Category Archives: Tyranny

What Ludwig von Mises Meant by “Democracy”

Article by Ryan McMaken.

Excerpt:

“Democracy” is one of those terms that is essentially useless unless the one using the word first defines his terms. After all, the term “democratic” can mean anything from small-scale direct democracy to the mega-elections we see in today’s huge constitutional states. Among the modern social-democratic Left, the term often just means “something I like.”

The meaning of the term can also vary significantly from time to time and from place to place. During the Jacksonian period, the Democratic party—which at the time was the decentralist, free-market, Jeffersonian party—was called “the Democracy.” By the mid twentieth century, the term meant something else entirely. In Europe, the term came to take on a variety of different meanings from place to place.

For our purposes here, I want to focus on how one particular European—Ludwig von Mises—used the term.

Although many modern students of Mises are often highly skeptical of democracy of various types, it is clear that Mises himself used the term with approval. But, Mises used the word in a way that was quite different from how most use it today. The Misesian view contrasts with modern conceptions of a “democracy” in which majority rule is forcibly imposed upon the whole population. Because modern democratic states exercise monopolistic power over their populations, there is then no escape from this “will of the majority.”

Misesian democracy is something else altogether.

Mises’s vision of democracy must be understood in light of his support for unlimited secession as a tool against majoritarian rule. For Mises, “democracy” means the free exercise of a right of exit, by which the alleged “will of the majority” is rendered unenforceable against those who seek to leave.

Continue reading here.

The Fatal Conceit

That’s the title of Friedrich Hayek’s final book (published 1988).

According to the Wikipedia page of the book, the title drives “from a passage in Adam Smith’The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), though the exact phrase does not occur in Smith’s book.”

Here is that Adam-Smith quote, according to Wikipedia:

‘The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. … He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces on a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces on the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse [choose] to impress upon it.’ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1984, VI.ii.2.17: 233-4.

What Has Government Done to Our Money?

Book by Murray Rothbard, preface by Guido Hülsmann

I can name maybe half a dozen books (including the Bible) which have been pivotal to my intellectual development. What Has Government Done to Our Money, by Murray N. Rothbard, is one of them. Here‘s the Wikipedia page on the book.

I cite in the following excerpts from the preface by Professor Jörg Guido Hülsmann.

What Has Government Done to Our Money? is an outstanding example of Rothbard’s creative mind at work. Since it was first published in 1964 .[sic! Wikipedia and other sources say 1963], it has appeared in four editions in English, and has been translated into many foreign languages. It has served as a primer on monetary theory for all its readers. In fact, it is probably the most brilliant introduction to monetary theory ever written, presenting both the foundation of monetary theory and exploring the role of the state in the degeneration of monetary systems. The book is suitable not only for economists, but also for non-academics and all people interested in the subject. It is, like all of Rothbard’s works, a timeless and powerful statement. It leaves the reader with a completely new way to think about the relationship between money and state.

Here the elements and the functions of a free monetary system are presented with brevity and clarity. Rothbard shows how and why gold and silver are used as money on the unhampered market. Money originates neither from social compact nor government edict, but as a market solution of the problems and costs associated with barter. All other tasks usually considered monetary duties of the state — from minting to the definition of the monetary units to the precise form money will take — are left to private entrepreneurs on the unhampered market.

Where is the place of the state in this picture? Doesn’t the state have to guard our money? Doesn’t it have to adjust the money supply and supervise the banks? Rothbard’s answer to these questions is a clear no. Government intervention does not protect money at all but rather threatens its integrity. Government interference leads to more abuse and more instability than the free market would otherwise have tolerated. Instead of solving problems, intervention creates them. Instead of order they bring chaos and economic upheaval.

For Rothbard, the central issue is not whether monetary policy should stabilize the price level or the money supply; it is whether there is a role for the state in the monetary system at all. On this question, Rothbard answers decisively in the negative. Entrusting the money to the state is a grave error. It opens door and gate for totalitarian control of the society by interest groups closely connected to the state apparatus. The consequences are economic and monetary crises, and a relentless decline in the purchasing power of money. Rothbard illustrates this impressively with a short history of the monetary collapse of the West.

Rothbard’s chronicle of decline ends with the breakdown of Bretton Woods and a prediction that the future portends continued exchange-rate volatility, debt accumulation, inflation, crises, bailouts, and a political drive to further centralize control of money and credit. This prediction turned out to be a good summary of the monetary events of the last quarter century. The world economy adopted a de facto dollar standard, a managed monetary integration came to Europe, and crisis has followed crisis in Asia, Russia, Mexico, and Central and South America, along with exploding deficits and debts in the United States. Undoubtedly many more will come our way.

This new edition includes a detailed reform proposal for a 100% gold dollar [see online here], an essay first published in 1962, the same year that Man, Economy, and State appeared and two years before What Has Government Done to Our Money. That it was written a decade before the last vestiges of the gold standard were abolished does not diminish its power as a proposal for reform.

Would Rothbard’s plan work? Certainly. The limits are due not to its economic viability but rather to the same forces that keep all radical proposals for freedom at bay: political barriers and ideological opposition. Should the conditions ever become ripe for pure liberty again — and Rothbard was ever the optimist — this essay will serve as an outstanding blueprint.

