This article by Gary North talks about the drag the administrative State puts on the lives and dealings of modern people.  Administrative law, like the permanent security
State, is above and apart from the elected governments in many ways.

North also talks about the inevitable Great Default, where governments will be forced to capitulate on their promises to pay health and other entitlement programs in the future.

Technological innovation has brought massive gains in efficiency and productivity in the last several decades.  These gains will likely increase at an increasing rate.  The prospects for the future are laid out in a very long and influential article by Ray Kurzweil, who begins his essay like this:

“You will get $40 trillion just by reading this essay and understanding what it says. For complete details, see below. (It’s true that authors will do just about anything to keep your attention, but I’m serious about this statement. Until I return to a further explanation, however, do read the first sentence of this paragraph carefully.)”

If one does read much further, the $40 trillion comment is explained.  Kurzweil says that exponential growth in technology, and hence efficiency, productivity, and wealth, imply that stock markets should triple, or rise $40 trillion in value.

Perhaps.  But some other things could happen.  Rapidly increasing technology is leading to greater connectivity between people, all of whom are buyers of some things and sellers of other things.  It is becoming less necessary for large corporations to aggregate labor for the production of goods and services on one hand, and to distribute those goods and services, on the other hand.  Technology will continue to allow more and more transactions to take place directly.  Will many of the profits of these transactions accrue to sources not listed on stock exchanges?  Will we see a re-localization of economies which will show the age of centralization and conglomeration to have been only a transitional state made necessary by a lack of technology?

How many corporations and their stock prices are boosted by the expectation of continued redirection of capital through governments?  A Great Default would not only mean that health care spending (in total dollars) would go down, and with them the stock prices of the health care sector.  The many corporations related to the war and surveillance State would be affected.  Auto makers, energy companies, airplane makers, and many others receive huge government subsidies.

These two factors, greater connectivity which will remove the need for many corporate middlemen, and a general government default which will leave more money in people’s hands at the expense of connected corporations, lead me to imagine another world.  This other world will see lower and less important stock markets, but greater total wealth in society as a whole.

Every non-coerced transaction leaves all parties better off.  The future will see exponentially more transactions taking place in more efficient markets.  Total wealth will rise exponentially.  But stock prices might not.

And what of the administrative State?  Will it be able to insinuate itself further into the dealings of our personally connected buyers and sellers?  Exponential increases in connectivity would lead to exponentially more holes to possibly be filled by State administration.  I don’t believe it would have the intelligence or the funding to be able to keep up.  It could revert, due both to lack of funding and capability and to being out-competed by the private sector, to a night watchman role.  Technology might lead to a re-distribution of wealth back to its producers.