Democracy is antithetical to the fundamentals of private property rights and, therefore, the functional, fair organization of society.
Earlier this month I published part one of the “Bitcoin Is Not Democratic” series.
In order to get a handle on how we can avoid the mistakes of the present, in part two, we’ll dive deeper into its impact on society and explore concepts such as wealth, poverty, free markets, politics, private versus public property, human rights, property rights, peace, war and moral hazard. From this foundation, the final part of the series will follow: “The Age of Meritocracy.”
Once again, prepare to be challenged. While my claims may seem outrageous on the surface, there is both truth and nuance buried within them. Seek and you shall find.
Democracy Is The Greatest Threat To Individual Freedom The World Has Ever Encountered
While communism, socialism and fascism gave us the greatest atrocities and tyrannies of the 20th century, they will pale in comparison to the long-term impact of global democratic rule.
A voice has been given to every incompetent, mindless, useless, compliant and complacent lemming, so that our children can become lab rats and we, who have the capacity to think, marched off into pods.
Under the guise of “we’re all in this together,” the false “safety” of the unhealthy who were too stupid to look after themselves in the first place and lived their entire lives plugged into a matrix of their overlords’ making, is being prioritized over the industrious and far-sighted people who actually made the right decisions for their body and mind.
Democracy has given us a world in which the healthy and capable are sacrificed for the unhealthy and incapable, all because it is easier to bring someone down than it is to raise them up. It is easier to destroy than it is to build. The tendency toward entropy is the overwhelming force that turns all “governments of the majority” into a downward spiraling tyranny of the lowest common denominator.
It is these lemmings we are up against and it is this mass of zombies that each have the same voice and vote as you, the functional, competent person, have.
One need not do more than spend 10 minutes on Twitter to see what is happening … In the USSA, fact checkers will blatantly lie to your face, tell you black is white and if you disagree, cancel you. In Auschtralia, they arrest and detain perfectly healthy athletes in the name of “health” and roll out untested, novel, experimental medicines on children from five to 11 years old: this is a group who’s not only got a 99.92% chance of not needing medical attention, but whose natural immune system is still in formation and we have absolutely no idea what the long-term effects of injecting them are. In New Xiland, they have built quarantine camps and created “single source of truth” websites hosted by a government that asserts science is something one must “believe” in.
This madness, this affront to all that is natural, sane and functional in the world is a result of trying to cheat natural, dynamic, economic and biological order, with stale, static, artificial and empirical models conjured up by myopic overlords, who in turn are empowered by the mindless masses. This madness, ladies and gentlemen, is democracy.
This form of madness is in fact worse than other forms of collectivism precisely because it is less overtly violent. Communism and fascism fell because they were such a blatant affront to everything and anything human. Their impact radius, whilst tragic and brutal, was small in comparison to democracy. This abomination on the other hand has spread to every corner of the world, and infected everyone. And worst of all, it can last long enough for us to literally destroy everything.
Democracy And Progress
Words that scarcely belong in the same sentence.
Progress via democracy has been conflated with actual progress via free markets for the longest time. I’d like to call it “The Great Lie” but I’m saving that title for something else.
Instead of it being represented as the parasite which has benefited from the prosperity of free markets and continues to leech resources, capital, capacity and energy alongside it, democracy is thought of as the source of prosperity and free markets.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. First and foremost, voluntary exchange existed long before this method of rule, and will do so long after it is gone. Secondly and more importantly, the undercurrent for all progress is productivity, innovation and exchange, NOT political rule.
Humanity has evolved despite its political chains, not thanks to them.
The source of human flourishing and progress has and always will be the free and voluntary exchange of private individuals who respect private property rights and tap into their individual ingenuity to be ever more useful and productive.
The fact that it has been conflated with dEmOcRaTiC rule is one of the greatest fallacies of modern society.
Sophisticated Theft
Democracy emerged in the West as a method of rule where parasites could weaponise the masses to extract wealth from productive members of society.
Unlike full-blown communism — which has imploded time and again because of how divergent it is from natural law and order — democracy is a more sophisticated method of leaching wealth from the prosperity created in free markets, which works on the following premise:
Give the producers enough space to innovate and produce, and then just take away all their shit after the fact … for the “greater good” of course.
The rising tide lifts all of the boats, and with it comes a wave of new capital that the parasites can feed on.
At a high level, it’s rather simple:
Democracy in five easy steps:
Take $1 from a productive person, and lose one votePromise 15 cents to five people, and gain five votesKeep the differenceGet voted into power as a “representative of the people”Blame the productive person for having more than $1 left, whilst promising him protection from the jealous masses with 15 cents each.
A socialist being ‘honest’ about his craft
Although simple, the devil is always in the details.
Let’s now disentangle terms that have been conflated or poorly defined, explore some of the problems with democracy, and use what we’ve learned so far to infer how they’ve manifested.
Poverty And Wealth
Poverty may be the initial state, but human action, ingenuity and innovation are the countering forces that produce wealth. The only things standing in the way of that natural force are high time preference, corruption and theft.
Note that mistakes can also lead to poverty but they’re not in the same category because mistakes are naturally corrective, not parasitic.
Poverty is therefore transitory. It is a function of “starting out”‘ and is something that changes and transforms as progress is made. With a healthy time-preference and willingness to work, poverty becomes a thing of the past for both the individual and society at large.
Edward C. Banfield, explains as follows:
“Poverty is merely a transitory phase, restricted to the early stage in a person’s working career. ‘Permanent’ poverty, by contrast, is caused by specific cultural values and attitudes: a person’s present-orientedness or, in economic terms, its high degree of time preference (which is highly correlated with low intelligence, and both of which appear to have a common genetic basis).
“Whereas the former-temporarily-poor-yet-upward-moving-individual is characterized by future-orientation, self-discipline, and a willingness to forego present gratification in exchange for a better future, the latter-permanently poor-individual is characterized by present-orientation and hedonism.” — “The Heavenly City Revisited” by Edward C. Banfield
You might say: “What about all those good, hardworking people who are still materially poor no matter what they do”?
And the answer is simple: They are victims of systemic corruption and theft, which are inherent to democracy — or any other form of collectivist state …
Corruption And Theft
At the micro and macro levels, there are two manifestations of high time preference which destroy wealth and lead to or keep a society impoverished:
Theft, or the confiscation of another’s property without their consent or through some form of coercion. It is a subtractive method of acquiring material wealth for oneself and comes at the obvious, direct expense of another, and the indirect expense of their future orientation and personal (or systemic) time-preference.Corruption, or systemic theft. The dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power. It is a function of the system operators taking advantage of other players in the game, at those players’ expense (i.e.; no skin in the game). The application of moral hazard.
