loki on Nostr: States create welfare states as an illusion for what they (largely) are intended to ...

States create welfare states as an illusion for what they (largely) are intended to do - a warfighting collective. A nation of people that can be called up for war with a consistent reception for narrative and identity - a debt-issuance authority meant to centralize and corral wartime manufacturing and financing and push spend to the present. The idea is that a nuclear deterrent might mean that elites feel the consequences of war - but it also means over the span of centuries that any number of mistakes or errors could end the world. As we enter into an era of rivals trying to reach economic and military near-parity with the United States, a meaningful peace that marked decades of less violence may be turning away.

Bitcoin separates money and state and allows for private property without physical enforcement and a state-turned-protector that can turn into war general. If wars consume the world, Bitcoin, Nostr and technologies like it will hopefully (in, sadly, a dreadful context) allow people to focus on the question that might define our age: can people live full, long lives, without the need for the Leviathan above them - a state entrusted with the power to destroy the world around them? Perhaps it is naive to expect conventional wars to decrease if states are meaningfully starved of the ability to conduct wars - but perhaps it is the only meaningful way that doesn't also risk mutually assured destruction.