The California Money Transmission Act is only one small portion of a greater struggle that is going on across the planet; a struggle that cuts to the very core of our societies, our diplomacy, our fundamental rights and freedoms, and nothing less than the future our world. It is a logical outgrowth of globalization, of technology, and of the internet. For international finance is the last great systems, next to law and the rule of government itself, that has not yet been toppled or reorganized by internet based, distributed technologies. Media has fallen. Education has fallen. Retail has fallen. Transport has fallen. Manufacturing seems to be coming under threat.

Finance is certainly under threat, but it consistently beckons for state protection under the ruse of protecting the public from the ethereal boogeyman. Why? To cut to the chase, finance is government: they are in essence one and the same. Throughout modern history, the state's monopoly on physical violence has been used to collect taxes; taxes that must be paid in the state's own currency. Often, the use of foreign tender is made illegal. The money, otherwise backed by little, thus acquires value: you need it to stay out of the state's jails or system of punishment, to eat, and to live. Almost without exception, the state then further demands interest or otherwise manipulates their currency's value.

At the turn of the 16th century, Martin Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms marked the beginning of the modern separation of church and state, which was enshrined in to law in many countries throughout the 20th century. I believe that today, citizens have had enough of financial abuses, and our societies stand on the threshold of one further separation: the separation of state and finance.

For as we have seen over the past few years, at present we have a financial system that sees itself above the law. A financial system that, despite reaping vast profits and efficiently systematizing both usury and the total, constant, warrantless international surveillance of private citizens and corporations alike (for it is inseparable from the state), has for the past twenty or thirty years failed to provide meaningful innovation or reduction in price, to provide transparency, to provide protection against corruption, to provide any meaningful service to society. Instead, we largely see the finance industry doing its best to stifle and defeat the threat of change, all the while scratching the state's back and imposing economic blockades against organizations and nations alike without any form of due process.

Thus, it is perhaps too optimistic to expect the state, intertwined as it is with the existing system, to punish our financial overlords. Luckily, this is not a requirement. Simply by refusing to artificially stifle innovation, the winds of change will come, they will whisk through the vacuous marble halls of old finance, they will carry fresh ideas, they will underpin great movements toward transparency of governance, they will empower the collective individual, and they will take no hostages.

State-sanctioned or not, this change is coming. We as humanity will continue along our historic trajectory: the technologically-backed shift away from nations and nationalism - Einstein's "infantile disease, the measles of mankind" - towards a human society. We will find ways to remove the state/financial overlords of old, and to enable for the whole of humanity - not just multinational businesses and the dynastic capital of old - the capacity to replace oligopolies of usury and fear with cooperation and enterprise, without regard for borders.

It is said that one cannot resist an idea whose time has come. Make no mistake: the shackles of old are opening, and only fools will attempt to hold them in place.