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Many citizens of the West believe that they live in free societies, or something close. But as time goes on, public authorities increasingly insist on having a say in everything.

People cannot build things on their own land without permits. They cannot run businesses without approvals and inspections. They cannot give advice without professional designations. They cannot educate their children outside of state-mandated curricula. They cannot hire employees without triggering a myriad of workplace and tax requirements. They cannot produce and sell milk, cheese, or eggs without a license. They cannot earn money, spend money, or hold property without being taxed, and then taxed again.

Jeffrey Tucker recently described three layers of omnipotent managerial technocracy.

The deep state, he suggested, consists of powerful and secretive central government agencies in the security, intelligence, law enforcement, and financial sectors.

The middle state is a myriad of ubiquitous administrative bodies – agencies, regulators, commissions, departments, municipalities, and many more – run by a permanent bureaucracy.

The shallow state is a plethora of consumer-facing private or semi-private corporations, including banks, Big Media, and huge commercial retail companies, which governments support, protect, subsidize, and pervert. The three layers work together.

For instance, in the financial sector, as Tucker illustrates, the deep state’s Federal Reserve pulls the powerful strings, the middle state’s financial and monetary regulators enforce myriad rules and policies, and the shallow state’s “private” titans like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs dominate commercial activity. It’s a system, Tucker writes, “designed to be impenetrable, permanent, and ever more invasive.”

We are approaching state singularity: the moment when state and society become indistinguishable.

In physics, a “singularity” is a single point in space-time. Inside black holes, gravity crushes volume to zero and mass density is infinite. In computer science, “technological singularity” is unitary artificial superintelligence. At the singularity, everything becomes one thing. Data points converge. Normal laws do not apply.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

When All Crimes Are Those Against the State

June 12, 2024

When All Crimes Are Those Against the State
“Do not encroach against others or their property.”

The above principle is a simple one, yet it’s the basis for all criminal law. In turn, criminal law is the basis for Common Law, the legal system for English-speaking peoples and much of the rest of the world.

The idea is a simple one: If party A aggresses against party B, party B is entitled under the law to restitution or compensation to be paid by party A to party B.

Well, that seems straightforward enough. But at some point along the way, two fundamental changes have been made that don’t reflect the original principle.

First, convicted offenders started to be ordered by the court to pay the court as punishment. Of course, the offense was not against the court, but the government of the day wanted to get in on the action. Surely, if a crime against a given party had been committed, the state was entitled to dip its beak, so to speak.

Over time, fines payable to the state became the norm. And for those who couldn’t pay the state, jail time.

Along the way, another extension to the concept came into use: victimless crimes. Increasingly, laws were passed by governments to make actions unlawful when there was no harm to an individual or his property.

To wit: Recently, the State of Michigan passed law HB4474, against “hate crime” – any perceived slight against another person, verbal or otherwise. The law recognizes such disparate slurs as those critical of gender identity, religion, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, or even affiliation with a group. Incredibly, the law extends as far as the outlawing of unacceptable pronouns.

The punishment is imprisonment of up to two years, a fine of $5,000, or both.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Welcome to the Warfare State

May 10, 2024

Welcome to the Warfare State

War is one of the few things that only the State can do. Indeed, as Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the State.” Let’s briefly discuss the nature of the State to see why World War 3 is on the way.

The State is like any other living entity: its prime directive is to survive and grow. Bear in mind that the State—the government—is not at all the same thing as the country or society, even though it claims to be. It’s not “We the People”; it’s a distinct entity with its own discrete interests. And that’s actually too mild an assertion. While individuals and companies prosper by providing goods and services to others through voluntary exchange, the State specializes in coercion.

There’s nothing voluntary about the State. Its main products have always been pogroms, persecutions, confiscations, taxation, inflation, censorship, harassment, repression—and war. The State is not your friend.

Mass murder and wholesale destruction are bad enough in themselves. But in wartime, the State enables them with new taxes, new debt, draconian controls, and new bureaucracies. These things linger long after the war is over.

Worse yet, the State does these things with the sanction of the victim; the typical citizen has been taught that almost anything is justified by “national security.” Anyone who would normally protest these depredations in peacetime soon learns to dummy-up when there’s a war for fear of being lynched for sympathizing with the invariably demonic enemy.

