Fiat, Fascism and Communism
Bitcoin, Freedom and Sovereignty
An article on why moving into Bitcoin is not just an economic imperative, but a moral duty.
To truly fight the leviathan known as “The State”, we must first starve it of its most important source of nutrition; economic input.
Economic input is simply a measure of the time and energy that the constituents of a society in-put. It’s a measure of the productive capacity of all human action that generates value. It’s literally the collective lifeblood of all individuals in society and as such, its most important asset.
The state consumes [steals] an ever growing amount of input, like a parasite, via its many machinations. It has overt methods such as taxation to do this, but also more covert methods such as inflation via its monopoly on money. In much the same way, it also claims monopolistic authority over ethics & morality, imposing regulations and controls in areas it absolutely does not belong (eg; the plants people may want to consume).
Consequentially, a system emerges in which the incentives skew toward blind consumerism over sustainable productivity, substantiated by the creation of endless fantasy-economic-models designed to borrow from the future, steal from the present and ignore the past.
The result?
- Destruction of our natural resources
- The obliteration of individual values
- Mindless consumerism
- Misallocated time, energy and intellectual resources
- Rampant Speculation
- Unnatural inequality (instead of 80/20, we get 99.9/0.01)
- Extreme corruption at the top
- Complete sloth, hopelessness & victimisation at the bottom
- Nihilism and futility in the middle class
- A world without a moral compass or a vision for the future
An unfair game
It is monopoly control over the unit by which we measure the product of our labor, & coordinate the creation of value, that allows the State to do so much damage. By owning, issuing, and mandating what is “money” they are able to setup the rules of the game so that no matter what happens, heads they win, tails everyone else loses.
It’s an incredible system. One that any rational mind would love to take advantage of given the opportunity, but it’s a power absolutely no one should have, lest the world devolve into a collectivist dystopia every few generations.
By ripping the control of money from the hands of any organization, State, individual, or institution, we ensure that all are playing the game of life by the same set of rules. Rules that give rise to civilization, & reward each individual for their time, energy, & innovative contributions.
This is the ultimate equality of opportunity.
By using, supporting and interacting with government issued fiat money, you are directly supporting a system that attempts to artificially manufacture a modern, immobile feudal state that is a blend of fascism, communism, authoritariansim, socialism, colonialism & globalism.
This hell is one in which “equality of outcome” is promised, placating the non productive with a pittance whilst robbing every productive member of society.
By strip mining the very soul from humans at the individual level, this broken system destroys humanity at the collective.
We must fight back, and in order to do so, we must fight fiat.
You fix the money, you fix the world.
Fiat Collectivism
Humans are social creatures and we naturally form groups, or tribes along similar values.
This is natural and it’s an emergent feature of “society” in the original sense of the term.
Collectivism by fiat is a totally different beast. It’s the abhorrent idea that the group, its identity and its values, can be mandated by some decree, and that the individuals of which it is comprised are just insignificant parts subservient to the whole.
Collectivism comes in many forms. The most corrupt & unsustainable forms must be supported with lies. The worst being lies about economic reality, which can last longer with a monopoly on [fiat] money.
A quick overview on each follows.
Socialism
The idea that a central authority has the magical ability to know what each member of their society wants or needs, and should therefore transfer the wealth generated by one group to another — all whilst wasting a significant portion of it, whether through incompetence, corruption or misallocation.
It is not concerned with creating wealth, but redistributing it as whoever the ruler at the time is sees fit.
This is the most prevalent version of modern governance because it underpins the rest of the models I’ll mention below.
Communism
A more extreme version of Socialism, Communism simply takes the re-distribution of wealth to a more primitive level.
Instead of socialising the wealth that others have had the capacity to produce, it attempts to artificially distribute the core resources which individuals would have turned into wealth.
This is why poverty & shortages are so prevalent in communist states. They don’t even get to the wealth creation stage because there is no mechanism to measure supply or demand in their “market” (if one can even call it that), nor is there the freedom to actually go out and create value for another because the state has already determined what your rations are.
