Incompressible

Taxes target not "income" - as they purport to - but economic activity. The government could not fund its $3 trillion budget even with a 100% tax on the top 10% of earners. Instead, the bulk of economic activity occurs in small transactions in which taxes are built-in (sales tax, tarrifs, gas tax, etc.) To spread out its burden, government must draw the majority of its revenue from these small economic transactions. The tax rules reflect this reality. IRS Pub. 525 defines income from babysitting as taxable income - when was the last time a rich person was making bank off of babysitting? Barter transactions are taxable - exchanging yard sale items with your neighbor is taxable. Of course, yard sale cash proceeds are taxable income - you know that's how Rockefeller got rich, right? He invested in the yard sale market and he soon became a global yard sale tycoon. Forgiven debt is taxable income - if I loan you $100, then forgive the repayment, you must pay taxes on that $100...

The war on your liberty has been being waged in this country for decades. Starting at least as early as the cartelization of the banking industry under the "Federal" Reserve Act in 1913, industrial power players, entrenched political interests and government bureaucracies have been waging all out war on personal freedom. I want to be clear that I am not engaging in some kind of paranoid exaggeration of the facts to rile you up. The facts are dramatic enough on their own, when you look at the right facts. Let's look at some of the specific tyrannical powers the Founding Fathers worried about government having. They were concerned with government having the power to: - Detain indefinitely without cause - Arrest without cause - Search without cause - Suppress dissent and peaceful protest - Torture or otherwise coerce confessions - Alter private contracts, ex post facto If you consider the history of US government growth during the 20th century, you see each and every one of ...

I am supposed to be using this blog to think through why I object to government and why I am an anarchist. I think that all the problems with government can be crystallized down to one, incompressible bit of error: government is an organization granted the power to make decisions and export the costs of those decisions onto others. "Government is an organization" People often ask questions like, "What is the will of society?" or make statements like, "This is what the people want." It is a fallacy, however, to speak of uncoordinated groups in terms of telic purpose. When a group of soldiers is routed and begin a panicked retreat, fleeing for their lives, is this a reflection that it was "the will of the soldiers" to retreat? To say it was "the will of the soldiers to retreat" would imply some kind of consensus, or organization, but in the case of a panicked retreat, this clearly cannot be the case. Let's say 80% of Americans want t...

I put together this video to explain it. Enjoy.

I have to confess that I have one conspiracy theory of my own (see my last post on Conspiracy Theories ). I think of it not so much a conspiracy theory as a hypothesis - but then, so do all conspiracy theorists. My conspiracy theory is this: there is always a royalty. In the West, we believe royalty ended with monarchy. Of course, there are still the museum-pieces of the English and European royal families, but they have real power, so they say. But let us suppose that all power derives, ultimately, from money. Since, in my view, no money but gold is a store of value, then it would follow that all power ultimately derives from gold. Gold is a physical measure of power. Now, controlling the gold itself can be achieved by many means. If you are a bank, you might simply refuse to honor any future withdrawal requests and steal the depositors' gold that way. If you have control of a military, you might invade a neighboring region with a lot of gold. If you are the Nazi SS, you might st...

I watched a History Channel special on the JFK assassination some time ago. In it, the presenters go over the evidence for a conspiracy, particularly the large number of entry/exit wounds. Using 3-D, time-synchronized computer models built from the time sequences of the several cameras which were filming JFK from different angles, they were able to show that the shots that we know were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald can quite easily account for all the entry/exit wounds with no mumbo-jumbo or massaging of data. While it is still possible that there were other shooters, Occam's razor would lead us to conclude that such explanations are superfluous and, therefore, improbable. Possible , but improbable. Because of my interest in currency, the Federal Reserve and the modern monetary system, I have been watching quite a few YouTube videos propounding conspiracy theories all the way from the 9/11-Truthers to David Icke and his shape-shifting, Illuminati alien-lizards. One common thread I fi...

What is money? You might say, "it's a medium of exchange" and it is that, but it's begging the question... what is a medium of exchange? So what is money? Is it power? Is it the root of all evil? Is it "legal tender for all debts public and private"? Is it gold? Is it a representation of land? Is it a representation of labor? What exactly is money? Here is a great video which breaks down the origins and nature of money in a simple, entertaining way. I had not really grasped just how enmired in debt our monetary system is until I watched this video. I will note a few mistakes I think the video makes. First, the author suggests that returning to gold as money cannot be the solution because the supply of gold is too fixed and it would leave only those currently holding gold (a tiny minority of the population) with any money. I think that gold has to be money because every other candidate (including the ones he mentions in the video, such as LETS) ultimately res...

Please watch the following videos, dramatic readings of an article by Alan Greenspan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoNW7u3TBi8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F2jDJS60YU&feature=related The current rhetoric out of Washington - supported by a chorus of unwitting populists - is to "regulate" oil speculation. The express purpose of this regulation is to prohibit hedge funds from moving assets into oil. This is because oil behaves a lot like gold, at least in ways that are important for sheltering assets from government policy uncertainty and inflation of the money supply. If we substitute "oil speculation" for "gold standard" in the tail end of Greenspan's discussion, as read in the above videos, we have the following: In the absence of [oil speculation] there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal as was done in the case ...