&gt; Nowhere have I seen any social democratic reformer argue for artisanal crafts and decentralized governance.<p>There might be a lot of reasons why decentralized governance isn&#x27;t advocated. First, there was a proximate experience in Occupy Wall Street of how decentralization torpedoes activism. I think a lot of activists walked away from that thinking &quot;the best possible time, the worst possible approach.&quot; OWS was a painfully squandered opportunity to get &quot;petty social democratic welfare reforms&quot; through conventional means.<p>The &quot;mutual credit solution&quot; also doesn&#x27;t necessarily work without global participation. And again, I think a lot of well-meaning radical communists—the kind far removed from the Soviet nomenklatura—realized that global revolution is basically impossible. They weren&#x27;t pursuing the same goals as 19th century anarchists, but they faced the same challenges: how do you convince people of your ideas which work only when the WHOLE WORLD participates? After all, if we live in our little republic with decentralized mutual credit economies, we&#x27;ll just get taken over by a country that has a well-fed and disciplined army. That&#x27;s not precisely what happens historically, but Chinese communism at least was achieved by violence, not by ideas. To spread radical ideas, you have to do the things that centralized countries are good at, like fielding armies. I can&#x27;t see a world where &quot;mutual credit&quot; can survive side-by-side with huge armied countries.<p>&gt; full employment has always been a bizarre fetish for Keynesians, social democrats, Marxists and conservatives.<p>I think people emigrate to where the jobs are, regardless of what government there is. You&#x27;re not appreciating that we already live in a world where there are lots of different ways of governance and participation. But we have legs, and legs on average move people from poor countries to richer ones. That&#x27;s a law of nature stronger than politics. So I wouldn&#x27;t call it a &quot;bizarre fetish;&quot; it&#x27;s just that political ideas that produce more jobs tend to survive. It&#x27;s a Darwinian process that selects for full-employment ideas.<p>The countries that don&#x27;t provide full-employment are eventually emptied of their people. We call that brain drain in some places. In Russia, population declined 4% from 1991 to 2008. That&#x27;s INSANE: two decades of population decline! I think availability of work for talented people, a legitimate meritocracy, safety, etc., all have a role in this decline. But regardless, all ways of Russian government thinking will cease to exist if people don&#x27;t want to live there.<p>So be honest: do you think a kid born in a &quot;mutual credit&quot; country will want to stay there, or will still want to move to the United States?