Communism is the arrogant assumption that a group of bureaucrats can decide what everyone, everywhere could possibly want or need, at all times and magically give it to them.
If you need proof as to whether or not it works, see Communism’s track record over the past century:
- Hundreds of attempts, all around the world
- >250m dead
- Mass starvation
- Mass poverty
- Continual hyperinflation
- Families, capital, societies and resources destroyed
Democracy
Democracy is the silly idea that just because everyone else wants something, you should want it too.
It’s like a giant Asch experiment, and whilst it works at small scales where the bulk of people’s values are aligned, when it gets larger it simply devolves into mob rule and the “Oppression Olympics”.
Democracy gives one the illusion that they can make a difference, but in reality places the disembodied collective above the corporeal individual.
It is a phantom menace in which imaginary public law takes precedent over private, individual property rights via a set of positivist legislations bureaucrats perpetually create to appease the mob, or benefit the lobbyists.
At scale it’s likely the most insidious of governance systems because it just socialism with the illusion of choice.
With a veneer of freedom, the productive members of society are given just enough rope to hang themselves. They have room to create wealth, but, with time, more & more will be stolen → unless they clue into the game, get close to the monetary & legislative spigot and begin to build a cantillon-moat.
Cantillon Effect: The primary benefactors of monetary stimulus get to spend the money first, before the effects of increased money supply (inflation) manifest in the market.
Perhaps its most dangerous aspect is the normalisation that you have a claim on another’s property or will, making it a more sophisticated way of stealing from others or claiming that which is not yours.
Therein lies the unraveling of Democracy. At scale it will always devolve into a corrupt version of capitalist-socialism where a politically connected few can privatise the gains, socialise any losses & enslave the middle class engine.
The good get robbed. The bad get rewarded. The mobs start rioting.
Fascism
This is the even dumber idea that government bureaucrats can force private industry to do and build what it is they want, when, and for what price.
It’s most effective for military-type dictatorships where innovation and production happens by force.
It’s the most overtly violent when in full bloom, as we’ve no doubt seen in the past century, thanks to Hitler & Mussolini, and whilst it is framed as a “far right” ideology, it’s got far more in common with all of the above than with almost any form of conservatism. In fact, it’s just another flavour of socialism.
NAZI = National Socialist German Workers Party
The interesting thing about modern America is that it resembles fascism in many ways. Big-pharma, big-agriculture, defence, transport, energy, healthcare and a series of other primary industries are either “told” what to do by their government overlords, or are merely an extension of it.
Blends
Of course there are blends of each of the above. China is a prime example of an authoritarian blend of communism & fascism.
The room they make for Capitalist wealth generation it is simply a mechanism for feeding the state. Deng Xiaoping realised this early on and saved China from a certain USSR type implosion.
Has China gotten strong through its approach? For now, Yes.
Is it something the world should aspire toward? Absolutely not, lest we want to live in some high tech dystopian version of 1984.
Thankyou…Fiat
All of the above is made possible by Fiat Money.
If “The State” cannot feed itself, if it cannot fund itself. If it cannot fund itself, then it cannot perpetrate the crimes it continues to commit.
This is the core of the game.
You and I cannot win a game of monopoly if there is a player who plays the bank. The best we can hope to do is make friends with the banker and join him in screwing everyone else over.
That’s where we are today.
On a Fiat Money standard, the incompetent fools in government (and it’s cronies or affiliates) can continue to fund themselves with the wealth we, and our future generations, produce. They will keep trying to substantiate their existence by getting in the way of free individuals, by robbing 1 Peter to pay 4 Paul’s under the guise or “the greater good”, and when that doesn’t work, they will resort to violence or force to get what they want.
The State Rules
“Heads I win, tails you lose”
Bitcoin Fixes This
On a Bitcoin standard, none of the above can exist at scale.
