#smart cities

📗 march 28, 2026

Toward a Realistic Vision of Post-Scarcity

While newspaper headlines bombard us with systemic corruption scandals, banking crises, and the endless cycle of “crony capitalism” between governments and financial elites, a quiet revolution is unfolding—in engineering labs, across blockchain networks, and within lines of code.

Humanity is living a paradox: our systems of governance still operate under a 19th-century feudal, extractive logic, while our technological capacity is racing toward a 22nd-century science-fiction reality.

The thesis of this essay is optimistic yet pragmatic: we are approaching an Economic Singularity. The transition from a world of state-imposed scarcity to one of technology-driven abundance is not a utopian fantasy, but the logical destination of human evolution. The path there, however, requires a necessary bridge: Minarchy.

1. The Diagnosis: Politics as the Manager of Misery

To understand the solution, we must first diagnose the disease. Economists from Public Choice Theory, such as Nobel laureate James Buchanan, have already shown mathematically that politicians act in their own self-interest, not for the “common good.”

The current system depends on scarcity. Central banks need inflation (the devaluation of money) to roll over unpayable debt. Inefficient corporations need state regulation to block competitors. Politicians need the poor in order to sell welfare in exchange for votes.

As seen in cases like the “Banco Master” and its political ties, corruption is not a flaw in the system—it is a feature. As long as centralized power exists to sell obstacles, there will be buyers for shortcuts.

2. The Engine of Change: The Zero Marginal Cost Era

Futurist and economist Jeremy Rifkin, in The Zero Marginal Cost Society, argues that capitalism, in its frantic pursuit of efficiency, is paradoxically creating the conditions for its own transcendence—or evolution.

Technology is inherently deflationary.

Moore’s Law and Ray Kurzweil: Processing power doubles roughly every 18 months, driving costs down.

Energy: The cost of solar energy has fallen by more than 80% over the past decade.

Production: Elon Musk’s vision with the Optimus robot points to a future where physical labor—the largest cost of any product—approaches zero.

When energy is cheap and labor is robotic and essentially free, the cost of producing housing, food, or cars collapses. We enter the era of Radical Abundance, championed by Peter Diamandis, author of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think.

3. Course Correction: From Jacque Fresco to Satoshi Nakamoto

Here lies the crucial insight for our future. Jacque Fresco (The Venus Project) envisioned this technical abundance: efficient cities, a moneyless society, resource-based management. But Fresco made a critical mistake by imagining centralized control—a “central computer”—which would inevitably lead to technocratic tyranny.

The missing piece of Fresco’s puzzle was delivered by Satoshi Nakamoto (creator of Bitcoin) and amplified by Musk’s industrial vision.

Infrastructure (Musk): Robots, rockets, solar panels, and batteries create physical abundance.

Governance (Satoshi): Blockchain and smart contracts enable decentralized management.

We don’t need a “benevolent leader” or a “central computer.” We need distributed networks where ownership and exchange are validated by mathematics, immune to human corruption. Fresco’s vision becomes viable when it leaves the mainframe and moves to the blockchain.

4. The Realistic Path: Minarchy as a Bridge

We cannot jump directly from today’s bloated state to a futuristic anarchy without passing through chaos. Society needs a weaning process. This is where Minarchy—the minimal state—comes in as a transitional strategy.

The proposal is straightforward:

Limit the State: Government should be strictly confined to protecting life, liberty, and property, and enforcing contracts.

Allow Deflation: Without a central bank manipulating interest rates and printing money, prices would naturally fall as technology advances.

Privatize the Social Sphere: With wealth no longer confiscated through taxes (which today absorb nearly half of productivity), civil society and markets take over healthcare, education, and infrastructure.

In this environment, “subsistence crime” disappears because survival becomes cheap. “White-collar crime” fades because the state no longer controls billion-dollar budgets worth stealing.

5. Answering the Pessimists and Critics

Objections are inevitable. Let’s address the main ones through this new lens:

Fear of Mass Unemployment (The Luddite Fallacy)

Critique: “If robots do everything, no one will have jobs and we’ll starve.”

Response: This ignores deflation. If robots do everything, the cost of living trends toward zero. You don’t need a $5,000 salary if housing, food, and energy cost $50. Wage labor is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Before that, people worked for subsistence. In the future, we’ll work for purpose, art, and innovation—not just to avoid starvation.

Fear of Inequality (The ‘Elysium’ Scenario)

Critique: “The rich will own the robots, the poor will have nothing.”

Response: Technology always democratizes. The smartphone a billionaire uses is the same one a teenager in a favela uses. Mass production, like Musk’s, requires scale. To get rich, Musk must sell robots to everyone, not a few. Competition under a minarchy drives prices down until they become accessible.

Fear of Human Nature (The Hobbesian View)

Critique: “Man is a wolf to man. Without a strong state, there will be barbarism.”

Response: Research like Steven Pinker’s (The Better Angels of Our Nature) shows violence has declined historically due to trade and prosperity, not policing. Prosperous societies don’t kill over bread. Scarcity is the father of war. Eliminate scarcity, and you remove the main incentive for violence.

Conclusion: A Glorious Future Within Reach

The shift from a corrupt, maximalist state to a minarchy—and ultimately to a decentralized post-scarcity society—is not just desirable; it is the only mathematical path to the long-term survival of civilization.

Technology has given us the tools to make poverty obsolete. What keeps us trapped in the past is not a lack of resources, but our insistence on preserving Jurassic political systems built on coercion and parasitism.

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