Can government be "outgrown"?

There are many wishes but with little chance of them ever materialising.We formed governments good or bad as a defence mechanism.You could create your utopia but if your neighbour wants your orchard you need to defend it.Can you defend it on your own? We may not want authority but we cant do without it.
As for the monetary system, its bankrupt because it does not represent true wealth.A piece of gold was worth X chickens now its a bankers note, rolled up and used as toilet paper not worth the .... its wiped on..

Do you refer to the centralized federal monetary system or are you talking about money in general?

The problems are the same: Even in the poorest forms of government which are all rule by one group over another, there is the element common to all forms, of the relationship... Without trust there can be no relationship, so even the poorest forms of goverment have some honor, which makes trust possible, and our majority rule makes a great show of honor; but where money is dear, honor is cheap; so if the people can find a way to enforce some honor, or restrict the corrosive power of money they have some hope of keeping their form from self destruction... Democracy as a natural form dies when honor dies, usually when wealth comes into the picture... The key to good government is to keep money out of it; but that is also the key to a virtuous society...We have to realize that much injury and death comes out of honor economies as well; but people are more able to show restraint, in my op...The Spartans used pickled iron as their money, which made it all but unseless...Others said of them that they were easily corrupted with gold... Who knows...It is obvious that wealth has destroyed many societies, because it is never uniform, and so it divides the society against itself..

Yea, likely so. I've just always had this idea that where and when barter can be used; it'd be so much nicer. And yea, this would be only correlative to the whole issue of surviving without government.

That was the first practical non-utopian piece of a solution any one of us have given so far.

Cheers,
Russ

All economies involve an exchange of values... Our problem is not so much the method; but that we equate wealth with honor...In honor economies it was often honor that made men poor... A great hunter fed many, and many sang his praises...In a democracy, equality is the highest value, because in those societies no one had the ability to guard or carry wealth; and they recognized the life of ones people, and their culture was the treasure no one could live without... We take life and security for granted just as we presume of wealth that it was arrived at honorably...It is a mistake... Divided societies always fail...The more one group tries to make its existence secure, the more it makes condition across society insecure, and that is a quality every person needs enough of...

it is not that we cannot use money to hold a value; but it is way too easy in our society to manipulate the value of money to the disadvantage of the majority... Inflation robs... Control of the money supply allow robbery... Forcing the government to tax the poor so the rich can have more free and clear is robbery...The government is the enemy of the people...

Equating wealth with honor? This might be better served in a new thread, but would you mind expounding? I'm genuinely curious

Thanks

Just because I recognize it as fact does not mean I have done any sort of detailed study of the phenomenon... The Protestants give a blessing to wealth, believing the ability to make profits and store up wealth is preordained, just as is salvation... The Jews seem very much to accept the notion of tangible justification, that God reveals to all who is blessed- with wealth or some other material success... I don't think that was what Jesus was saying, but rather, that the rich have the reward they are going to get...If he said that all are blessed, and the sermon on the mount leaves out very few, then we must be blessed with life, what all share, which is the only opportunity anyone has of showing their fellow humans or God as the case may be that they are truly justified...

The thing is; an economy is just a form...If it does not work it can be reformed...The rules have been changed in our society to allow for a great accumulaton of wealth, and this, in turn has corrupted the government faster and further than the founders imagined...These rules could be changed, essentially so that wealth in time would return to the commonwealth, and so that everyone would know that those with wealth really were worthy, and did not just happen to be born with no talent and lots of money...

With money a sign of honor, people want the wealth and care nothing for real honor...But that situation means that people with real talent, creativity, and intelligence must struggle to find a chink in a towering wall... There are drug dealers with skill sufficient to be tycoons, and there are people who can strip cars in record time that should be able to manage any timed task with ability...For the poor looking up, all they see is that poverty is dishonorable, and that escaping poverty no one asks where one got wealth, or how one came by money... So the morality of a whole nation is destroyed because of rot demonstrated at the top and spread to all levels... The Catholics are right; that there is a just profit... There are also just methods of conceiving of private property so it can do the maximum of good for a society with the least part of harm... We should never assume honor, but say that out of honor comes goodness, virtue; and if it does not, then realize we are dealing with a different quality...

The latter. Yes, I believe that one day it will be possible to outgrow the monetary system.

Why would we want to?

Other than the fact that it creates many of the societal problems that we scorn - advances in robotics, automation and computation and its affects on employment and consumption will necessitate a new socio-economic system to replace the one we have now.

---------- Post added at 05:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:07 PM ----------



I believe that this is a response to my comment, but for some reason I didn't get the notice in my email. Maybe you didn't reply directly.

I am not proposing a utopia. I don't think that everything will be perfect if we get rid of the monetary system, but things would be a lot better.