On a local level, people can orient themselves in whatever way they want. In fact, a communal approach [“communism”] is probably ideal at the scale of the immediate family and perhaps even up to the level of the extended family and friends. Any further and the lack of private property will guarantee that conflict ensues, and it will devolve into a tragedy of the commons.
Democracy suffers from similar scaling problems. When what can be voted on is limited to a few areas then it may scale further than some of the other models. But much of the political polarization & hostility we see today are a result of too much in our lives being impacted by how someone else votes.
What Bitcoin changes is not the governance models themselves, but by creating a hard monetary standard, it holds them accountable. By anchoring the system to economic reality, it cannot create fantasies or collective illusions in which to perpetuate lies or carry out large scale theft (overt or covert).
By fixing the money, Bitcoin re-aligns the base incentives at the individual and collective level. The trickle down effect then fixes many things gone awry in the world.
Let’s explore a few key things:
Social Mobility
This is perhaps the biggest, and most persistent of problems to plague humanity in a social sense. Feudalism and Caste systems exist today just like they did millennia ago, only in a different form.
Inequality is NOT a problem when you have social mobility. In fact, it’s desirable, because it’s what makes the world diverse. So many people miss this, even those I admire like Jordan Peterson.
With Bitcoin, for the first time in history, the social strata becomes truly dynamic. The capacity to move upwards exists because those “at the bottom” can officially save.
And just as importantly (if not more importantly), downward mobility exists because those “at the top” can no longer socialize their losses when they fuck up.
Skin is inextricably in the game for everybody, and there is no possibility for an unfair advantage.
If you add more value, do more work, provide a better service, build a better product or make better choices in life, you will climb.
If you consume more than you produce, if you are wasteful, if you make bad investment decisions, if you blow all your money on hookers and coke, then guess what, you can’t print any more money or tax others to pay for your losses. You will fall down the social ladder.
And that’s exactly as it should be.
This is true equality.
True equality is equality in probability
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An excerpt from Skin in the Game is very apt here also:
Dynamic (ergodic) inequality takes into account the entire future and past life.
You do not create dynamic equality just by raising the level of those at the bottom, but rather by making the rich rotate — or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening.
The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the one percent.
The Environment
The fiat monetary system has a devastating impact on the environment. The State burns up an incredible amount of our natural resources and the majority of it is complete waste.
Think about the amount of money (remember money = resources, whether present or future) spent on the following:
- Defence & Military
- Government, Regulatory & Judicial System
- Banking, Payments & Financial System
- Wall Street
- Subsidising materials which kill the earth (cheap plastics)
- Blind consumerism
The top 4 listed above are what it takes to ensure the Fiat monetary system operates. Remember that “money” is a system of trust, and the only reason the USD preserves some form of value is because it is “backed by the full faith and credit of the US government”. In other words, the entire government, banking, judicial and military industrial complex exists to back the dollar.
And that’s not counting the rest of the countries around the world and the copious amount of paper, cotton, platics and metals used to mint “money”.
That’s alot of wasted resources.
I’d strongly suggest a review of Hass McCook’s work on the environmental impact of different monetary systems:
Waste. Waste. Waste.
The global economy is a closed system. If one group can conjure money up out of thin air it dilutes the money (read finite resources) of the group that did not!
If there is not enough money to overtly or covertly steal today, the state borrows from the future to pay for for the present. And what do you think the asset supporting the future is? Yep, you guessed it; it’s more finite human and natural resources.
Remember that money measures time, energy and finite natural resources. Creating it out of thin air and wasting it is literally how you destroy those resources!
This cannot happen when money is fixed & incorruptible. It can only happen as a direct consequence of The State’s decree on money.
Junk
Plastics are another prime example of the ramifications of fiat.
Why do you think they’re so cheap?
It’s not just because they are mass-produced for blind consumers who are hell bent on spending what they have because their time preference is so skewed, but…Plastic manufacturers are directly subsidised by their government, alongside the larger petro-dollar system.