In politics, corruption is a forcing function. The incentive to use the apparatus of rule to change the rules of the game is just “too damn high.” No matter who you have at the head of the train, the train tracks are pointed in the wrong direction.
Changing the representative rarely works, and becomes less effective as a remedy over time. We noted this in part one, under “Worst of the Worst.” Democracy is the perfect environment for bureaucrats, parasites and rousers of the rabble who can make the most empty promises to the most people.
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game”
Contrast this with raw economics, where the forcing functions are efficiency and efficacy. It’s an entirely different world. Unimpeded by politics, it is the realm of the entrepreneur, the problem solver and the productive individual. How we keep it from degenerating is the topic of part three in this series. Suffice it to say for now that democracy is not an answer.
In fact, the design of democracy and other such forms of political order lend themselves to the concentration of political and economic power by “decree.” Then they feed into each other.
“The biggest problem on the planet today is the concentration of political power that comes as a result of the concentration of economic power … if you are close to the monetary spigot you can socialize your losses and privatize your gains.” — Aleks Svetski, Svetski Versus BitBoy, Jan 25, 2022
The result is the onset of political and economic entropy.
The more theft that occurs, the less potential there is for future wealth creation, and the greater the propensity for poverty. When theft is obfuscated by law and legalized as a statute, it becomes systemic, and has an even greater negative impact. Enter corruption. If you know that for every 10 units of work, more than half is siphoned out by corrupt bureaucrats, then why work so hard? If you know you’re going to be robbed, again and again, then why even work at all?
These are the questions percolating in the subconscious minds of all individuals. They underpin behavior people are not even consciously aware of, but instinctively move toward in order to survive.
Our job is to illuminate these problems and view democracy through a more critical lens. In doing so, we shall discover the truth:
Moral hazard is literally baked into the system.There is by definition no skin in the game from neither the “representatives” that are voted in, nor the net receivers of benefits.Because “‘elected” rulers are given legislative powers, they are able to create more cracks, crevices and opportunities for corruption.Those who produce most are stolen from most, and by virtue of majority rule, it’s something with no end in sight that impacts future time preference orientation.
Knowing this, it’s impossible to say that democracy can lead to anything other than long-term heightening of time preference, and as a result, poverty.
Over time, capital is strip mined, as are people’s spirits.
In fact, one could argue that a high time preference and an unwillingness to work are corruptions of the self, and theft from one’s own future. In this sense, the micro and macro are one in the same and both degrade under the banner of democracy.
Bitcoin makes meaningful corruption and theft impossible, because the greatest source of theft and corruption comes from those which give themselves the “legal” right to do so, whether via taxation, inflation of the money supply or borrowing from a future generation who has not even agreed to it.
This, alongside economic consequences, are perhaps the most significant impacts Bitcoin will have on humanity long term.
Moral Hazard
I’ve mentioned moral hazard multiple times in both essays. I’d like to define it so you understand why it is the most dangerous of destructive social forces.
Moral hazard occurs when the costs or consequences of risk-taking are borne by another party. It runs rampant in politics and democratic governments because representatives, by design, can have no skin in the game. The attempt to prevent biases and conflicts of interest creates an even bigger, systemic problem.
Moral hazard is a function of the risk taker having no “skin in the game.”
When you know someone or some other entity will pay for any resultant damage, your incentive to take risks increases. In fact, so does your incentive to hide risk. Good optics allow you to remain in a position of representative power for longer, and when you can influence the measures used to ascertain those optics, the situation becomes doubly precarious.
The result is always cronyism, or the privatization of gains and socialization of losses.
And just when you think it cannot get worse, democracy strikes again by actually moralizing hazard at the level of the individual.
Imagine going into a shop to buy a chair, but not being able to choose it because a democratic process exists where those who are not paying for it get to choose which one you have to buy.
In other words, people get to have a vote and a say into how others should live their lives, how they should be governed and how their money should be spent, all whilst ducking and dodging as much responsibility as possible on their part.
This dance of responsibility-hot-potato, and hazard-coverage is integral to democracy and is how we derange and destroy not just free markets and prosperity, but individual sanity.
Individual responsibility is the cornerstone of liberty, and its obfuscation is the path to hell.
To regain heaven we must dismantle the demon of democracy.
Wealth And Free Markets
If corruption and theft are the ultimate sources of poverty because they erode wealth, then voluntary participation and free markets are the ultimate source of prosperity because they generate and then multiply wealth.
In a free market, where individuals are able to voluntarily trade the product of their labor, they can make economic calculations and take action toward their desired ends. They can take their capital (time, energy, natural resources) and apply intellect and ingenuity to produce something of value, for either their own use, or in exchange for “units of value” that they can use at a later date to exchange for something they themselves need or deem valuable.
This process, this transformation of chaos into order is how progress occurs, how wealth is generated and at a macro scale, how wealth multiples and flows between all of the entities involved.
Could work be done, resources used and energy spent for no reason? Of course. That’s called waste, poor calculation, a mistake or poor judgment. You could of course spend six years building a chair attached to balloons as a “flying contraption,” and in the end, nobody buys it. That would be perfectly normal. That is the market telling you it’s a bad idea, and that you need to correct. As such, wealth would be destroyed, but behavior has an opportunity to correct so that next round, wealth can be created.
This is very different to the process of protectionism or forceful wealth redistribution inherent to political systems across the entire spectrum – from communism, to socialism, fascism or democracy. They not only ram what people don’t need to want to pay for down everyone’s throat, but they get in the way of market feedback, get in the way of prices as information, get in the way of economic forces, introduce moral hazards, make room for corruption and they validate or moralize “redistribution by politik.”
Free markets self-organize through merit, competence and economic feedback. The result is an increase in wealth and a higher degree of longer-term certainty, which in turn results in more farsightedness, lower time preferences and longer-term planning, which all in turn create the environment for more wealth generation.
Capitalism can be defined as the process of managing or decreasing future uncertainty.
Peace And Democracy
Peace is not just the opposite of violence, but is actually a function of the potential for mutual damage as a result of violence.
Said another way, peace is a function of cost/benefit, and to have it, there needs to be:
A deterrent to violence (cost for no peace)A potential for profit (peace needs to make economic sense)
This is why periods of true peace are correlated to the opening up of trade, not to the introduction of “democracy.”
Trade promotes peace because the counterpart is more valuable alive. The capacity to defend oneself promotes peace because the counterpart may incur significant damage (cost) in attacking you.
“Two hungry tigers. Put a piece of meat between them. They will not go to war with one another. The reason is that a single meal is not worth risking a crippling or life-threatening injury.
