This treatise explains how boundaries enable self-directed lives and how boundary defects undermine economic and political independence. It contains recommendations for urgently needed repairs to the national borders of the United States, and to the boundaries of its citizens, businesses, and governments. Self-directed entities must have well-regulated borders between themselves and their environments to separate their spheres of autonomy from environments over which they have little or no influence but in which they must interact. Borders are their first line of defense against parasites, pathogens, and predators, which continually probe and attack them with increasing sophistication as they attempt to drain their rich pools of resources.
Boundaries don’t create or maintain themselves. They are complex physical, temporal and mental structures that take work to build, work to operate and work to maintain. When overbuilt or overregulated, they isolate and suffocate. When inadequate, not adapted, allowed to deteriorate, or under regulated, they dissipate vital reserves.
Citizens, businesses, governments and nations are new species of autonomous agents which first appeared about 10,000 years ago when wandering tribes of hunter gatherers adopted agriculture and settled down. Their environments include new forms of parasites, pathogens, predators, poisons and pollutants; most of which are other members of the new species. Members of these species have physical borders and term limits like those of microbes, cells, insects, plants and animals. They also have mental borders like those of tribes and tribal members. Their mental structures of beliefs, myths, rituals, rules, languages, cultures, etc. are generated by human brains. They emerge from physical patterns formed by biology, education, culture and experience. They filter, process and store information, and they motivate choices and actions. For example, economic mental structures include patterns which symbolize the scope and limits of ownership, and rituals for transferring it to and from other agents in the environment.
These newest self-directed entities are rapidly and painfully adapting as they compete and cooperate with one another to produce sustainable structures, niches and relationships. They are so new that natural selection hasn’t produced the fittest designs. They are so complex and interconnected that we can’t run controlled experiments on them to scientifically validate or challenge conflicting opinions. However, we can learn a great deal about which designs will certainly fail and which designs are likely to succeed by analyzing them as species of evolution.
Background
The United States emerged from WWII as the world’s dominant economic and military power. It had a substantial, educated middle-class and a massive reserve of infrastructure and natural resources. In the next two decades, its governments taxed heavily and invested aggressively in a national highway system, public education, clean air, clean water and social safety nets. These actions increased its reserves, expanded its middle class and improved the average quality of life.
The Federal government also pursued economic policies intended to develop a prosperous community of democracies supported by market based economies. It reduced trade barriers and systematically reduced tariffs and duties. It made the US dollar a global reserve currency which flowed freely into and out of the nation. It reduced tax rates on wages and profits. It deregulated banks and other financial institutions. Special-interest groups also manipulated the government into erecting isolating barriers of legal protections and tax benefits around multi-national corporations, entitled constituencies, and wealthy citizens. These two sets of boundary changes have helped other nations, large corporations, and the richest 1% of its citizens. However, over the last 30 years they have drained most of the nation’s reserves, weakened the middle class, undermined its economic health, and threatened national autonomy. These debilitating changes are evidenced by chronic trade and budget deficits, huge debts, blubberous masses of wealth feeding cancerous concentrations of power and privilege, financial bubbles, a deteriorating public education system, and most recently: persistently high unemployment, increasing underemployment, and draconian spending cuts which will cripple defense and shred social safety nets.
While the USA deteriorated from a creditor nation to the world’s most indebted, China’s economy flourished and its currency reserves make it the world’s second largest creditor nation (behind Japan and ahead of Germany). One key to China’s success has been its careful management of political and economic borders.
When, as CEO of a hi-tech company, I first journeyed around mainland China in the spring of 1984, there were only a handful of experienced risk takers in all of China. I was besieged Continue reading