On a hard money standard, people are not only more discerning with respect to where they spend their hard-earned money (which in itself would solve much of the waste problem), but in the absence of government handouts, the real cost of plastics and other disposable junk would be much higher.
These ridiculous face diapers are another example. 30bn of them are disposed of every month (that we’ve been able to estimate) — all over a set of absurd mandates decreed by overweight, bureaucratic hysterics who care not what the consequences of their decisions are.
And that’s not counting the incredible waste of materials that have been ripped out of the earth to make chairs, bathrooms, restaurants and a countless quantum of infrastructure that is not being used. Just go to an airport and every second chair, toilet, tap and urinal is just sitting there.
Waste
Want to help slow & reverse the damage being done to the planet?
QUIT SUPPORTING FIAT MONEY
Not only do you help slow the amount of resources being wasted, but you also opt into using a form of money that does not require the multi-trillion dollar wall street and military industrial complex to “back” it.
Bitcoin is pure energy money.
It has no waste.
Fiat’s guarantee comes from the promise of an archaic, wasteful and morally bankrupt series of institutions that care about nothing but themselves, and are willing to rape, pillage and loot to stay in power.
Bitcoin’s security guarantee comes from the direct conversion of unforgeable energy into a fixed supply unit on an incorruptible monetary network.
There is no alternative that exists that is more sound, efficient, effective and rooted in the physical laws of the very universe itself.
Health
Fiat food & fiat medicine are another phenomenon made possible by fiat money.
Denatured fake foods are the direct result of government subsidized, large scale industrial “food” manufacturing, whether those subsidies come in the form of direct tax cuts, low interest rate loans (backed by the government), regulatory moats or the flood of fake money flowing into the publicly listed companies selling this sludge.
Before fiat, we cultivated the land, we respected the soil, we ate naturally grown foods.
Today, 95% of the junk you can buy at a supermarket can barely pass as “food”, and the little that does has been denatured with god-knows what sorts of hormones, pesticides, herbicides or chemicals. And let us not mention the damage that mono-crop and/or GMO farming has done to the planet, the precious top soil, the rainforests and the biosphere.
All of this, proudly made possible by yours truly. Fiat Money.
The corporate leviathans who benefit most from this only have the capacity to what they do, thanks to their proximity to the state and its printing press.
The same goes for the entire Pharmaceutical industry.
People have come to believe that disease is the absence of drugs, and that “health” is just another pharma-manufactured pill away.
Fiat medicine has numbed everyone into submission, and alongside its partner in crime; fiat-food, it breeds physically dependent and incapacitated victims who can no longer live without them.
It’s a sad state of affairs and one in which the numbers paint a clear picture:
(1971 is when the USD came off the Gold Standard & became an unhinged fiat currency)
If we want to once again take control of our health, we have to move onto a hard money standard.
We need to build strong humans, with real nutritious food, on fertile soil, out in the sun, independent of these maniacal, state sponsored institutions that want to turn us all into zombies (figuratively…and perhaps literally speaking).
Education
This is another area that will flourish in the absence of state-sponsored shenanigans.
Schooling originally emerged as a way to prepare people for production lines and in some cases for the army.
It had merit at the time, and perhaps it’s early incarnations were a legitimate attempt to standardise a basic education across the board. “A rising tide lifts all boats” so to speak.
Whatever the initial intentions, it’s not where we are today.
There is a big difference between schooling and education.
- Education is something we experience naturally. Humans are learning and problem solving machines. Our education starts as soon as we’re born and it continues on throughout our life. It does not require a “school”.
- Schooling is the attempt to standardise and streamline education at scale. It’s useful in many ways, and especially early on in a child’s life when learning some basics is valuable. It’s biggest drawback is that it incentivises rote-learning and memorisation as opposed to real education due to the nature of it’s standardisation. This becomes even more of a problem when the “schooling” curriculum is designed and mandated by the state.
