Welcome to the fourth week of our book club reading A Lodging for Wayfaring Men. We're reading one chapter every two weeks, so we are discussing Chapter 2 today. You can find the book club reading schedule here: #1582413
A Lodging for Wayfaring Men, Chapter 2
"What happens," he thought to himself, "if a thousand free marketplaces spring up all over the world? Governments will lose their revenues. How far will they go to protect their positions of power? Will they declare martial law, and start searching every home and every computer they can? Will they use terror and intimidation to keep people out of free markets? What happens when their power slips away...how many types of crises can they arrange, so that people will not complain about having the last of their privacy taken away? And how many people are left who can muster half a care?"
Sitting here at a coffeeshop where I could have paid with Bitcoin (if I could only tell the cashier how to enable it on their Square terminal), this fantasy Michael has about the success of their online free markets is both inspiring and laughable. Inspiring because Rosenberg has this belief that free, private markets can be such a threat to the behemoth that is state power. Laughable because it's rather ridiculous to imagine governments declaring martial law.
While Bitcoiners may fantasize about the collapse of the dollar, the reality is rather more humdrum: FinCEN issues confusing and at times conflicting regulatory guidance, bureaucracies attack the edges of Bitcoin with unpredictable, but largely restrained savagery, KYC has thoroughly permeated many aspects of bitcoin trade. Developers working on privacy applications[1] are the ones who bear the brunt of the states' violence, while the rest of us seem to be more or less free to pursue our use of bitcoin.
Perhaps this more extreme vision of the state's reaction to free internet markets would have resonated more in a decade ago when Silk Road had just been taken down and the guy behind the Liberty Dollar had been thrown in jail, but these days it feels like bitcoin is fairly freely used and the lack of adoption is due to the people being retarded, not because the state is waging all-out war against us.
Most[2] of Chapter 2 is a fairly basic (if nonetheless compelling) explication of the argument that taxation is theft.
"I am a psychologist by trade...The collection of taxes is not moral; it involves coercion and intimidation: things that are rightly branded as evil if a person does them to his neighbor. All taxes involve the threat or use of force. At some point in every taxation process, weapons are involved. This fact intimidates people into paying.
"I know a life of servitude damages the human psyche. Living under a taxing state is servitude, and it is seriously damaging to human health and function. This I can prove empirically."
"I have a friend who is an economist, and he opposes taxation because it is incredibly inefficient, taking money out of the most productive hands, and placing it in the hands of people who produce nothing. He argues that humanity would do far better without it.
"My friend the philosopher says that anything involuntary is contrary to the best interests of mankind, and that taxation slows the true engine of progress, individual human energy."
Rosenberg takes a sturdy stance on this moral highground with statements like:
"Remember this son. You deserve justice. When animals like them hurt you, you hurt them back. Do justice, son. It's not for someone else to do, it is for you to do. Don't let them destroy the world."
But if the state is destroying the free world (bitcoin), it isn't attempting to do it through martial law and overt warfare, but rather through sneaky, roundabout means. The state's opposition to Bitcoin hasn't materialized in jackboots, but rather lukewarm acceptance and fairly weak regulatory efforts unevenly enforced. Freedom-lovers expected a war and the state has responded with bureaucracy -- is this a mistake on their part or a masterstroke?
The other group who seem to have most suffered under the law are the exchange operators, but it's hard to feel that the state has been entirely wrong in this as so many of these guys were also scammers. ↩
Rosenberg's writing continues to be hamfisted. The love scenes between Frances and James are painful to read. Witness: "Oh, Frances, your explanation of economics pertaining to anything that is exchanged is brilliant. Elegant, simple, brilliant." Half of his consciousness broke off for a fraction of a second, and he noticed that his voice was sounding smooth and melodic, as if he were trying to caress her with it. "Very, very well put." I puked a little in my mouth while reading the following: "This," she vaguely thought to herself, "may be the purest, highest moment of love anyone ever has...here I am making love with a good man, a great man...a man whose soul I have just healed." ↩
The way I see it is that everything exists on a spectrum including the state's ability to exercise control, and the people's ability to escape it.
There are limits to what the state can actually do, and martial law in western societies may be one of those things that they're unable to carry out successfully, at least in such a way that it helps their objectives.