“Now, put a piece of meat between a small dog and a tiger. The tiger’s just going to eat both of them. The dog’s capacity for violence is so far below the threshold of risk for the tiger that there’s no issue.” — Ajay Kumar Ph.D.
Both of these conditions are slowly eroded in a democracy.
Productive minorities are forced to pay for things they do not want, provided by organisations they do not like, and if you do not conform, you are a dissident/tax evader/domestic terrorist/threat to society which must be neutralised.
Violence is entirely one-sided because the representative state holds the monopoly on violence via the supposed “consent” of the masses. Over time, they are the only ones left with guns, whilst the populace is entirely dependent on them to uphold their promise to protect.
We’ve seen how well that played out in so-called democratic nations throughout 2020 – 2022.
How police protect their citizens in the Netherlands, 2021.
Under these conditions, trade becomes secondary, self-defense slowly becomes illegal, and a functional peace is a thing of the past. A state of tension, unease and distrust will emerge, and while overt violence may not occur immediately, it will come to bear as a reaction to censorship, excessive controls, stupid regulations, blanket mandates, wealth redistribution, poor policy, political disagreements, etc.
This is the unfortunate reality of a society in which the representatives have all of the power, but bear none of the costs, while everyone else is left to politik their way into each other’s lives.
As mentioned in part one; because democracy ensures everyone has their hand in everyone else’s pocket, everyone becomes a threat of some sort.
“There is never any real ‘peace.’ Only peace on the surface, with a deep-seated tension that someone with a greater subjective ‘need’ may one day lay claim to that which you have worked for, without your consent, but with the supposed ‘consent of the governed’.” — “Bitcoin Is Not Democratic, Part One”, Aleks Svetski
Politics Versus Productivity
In a democracy, your highest and best use of time is to coerce and convince enough people to join “your cause” so you can be part of the group that is a net receiver. The rational course is to avoid becoming a net giver.
This entire process is done before, during and after the mob have voted, and the representatives have taken office.
Instead of focusing on how to innovate or produce more, the system is designed such that your talents, energy and intellect go toward figuring out how best to politically outmaneuver your opponents, not even because you want to, but because you have to.
In this sense, democracy is a constant, never-ending psychological war against groups of people and organizations you do not agree with (hence the paradoxical relationship to peace).
Contrast that to a free market where you compete if you want to, pivot if you need to, or structure commercial terms with your counterparts so you both benefit economically.
The competition in a free market drives greater efficiencies and productivity, whilst competition in democracies drives greater degrees of politicking and bureaucracy.
This is why democracy is such a net drag on society, and ultimately subtractive, whilst markets tend to enhance and multiply wealth (when they’re not rigged). Markets are more efficient and can deliver any service the government can, only cheaper, faster, better and more accurately, with less waste!
Democratic brainlets can’t seem to understand this, which reminds me of a quote by Frederic Bastiat:
“[E]very time we object to a thing being done by government, [defenders of government intervention claim] that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the state — then we are against education altogether. We object to a state religion — then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the state.” — Frederic Bastiat, “The Law” 1850
Property Versus Plunder
“Man can only derive life and enjoyment from a perpetual search and appropriation; that is, from a perpetual application of his faculties to objects, or from labor. This is the origin of property.
“But also he may live and enjoy, by seizing and appropriating the productions of the faculties of his fellow men. This is the origin of plunder.” — Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”
We discussed the two means of acquiring wealth in part one, drawing from Oppenheimer’s definition of the economic and political means.
Frederic Bastiat echoes this in “The Law” where he makes a distinction between “property and plunder.” The former being that which a free individual produces by virtue of his labor, and the latter being that which is taken from another by force or coercion.
“When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated.” — Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”
Bastiat makes clear that there are really only two forms of wealth acquisition and he also points out the ease with which plunder occurs in a world where the law does not protect private property rights.
When the law extends beyond this very specific scope, it creeps into the realm of plunder. And because law is the “collective use of force,” politics very quickly devolves into a form of legalized plunder at scale. Nobody wants to be stolen from, and everybody wants something for free.
Democracy merely gave these tendencies a more inclusive framework. One where everyone can legally (confused with ethically) participate in plunder under the guise of “a vote” or “a voice.”
“The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it.” — Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”
It takes a second-grade level of intelligence to understand that you cannot build wealth by passing a fixed or decreasing amount of wealth around between each other. In fact, the more hands in the cookie jar, so to speak, the more of the wealth that gets lost as it is passed around. It’s like the erosion of signal that occurs in the game of Chinese whispers.
Of course, the force of innovation and the desire for progress by the individual generates enough real wealth to counter this destructive force (in the short term), which explains why modern society has lasted so long. Innovation is so powerful that it has carried democracy and every other ridiculous modality of political control along with it.
But alas, over time, democracy and all “rule by the collective” reduce productive behavior and replace it with parasitic behavior because of how the incentives are structured.
In time, you get an increase in rent-seekers, plunderers, laziness, and parasitic behavior, all translating into a net loss of wealth for the system as a whole.
This is where we find ourselves today. A point in human history where the parasite has grown beyond the capacity of the host to sustain it. It is now eating itself alive and falling apart.
Let us now layer this further..
Human Rights Versus Property Rights
There is no such thing as “human rights.” They are an illusion made up by the same people who believe in democracy and leprechauns.
There can only be property rights, traceable to some form of biological, territorial imperative that we share with a whole host of complex species across the biological spectrum.
“Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” — Frederic Bastiat
Human rights are a topic of major confusion in modern society, especially after the atrocities of World War II. On the surface, they are something that everyone agrees we should have, but beneath their moral sounding exterior, they are little understood, and mostly violations of one group’s property rights for the extensions of another’s.
The first challenge is the delineation between rights and responsibilities.
What is a right, and who is responsible for providing it?
The ledger must be balanced. Nothing in the universe can be conjured up ex nihilo. There is a cost somewhere, and ignoring it does not make it go away.
This problem becomes more complex when there exists representatives and “public institutions” who are able to define what is and is not a “right.” It inevitably gets worse when the subsequent step takes place, i.e., the promise of rights used as a means for acquiring political power. We’re drowning in this madness today.
Modern democracies use the term “human rights” to give moral veil to all of their thievery. They cloak their blanket promises to one group as rights, whilst ignoring the other side of the equation, and stealing from those held responsible against their own will.
They expand “rights” to include everything from housing (who’s responsible for building?) to food (who’s responsible for growing?) to health (who’s paying the doctors?) to education (who is teaching the children?) and recently, to some vague notion of the “health of all,” as they invert individual autonomy into an act of terrorism because it is the collective’s “right” to be protected from a virus.