Schooling, courtesy of the state has devolved into “State Indoctrination”. It’s no longer about education, nor is it even about systematised education in the traditional sense of the word ‘school’.
Today, it’s about taking young, impressionable children, & beating all of the individuality & free spirit out of them. It’s a sausage machine, teaching them how to conform, feeding them propaganda like “inflation is normal”, “the government is great”, “white people are evil” or “you need a degree to succeed”. It then encourages them to join some university so they can start their adult lives under a mountain of debt. Debt they’ll never be able to repay, owed to an institution further indoctrinating them in some crazy political ideology.
Sounds like fun right.
And how is this all funded?
Yep — you guessed it. Via taxation and inflation.
If I want to teach my own kids, and over time select a-la-carte what they have a natural pre-disposition to excel at and double down on it, I am a criminal.
If the state wants to turn your kids into a blind zombie, running in a rat race they cannot finish and remain subservient to the government, they are heroes.
I see a future where education becomes the focus once again.
Where parents can choose early on which key subjects they’d like to send their kids to, and pay for a-la-carte
As their kids grow up and latch onto different topics or develop skills, they can be more involved in the selection process of what they want to do & learn.
In the absence of state induced poverty (ie; taxation and inflation), you can pay for what you feel is important for your child to learn, and education itself will continue to trend toward a lower and lower cost.
In fact, you can already get a better education from YouTube for FREE today, than you can from any state school.
Furthermore, the best educators and specialists in their fields will create their own bespoke, unique curriculums that those who want to, can afford to, or show promise (scholarships) can attend.
You want to see a new Renaissance?
This is how it happens.
We move onto Bitcoin.
We defund the state.
Business & Free Markets
Markets are nodes in society where people from all walks of life meet to learn, transact and trade.
Markets have existed since the beginning of time, and the medium via which information permeates is called “price”.
When you have high-fidelity information, you can make better decisions and with better decisions you can add more value, produce better products, provide better services and more efficiently use scarce resources.
Fiat money distorts prices, and therefore distorts markets.
Buyers can no longer adequately assess the value of what they want to acquire whilst producers are confused about what to build, create or sell because they have no clear indication of demand.
This creates a significant amount of unnecessary waste, and a huge amount of mis-allocated capital when it comes to investment and entrepreneurship.
Shit we don’t need gets built, funded and sold to us especially in the realm of finance and tech because they’re low hanging fruits that benefit most from the unlimited supply of fake money.
The economy begins to look like a deformed human with fake muscle in all the wrong places.
Entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of any and all economies, and by definition they are problem solvers and opportunists. They see a problem, they then build a product or service to solve it. They see an opportunity and they capitalise on it.
When the market signals are all out of whack because the government is willy-nilly funding whatever agenda it sees fit this month, or the fake money printed by central banks flows into Wall Street and is invested into the Nasdaq or some VCs, what do you think entrepreneurs will do?
They will go to where the gold is, further exacerbating the deformity of the market.
Once again, Bitcoin fixes this.
In the absence of false price signals and fake markets, consumers think twice about what they want to buy and are clear on why they need it, whilst producers get a real, organic gauge of what the needs of the marketplace are and will go solve those problems.
You know…things like poverty, or starvation in Africa, or homelessness in America, or quality food & farming worldwide, or better ways to extract energy from scarce resources.
Savings
The capacity to save and securly store the product of one’s labour is the cornerstone of civilisation.
Words & language do this for knowledge, in the same way as money does it for “Capital”. Capital being defined as condensed resources & energy.
Imagine not being able to transmit the lessons of today, to tomorrow. If we didn’t have language, we would never have evolved and each generation would repeat what the prior generation had experienced.
It’s the same with money, savings and capital.
We cannot build upon the past nor stand on the shoulders of giants if we are unable to preserve our capital.
