporate. Today, Silicon Valley runs on Sarbanes Oxley. Due to Sarbanes Oxley, the only way to cash out your startup is to sell it to Google or suchlike. Hence the great centralization.

Sarbanes Oxley makes every accounting department into a tentacle of the state, hence centralization. Which has the unfortunate side effect of abolishing actual accounting in favor of bureaucratic ass sniffing.

The Silicon Valley network is not a network of people who can optimize Google’s ad revenue by 0.0001%

The Silicon Valley network is a network of venture capitalists who can sell startups to Google and suchlike. Which means that their business is making startup economic activities Sarbanes Oxley legal. The business of Silicon Valley used to be silicon. Today, however, the business of Silicon Valley is making startups Human Resources and Sarbanes Oxley compliant.

Kings fell from a little bit of socialism, and democracy is falling because it inexorably leads to even more socialism.

The state must be one, but society must be many. You need many independent actors to operate the economy, but the state must be one actor, and must restrict itself to things where only one actor can operate.

Further, in matters where that actor can operate in a geographically limited scope, the state needs to grant local power, even if it is likely to mean local oppression (King, God, and Freehold)

The presidency has grasped such immense power that it is paralyzed and impotent, powerless because far too powerful.