Paradocracy

Keynesians and central planners prefer to view economic activity as some kind of mechanical machine whereby the people and their exchanges are the necessary gears to get it moving. Insofar as the people and their exchanges affect the performance of the machine, the Keynesians and the central planners seek to bring the gears into hyperdrive, eliminating every delay and discretion that might otherwise prevent a transaction from moving the gears.  In this way, the Keynesians and the central planners view the people as incidental to economic growth. The former lament the fact that their field of study has them dealing with mere human beings instead of raw, expressionless material; but this hardly keeps them from treating their human subjects any differently than the material they might otherwise manipulate at will.  In this way, the Keynesians and the central planners view the people and their actions as constantly grinding the gears or needlessly slowing them down. The Keynesians and the

Whereas socialists condemn slavery of the past, they seek in the present (and into the future) to bind slaves to their ever-changing concept of the “common good.” Ironically enough, as a percentage of his productivity, the average slave up through the nineteenth century actually kept more than three-fourths of his productivity, considerably more than the average taxpayer today.  Moreover, the average slave reserved the option to eventually buy his freedom: indeed, many slaves became freemen in just this fashion. However, it’s virtually impossible today for the average taxpayer to ever reclaim his freedom; he’s met everywhere with superficial justifications for his continued enslavement to the consensus, the “common good” and the tax collectors who enforce their will.  Why is it that, in the estimation of self-described socialists, financial slavery is preferable to chattel slavery? It’s certainly not because it is less violent: after all, their ongoing protests against police brutality

The price of bitcoin plunged overnight by more than 21 percent: this placed the digital "asset" $26,756 (38.8 percent) below its November 10 high. While some bitcoin speculators are unfazed by the decline, citing past volatility to assuage their concerns, their indifference to the price action of bitcoin exposes yet another of its weaknesses: bitcoin is not a store of value; it is not money; and its use case is exclusively limited to its use as a speculative risk asset.  Since its conception, bitcoin enthusiasts have characterized the cryptocurrency as an alternative monetary asset, namely "Gold 2.0". They have likened certain qualities of bitcoin to those of gold, and they've claimed that bitcoin improves upon gold just as every other digital asset has improved upon its predecessor: whether it's e-mail, audio files or online shopping, the bitcoin enthusiasts claim that the digital space is the preferred domain for all things.  Unfortunately, the bitcoin ent

Once again, rural California is bustling with chatter about another secession movement. Draconian mandates and hypocrisy continue unabated, animating talks of secession across all of northern California. Yet, just as there are plenty of proponents of secession, there are many doubters.    The doubters claim that hopes of secession are a pipe dream, that they are unrealistic due to the administrative costs that the "poor country folk" couldn't possibly afford. Fortunately, they're wrong.  While it may be unlikely, their outlook is purely self-fulfilling: while they claim that secession is unlikely, they're bound to make it so with their complacency. Secession is successful where a people join together to declare their sovereignty and to effect their separation; in many cases, this means positively asserting one's rights, not asking for permission. Secession, not only an essential course for representative government and developing communities, produced several

In all courses of life, debt is a curious yet dangerous instrument: it can serve a person well, but it can just as easily ruin him.  Whereas personal debt serves a vital function to meet needs in times of great exigency, the public debt is a scourge to be avoided everywhere and at all costs. Obscured by empty promises and delusions of grandeur, the public debt, as exercised historically and today, is little more than perpetual slavery: it is a debt-financed government powered exclusively by the exploits of theft, force and coercion.  Where its promises are plenty, the costs to the public liberty are indefinite.  Debt-financed government is insidious not only because it creates the illusion that the public can have something for nothing, but because it distorts the relationship between the public and their government; in this way, the government funded through debt is more disconnected from the public which it purports to represent, and it is thereby less sensitive to the limitations im

With bitcoin trading around the vaunted $50,000 level, speculators galore project the next moonshot to $100,000 and beyond. In the fanfare surrounding bitcoin, people have been animated about all things virtual, smugly mocking the physical world as they do their best Scrooge McDuck impersonations in virtual form. Regrettably for them, whereas Scrooge had a pool of gold that he enjoyed, they can merely stare at their virtual wallets wondering what they might one day be able to afford.  Ironically, while the bitcoin bandwagon is full of fanatics caught up in their virtual fantasies, they sense they're getting rich not by assessing their wealth in the form of bitcoin, a nebulous unit to be sure, but in the form of US dollars or other assets with actual utility. If not for the fact that the tangible world stands to speculate with them, contributing to their illusions with the assets that make us truly wealthy, the music would've stopped long before the bandwagon ever got going.  In