Quoted for truth.

I don't think that 18th century Americans were largely illiterate. Thomas Paine's Common Sense pamphlet (published in 1776) sold 600,000 copies to a population of 3,000,000 people - that's 1 copy for every 5 people. Of those 3,000,000 people, 1 in 5 were slaves and 1 in 2 were indentured servants. Oh sure, a lot of people probably bought several copies of it and performed the colonial equivalent of sticking it under strangers' windshield wipers. But still, I think that a national ratio of 1:5 for a non-religious printed publication is impressive, especially if hardly anybody could have even read it at the time.

What would be the equivalent of Common Sense today? 61.6 million copies of something for 308 million Americans? Is there a single book, newspaper article, political manifesto, or any other publication that comes close to that today? Sure, there's probably a TV show or movie or something that almost everybody today has seen, but I'm more interested in comparing the overall interest in reading between 1776 and 2012 (especially when the reading requires the commitment of paying to read a print publication rather than checking Google News three times a day for the cost of electricity). The most widely-read publication of today, as far as I can tell, is AARP Magazine, with a circulation of 22.4 million in 2011, roughly 1/3 what Common Sense achieved over 200 years ago. Except I don't think that really counts. AARP is a periodical and it has had 50+ years to get to where it is now.

It's a shame. I've been driving very aggressively for four years, going well over the limit a lot of the time, and I've never hit anybod. Or really come close to hitting anybody, unless you count all the doofuses in Suburban Assault Vehicles turning in front of me on snowy days... jackasses. To me, driving is like a real fun game with potentially lethal consequences. If I don't push myself to drive as hard as I can, I get bored and find it harder to notice everything happening on the road (like looking carefully for a 4-way stop sign mostly hidden by a low-hanging tree branch). Or worse, I get bored and start playing with the radio.

On the 65mph-limited interstates here, people seem to get nervous around 70. I usually cruise at 75 if it's busy. I've cruised at 100 and that's about when I start to get nervous. But I know my car's tires can handle the speed and I make sure I'm not endangering anyone else (no cars in sight, passengers consent to speed).

And once a precedent has been set, it's just 20 precious years until GATTACA.

I hate liberty, too! As long as we've got distribution methods for viruses set up, let's distribute another one that makes everyone's penises fall off. We can combine it with a program to store everyone's sperm in sperm banks. Then, if a couple wants to procreate, they can withdraw sperm and fertilize with artificial insemination.

The lack of penises would really clamp down on vile, pleasure-seeking sex that no one has a right to practice (last I checked it wasn't in the bill of rights). And there would be fewer rapes, too! Anyone who opposes this idea is addicted to sex, a rapist, or probably both.

This. I would like to add some data here to back this up. Word birth rates are falling in developed an developing countries. It's not "Children of Men" by any means, but I feel it makes concerns about over-population moot. http://www.independent.org/images/events/crichton/image016.jpg Notice the vertical line drawn at the release of The Population Bomb, an archetypal book about overpopulation.

Offtopic (or maybe it's not; I heard the word "sustainability" in the article's title, and that's a word on the EPA's bingo sheet), but I just had a thought. If we accept as given that man-made C02 will lead to runaway heating scenarios in the future, then why does it seem that our *only idea* to fight this is to scrap the massive capital cots of our carbon economy with something "green" (that, and less noticeable measures, like banning CFCs). If our 20-odd years of climate research study doesn't have enough of a complete view of the Earth's climate to be able to come up with some less painful, less expensive, and more elegant way of avoid possible climate change disaster cases than gutting our way of industrial life, I have trouble believing they really understand the climate to any useful degree. I thought scientists were supposed to be about individual pursuits, ingenuity and and building on/discrediting your colleagues, especially when one's colleagues (not necessary climate scientists) spend a disturbing about of time polling each other to find how many "believers" and "deniers" there are.

I take issue with that, sir! I firmly believe the Earth's climate has never changed. Ever.

I feel that's a glib description of what Libertarians and libertarian-leaning people have in mind. Don't attack labels or even people - attack specific ideas. You say you agree with many libertarian ideals, so we probably have more in common than we know.

