Polystate

Weinersmith, Zach

Much of science fiction has to do with the fact that what is possible often becomes typical. In this way, science fiction often smooths the introduction of new technologies by exploring their meaning, ethics, sanguine visions, and dystopian possibilities in advance of their existence.


The strange thing is that an American is all of those things. So, the geostate called America is a superposition of many institutions — legal, cultural, geographic, and so forth. Why should it be thus? Why should we suppose that a person who likes hot dogs, is familiar with a two-party electoral system, and believes Abraham Lincoln was a great man is necessarily someone who should live in a temperate climate in the Western hemisphere?


I am not the person I was at age 10 — a fact I deduce from the lack of Star Wars posters on my wall. I am not the person I was at 20. In fact, I suspect I would not get along with those people particularly well.


The state is not so different — America is America because it hasn’t stopped being America.


In the year 1800, a New Yorker might have little desire to be taxed for a road in San Francisco. The price of that road is a cost to him with no direct benefit. The more interconnected society becomes, especially in terms of transportation speed and globalized commerce, the more palpable the effect of a crumbling California road becomes to a New Yorker, or perhaps even a Londoner or Parisian.


In the Victorian era, bicycles were spoken of as “annihilating distance.” People and data now travel quite a bit faster


Speed is the exchange rate between distance and time, and the exchange rate is getting more and more favorable.


If 95% of people work poorly in a collectivized environment, any random collectivized farm will perform poorly. But it may be the case that 5% of people would excel in such an environment. By allowing individuals free, available, inexpensive choice of government, generally unpopular forms of existence might prove to be benign or even beneficial to the unusual individuals who choose them.


As Bertrand Russell wrote in The Proposed Roads to Freedom(9), “On every matter that arises, [the people in the Official Caste] know far more than the general public about all the definite facts involved; the one thing they do not know is ‘where the shoe pinches.’ “ The central planning board poses two large costs — one at the level of bureaucracy and/or bargaining, and another at the level of the ill-served consumer.


In a polystate, where change of anthrostate is available on a regular basis, leaving a country would be a simple affair. Therefore, punishing one’s leaders is a simple affair. Consequently, leaders of a government would have more need to please their constituents.


In a geostate, once you are the prime minister of a nation of about 100,000,000 people, you are very likely to end your term as the prime minister of a nation of about 100,000,000 people. That is, your “customer” base cannot change significantly. This is true even under low-quality and generally disliked governance. For example, the population of North Korea has increased every year since the end of the Korean War. One suspects this is despite the fairly tepid immigration numbers.


If an anthrostate is run by corrupt buffoons, but its voluntary citizens are happy with their performance, what business is it to an outsider to critique?


Oscar Wilde wrote “As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.”


That is to say, war has always been hell, but historically many pretty girls have been attracted to a man who just got back from hell.


conceivably there would not be so much a race to the bottom as a race to equilibrium. Indeed, there are many current geostates or states in confederated geostates which lack minimum wage, but which nevertheless have workers who are, on average, paid as well as in comparable states. And, in those states which do have minimum wage, it is rarely more than a small percentage of working people who earn only that much.


Although you might find his life an unhappy one, it is at least voluntary. Voluntary unhappiness seems to me to be a reasonably good descriptor of most people, so I don’t see it as a particular problem for the polystate.


Similar arguments could be made regarding, for example, a system that explicitly finds women inferior. One suspects such a system would, it goes without saying, have trouble attracting many women. Many polls of modern geostates that ask men and women about anti-woman laws regularly find that men and women hold divergent opinions(11). That is, if the choice of home “country” were wide open, sexist societies would have a lot of trouble holding on to women.


It might be argued that if people really wanted wildlife preserves they’d be willing to pony up the money. However, a well-developed sense of ethics and a well-developed stock portfolio are not always tightly correlated.


For example, if one anthrostate has drivers always on the right side of the road and another has drivers always on the left, there would be an increase in accidents. I think it likely that this would not long be a problem. USB cords work in thousands of devices without a governmental authority insisting on it.


if everyone can avoid taxes very easily, including people who are not politically connected, anthrostates would be forced to confront the issue.


When a nation raises a tariff on a good, it is essentially protecting one group of people (those who work with the good or in related areas) at the expense of another group (everyone else). For example, if China wishes to sell cheap tires to Americans, a high tariff on tires protects tire people, but removes the benefit to everyone else of cheap tires.


propaganda is often hard to maintain in the long run. In his memoirs, Siegfried Knappe recalled that even in highly propagandized Nazi Germany, soldiers quickly learned to differentiate victory from defeat because newsreels used the term “heroic” whenever there was a loss.


As C. Northcote Parkinson said, “...it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned.”