[ExI] Power vs. Money

[Stefano Vaj]

On 4 October 2011 05:51, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:

> Many people equate power with money. While it is true that many of the
> most powerful people do have large sums of money, the converse is not
> true.


I would not even be ready to concede so quickly the first part, which is at
best applicable to contemporary western societies, but certainly does not
correspond to any "natural" law. In fact, Nietzsche theorised that a future
could be possible where the ruling class would be "poorer" than its
subjects. Historical examples to this effect also exist.

In the future, the nation state seems doomed to me, because you can't
> govern a global village of highly interconnected individuals with 120
> separate sets of rules. I don't really like that part of the future,
> but it does seem somewhat inevitable. Push it off as far as we can, I
> don't think it will be pushed off indefinitely. The best we can hope
> for is some kind of united states where individual states maintain
> some independent rights, but there is also centralized world wide
> power to police those things that do not have location as a
> significant property.
>

Such a scenario is already described well enough in Huxley's Brave New
World.

As far as dystopias go, however, even Orwell's 1984 shows how a more plural,
albeit rather unpleasant, world could be maintained indefinitely.

So, traditional nation-states as we have known them only for two-three
centuries or less may well be going out of fashion, but political pluralism
and conflicts existed before and might continue existing after their demise.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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