After the war—assuming a victory, of course—the State’s debt, taxes, regulations and general size never return to pre-war levels. They ratchet up to ever higher plateaus, requiring the State to do more of the same to justify its existence. Government programs, of whatever description, are almost never pulled out by their roots. At most, they’re trimmed, which has the same effect as pruning a plant, i.e., they’re encouraged to grow back bigger and stronger.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

State Violence Is The Norm

April 17, 2024

State Violence Is The Norm

Rewilding is the solution

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about centralisation as a violent force. In short: state violence. It’s hard not to think about at the moment, given Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, backed by America’s imperialist agenda who, along with their British allies, have been dropping bombs on Yemen because the Houthis dared destabilise shipping in the red sea as protest against genocide. It’s hard not to think about state violence when one state is taken to international court by another who knows first hand the bloody scars of apartheid only for that genocidal state to decry the court as discriminating against them—only to launch a series of attacks on neighbouring countries. It’s hard not to think about state violence when one of those countries responds in violence.

It’s hard not to think about state violence when environmental defenders are being killed, locked up and branded ‘terrorists’ in an obvious move to mobilise intensifying criminalisation of civil protest. It’s hard not to think about state violence when children are going hungry in wealthy nations, energy companies are raking in mind-boggling, record-breaking profits at the expense of a stable society, and police are murdering women.

These are particularly awful examples, but state violence is the norm. In his phenomenal essay on legal interpretation, Violence and the Word, Robert Cover astutely pointed out the law’s fundamental violence as “commitments that place bodies on the line.” The state only upholds its alleged order with a willingness to commit violence against its civilians—to lock them up. Of course, all this is done in the name of protecting citizens, supposedly (although a cursory exploration of past legal cases shows the courts’ main priority has long been the protection of private property)…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Everyone Loves a Generous Government Until They Have to Pay For It

December 24, 2023

Everyone Loves a Generous Government Until They Have to Pay For It

Not only does everyone love getting “free money” from the state, they also love hearing the fantasy repeated endlessly that debts are no problem.

Governments, like individuals, can spend liberally with great generosity, or they can be frugal. Everyone receiving government money loves the state’s free-spending generosity, as it is “free money” to the recipients.

But there is no such thing as truly “free money,” a reality discussed by Niccolo Machiavelli in his classic work on leadership and statecraft, The Prince, published in 1516. In Machiavelli’s terminology, leaders could either pursue the positive reputation of being liberal in their spending (not “liberal” in a political sense) or suffer the negative reputation of being mean, i.e. miserly, tight-fisted and frugal.

Machiavelli pointed out that the spending demanded to maintain the reputation for free-spending liberality soon exhausted the funds of the state and required the leader to levy increasingly heavy taxes on the citizenry to pay for the state’s largesse.

Once we examine this necessary consequence of liberal spending, it turns out the generous government is anything but generous, as it is eventually forced to impoverish its people to support its spending.

It is the miserly leader and state that is actually generous, for it is the miserly leader / state that places a light burden on the earnings and livelihoods of the citizenry.

As Machiavelli explained, taxes and the inflation that comes with free spending both rob everyone, while the state’s generosity is a political process that necessarily distributes the largesse asymmetrically:

If he is wise he ought not to fear the reputation of being mean, for in time he will come to be more considered than if liberal, seeing that with his economy his revenues are enough…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Climate Disaster Is Here—and the State Will Never Save Us

November 16, 2023

Climate Disaster Is Here—and the State Will Never Save Us

“States demonstrate, again and again, that not only do they not protect the Earth, they facilitate its destruction.” Dean Spade on the promise of speculative fiction and a review of The Ministry for the Future and The Deluge.

The Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana was once 22,000 acres of bayous. Now, less than 2% of it is still above water. In 2016, residents left because of the effects of climate change in what was labeled the “first federally recognized climate-displaced population” in the United States.PHOTO BY CÉCILE CLOCHERET / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Global temperatures have reached new record highs, flooding and wildfires reaped widespread destruction this summer, and rainwater was declared, for the first time, unfit for human consumption around the globe. Amid these crises, I delved into two novels portraying our current and developing ecological and societal crises: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson and The Deluge by Stephen Markley.

Reading fiction about ecological crisis and societal collapse — including heavily researched books like Deluge (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Ministry (Hachette, 2020) that aim to realistically paint future scenarios, as well as young adult stories (often with elements of magic or science fiction) — can be useful for combating the persistent culture of denial of current conditions. Seeing how an author imagines emerging conditions also helps me grapple with and digest the difficult-to-comprehend onslaught of daily news.

