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 vote
- Promise 15 cents to five people, and gain five votes
- Keep the difference
- Get 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…
Read More: How Democracy Failed Us: Bitcoin Is Not Democratic Part Two
