>
> That I can't imagine a viable alternative to liberal democracy does not mean
> there isn't one, or that one won't come along after I die. Someone who lived
> in Weimar Germany and died in, say, 1922 might have thought things were going
> swell. Fortunately for them, they would have missed the horrors of the next
> 23 years. Unfortunately for them, they would also have missed the good things
> of the 50 years after that. Someone who died in the American South in the
> 1830s could never have conceived the end of slavery.
>
> Something none of us can imagine is brewing out there. Mark my words...
I tend to agree with Tom here. The one thing we should have learned about the world so
far is that we really cannot predict what will come. The very stability we have had
since 1945 has blinded us to the future. Technology is going to change our world and
ourselves in unpredictable ways and government and economic systems will co-evolve in
response to these changes. We like to think of the world as an equilibrium but it is
not. To paraphrase Robert Wright in "Nonzero", the combination of cooperation and
competition insure that things will always change. Progress (in the completely
non-judgemental sense -neither good nor bad) is ienvitable.
>
>
>
> Tom Beck
