There is a deeper and more satisfying reason for us to be optimistic. The state is not only fiscally unsustainable, it's intellectually unsustainable as well. We should be optimistic because we're living at the beginning of what Hans- Hermann Hoppe calls a "bottom-up" revolution. Bottom-up because it starts at the individual and hyper-local level. Bottom-up because it relies on radical decentralization and political secession. Bottom-up because it bypasses politics and traditional power structures. Bottom-up because it bypasses state schools, state intellectuals, and state media.

Governments, and the political classes who run them, are facing a nonviolent revolution of ideas that was scarcely imaginable just twenty years ago. And this revolution will strike at the heart of these states' only true asset: their legitimacy in the eyes of those they would govern. The bottom-up revolution is based on informed individuals who increasingly don't need elites, political, academic, or scientific, to run their lives. It is based on the recognition that national and global governance schemes have failed to solve, or even address, huge structural problems like hunger, medical care, energy, and economic development. It is based on radical decentralization, political and otherwise, because the vast diversity of individual interests demands an end to top-down government edicts and bullying by 51 percent of the electorate.

This can happen - and is happening - without even a tacit acceptance or understanding of liberty among the majority of people necessarily. They simply see with their own eyes that the state doesn't work, so naturally they seek another way.

Jeff Deist