But, I do agree with Peter Thiel fervently: the main problems are not of freedom and liberty, but a lack of technological innovation which is an apolitical assertion. Thiel himself stated that the voters and the government are not even aware of these problems, and he doubts that the government can do much (and I agree with him and everyone here on this.) My believe is that most people would see capitalism as intolerable in a stagnant world (Peter Thiel said this in the interview.) I guess it is just my view though.

I also said this about socialism:
“Damn, I love socialism, but I realize that it is politically impossible because “Robbing Stefan to pay Sven” works while “Robbing Peter to pay Pablo” doesn’t.”

I would suggest anybody reads John V Denson’s books, and also Murray Rothbard’s book on the great depression.

It’s a neat trick to sneak the premise of a zero-sum, no-growth world into the debate and then use that to prop up social democracy. But where does the decay in the rate of innovation and technological development come from? It doesn’t make sense to posit that it just happens “out of thin air.”

We can very easily compare now (a period, I would agree, of fairly slow technological growth) with periods of more rapid development (e.g. the nineteenth century) and posit that perhaps part of what helped creativity to flourish in that time was the system of laissez faire itself, which provided for the highest possible levels of individual self-realization, with fairly little or no obligations to or benefits from the community, other than what each individual saw fit to voluntarily pursue, in a spirit of cooperation rather than coercion.

I don’t need to “fantasize” about the things you listed because they DID exist then (aside from “obliteration of unions” … workers were free to organize and employers were free to fire them and find replacements, if they could) and technology DID develop faster.

Even my argument perhaps doesn’t trace all this back to its root cause; a socionomist would say that both technological development and political liberty peaked in the nineteenth century because the social mood trend was at its most powerfully positive. As that positive trend has waned in the twentieth century, concern has shifted from obtaining power over nature to obtaining power over other human beings, hence the decline in both the rate of technological development and the increasing encroachment of the state into what used to properly be considered an individual’s affairs.

Even in a zero sum world (a premise I steadfastly refuse to grant) I don’t see why social democracy would make more sense. Your argument above seems to be “libertarianism won’t solve all problems, therefore we should go with social democracy, even though that won’t solve all problems either.”

I found this recently from Thiel…

Instead of seeing an inexorable trend to The Singularity, I see one towards entropy and decay…

What are you solutions? Libertarian fantasizing about low taxes, replacing the welfare state with charity, gold standard (or “sound money”), obliteration of unions?

No, do not take this as general antagonism against anyone here, I really doubt that most libertarians (or even people) really get what is wrong.

However, I do not see this as a crisis of abandoning sound money or a financial crisis anyone (those are the symptoms not the causes), but as a crisis of innovation and the stagnation of technology. This view is held by Peter Thiel (a libertarian nonetheless). I do not see how libertarianism will solve the problem, but if we are going to have a zero-sum world without innovation, I prefer social democracy.

Don’t this as eliciting emnity, but see it as my general disconent on the lack of real technology progress.

Thus, EUR calls.