The creep of rights is like the creep of cancer. It slowly erodes autonomy and ignores the responsibility side of the ledger until the bankrupt system collapses in on itself because there are not enough responsible entities to carry the entitled.
The second problem is the ephemeral nature of “human rights.”
As much as I dislike his work, Yuval Harari first got me questioning this. I cannot recall if it was in his book “Sapiens” or if it was an interview about the book, but he said something along the lines of:
“What are human rights? It’s not something you can look inside of a human and find, or point to and say ‘hey, that’s where the human rights are …'”
He was substantiating his idea of “shared fictions” as the basis upon which Homo sapiens in particular have been able to build abstract, complex societies and means of interaction.
And whilst this is correct, he (and just about every other historian, economist or anthropologist) seem to be ignorant to the fact that property rights are different and don’t quite fit into the same “shared fictions” category. There is actually a real, territorial imperative that we share with a myriad of other species.
Robert Ardrey, one of the great anthropologists of the mid-20th century, explores this in both “African Genesis” and “The Territorial Imperative.” One of the implications of his observations is that nature seems to have achieved a dynamic equilibrium in the relationships that complex living species have with their resources and in particular, their territory.
If you’ve not read his work, I suggest you check out “The Territorial Imperative.” I call his work “sound anthropology,” because of its Austrian-econ-analogous approach.
We have an innate relationship with property, both as an extension of ourselves and in relationship to our territory. You know it’s real because of the feelings of possession that emerge in babies who are yet to be taught anything. There is much more to explore on this, but it’s beyond the scope of this essay. For now, suffice to say there is an unbroken link between the following:
Nature -> Biology -> Fitness -> Territorial Imperative -> Property Rights
Homo sapiens, because we have the capacity to operate beyond strictly biological constraints, can both reinforce this relationship to nature, or we can deviate from it.
Like all great powers, there is a light, or positive, side, and also a shadow. Human rights in place of property rights are a manifestation of the shadow.
Much like “The Law,” we must strip it all back.
In order to solve problem number one, and do so within the natural frame of what’s discussed in problem number two, we simply reduce all “rights” to one single form:
Private Property Rights
Ayn Rand said it best in a quote from Atlas Shrugged:
“One cannot exist without the other, and when property rights are violated for some made up human rights, we’re right back at slavery.
Only a ghost can exist without material property.
Only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort.
The doctrine that human rights are superior to property rights simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.
Since the incompetent have far more to gain from the competent than vice-versa, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle.
Whoever regards this as ‘human’ and ‘right’ has no right to the title of human.” — Ayn Rand
Private property truly is the cornerstone of a functional society. Ownership of property, the separation of that which is yours from that which is somebody else’s means that we can actually create, build, produce and trade with others freely and without permission.
Democracy fails us once again in this dimension.
Property Rights In Democracy
Private property is always secondary to public property in a democracy.
In fact, any and all private property is subject to confiscation and transformation into public property for the “good of the people” should the state deem that necessary and have it “voted” upon.
You might think this an extreme viewpoint, or something unlikely to happen because “people may revolt,” but don’t fool yourself. Remember, verbal diarrhea such as “The Communist Manifesto” is one of the most widely-read treatise on economics this century. Most people, after a decade of state indoctrination, are stupid. They no longer have the capacity to think clearly, and under a democratic state, are actually incentivised to politic and plunder instead of producing.
A recent example in Berlin drives this point home. A city, which through bureaucratic overreach, has stifled and distorted its own prosperity.
Berlin Votes To Seize Real Estate
“In Berlin, Germany, a growing shortage of affordable housing coupled with increased demand to live in the city has reached a boiling point. Today, voters took part in a referendum on whether to force large real estate companies to sell off most of their housing units, turning them into socialized public housing.”
Source DW.com
The “yes” vote garnered 56.4% while the “no” vote received 39% in the non-binding referendum. The passing of the referendum will require incoming Berlin city-state government officials to debate the proposal.
The “public” apparatus is the most dangerous and pernicious phenomenon known to man.
It is used to simultaneously represent no individual, but all individuals simultaneously. It is a beast owned by nobody and everybody at the same time, which gives nobody and everybody the illusion of choice, the illusion of skin in the game, and the simultaneous distance and proximity to confuse everyone about whether they should have a say or not.
It is the ultimate tragedy of the commons, and it always, always, always devolves into a complete destruction of the property because there is really no specific owner.
Leave a car outside for anyone to drive, whenever they want to and see what happens.
Or better yet, go check out what an abandoned house looks and feels like.
In a democracy, not only can private property rights be stripped by public decree, as per the situation in Berlin noted above, but public property subject to tragedies of the commons (unless maintained by resources confiscated from people not using it) is given precedence over private property which is voluntarily taken care of by its owner.
The result?
Erosion of property. Erosion of natural resources, of energy and of the time spent forming this property into something of a higher order in the first place.
In Closing …
Private property rights are the cornerstone of a free and functional society where individuals can voluntarily choose to collaborate, cooperate or compete with each other. Clear skin in the game means owners are incentivized to maintain and enhance their property, and do so at their own expense.
Democracy stifles progress through the legalization of universal plunder, the introduction of public property and the simultaneous erosion of private property rights. It is a sophisticated means of theft, which due to its disguise, has been long conflated with progress.
The original intent may have been good but it went the way it was always going to go: rule of the competent, by the incompetent and the never-ending expansion of law and rights at the expense of the responsible.
Bitcoin, being as anti-democratic as a system could possibly be (contrary to what many believe), is not just immune from these democratic tragedies of the commons, but is actually the greatest “prospering of the commons” we’ve ever encountered.
And this is true because of the way it embodies and enforces private property rights through economic incentive rather than political force and coercion.
For the first time in history, we have property rights not reliant on government might or even the legal system. We have property protected by the natural incentives of those participating in the network.
“Satoshi Nakamoto has created a form of property that can exist without relying on the state, centralized authority, or traditional legal structures.” — Eric D. Chason, How Bitcoin Functions As Property Law
No amount of democratic decree, voting, corruption or sophisticated theft can ever break the public-private key cryptography securing my property and no amount of politicking, pandering to the masses or central planning will change the way Bitcoin works.
Bitcoin just is.
Democracy along with all other collectivist models of bureaucratic coercion will fail against the specter of its economic reality. They will all be crushed under the weight of its gravity.
All of your political models are broken.
Bitcoin is not just going up forever, it is fundamentally transforming human behavior and interaction, forever … Laura … forever.
Democracy is dictatorship by attrition technology.
Bitcoin is Humanity Go Up Technology.
In part three, we will explore how, and what a future on a Bitcoin standard might look like.