Sure, but it seems to me that the successful states have realized that don't necessarily need such blunt measures as martial law...mass surveillance and making exemplars to nudge people around may be much more effective.
I like how you think about the existence of a spectrum here. The tendency of the sovereign idealists (as so clearly demonstrated in Lodging) is to paint the world in black and white and this probably contributes to their lack of success in so many areas.
Bitcoin discourse in general could probably use a healthy dose of spectrum thinking...except that bitcoin itself (ie the protocol) requires strict black and white).
yes most political discourse of any kind needs a healthy dose of spectrum thinking.
I tend to think in terms of "which side of the hill are we on" rather than "who's right"
The essence of a freedom-loving culture is that it perceives tyranny as so intolerable that it necessitates war (because their children would otherwise suffer an exponentially worse tyranny), whereas a freedom-skeptic culture values peace for its own sake, and is willing to tolerate or even actively support tyranny as a means of preserving peace. These cultures will inevitably come to blows given enough destabilizing factors.
The US is an odd case. The established order was originally founded in liberty, so the freedom-fighters, who are constantly thinking in terms of overthrowing the establishment, have managed to obtain a significant degree of institutional power. The dog caught the car.
But as for the seemingly peaceful developments of businesses and local governments incorporating Bitcoin into their balance sheets, those are actually escalations towards war. Because now instead of just me evading a few thousand dollars in taxes, we have whole regions that are integrating a revolutionary form of capitalism into their infrastructure in a way that will simply not be accepted as legitimate by its opponents, just as the North's lack of slavery inevitably triggered a secession crisis.
It's easy to envision a small group of elites enforcing a top-down dictatorship, but look at the corona lockdowns. That was a grassroots movement. The state was accommodating the demands of civilian commoners. It would be easy if simply bankrupting the state were enough. It isn't. There are millions of dictators among us. If they can't collect through the IRS then vigilante groups will run their own wealth redistribution campaigns.
This sounds like a pretty accurate description of most in the Bitcoin space (probably myself included). I don't like to think that I'm actively supporting tyranny, but it's difficult to deny that my tax dollars are used to do a lot of tyrannical things.
What am I to do with this?
I think the easiest way to visualize the problem is to reduce it to financial math.
Let's say I earn $60k in a year. So I owe $5k to the federal gang, $2k to the state gang, and $1k to the Venezuelan gang.
There's a moral problem here (why are these strangers taking my money when I did nothing wrong) and there's a structural problem which is that the rate of taxation and the way it's being spent has become a disruption to my ability to do business, and is crossing over from a nuisance I can afford to ignore, to a drain on my life's work, which ultimately harms not just me but the entire financial ecosystem in which we all live.
Well, I do have $52k left. I have a gun. I have friends who agree that taxation is theft, who also have guns. The United States was founded as a capitalist country. We have Bitcoin now, which effectively channels the pursuit of self-interest into a public benefit. We have a prolific Jew who provided a moral framework to justify blowing things up. So really, I think I have a lot of leverage in this situation.
The ideology is the strategy. You do what works for you with the information you have. God sorts out the rest.
Masterstroke. Death by snu snu and yaaaawns... It was always Huxley's dystopia we should fear more than Orwell's.
100%
I'd argue we're already living in Huxley's dystopia... but it's even worse because in Huxley, the social control via entertainments was planned with a purpose, including reproductive purpose.
Buy in our dystopia, the social control via entertainments is a mostly decentralized phenomenon driven by economic interests and the frailty of the human mind
what's worse? The unplanned or the planned one?
it's like what @k00b said in SNL: "I'd prefer the lifestyle of the fascists"
both are bad but i think living in a planned dystopia might be a better life than living in an unplanned dystopia?
I've thought about this before (but maybe I'm just remembering sometime you talked about this in the past). I need to reread Brave New World because I really don't remember much from when I read it way back.
If the snu snu attack is a masterstroke on the state's behalf, what is our best defense? Protesting against Trump not buying bitcoin for his National Bitcoin Reserve doesn't seem to be achieving the self-sovereignty I was hoping for.
HAHAAA, shocking, right! My politician didn't do what I voted for him to do!
even worse: what they voted for him to do wasn't any good in the first place