If we continually waste, redistribute, squander, or dilute our capital, we not only slam the brakes on societal progress & burn up the planet’s scarce environmental resources, but we malign the incentives of all individuals to produce & save. Instead people become blind consumers because the fantasy that is fiat suggests, “there’s more where that came from, we can just print it.” Others become rabid speculators chasing the next get-rich-quick scheme in an effort to outrun the endless devaluation of their savings.
Both are behaviours that add no value to society, which further dampen or skew societal progress, and waste precious resources.
A fixed supply, incorruptible money “Makes Saving Great Again”.
When an individual knows they can save, they can better plan for the future. Savings gives us more control over when, and how much, we want to work. It lowers the anxiety we all feel about the uncertainty of what lies ahead. It allows us to think long term and pass the marshmallow test.
Furthermore, when the purchasing power of money reflects the overall growth in society’s productive capacity, people want to save! This lowers time preference & increases the amount of thought we put into the things we buy (you’re less likely to spend your money on shit). It ensures that we maximize efficient use of precious resources to produce things of value (you’re more likely to build for quality = less waste)
This is how strong individuals, communities and societies are built, from the ground up. Emergent, organic, robust. It all starts with “saving” which is just another way of saying “delayed gratification” or the lowering of time-preference.
True equality of opportunity
As mentioned earlier, social mobility may be the most important aspect of a functional society.
Inequality is perfectly natural, and we see it everywhere. But it’s dynamic and ever changing. That’s what life is. A diverse array of experiences all representing some form of fractal 80/20 Pareto distribution.
Whether you look at the birds, the trees, the animal kingdom, music, sports, intellect, effort, skill, wealth, whatever. There is no one-size fits all.
This is why Equality of Outcome is abhorrent & downright disgusting.
Equality of opportunity on the other hand is something worth aspiring toward, but in many ways a fantasy because unless we nuke the entire planet and start from scratch, everyone everywhere is ALWAYS going to start from a different point, with different influences, skills, talents, resources and natural pre-dispositions.
Furthermore, we live in the bounds of a world where scarce resources are unevenly distributed around the earth. We cannot change this.
Equality of opportunity is thus an impossible goal, especially because it is so poorly defined.
This is where Bitcoin saves the day once more.
A common, incorruptible monetary standard is the ONLY form of equality of opportunity that’s possible or that matters. Measurable human action must be a standard we’re all bound by. When each individual can store the product of their time, effort and energy into the same unit everyone else is using, the opportunity to rise up and progress equalises.
I want you to think about this for a moment.
There is no greater force for social progress than this.
Corruption and theft is the source of poverty and social regress. Bitcoin fixes this in a way nothing else on that planet can or will.
In Closing
Fiat money may be the most damaging invention of modernity, and the greatest hindrance toward our capacity as humans to transcend the challenges of our time, whether those challenges are personal in nature, like meaning & mental wellbeing, or social, eg; poverty, education, health, social mobility and the environment.
Fiat ensures the destruction of the individual, the environment and the future. It’s end game is always war and/or revolution.
Show me a regime change, and I will show you inflation.
Arthur Hayes
When you are starving to death, nothing else matters except feeding your family. When you work your ass off only to stand still or get poorer, you will either riot or flock toward the “ism” that promises food, water and shelter.
It’s a one way road to hell.
In continuing to support fiat by using, holding, or promoting it, you are contributing to a broken system designed to create poverty, populism, social unrest, food riots, high and rising financial asset prices, social stagnation, and extreme wealth inequality.
Moving your wealth, the precious product of you labour, into Bitcoin is not only the most intelligent economic move you will ever make, but it is the highest of moral actions.
It is the ultimate fuck you to the system of serfdom we’re all subject to.
Join me, and millions of others in unshackling the chains and becoming free, sovereign individuals.
It all starts with you.
#Bitcoin
If you learned some thing from this, you can see more of my articles on Medium, you can follow me on Twitter, or you can check out The Wake Up Podcast.
Thankyou to everyone that took some time out to review the article, including; Agorist View and Keegan Francis. The feedback was very much appreciated.