Going back to the "robber-baron" topic discussed by you and the AC... today's "robber-baron" is the multinational conglomerate corporation. PepsiCo... Apple... WalMart... Berkshire Hathaway... basically any Fortune megacorp. Which system of government do you feel would be easier for the megacorps to influence at the cost of the American people's liberty? A single government entity with jurisdiction over all the land, or 50 smaller entities concerned only with their own land? A corporation that wants to engage in regulatory capture wants a government with a pyramid-shaped corporate structure to match its own. Forcing a national corporation to comply with a different set of regulations for every state in which it operates places a huge tax on it that it cannot simply lobby away. Okay, so maybe it can, but the lobbying would be about 50 times more complicated, and it would likely still have to fragment its supply chain and business offices to comply with state-by-state differences with respect to things like banned materials. Decentralized government favors smaller, localized corporations more effectively and permanently than any decree from some bureaucrat's office in DC. I think this is approximately how many people arrive independently at the conclusion that smaller, locally-limited government leads to better overall government with near certainty.

You mentioned that we don't need more or less regulation, just *better* regulation, and I agree with you, but how do we achieve better regulation with a strong centralized government? Be ensuring that "only the right people" are placed in charge of the inevitably massive social machinery? And what do you do when a malicious person eventually gets control of the levers of power? Raise a stir among the 300+ million people who have the authority to reign him/her in? What are the chances that the electorate will even find out about it amidst the million-and-one other things the monolithic government is doing? Our federal government long ago exceeded any kind of human scale, it is not managed by people as originally intended but by institutions like the Aspen Institute, massive corporations, and its own bureaucracies. To take one example, there is no one human being who knows the entire US Tax Code. Does raising money for a government really need to be *that* complicated? Rule by institutions is poisonous to personal liberty; it shifts control of decision-making away from individuals and towards conference rooms full of career politicians and K Street lobbyists who all used to be drinking buddies at Yale and Harvard.

Today, a national government (and a matching national corporate culture nuking and paving regional tastes and values... "I'm lovin' it") has us thinking of ourselves as "Americans" concerned with national matters, and not just "Iowans" or "Californians" concerned with our own matters. Evolution takes place faster in small populations. With centralization, we are all but surrendering ourselves to an indefinite status quo of homogeneity. With a strong centralized government, if you're in the 49% minority on an issue that's important to you, your *only option* is to get hundreds of millions of like-minded people behind you. Good luck. Sure, you can always move to another country, but world superpowers have a way of imposing their laws on other countries. With a decentralized government, if one state goes sour, its people can move out and deprive the state of tax revenue and members of US Congress, starving the dread state of victims, decreasing any influence it might hold over the nation, and eventually causing it to collapse on itself. I think that's the whole idea the anonymous coward was trying to convey to you with his link to the Myth of The Robber-Barons - we need to be prepared to let bad institutions (corporations, governments, whatever) die a lonely death instead of using other (fallible) institutions to regulate them into eternity.

I submit to you that it's impossible to know or care very much about people who don't live in the same area as you, and that this sharply limits the virtues of strong national governments. For example, I've lived in Iowa my whole life and I've never met anyone from New Mexico. A strong central government gives me a say in New Mexico's government, but how can my ability to govern New Mexico even come close to that of a New Mexico resident? I feel like it's impossible to justify a strong central government's inherent flaws without accepting as given that most people just aren't capable of ruling themselves, and that they require a professional national managerial class to place them in one big playpen to better ensure they don't misbehave. I'm guessing (hoping) you'll disagree with that, and I'd be interested in reading your rebuttal.

This argument is getting long-winded, so I'll try to sum up my frustration with centralization in four words: "Too big to fail."

It would be impossible for a top-heavy centralized federal government run by a professional managerial class to exist, no doubt. But what about a decentralized government with a bias for decision-making in the other direction? One that lets the individual decide for himself... if not the individual then his town, if not the town then the county, if not the county then the state, etc.

Being forced to live in a pluralistic society sucks. Decentralization of decision-making is the best antidote I can think of.