gettinurgun

Current Listening: Ihsahn, The Adversary

So as I was riding home from the hospital yesterday (cancer-free at last, with hope), I noted the billboards about the upcoming Crossroads of the West gun show on April 19-20. Of course they have a gun show on April 19, who wouldn't? Ask any armchair-patriot pseudo-revolutionary and he'll tell you the great importance of that date, because an average of one Patriot-Movement-endorsed historical event per century happened then (Boston Tea Party, Waco, Ruby Ridge). So holding a gun show then helps pull in extra buyers and sellers and makes a bit more money.

So why mention Ihsahn, my favorite-of-the-moment musician? Somehow the themes of the album merge with my political thoughts and got me to crawl over to the computer and post this. I believe in the union of seeming opposites and veneration of rebellion that underlies post-satanic thought (like many other things, satanism is useless except for the kind of person you can become once you grow out of it; bye-bye high school.)

What's this to do with politics? I've long felt that there really is no conflict between libertarianism and socialism. The illusion of conflict arises when libertarians use the language of conservatism (Patriot Movement), or socialists use the language of totalitarianism (Soviet communism). Capitalist versus communist may have been the driving conflict of the mid- to late-20th century, but look around, all the smart countries have mixed economies (including the U.S.) Only fanatical purists bitch about the liberalized market economies or the nefariousness of social programs.

In the last couple decades, we've seen the rise of the information economy and the open-source movement. Manufacturing costs have decreased, and increasingly information has become the primary component of value. In time, much of manufacturing could become a home industry, and information will be the only thing valued, and that will be highly structured by the rising open-source movement. The scarcities that underlie 20th century economics will not be any more relevant in the late 21st and 22nd centuries than those of 16th century economics are now, new economic issues will breed new political problems and new approaches to solutions, and capitalism and communism will be left as museum pieces. The asymptotic result of all this is a post-scarcity civilization, though that is about equal to a post-singularity civilization in its probability of being entirely wishful thinking.