Even those of us who know that climate change is already killing and displacing tens of millions of people (let alone other species) annually are mostly missing the scale of the impending global collapse.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Some Call It Conspiracy Theory – Part 1

October 21, 2023

Some Call It Conspiracy Theory – Part 1

There are certain assumptions that are applied to anyone labelled a “conspiracy theorist”—and all of them are fallacies. Indeed, the term “conspiracy theory” is nothing more than a propaganda construct designed to silence debate and censor opinion on a range of subjects. Most particularly, it is used as a pejorative to marginalise and discredit whoever challenges the pronouncements and edicts of the State and of the Establishment—that is, the public and private entities that control the State and that profit from the State.

Those of us who have legitimate criticisms of government and its institutions and representatives, who are therefore labelled “conspiracy theorists,” face a dilemma. We can embrace the term and attempt to redefine it or we can reject it outright. Either way, it is evident that the people who weaponise the “conspiracy theory” label will continue to use it as long as it serves their propaganda purposes.

One of the most insidious aspects of the “conspiracy theory” fabrication is that the falsehoods associated with the term have been successfully seeded into the public’s consciousness. Often, propagandists need do no more than slap this label on the targeted opinion and the audience will immediately dismiss that viewpoint as a “lunatic conspiracy theory.” Sadly, this knee-jerk reaction is usually made absent any consideration or even familiarity with the evidence presented by that so-called “lunatic conspiracy theorist.”

This was the reason why “conspiracy theorist” label was created. The State and its propagandists do not want the public to even be aware of inconvenient evidence, let alone to examine it. The challenging evidence is buried under the “wild conspiracy theory” label, thereby signalling to the unsuspecting public that they should automatically reject all of the offered facts and evidence.

There are a number of components that collectively form the conspiracy theory canard. Let’s break them down.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Warre and peace: of gifts, government and men with guns

January 27, 2022

Warre and peace: of gifts, government and men with guns

This is the last in a somewhat interrupted series of posts about property rights in small farm futures and small farm pasts, which started here, looked at the idea of work and self-ownership here, considered private property here and common property here. The missing piece in terms of standard definitions of property ownership is public or state ownership.

So here I’m going to address public ownership to complete this part of the blog cycle. But I’m not going to say much about the forms of state ownership emanating from national, federal or local government familiar from everyday modern politics. For one thing, the issues involved in those have been endlessly rehashed in standard political positions concerning the pros and cons of (big) government, and I have little to add to all that. More importantly, I don’t think this modern politics is going to survive in anything much like its familiar present forms as the various challenges of our present and future world begin to bite.

That prompts questions about what state power and public ownership might look like in the future viewed from the centres out – from London or Washington DC, New York or New Delhi, Beijing, Mumbai, Edinburgh, Juba, Dublin, Belfast, Brussels, Los Angeles, Sacramento and so on. But it also prompts questions about what political power and public ownership might look like in the more rural peripheries of these power centres.

My view, which could of course turn out to be wrong, is that the de facto power of the centres to organize life in these peripheries will wane, that more people will be living in many of these peripheries than they presently do, and that it’s in these peripheries that the most important and interesting political and economic innovations of the world to come will occur…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ending Fiat Money Won’t Destroy the State

January 13, 2022

Ending Fiat Money Won’t Destroy the State

A certain meme has become popular among advocates of both gold and cryptocurrencies. This is the “Fix the money, fix the world” meme. This slogan is based on the idea that by switching to some commodity money—be it crypto or metal—and abandoning fiat currency, the world will improve greatly.

Taken in its moderate form, of course, this slogan is indisputably correct. State-controlled money is immoral, dangerous, and impoverishing. It paves the way for government theft of private wealth through the inflation tax, and thus allows the state to do more of what it does best: wage wars, kill, imprison, steal, and enrich the friends of the regime at the expense of everyone else. Privatizing the monetary system and imposing a “separation of money and state” would help limit these activities.

But it’s also important to not overstate the benefits of taking money out of the hands of the state. The temptation to push the “fix the world” idea to utopian levels is often seen among cryptocurrency maximalists, and among some gold promoters as well.

For example, at least one bitcoin enthusiast thinks bitcoin will bring “the end of the nation states.” And in one particularly over-the-top paragraph from another bitcoin promoter, we’re told that cryptocurrency will essentially cure every ill from poverty to corruption to environmental destruction.

The idea that changing to different money will somehow end theft, poverty, or even war is the sort of messianic thinking that would have given old-school Marxists a run for their money.

Yes, we can all agree that if we “improve the money” we also “improve the world.” But removing the state’s money monopoly won’t make states fold up their tents and slink away in the night. (And, needless to say, simply changing the money won’t make bad food or poverty disappear either.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Programmable Digital Currency”: The next stage of the new normal?The war on cash’s endgame is here: money replaced by vouchers subject to complete state control.

