Mat

State Capture

As a result of state capture of the media and scientific fields of interest, citizens don’t have a reliable, easy to access, objective measure of how well the state is doing at value creation. This is true both for the state as a whole and also for population modifiers of interest like locale, ethnicity, and class. Machine intelligence lowers the barrier to entry into creation of these metrics. For example, it can aid in creation of inflation metrics which can be compared against GDP, which would tell us how well the state is doing for us or our groups.

Many of us use applications to track our individual finances. We have seen these applications move into the cloud along with all other software. This data has the potential to be used to gain clear vision into success or failure of the state. This results in a collective action problem. It would be better if everyone openly shared their data, but that would shine the spotlight on those who are currently benefitting much more than others. While there are legitimate privacy concerns, our privacy seems to be almost completely eroded already by state and big-tech surveillance.

This puts libertarians and free market advocates more generally in an interesting position. They have created their own chains. Many of them pretend to advocate for freedom while participating in and exploiting a system that hurts those less capable than them disproportionately. To achieve the freedom they seek, all related data that can become public needs to become public. That is the only way that all market participants can be maximally informed and that the market can be maximally free and productive. By surreptitiously optimizing for their own good over that of others, they have greatly increased their own cost of entry into the free society they dream of.