The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State

Information technology has a shorter product cycle. Products will become obsolete faster, so any gains from extorting above-market wages will be short lived.

In the Information Age, only cities that repay their upkeep with a high quality of life will stay viable. People at a distance won’t be obligated to subsidize them.

The web allows people to transcend any bad luck of being born in a certain country or state, they’re global citizens now.

Unless the US changes its tax laws, enterprising individuals will likely renounce their citizenship in the future in pursuit of a better form of governance.

In the hunting gathering days, there was no reason to work more than the 10-15 hours a week you needed to do to secure food. Overkill was punished because the food would rot before it could be eaten, and decrease food available to you in the environment in the future.

When money can be earned anywhere, you won’t be obligated to live in or subject yourself to high taxation. Governments that charge too much will drive away their best customers. The nation-state will not endure these changes in its present form.

Memorization as a skill will become useless, but the value of quickly learning will increase. We’ll be in a world of abundant information and what you’ll need to know is how to use it.

Mass production of books ended the Church’s monopoly on Scripture and information, wider book availability increased literacy, more people could contribute thoughts on important subjects, and it threatened the church’s monopoly on theology and information.

In medieval society, the successful and rich concentrated in certain areas, but cyberspace doesn’t require this. Instead, you can keep pushing out the boundaries and claiming new frontiers, and in doing so, pulling more resources away from governments and the physical world and into cyberspace.