At the same time, politics is heavily driven by technology. Some would say primarily. If the most significant power available at a given era, especially in weapons, requires a huge infrastructure of men to wield—such as old-fashioned, crew-served field guns needing hundreds of men to manufacture and 10 men to move and fire—that tilts the advantage to central government. Same with the gathering of intel.
But as death-dealing force and the ability to gather and use game-changing intel become miniaturized, with an individual man able to cause huge disruption—like an Afghan soldier in the 1980s shooting down a Soviet helo with a stinger, or one NSA geek who decides to download the regime's secrets and leak them—the advantage moves to the individual (all the way to chaos, sometimes).
The politics of the centralizers attempt to starve out innovation by penalizing it and keeping capital from reaching unauthorized innovators such as entrepreneurs—so the central government can have a monopoly on force and information. That's North Korea and NSA. In our day, the culture of disparate entities like CATO Institute, the Occu-tards, the Catholic Church, and Internet geeks pushes toward the individual. The question is whether the borders of the world turn out to be so porous that the Snowdens and 3-D printers and fly-sized aircraft in our era pull the rug out from under the centralizers.
As Rees-Mogg and Davidson observe (in The Great Reckoning), the landscape of history is a see-saw between centralized vs. individualized power, driven significantly by the developments in technology. They were actually citing someone else's work in this thesis—I forget who. Both extreme central government and its opposite, the world of Mad Max, are quite unpleasant to inhabit.
At the same time, politics is heavily driven by technology ...
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Nice commentary. Keep it up. We need a little more analytic depth around here. Sometimes I just skip over the one-liner responses and just read those that actually have something to say that might be worth reading.
Of course I state all of this in a sentence or two.