(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How many times must we needlessly repeat this war?
As long as the blind business of extraction - vs evolution - promotes Roll-Up strategies?
For Pete's sake!
Gov is NOT akin to a household, any more than components are akin to a system, or teammates are akin to a team. Scale presents entirely novel options. It IS different to be a whole which is greater than the sum of it's separate parts.
Yet on this point, macro economics teaching is clearly and nearly universally broken.
Do university physics programs teach students that Quantum Mechanics & Relativity are akin to Newton's physics? Of course not!
Yet economics essentially does. It's a rare economist who's learned the simplest aspects of fiat currency operations.
How can anyone moral teach economics without teaching currency operations? By acquiescing to the banking lobby? THAT'S not pedagogy. It's cowardice.
And it's also not ...
For the case of endlessly competing roll-up strategies, it's all a question of who's chasing whom. Rather than running from corruption on a treadmill .....
it's better to be
trampling Luddites, on an ascending spiral.
Every time I think of this general topic,
Joshua Chamberlain's words come to mind.
"We know not of the future and cannot plan for it much. ... But we can ... determine ... what manner of men we will be, whenever and wherever the hour strikes and calls to noble action."
To paraphrase Joshua Chamberlain for today's civil war:
We cannot know what specific contexts the future may bring, and therefore cannot much prepare for them.
We can, however, determine what sort of Adaptive Rates our aggregate can muster when those contexts strike.
To better determine those capabilities, we can practice continuously re-mapping & RE-VISUALIZING all of our emerging cultural processes, so that we can maintain practice at making Rapid Adaptive Transitions throughout our own culture.