October 10, 2021

“Programmable Digital Currency”: The next stage of the new normal?The war on cash’s endgame is here: money replaced by vouchers subject to complete state control.

Building on the bitcoin model, central banks are planning to produce their own “digital currencies”. Removing any and all remaining privacy, granting total control over every transaction, even limiting what ordinary people are allowed to spend their money on.

From the moment bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies first emerged, sold as an independent and alternative medium of exchange outside the financial status quo, it was only a matter of time before the new alternative would be absorbed, modified and redeployed in service of the state.

Enter “Central Bank Digital Currencies”: the mainstream answer to bitcoin.

For those who have never heard of them, “Central Bank Digital Currencies” (CBDCs) are exactly what they sound like, digitized versions of the pound/dollar/euro etc. issued by central banks.

Like bitcoin (and other crypto), the CBDC would be entirely digital, thus furthering the ongoing war on cash. However, unlike crypto, it would not have any encryption preserving anonymity. In fact, it would be totally the reverse, potentially ending the very idea of financial privacy.

Now, you may not have heard much about the CBDC plans, lost as they are in the tangle of the ongoing “pandemic”, but the campaign is there, chugging along on the back pages for months now. There are stories about it from both Reuters and the Financial Times just today. It’s a long, slow con, but a con nonetheless.

The countries where the idea progressed the furthest are China and the UK. The Chinese Digital Yuan has been in development since 2014, and is subject to ongoing and widespread testing. The UK is nowhere near that stage yet, but Chancellor Rishi Sunak is keenly pushing forward a digital pound that the press are calling “Britcoin”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“The Enemies of the State”: The New York Times and The Fluidity of Advocacy Journalism

July 30, 2021

“The Enemies of the State”: The New York Times and The Fluidity of Advocacy Journalism

We have been discussing the rise of advocacy journalism and the rejection of objectivity in journalism schools. The New York Times has been at the forefront of this shift away from traditional reporting but has increasingly found that the fluidity of advocacy journalism leaves it without any clear framework or standards. Consider the latest scandal at the Times. Justice Department reporter and MSNBC contributor Katie Benner went on a rave about Republicans and called Trump supporters “enemies of the state.” She also made a not-so-veiled call for readers to vote against them. The Times has been in total radio silence over what, just a few years ago, would have been viewed as an outrageous violation of journalistic standards. Yet, just recently, it fired another reporter for a comparatively mild tweet supporting Biden. Professional ethics, it seems, has become entirely impressionistic in the age of advocacy journalism.

Notably, many of us denounced Donald Trump for calling the New York Times and other media outlets the “enemy of the people.” The media was aghast and the Times publicly condemned such rhetoric as “inflammatory.” Now, however, journalists like Benner are engaging in the same inflammatory rhetoric and the Times is conspicuously silent.

We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. This movement includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the State Spreads Mass Hysteria

December 18, 2020

How the State Spreads Mass Hysteria

The history of mass hysteria, or mass sociogenic illness is fascinating. Cases of mass hysteria have been documented since the Middle Ages. Let me just mention a few of the more recent cases.

When a radio play by Orson Welles, War of the Worlds, was broadcasted in 1938 shortly after the suspension of the Munich agreement, the play allegedly caused panic among listeners, who thought that they were under attack by Martians.

Another intriguing case is an episode of a Portuguese TV show called Strawberries with Sugar. In the episode, the characters were infected by a life-threatening virus. After the show, more than three hundred students reported similar symptoms as the ones experienced by the TV show characters such as rashes and difficulty breathing. Some schools even closed. The Portuguese National Institute for Medical Emergency concluded that the virus did not exist in reality and that the symptoms were caused by mass hysteria.Similarly, on Emirates flight 203 in September 2018, dozens of passengers started to believe they were sick after observing other passengers with flu-like symptoms. As a consequence of the panic, the whole flight was quarantined. In the end only a few passengers had a common cold or the seasonal flu.

It is well known that there exist nocebo effects, which are the opposite of placebo effects. Due the placebo effect, a person recovers from an illness because she expects to do so. When we suffer a nocebo effect, on the other hand, we get ill just because we expect to become ill.1 In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the expectation can cause the symptoms. Anxiety and fear exacerbate this process.2

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cover-19 and the Death of Market Fundamentalism

April 17, 2020

COVID-19 AND THE DEATH OF MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM

On top of the countless human tragedies, there will be many long-lasting social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps none will be more profound though, than the death of free market fundamentalism and the return of the State.

