You set a pretty problem, Phil.

Next, I’m going to start a discussion of Star trek, but no one is allowed to mention space flight in any way.

I think the most critical step to avoiding the decline you and Josh mention is to acknowledge that resistance to such technologic change will come from those most invested in the status quo. Indeed, that the degree of resistance expressed is a direct corrollary of their individual investment in the established methodologies.

Imagine a tinker/peddler who ekes out a living selling this and that to the nearby villagers. The village is so destitute that, by their standards, the tinker is actually pretty well off. Little do any of them realize that their town sits atop the mother lode — the richest vein of gold anyone has ever seen. Every hovel in the village has a fortune beneath it. Right next to the tinker’s shack is the mouth of a cave that would open up the fortune both for him and the rest of them.

The tinker spends his days thinking of how he can sell more tin cups and bits of string to the villagers.

He uses the cave mouth as a garbage dump.

I see what you’re saying, Will. We need to get this guy’s attention.

By the World Wars, every European leader understood (even though they didn’t care to discuss it much) that having America on their side would not only tilt the balance of power but topple the board.

Historian David McCullough noted during the Battle of New York in his book “1776″ that the British were astonished at the wealth displayed in ordinary American farmhouses they ransacked.

Apparently, Americans were relatively wealthy in Colonial days.

Yes, I do believe freedom is very conducive to wealth production, and as we’ve also seen from American history, conducive to accelerating technology.

I think the most critical step to avoiding the decline you and Josh mention is to acknowledge that resistance to such technologic change will come from those most invested in the status quo. Indeed, that the degree of resistance expressed is a direct corrollary of their individual investment in the established methodologies. It should be self-evident that those who seek funding for campaigns for public office will be most indebted to (and supportive of in return) those who garner the most funds from existing technology to invest in said campaign efforts. Thus, any effort to alter the future outcome (ala the Scrooge example) must needs be directed at encouraging those most invested in historical technology that their individual circumstances are best improved by as rapid a conversion into the potential future model as possible. The recipients of their largess will continue to dutifully follow their lead, I’m certain.

Until those who most benefit from the existing technology can be convinced not to continue investing in that technology, there will continue to exist massive and pervassive resistance to technology development in terms of practical, accessable engineered products for wide-spread consumer applications. Not to tug on Alvis’ cape, but I think one of the best techniques to achieving that end will be continued (indeed accelerated) conversion of the consumer into the prosumer and massively expand the level of return to technology investors from the existing standards. If you want to win the revolution, get (and keep) the wealthy on your side.

Cheers,
Alex

Everything requires tons of paperwork, licenses, and overhead – it’s not going away.

The one big structural problem the Founding Fathers did not address in the Constitution is how to keep government from growing without bound. Even in the – admittedly laughable, these days – case where it would limit itself to what is actually in the Constitution, there is no way to prevent this growth at the Federal level – to say nothing of State and Local governments.

I wonder if the tea-party people would be behind an amendment that required for every word of new law, or regulation, enacted, a word of existing law, or regulation, must be repealed?

We will drown in this quagmire, it’s just a matter of when.

And to say that Britain in the decade following WWII was at the level of the Third World economically is also false. Has the writer ever been to Cairo or Islamabad or Havana? I lived in England in the ’50s and I can assure you this assertion is a laughable fib.