centralization

Big Brother is Coming to Healthcare – How Hospitals are Entering Your Credit Card Info Into Algorithms

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Screen Shot 2014-06-28 at 11.23.58 AMThe article below is a great example of the unforeseen dangers of creating gigantic bureaucratic systems into which potentially hundreds of millions of people are forced into involuntarily, i.e., Obamacare.

The moment you create a national system of healthcare is the moment everybody suddenly has this so-called “health responsibility” to everyone else. Which is fascistic and the opposite of freedom. Again, I don’t have an issue with human beings voluntarily organizing into whatever kind of systems they want. This brings me back to this idea that we need to move more toward city-states and decentralization as a means of human organization. If the people of Boulder for example want to have a city-wide healthcare system they devise, great. Let the people decide. If you don’t want to live under that, you can easily move to another city that does it differently. This idea that one healthcare system should be in place for a gigantic, culturally diverse land of 315 million people is childish, inefficient and, for lack of a better word, stupid.

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Networks vs. Hierarchies: Which Will Win? Niall Furguson Weighs In

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Networks are not planned by a single authority; they are the main source of innovation but are relatively fragile. Hierarchies exist primarily because of economies of scale and scope, beginning with the imperative of self-defense. To that end, but for other reasons too, hierarchies seek to exploit the positive externalities of networks. States need networks, for no political hierarchy, no matter how powerful, can plan all the clever things that networks spontaneously generate. But if the hierarchy comes to control the networks so much as to compromise their benign self-organizing capacities, then innovation is bound to wane.

– From Niall Furguson’s recent article Networks and Hierarchies

I’m not always a huge fan of Niall Furguson, but his latest article in The American Interest, simply titled Networks and Hierarchies is worth reading. Readers of Liberty Blitzkrieg will be well aware that I believe the most significant battle of our era is between the forces of Decentralization vs. Centralization. Mr. Furguson takes that battle and looks at it from a historical perspective, describing it as Networks vs. Hierarchies, and posits that indeed much of our collective history has been characterized by the struggle between these two forces. In fact, he starts out the article with the following question:

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