Kinuachdrach @ 7 said:
“Forget about Peak Oil; we are stumbling into Peak Government, when overhead expenses finally overwhelm the Political Class’s ability to tax & borrow.”

Kinuachdrach’s comment is actually a very deep concept. For most of my adult life this thing has been staring me in the face but it wasn’t until I read Kinuachdrach’s comment that I grasped the concept, i.e. human limitation places an upper limit to government complexity. If government becomes more complex than this upper limit then no matter how well intentioned, more harm than good is caused, i.e. the government is simply administrating more background noise rather than something real. One consequence is obvious: The first article in a constitution should read: To be legally valid this document may not exceed # kilobytes as an ASCII file. If some legislator wants to add something new that bumps the document over # kilobytes then he is obligated to remove or compress old content.

A corollary to this observation is there is an upper limit that any organization can grow to beyond which it becomes ungovernable, i.e think “To Big to Fail”.

Now as an engineer this raises a $64,000 question: Are there projects that are so big that no organization can be created to manage it? Maybe an interplanetary civilization or single world government is impossible because any bureaucracy administrating such a civilization or government would collapse under its own weight.