How technology will create true democracy A non-physical business, for instance, can often decide pretty freely where, for the purposes of taxation, it wants to live. Naturally, it will choose benign jurisdictions. Governments can try to ban it from doing so, but they will either fail, or find that they are cutting off their nose to spite their face. The very idea of a "tax base," on which treasuries depend, wobbles when so much value lies in intellectual property and intellectual property is mobile. So taxes need to be flatter to keep their revenues up. If they are flatter, they will be paid by more people. Therefore it becomes much harder for government to grow, since most people do not want to pay more. Increasingly, money itself is subject to the same personal choice. There is now little physical difficulty in paying for things in currencies other than one's own. This allows people to decide which currency they wish to trust and use. So "fiat" money - the money created at the orders of a national treasury or the European Central Bank - may find that it has no means of commanding the confidence of the public. The trick of governments, from which we are all suffering acutely just now, is to debase the currency in order to postpone the bill. How much longer, asks the author, can that trick be played? Lest anyone think that this is just personal greed cloaking itself in the language of freedom, Mr Carswell gives many examples of social rather than financial benefit. When he first became an MP in 2005, he writes, he dealt with many inquiries from the parents of children with special needs. They desperately needed his help to fight their way through the system. Then, in a matter of months, the flow dried up. This was because, once most families had the internet, they learnt how to share the know-how required to fight their cases. Mr Carswell was the middle man they simply didn't need any more: he was delighted to be made redundant. Another example is education. There was a school in Mr Carswell's constituency so bad that parents took their children away from it en masse. They created such a strong social network via the internet that they forced the local authority to give them home education grants instead. Far from producing individualistic selfishness, the internet is assisting collective solidarity without the guidance of the state. In this new world, our political parties ("a two-and-half-horse race") scarcely begin to reflect the variety of people's wishes and views. The bigger the state, the less able it is to respond to this new environment, and therefore the less likely to survive. The biggest such state in this part of the world is the European Union. In the face of the digital revolution, its gigantism is its doom. I do hope Douglas Carswell is right: he deserves to be. But one of the strange things about politics is its perpetual capacity, despite everyone's wishes, to produce bad results. He has a fight on his hands, and sadly he will not find many allies in the chamber of the House of Commons. Probably he does not mind: he has an i-army, and its numbers are growing.