This is a guest post by Aleks Svetski of anchor.fm/WakeUpPod, and https://bitcointimes.news. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Earlier this month I published part one of the “Bitcoin Is Not Democratic” series.
In order to get a handle on how we can avoid the mistakes of the present, in part two, we’ll dive deeper into its impact on society and explore concepts such as wealth, poverty, free markets, politics, private versus public property, human rights, property rights, peace, war and moral hazard. From this foundation, the final part of the series will follow: “The Age of Meritocracy.”
Once again, prepare to be challenged. While my claims may seem outrageous on the surface, there is both truth and nuance buried within them. Seek and you shall find.
Democracy Is The Greatest Threat To Individual Freedom The World Has Ever Encountered
While communism, socialism and fascism gave us the greatest atrocities and tyrannies of the 20th century, they will pale in comparison to the long-term impact of global democratic rule.
A voice has been given to every incompetent, mindless, useless, compliant and complacent lemming, so that our children can become lab rats and we, who have the capacity to think, marched off into pods.
Under the guise of “we’re all in this together,” the false “safety” of the unhealthy who were too stupid to look after themselves in the first place and lived their entire lives plugged into a matrix of their overlords’ making, is being prioritized over the industrious and far-sighted people who actually made the right decisions for their body and mind.
Democracy has given us a world in which the healthy and capable are sacrificed for the unhealthy and incapable, all because it is easier to bring someone down than it is to raise them up. It is easier to destroy than it is to build. The tendency toward entropy is the overwhelming force that turns all “governments of the majority” into a downward spiraling tyranny of the lowest common denominator.
It is these lemmings we are up against and it is this mass of zombies that each have the same voice and vote as you, the functional, competent person, have.
One need not do more than spend 10 minutes on Twitter to see what is happening … In the USSA, fact checkers will blatantly lie to your face, tell you black is white and if you disagree, cancel you. In Auschtralia, they arrest and detain perfectly healthy athletes in the name of “health” and roll out untested, novel, experimental medicines on children from five to 11 years old: this is a group who’s not only got a 99.92% chance of not needing medical attention, but whose natural immune system is still in formation and we have absolutely no idea what the long-term effects of injecting them are. In New Xiland, they have built quarantine camps and created “single source of truth” websites hosted by a government that asserts science is something one must “believe” in.
This madness, this affront to all that is natural, sane and functional in the world is a result of trying to cheat natural, dynamic, economic and biological order, with stale, static, artificial and empirical models conjured up by myopic overlords, who in turn are empowered by the mindless masses. This madness, ladies and gentlemen, is democracy.
This form of madness is in fact worse than other forms of collectivism precisely because it is less overtly violent. Communism and fascism fell because they were such a blatant affront to everything and anything human. Their impact radius, whilst tragic and brutal, was small in comparison to democracy. This abomination on the other hand has spread to every corner of the world, and infected everyone. And worst of all, it can last long enough for us to literally destroy everything.
Democracy And Progress
Words that scarcely belong in the same sentence.
Progress via democracy has been conflated with actual progress via free markets for the longest time. I’d like to call it “The Great Lie” but I’m saving that title for something else.
Instead of it being represented as the parasite which has benefited from the prosperity of free markets and continues to leech resources, capital, capacity and energy alongside it, democracy is thought of as the source of prosperity and free markets.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. First and foremost, voluntary exchange existed long before this method of rule, and will do so long after it is gone. Secondly and more importantly, the undercurrent for all progress is productivity, innovation and exchange, NOT political rule.
Humanity has evolved despite its political chains, not thanks to them.
The source of human flourishing and progress has and always will be the free and voluntary exchange of private individuals who respect private property rights and tap into their individual ingenuity to be ever more useful and productive.
The fact that it has been conflated with dEmOcRaTiC rule is one of the greatest fallacies of modern society.
Sophisticated Theft
Democracy emerged in the West as a method of rule where parasites could weaponise the masses to extract wealth from productive members of society.
Unlike full-blown communism — which has imploded time and again because of how divergent it is from natural law and order — democracy is a more sophisticated method of leaching wealth from the prosperity created in free markets, which works on the following premise:
Give the producers enough space to innovate and produce, and then just take away all their shit after the fact … for the “greater good” of course.
The rising tide lifts all of the boats, and with it comes a wave of new capital that the parasites can feed on.
At a high level, it’s rather simple:
Democracy in five easy steps:
Take $1 from a productive person, and lose one votePromise 15 cents to five people, and gain five votesKeep the differenceGet voted into power as a “representative of the people”Blame the productive person for having more than $1 left, whilst promising him protection from the jealous masses with 15 cents each.
Although simple, the devil is always in the details.
Let’s now disentangle terms that have been conflated or poorly defined, explore some of the problems with democracy, and use what we’ve learned so far to infer how they’ve manifested.
Poverty And Wealth
Poverty may be the initial state, but human action, ingenuity and innovation are the countering forces that produce wealth. The only things standing in the way of that natural force are high time preference, corruption and theft.
Note that mistakes can also lead to poverty but they’re not in the same category because mistakes are naturally corrective, not parasitic.
Poverty is therefore transitory. It is a function of “starting out”‘ and is something that changes and transforms as progress is made. With a healthy time-preference and willingness to work, poverty becomes a thing of the past for both the individual and society at large.
Edward C. Banfield, explains as follows:
“Poverty is merely a transitory phase, restricted to the early stage in a person’s working career. ‘Permanent’ poverty, by contrast, is caused by specific cultural values and attitudes: a person’s present-orientedness or, in economic terms, its high degree of time preference (which is highly correlated with low intelligence, and both of which appear to have a common genetic basis).
“Whereas the former-temporarily-poor-yet-upward-moving-individual is characterized by future-orientation, self-discipline, and a willingness to forego present gratification in exchange for a better future, the latter-permanently poor-individual is characterized by present-orientation and hedonism.” — “The Heavenly City Revisited” by Edward C. Banfield
You might say: “What about all those good, hardworking people who are still materially poor no matter what they do”?
And the answer is simple: They are victims of systemic corruption and theft, which are inherent to democracy — or any other form of collectivist state …
Corruption And Theft
At the micro and macro levels, there are two manifestations of high time preference which destroy wealth and lead to or keep a society impoverished:
Theft, or the confiscation of another’s property without their consent or through some form of coercion. It is a subtractive method of acquiring material wealth for oneself and comes at the obvious, direct expense of another, and the indirect expense of their future orientation and personal (or systemic) time-preference.Corruption, or systemic theft. The dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power. It is a function of the system operators taking advantage of other players in the game, at those players’ expense (i.e.; no skin in the game). The application of moral hazard.
