Only those of my colleagues working in fledgling industry of the decentralized finances (DeFi) who had diligently suffer through all of one thousands pages of the Ludwig von Mises ‘Human Action: A Treatise on Economics’ could appreciate how difficult is to critic its author, which is considered by many within our ranks to be their lives inspiration laying the ideological foundation to decentralized currencies.
However, it is hard to ignore how little does Mises in its fundamental work concerns himself with the natural (ergo economic) constraints within which the great majority of humans exists except in a very small group of Western countries. In fact, on pages of his work he condescendingly dismissed ‘3d world countries’ as being historically handicapped and (ergo) doomed to follow the lead of more fortunate geographies.
Moreover, although he ardently argues against any governments (specially, of those with ‘socialist’ leanings) interferences with the functioning of ‘free markets’, von Mises recognizes that main participants of those markets — business enterprises — are to be run essentially as small dictatorships.
That poses the question how to enforce the peaceful co-existence of all those ‘corporate Napoleons’ each of which might some day decide that following the liberal economic protocol within a given state is not in his or her best interests.
Of course, today we all think we know the answer to this question — an algorithmic consensus must economically restrain each of those ‘petite Emperors’ from growing their private armies to the extend when they become a real threat to neighbors. However, on a practical side, we can not be sure that some charismatic loco would not beat all the odds and unites most of voters under the banners of some distractive cause, again.
Is there the way for the creative, productive classes (including, entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers and artists) to enjoy their lives to its fullest without the constant interference from part of hereditary sociopaths, corporate megalomaniacs, worthless politicians and talentless bureaucrats?
It looks like we either have to evolve to the stage, when passing all reigns of supreme power to machines becomes so vital to our existence that we can’t avoid it without activating self-destruct mode, or to claim to ourselves a self-governed territory (e.g. a floating city-state ) where the first experiment with such society-governing algorithms is possible to realize within the observable historic time-frame.
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