Paradocracy

Once again, rural California is bustling with chatter about another secession movement. Draconian mandates and hypocrisy continue unabated, animating talks of secession across all of northern California. Yet, just as there are plenty of proponents of secession, there are many doubters.    The doubters claim that hopes of secession are a pipe dream, that they are unrealistic due to the administrative costs that the "poor country folk" couldn't possibly afford. Fortunately, they're wrong.  While it may be unlikely, their outlook is purely self-fulfilling: while they claim that secession is unlikely, they're bound to make it so with their complacency. Secession is successful where a people join together to declare their sovereignty and to effect their separation; in many cases, this means positively asserting one's rights, not asking for permission. Secession, not only an essential course for representative government and developing communities, produced several ...

In all courses of life, debt is a curious yet dangerous instrument: it can serve a person well, but it can just as easily ruin him.  Whereas personal debt serves a vital function to meet needs in times of great exigency, the public debt is a scourge to be avoided everywhere and at all costs. Obscured by empty promises and delusions of grandeur, the public debt, as exercised historically and today, is little more than perpetual slavery: it is a debt-financed government powered exclusively by the exploits of theft, force and coercion.  Where its promises are plenty, the costs to the public liberty are indefinite.  Debt-financed government is insidious not only because it creates the illusion that the public can have something for nothing, but because it distorts the relationship between the public and their government; in this way, the government funded through debt is more disconnected from the public which it purports to represent, and it is thereby less sensitive to the ...

With bitcoin trading around the vaunted $50,000 level, speculators galore project the next moonshot to $100,000 and beyond. In the fanfare surrounding bitcoin, people have been animated about all things virtual, smugly mocking the physical world as they do their best Scrooge McDuck impersonations in virtual form. Regrettably for them, whereas Scrooge had a pool of gold that he enjoyed, they can merely stare at their virtual wallets wondering what they might one day be able to afford.  Ironically, while the bitcoin bandwagon is full of fanatics caught up in their virtual fantasies, they sense they're getting rich not by assessing their wealth in the form of bitcoin, a nebulous unit to be sure, but in the form of US dollars or other assets with actual utility. If not for the fact that the tangible world stands to speculate with them, contributing to their illusions with the assets that make us truly wealthy, the music would've stopped long before the bandwagon ever got going.  I...