Today all nations face a choice between sound money and continuing monetary depreciation and/or monetary crisis. Sound money, Rothbard shows, means the enforcement of strict separation between the state and money. Rothbard has shown that the world’s party of liberty can embrace what is usually said to be an impossible ideal: an international money protected against the arbitrariness of the state. His analysis and prescriptions deserve even more attention today than when they were first written.

Jörg Guido Hülsmann

Angers, France

April 2005

Why you should NEVER believe your eyes

Article by Kit Knightly

Excerpt:

The media landscape is saturated with pretend, and has been for decades.

The technology discussed above doesn’t mean they will start faking things, it means the faking they’ve been doing for years will be easier to do and harder to detect.

The technology exists. The motivation exists. The required levels of dishonesty and corruption more than exist. The lazy entitlement that ‘justifies’ a culture of pretend also exists.

We’re long past the point now where questioning everything you see and/or hear could ever be considered “paranoid”. It’s healthy, rational and even a prerequisite for maintaining your sanity.

We know they’ll fake anything, so we must be prepared to question everything.

The COVID “vaccine” had no benefit

Zero. Zip. Nada.

Article by Steve Kirsch.

Excerpts:

Official US government data, “gold standard data,” shows that the vaccine didn’t save any COVID lives at all. None. In fact, if anything, the data shows that the vaccine made you more likely to die from COVID. To the estimated 21 million people who were killed or seriously injured, you should know it was all for nothing.

[. . .]

In science, if you can’t explain a data point, you don’t just write it off. You have to explain it or at least publicly admit that your hypothesis could be wrong until you can explain it.

And this wasn’t cherry picked either. In the entire time I’ve been a “misinformation spreader,” I’ve only gotten one insider call from someone in a nursing home who would reveal the date that the vaccine was rolled out in her facility. One.

And even if I scoured all 15,000 nursing homes for a case like this, it still can’t happen because the probabilities are too small.

So I had two independent ways at looking at this data: the tip from the insider and the data reported to the government. Both aligned.

Does this deserve investigation?

Of course!

But there will be no investigations. Ever.

Because that’s the way science works nowaday [sic]. It’s all about ignoring all credible evidence that doesn’t support the narrative. And that should be troubling for everyone.

The Glue Binding Democracy and a Free Economy Has Melted

Writes Charles Hugh Smith in an article with that title on the blog “Of Two Minds”.

Quote:

The single-minded pursuit of greed does not magically organize the economy or society to serve everyone’s interests equally. As Adam Smith explained, capitalism and the social order both require a moral foundation, which in a free society takes the form of civic virtue: it is the responsibility of every citizen who is able to contribute to the social capital that serves us all to do so not in response to an oppressive state but of their own free will.

Here’s the problem though: What if the citizen opts to use his free will to not contribute to the social capital? What if, instead, he opts to use his free will to exploit the social capital without giving anything back, ever? Who’s to stop him, and how and why?

This is where the force of religion comes in. Wherever we use the word “responsibility” we need to examine this: “To whom are we responsible”? In a society where we can assume the vast majority of members believe in a God to whom they feel “responsible”, we can assume that they will behave largely along the lines of the commandments handed down from on high.

This can no longer be taken for granted in erstwhile Christian societies. This general presupposition began to be eroded to a large extent during the (pre-French Revolution) Enlightenment (with precursors of this trend beginning in the Renaissance). The French Revolution massively strengthened and accelerated this trend. The logical end points of this trend were the concentration and death camps of the 20th century.

We have since taken one (!) step back from that abyss. But we haven’t “turned around” yet and walked away from it.

“Climate Change” is a $100 Trillion Wealth Transfer from the Poor to the Rich

Are you predator or prey?, asks Elizabeth Nickson.

Excerpts:

Ever asked yourself why 20 million have poured through the Southern border in the last three and a half years?

[. . .]

Mostly they are coming because Black Rock, the UN, the WEF are grabbing their lands, the more fertile the better, driving them from those lands and sticking them into tenement cities where they have to scratch like chickens for a living.  Agenda 2030 is ravening under the radar in the US and Canada, where “civil society” in the pay of the government and environmental NGOs funded by oligarchs, is taking as much land and as many resources as possible out of the productive economy and shoving it into the land banks of BlackRock.

In the south, it’s not surreptitious. It is state policy to destroy their lives, to take their ancestral lands, whether it’s 40 acres or a half acre and leave them begging by the side of the road.

[. . .]

At the same time, in our vast swaths of upland forests, the UN organization Transitions is slowly accreting that land. For who? We don’t really know. Transitions is everywhere, in the US, in Canada, in every country in Europe.  It is where you live. It is one of the many prongs of Agenda 2030. Everywhere, it invades local governments and acts to suppress economic activity.

Transitions also trades carbon credits. For who? Who do you think?

Therefore Transitions, which has a rainbow-colored smiley PR face, is in that business. Buying land to transfer it to international organizations and mega-rich families so they can make money on our forests. But not us. We can’t.  We can’t even thin them to prevent catastrophic forest fire.

Those contracts must be interesting, not that anyone can see them. The first thing they do is act as whacking big first-time tax deductions. The second thing they do is act as an annual tax deduction because those trees are eating CO2. Very clever. International interests buy our land (and yours) and use it to not pay taxes. While banking some of the most valuable assets on the planet.

Multiply this 100,000 times, and you will see just a very tiny piece of the vast tapestry, the puzzle, of the Climate Change/Agenda 2030 plan that will shut down economic activity everywhere.