Why now? After all, there have long been moral, social and environmental risks posed by an unfettered market. Risks that present a strong case for action by the State – with inequality and climate change being the two most glaring examples. It didn’t help.

This is different. COVID-19 presents a blindingly powerful economic case for change. It shows that an ideological, quasi-religious approach to regulating markets, sometimes called neo-liberalism and, until the virus, the dominant political approach in the west, is fatally flawed. It creates a weak and unstable economy, which magnifies risks and is unable to manage shocks¹. It threatens itself.

Of course, a pandemic would always have had a very large and disruptive economic impact. However, we can already see that those countries with a coherent, competent, respected and well-resourced State – everything market fundamentalists have sought to undermine – are likely to have both lower economic and human cost.

Thus, market fundamentalism is no longer even in the interests of the corporate sector or the financial elites. It creates unmanageable economic risks and ultimately poses an existential risk to capitalism, as argued by Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz². Therefore, any corporate or finance leader who continues their knee jerk support for actions to ‘free up markets, ‘reduce taxes’, to ‘get government out of the way’, will now know the consequences.

This is not about being for or against ‘the market’ or the ‘corporate sector’. It is not about ‘curbing corporate power’ or developing ‘an alternative economic system’. Capitalism, correctly defined and well managed, can be a powerful and effective component of an intelligently designed, democratic and fair society.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doug Casey on the Destruction of the Dollar

November 28, 2019

Doug Casey on the Destruction of the Dollar

“Inflation” occurs when the creation of currency outruns the creation of real wealth it can bid for… It isn’t caused by price increases; rather, it causes price increases.

Inflation is not caused by the butcher, the baker, or the auto maker, although they usually get blamed. On the contrary, by producing real wealth, they fight the effects of inflation. Inflation is the work of government alone, since government alone controls the creation of currency.

In a true free-market society, the only way a person or organization can legitimately obtain wealth is through production. “Making money” is no different from “creating wealth,” and money is nothing but a certificate of production. In our world, however, the government can create currency at trivial cost, and spend it at full value in the marketplace. If taxation is the expropriation of wealth by force, then inflation is its expropriation by fraud.

To inflate, a government needs complete control of a country’s legal money. This has the widest possible implications, since money is much more than just a medium of exchange. Money is the means by which all other material goods are valued. It represents, in an objective way, the hours of one’s life spent in acquiring it. And if enough money allows one to live life as one wishes, it represents freedom as well. It represents all the good things one hopes to have, do, and provide for others. Money is life concentrated.

As the state becomes more powerful and is expected to provide more resources to selected groups, its demand for funds escalates. Government naturally prefers to avoid imposing more taxes as people become less able (or willing) to pay them. It runs greater budget deficits, choosing to borrow what it needs. As the market becomes less able (or willing) to lend it money, it turns to inflation, selling ever greater amounts of its debt to its central bank, which pays for the debt by printing more money.

Doug Casey on Why the State Is a “Parasite on Society”

September 22, 2019

Doug Casey on Why the State Is a “Parasite on Society”

Allow me to say a few things that some of you may find shocking, offensive, or even incomprehensible. On the other hand, I suspect many or most of you may agree – but either haven’t crystallized your thoughts, or are hesitant to express them. I wonder if it will be safe to say them in another five years…

You’re likely aware that I’m a libertarian. But I’m actually more than a libertarian, I’m an anarcho-capitalist. In other words, I actually don’t believe in the right of the State to exist. Why not? The State isn’t a magical entity; it’s a parasite on society. Anything useful the State does could be, and would be, provided by entrepreneurs seeking a profit. And would be better and cheaper by virtue of that.

More important, the State represents institutionalized coercion. It has a monopoly of force, and that’s always extremely dangerous. As Mao Tse-tung, lately one of the world’s leading experts on government, said: “The power of the State comes out of a barrel of a gun.” The State is not your friend.

There are two possible ways for people to relate to each other: either voluntarily or coercively. The State is pure institutionalized coercion. As such, it’s not just unnecessary, but antithetical, to a civilized society. And that’s increasingly true as technology advances. It was never moral, but at least it was possible in oxcart days for bureaucrats to order things around. Today the idea is ridiculous.

The State is a dead hand that imposes itself on society, mainly benefitting those who control it, and their cronies. It shouldn’t be reformed; it should be abolished. That belief makes me, of course, an anarchist.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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