When is trade with another country strictly required?
Can that transaction be broken down into communities 'trading up' to some extent? - for clarification i consider anything similar to a city-state a 'large communion'. We should be very seriously (re) examining the ways that a technologically advanced society can exist outside of a deeply centralized, fragile, just-in-time based operating system.
It just seems very evident that the myth of 'scale-up benefits' has destroyed guilds, craftsmanship, actual sustainable production and a host of other things. So in a sense, yes i would like to go back to a 1700's style society in several ways, just without being a complete luddite about it.
Sorry if the thread still seems vague but this is an attempt to tackle the current 'everything crisis' from a economical/ logistical (history) perspective first, before tying in the other countless possible vantage points.