If all goods and services are provided by the community and therefore free of charge, why would your neighbor want to steal from you? People steal because goods and services are not provided equally.

Fido,

Thanks for the clarification, I see the context you're coming from.

You did not ask me the question, but a system is a unit... We can see this with a circulatory system where the system remains the same... Our monatary system is not a system... Money can be made cheap for the rich and dear for the poor...If they do not want to tax the rich, which is usually themselves or their friends, then they can increase the size of the system by debasing the currency, and again, this robs from everyone who cannot compensate by raising their prices...Money is a commodity too, though that aspect of it should be diminished... When property supported the government, property was cheap and the labor necessary to make it profitable was expensive... The pressure of taxes forced its price down, so people could buy it with a promise...With taxes on wages, every person has to work for profit, and work for taxes for the opportunity to work for wages...With everyone working harder, wages are driven down... Money is scarce for the worker, but the profiteers can get their money cheap, and to get ahead, or to make up for short wages, workers borrow, and that is a third drain on the wealth of the worker, paying interest, which when practiced out of necessity by the whole working class means an absolute transfere of wealth to the rich...Let me offer some statistics...I just heard them during the last election, so they should be current, even if I cannot verify them... Only twenty percent of our economy is the result of actual productive employment, and that accounts for 90% of our exports...Eighty percent of our economy is service industry jobs...I assume that finance is considered a service since it is not productive....And finance accounts for 90% of the profits in this land.... So they are getting the lions share of everything, for sitting on their butts, and loaning money they get cheap from the government...Does that make sense???

Yes. Especially with the access to information and communication available today, and to come. You must realize that liberty is the mother, not the daughter of order. Government is simply a legal monopoly on force, the well connected minority imposing its will on the majority, in the majorities name. Some say humans are too corrupt and self centered to self govern. The solution from these same people to combat this corruptable self-centered nature is to concentrate power to a select few people and institutions. The level of cognitive dissonance necessary for this thought process is impressive. So, back to your question, can we someday manage to build roads, help those in need, defend lives and property, educate children, upkeep museums and parks, and fly to Mars without appointing a monopoly to point guns at people and threaten them with robbery, force, kidnapping, inprisonment, and death if they resist? I believe we can do much better than that.

From where did you took the idea governments govern anything other then symbols ?

We are governed by dicks stomachs and similar wants and needs...

Large societies cannot survive (even if composed of ubermenchen) without some degree of "government". Small bands of hunters and gatherers (based on families) and even some tribes (based on lineages) survive without formal leaders/office holders (i.e., government), but once they evolve to the point of forming chiefdoms you have GOVERNMENT (with formal offices). Kingdoms ("super chiefdoms") and states (sometimes legally based "superkingdoms") take on an organizational/structural life of their own.

...yes the symbolic powers do work do have a place and a relative importance...they work by example and that's precisely why they are symbolic powers...in turn there are effective forces of nature that rule our lives on a much deeper deeper level...true power is invisible in the measure that it is unquestionable...like breathing !

It is fascinating that in 3 pages of responses ...not one person has asked - if we didn't have governments, then how would :

- roads would get built / planned for
- city facilities would be built / planned for
- any other form of public works would be planned for and done
- air traffic / safety would be regulated
- land title records would be kept (if you wonder what the most common cause of neighbour dispute is - look no further than the humble dividing fence)
- fish stocks would be preserved
- rivers would be preserved (and any form of precious environment)
- natural disasters would be responded to (there's no money in cleaning up for people who can't pay you)
- you pay for the defense forces (are you really going to let private enterprise run your armies?)

...and that just scratches the surface.

I agree. It seems to me that the ideal is self-government. After all, politicians are chosen by the people, from among the people. At least, that used to be the case, though it may be that capitalistic forces make politics more or less irrelevant.

I don't think we can "outgrow" government. But I think we can outgrow our current ideas about it.
Technologically, we are at a point where it could be possible to create a system in which everyone voted on the things they care about. No representatives and no lobbying.
This would require that a lot of people actually care enough to participate, but then again, even the perfect system will fall apart if people don't care.

This is an interesting idea although it can raise concern.
Should all the votes in different fields of legislation be worth the same ?
Should the vote of say a Biologist be worth the same in a matter of Biology then the vote of a non specialist in the field ?
How would people vote in a multitude of complex issues and be informed about them all ? Isn't that the reason why we have specialists in every area ?
Perhaps a middle term would be to confine the voting pools to all specialists in the field in each situation but not open it to everybody...what you think ? it still is a cloud solution and it seams to look robust in terms of guaranteeing wise decision making...I think to some extent we work this way already, as governments have become more and more dependent on large clouds of specialists to make decisions...they sign the paper work and are the public face of decisions but they aren't the ones deciding...