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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

There's a false premise here in the criticism here. It is not a foregone conclusion that "common purpose" and "collective action" must be acheieved through more centralized planning. Obama's election, in fact, was a triumph of decentralized coordination through consistent communication of focal points for action. It's impossible to ignore the more centralized structure of decisionmaking within the Obama Whitehouse; but this doesn't mean that his vision of common purpose and collective action is predicated on affirmative acts of government. See, for example, the commitments to increased transparency and elimination of "waste." We'll see how things play out. But I'm still of the mind that the Obama adminstration may be go down in the books as classical liberal in the vein of J.S. Mill.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

What does the empirical evidence show? Are the strong economies of the world those that are highly centralized, or regionalized? Do countries with strong nationalism do better than those without?

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