In politics, corruption is a forcing function. The incentive to use the apparatus of rule to change the rules of the game is just “too damn high.” No matter who you have at the head of the train, the train tracks are pointed in the wrong direction.
Changing the representative rarely works, and becomes less effective as a remedy over time. We noted this in part one, under “Worst of the Worst.” Democracy is the perfect environment for bureaucrats, parasites and rousers of the rabble who can make the most empty promises to the most people.
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game”
Contrast this with raw economics, where the forcing functions are efficiency and efficacy. It’s an entirely different world. Unimpeded by politics, it is the realm of the entrepreneur, the problem solver and the productive individual. How we keep it from degenerating is the topic of part three in this series. Suffice it to say for now that democracy is not an answer.
In fact, the design of democracy and other such forms of political order lend themselves to the concentration of political and economic power by “decree.” Then they feed into each other.
“The biggest problem on the planet today is the concentration of political power that comes as a result of the concentration of economic power … if you are close to the monetary spigot you can socialize your losses and privatize your gains.” — Aleks Svetski, Svetski Versus BitBoy, Jan 25, 2022
The result is the onset of political and economic entropy.
The more theft that occurs, the less potential there is for future wealth creation, and the greater the propensity for poverty. When theft is obfuscated by law and legalized as a statute, it becomes systemic, and has an even greater negative impact. Enter corruption. If you know that for every 10 units of work, more than half is siphoned out by corrupt bureaucrats, then why work so hard? If you know you’re going to be robbed, again and again, then why even work at all?
These are the questions percolating in the subconscious minds of all individuals. They underpin behavior people are not even consciously aware of, but instinctively move toward in order to survive.
Our job is to illuminate these problems and view democracy through a more critical lens. In doing so, we shall discover the truth:
Moral hazard is literally baked into the system.There is by definition no skin in the game from neither the “representatives” that are voted in, nor the net receivers of benefits.Because “‘elected” rulers are given legislative powers, they are able to create more cracks, crevices and opportunities for corruption.Those who produce most are stolen from most, and by virtue of majority rule, it’s something with no end in sight that impacts future time preference orientation.
Knowing this, it’s impossible to say that democracy can lead to anything other than long-term heightening of time preference, and as a result, poverty.
Over time, capital is strip mined, as are people’s spirits.
In fact, one could argue that a high time preference and an unwillingness to work are corruptions of the self, and theft from one’s own future. In this sense, the micro and macro are one in the same and both degrade under the banner of democracy.
Bitcoin makes meaningful corruption and theft impossible, because the greatest source of theft and corruption comes from those which give themselves the “legal” right to do so, whether via taxation, inflation of the money supply or borrowing from a future generation who has not even agreed to it.
This, alongside economic consequences, are perhaps the most significant impacts Bitcoin will have on humanity long term.
Moral Hazard
I’ve mentioned moral hazard multiple times in both essays. I’d like to define it so you understand why it is the most dangerous of destructive social forces.
Moral hazard occurs when the costs or consequences of risk-taking are borne by another party. It runs rampant in politics and democratic governments because representatives, by design, can have no skin in the game. The attempt to prevent biases and conflicts of interest creates an even bigger, systemic problem.
Moral hazard is a function of the risk taker having no “skin in the game.”
When you know someone or some other entity will pay for any resultant damage, your incentive to take risks increases. In fact, so does your incentive to hide risk. Good optics allow you to remain in a position of representative power for longer, and when you can influence the measures used to ascertain those optics, the situation becomes doubly precarious.
The result is always cronyism, or the privatization of gains and socialization of losses.
And just when you think it cannot get worse, democracy strikes again by actually moralizing hazard at the level of the individual.
Imagine going into a shop to buy a chair, but not being able to choose it because a democratic process exists where those who are not paying for it get to choose which one you have to buy.
In other words, people get to have a vote and a say into how others should live their lives, how they should be governed and how their money should be spent, all whilst ducking and dodging as much responsibility as possible on their part.
This dance of responsibility-hot-potato, and hazard-coverage is integral to democracy and is how we derange and destroy not just free markets and prosperity, but individual sanity.
Individual responsibility is the cornerstone of liberty, and its obfuscation is the path to hell.
To regain heaven we must dismantle the demon of democracy.
Wealth And Free Markets
If corruption and theft are the ultimate sources of poverty because they erode wealth, then voluntary participation and free markets are the ultimate source of prosperity because they generate and then multiply wealth.
In a free market, where individuals are able to voluntarily trade the product of their labor, they can make economic calculations and take action toward their desired ends. They can take their capital (time, energy, natural resources) and apply intellect and ingenuity to produce something of value, for either their own use, or in exchange for “units of value” that they can use at a later date to exchange for something they themselves need or deem valuable.
This process, this transformation of chaos into order is how progress occurs, how wealth is generated and at a macro scale, how wealth multiples and flows between all of the entities involved.
Could work be done, resources used and energy spent for no reason? Of course. That’s called waste, poor calculation, a mistake or poor judgment. You could of course spend six years building a chair attached to balloons as a “flying contraption,” and in the end, nobody buys it. That would be perfectly normal. That is the market telling you it’s a bad idea, and that you need to correct. As such, wealth would be destroyed, but behavior has an opportunity to correct so that next round, wealth can be created.
This is very different to the process of protectionism or forceful wealth redistribution inherent to political systems across the entire spectrum – from communism, to socialism, fascism or democracy. They not only ram what people don’t need to want to pay for down everyone’s throat, but they get in the way of market feedback, get in the way of prices as information, get in the way of economic forces, introduce moral hazards, make room for corruption and they validate or moralize “redistribution by politik.”
Free markets self-organize through merit, competence and economic feedback. The result is an increase in wealth and a higher degree of longer-term certainty, which in turn results in more farsightedness, lower time preferences and longer-term planning, which all in turn create the environment for more wealth generation.
Capitalism can be defined as the process of managing or decreasing future uncertainty.
Peace And Democracy
Peace is not just the opposite of violence, but is actually a function of the potential for mutual damage as a result of violence.
Said another way, peace is a function of cost/benefit, and to have it, there needs to be:
A deterrent to violence (cost for no peace)A potential for profit (peace needs to make economic sense)
This is why periods of true peace are correlated to the opening up of trade, not to the introduction of “democracy.”
Trade promotes peace because the counterpart is more valuable alive. The capacity to defend oneself promotes peace because the counterpart may incur significant damage (cost) in attacking you.
“Two hungry tigers. Put a piece of meat between them. They will not go to war with one another. The reason is that a single meal is not worth risking a crippling or life-threatening injury.
