Half a century of debt-fueled growth? As an exercise in revisionist history it's workable, but those of us in the reality-bsed community cannot help but note that Thatcherism has only spent thirty years - closer to a quarter century than a half - on its thirdworldization project.

As for the idea of a city state, show me one that's sustainably self-sufficient in food and energy, then maybe we can talk. Until such time, I rather like having food and electricity, so I'll pass on the city-state as the principal organisational unit of society. Incidentally, advocates of the city-state may wish to bone up on the reason most city states spent a quite inordinate fraction of their discretionary value added on building walls, towers and parapets.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.