“Now, put a piece of meat between a small dog and a tiger. The tiger’s just going to eat both of them. The dog’s capacity for violence is so far below the threshold of risk for the tiger that there’s no issue.” — Ajay Kumar Ph.D.
Both of these conditions are slowly eroded in a democracy.
Productive minorities are forced to pay for things they do not want, provided by organisations they do not like, and if you do not conform, you are a dissident/tax evader/domestic terrorist/threat to society which must be neutralised.
Violence is entirely one-sided because the representative state holds the monopoly on violence via the supposed “consent” of the masses. Over time, they are the only ones left with guns, whilst the populace is entirely dependent on them to uphold their promise to protect.
We’ve seen how well that played out in so-called democratic nations throughout 2020 – 2022.
Under these conditions, trade becomes secondary, self-defense slowly becomes illegal, and a functional peace is a thing of the past. A state of tension, unease and distrust will emerge, and while overt violence may not occur immediately, it will come to bear as a reaction to censorship, excessive controls, stupid regulations, blanket mandates, wealth redistribution, poor policy, political disagreements, etc.
This is the unfortunate reality of a society in which the representatives have all of the power, but bear none of the costs, while everyone else is left to politik their way into each other’s lives.
As mentioned in part one; because democracy ensures everyone has their hand in everyone else’s pocket, everyone becomes a threat of some sort.
“There is never any real ‘peace.’ Only peace on the surface, with a deep-seated tension that someone with a greater subjective ‘need’ may one day lay claim to that which you have worked for, without your consent, but with the supposed ‘consent of the governed’.” — “Bitcoin Is Not Democratic, Part One”, Aleks Svetski
Politics Versus Productivity
In a democracy, your highest and best use of time is to coerce and convince enough people to join “your cause” so you can be part of the group that is a net receiver. The rational course is to avoid becoming a net giver.
This entire process is done before, during and after the mob have voted, and the representatives have taken office.
Instead of focusing on how to innovate or produce more, the system is designed such that your talents, energy and intellect go toward figuring out how best to politically outmaneuver your opponents, not even because you want to, but because you have to.
In this sense, democracy is a constant, never-ending psychological war against groups of people and organizations you do not agree with (hence the paradoxical relationship to peace).
Contrast that to a free market where you compete if you want to, pivot if you need to, or structure commercial terms with your counterparts so you both benefit economically.
The competition in a free market drives greater efficiencies and productivity, whilst competition in democracies drives greater degrees of politicking and bureaucracy.
This is why democracy is such a net drag on society, and ultimately subtractive, whilst markets tend to enhance and multiply wealth (when they’re not rigged). Markets are more efficient and can deliver any service the government can, only cheaper, faster, better and more accurately, with less waste!
Democratic brainlets can’t seem to understand this, which reminds me of a quote by Frederic Bastiat:
“[E]very time we object to a thing being done by government, [defenders of government intervention claim] that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the state — then we are against education altogether. We object to a state religion — then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the state.” — Frederic Bastiat, “The Law” 1850
Property Versus Plunder
“Man can only derive life and enjoyment from a perpetual search and appropriation; that is, from a perpetual application of his faculties to objects, or from labor. This is the origin of property.
“But also he may live and enjoy, by seizing and appropriating the productions of the faculties of his fellow men. This is the origin of plunder.” — Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”
We discussed the two means of acquiring wealth in part one, drawing from Oppenheimer’s definition of the economic and political means.
Frederic Bastiat echoes this in “The Law” where he makes a distinction between “property and plunder.” The former being that which a free individual produces by virtue of his labor, and the latter being that which is taken from another by force or coercion.
“When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated.” — Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”
Bastiat makes clear that there are really only two forms of wealth acquisition and he also points out the ease with which plunder occurs in a world where the law does not protect private property rights.
When the law extends beyond this very specific scope, it creeps into the realm of plunder. And because law is the “collective use of force,” politics very quickly devolves into a form of legalized plunder at scale. Nobody wants to be stolen from, and everybody wants something for free.
Democracy merely gave these tendencies a more inclusive framework. One where everyone can legally (confused with ethically) participate in plunder under the guise of “a vote” or “a voice.”
“The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it.” — Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”
It takes a second-grade level of intelligence to understand that you cannot build wealth by passing a fixed or decreasing amount of wealth around between each other. In fact, the more hands in the cookie jar, so to speak, the more of the wealth that gets lost as it is passed around. It’s like the erosion of signal that occurs in the game of Chinese whispers.
Of course, the force of innovation and the desire for progress by the individual generates enough real wealth to counter this destructive force (in the short term), which explains why modern society has lasted so long. Innovation is so powerful that it has carried democracy and every other ridiculous modality of political control along with it.
But alas, over time, democracy and all “rule by the collective” reduce productive behavior and replace it with parasitic behavior because of how the incentives are structured.
In time, you get an increase in rent-seekers, plunderers, laziness, and parasitic behavior, all translating into a net loss of wealth for the system as a whole.
This is where we find ourselves today. A point in human history where the parasite has grown beyond the capacity of the host to sustain it. It is now eating itself alive and falling apart.
Let us now layer this further..
Human Rights Versus Property Rights
There is no such thing as “human rights.” They are an illusion made up by the same people who believe in democracy and leprechauns.
There can only be property rights, traceable to some form of biological, territorial imperative that we share with a whole host of complex species across the biological spectrum.
“Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” — Frederic Bastiat
Human rights are a topic of major confusion in modern society, especially after the atrocities of World War II. On the surface, they are something that everyone agrees we should have, but beneath their moral sounding exterior, they are little understood, and mostly violations of one group’s property rights for the extensions of another’s.
The first challenge is the delineation between rights and responsibilities.
What is a right, and who is responsible for providing it?
The ledger must be balanced. Nothing in the universe can be conjured up ex nihilo. There is a cost somewhere, and ignoring it does not make it go away.
This problem becomes more complex when there exists representatives and “public institutions” who are able to define what is and is not a “right.” It inevitably gets worse when the subsequent step takes place, i.e., the promise of rights used as a means for acquiring political power. We’re drowning in this madness today.
Modern democracies use the term “human rights” to give moral veil to all of their thievery. They cloak their blanket promises to one group as rights, whilst ignoring the other side of the equation, and stealing from those held responsible against their own will.
They expand “rights” to include everything from housing (who’s responsible for building?) to food (who’s responsible for growing?) to health (who’s paying the doctors?) to education (who is teaching the children?) and recently, to some vague notion of the “health of all,” as they invert individual autonomy into an act of terrorism because it is the collective’s “right” to be protected from a virus.
The creep of rights is like the creep of cancer. It slowly erodes autonomy and ignores the responsibility side of the ledger until the bankrupt system collapses in on itself because there are not enough responsible entities to carry the entitled.
The second problem is the ephemeral nature of “human rights.”
As much as I dislike his work, Yuval Harari first got me questioning this. I cannot recall if it was in his book “Sapiens” or if it was an interview about the book, but he said something along the lines of:
“What are human rights? It’s not something you can look inside of a human and find, or point to and say ‘hey, that’s where the human rights are …'”
He was substantiating his idea of “shared fictions” as the basis upon which Homo sapiens in particular have been able to build abstract, complex societies and means of interaction.
And whilst this is correct, he (and just about every other historian, economist or anthropologist) seem to be ignorant to the fact that property rights are different and don’t quite fit into the same “shared fictions” category. There is actually a real, territorial imperative that we share with a myriad of other species.
Robert Ardrey, one of the great anthropologists of the mid-20th century, explores this in both “African Genesis” and “The Territorial Imperative.” One of the implications of his observations is that nature seems to have achieved a dynamic equilibrium in the relationships that complex living species have with their resources and in particular, their territory.
If you’ve not read his work, I suggest you check out “The Territorial Imperative.” I call his work “sound anthropology,” because of its Austrian-econ-analogous approach.
We have an innate relationship with property, both as an extension of ourselves and in relationship to our territory. You know it’s real because of the feelings of possession that emerge in babies who are yet to be taught anything. There is much more to explore on this, but it’s beyond the scope of this essay. For now, suffice to say there is an unbroken link between the following:
Nature -> Biology -> Fitness -> Territorial Imperative -> Property Rights
Homo sapiens, because we have the capacity to operate beyond strictly biological constraints, can both reinforce this relationship to nature, or we can deviate from it.
Like all great powers, there is a light, or positive, side, and also a shadow. Human rights in place of property rights are a manifestation of the shadow.
Much like “The Law,” we must strip it all back.
In order to solve problem number one, and do so within the natural frame of what’s discussed in problem number two, we simply reduce all “rights” to one single form:
Private Property Rights
Ayn Rand said it best in a quote from Atlas Shrugged:
“One cannot exist without the other, and when property rights are violated for some made up human rights, we’re right back at slavery.
Only a ghost can exist without material property.
Only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort.
The doctrine that human rights are superior to property rights simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.
Since the incompetent have far more to gain from the competent than vice-versa, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle.
Whoever regards this as ‘human’ and ‘right’ has no right to the title of human.” — Ayn Rand
Private property truly is the cornerstone of a functional society. Ownership of property, the separation of that which is yours from that which is somebody else’s means that we can actually create, build, produce and trade with others freely and without permission.
Democracy fails us once again in this dimension.
Property Rights In Democracy
Private property is always secondary to public property in a democracy.
In fact, any and all private property is subject to confiscation and transformation into public property for the “good of the people” should the state deem that necessary and have it “voted” upon.
You might think this an extreme viewpoint, or something unlikely to happen because “people may revolt,” but don’t fool yourself. Remember, verbal diarrhea such as “The Communist Manifesto” is one of the most widely-read treatise on economics this century. Most people, after a decade of state indoctrination, are stupid. They no longer have the capacity to think clearly, and under a democratic state, are actually incentivised to politic and plunder instead of producing.
A recent example in Berlin drives this point home. A city, which through bureaucratic overreach, has stifled and distorted its own prosperity.
Berlin Votes To Seize Real Estate
“In Berlin, Germany, a growing shortage of affordable housing coupled with increased demand to live in the city has reached a boiling point. Today, voters took part in a referendum on whether to force large real estate companies to sell off most of theirhousing units, turning them into socialized public housing.”
The “yes” vote garnered 56.4% while the “no” vote received 39% in the non-binding referendum. The passing of the referendum will require incoming Berlin city-state government officials to debate the proposal.
The “public” apparatus is the most dangerous and pernicious phenomenon known to man.
It is used to simultaneously represent no individual, but all individuals simultaneously. It is a beast owned by nobody and everybody at the same time, which gives nobody and everybody the illusion of choice, the illusion of skin in the game, and the simultaneous distance and proximity to confuse everyone about whether they should have a say or not.
It is the ultimate tragedy of the commons, and it always, always, always devolves into a complete destruction of the property because there is really no specific owner.
Leave a car outside for anyone to drive, whenever they want to and see what happens.
Or better yet, go check out what an abandoned house looks and feels like.
In a democracy, not only can private property rights be stripped by public decree, as per the situation in Berlin noted above, but public property subject to tragedies of the commons (unless maintained by resources confiscated from people not using it) is given precedence over private property which is voluntarily taken care of by its owner.
The result?
Erosion of property. Erosion of natural resources, of energy and of the time spent forming this property into something of a higher order in the first place.
In Closing …
Private property rights are the cornerstone of a free and functional society where individuals can voluntarily choose to collaborate, cooperate or compete with each other. Clear skin in the game means owners are incentivized to maintain and enhance their property, and do so at their own expense.
Democracy stifles progress through the legalization of universal plunder, the introduction of public property and the simultaneous erosion of private property rights. It is a sophisticated means of theft, which due to its disguise, has been long conflated with progress.
The original intent may have been good but it went the way it was always going to go: rule of the competent, by the incompetent and the never-ending expansion of law and rights at the expense of the responsible.
Bitcoin, being as anti-democratic as a system could possibly be (contrary to what many believe), is not just immune from these democratic tragedies of the commons, but is actually the greatest “prospering of the commons” we’ve ever encountered.
And this is true because of the way it embodies and enforces private property rights through economic incentive rather than political force and coercion.
For the first time in history, we have property rights not reliant on government might or even the legal system. We have property protected by the natural incentives of those participating in the network.
“Satoshi Nakamoto has created a form of property that can exist without relying on the state, centralized authority, or traditional legal structures.” — Eric D. Chason, How Bitcoin Functions As Property Law
No amount of democratic decree, voting, corruption or sophisticated theft can ever break the public-private key cryptography securing my property and no amount of politicking, pandering to the masses or central planning will change the way Bitcoin works.
Bitcoin just is.
Democracy along with all other collectivist models of bureaucratic coercion will fail against the specter of its economic reality. They will all be crushed under the weight of its gravity.
All of your political models are broken.
Bitcoin is not just going up forever, it is fundamentally transforming human behavior and interaction, forever … Laura … forever.
Democracy is dictatorship by attrition technology.
Bitcoin is Humanity Go Up Technology.
In part three, we will explore how, and what a future on a Bitcoin standard might look like.
This is a guest post by Aleks Svetski of anchor.fm/WakeUpPod, and https://bitcointimes.news. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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