Beginning

I want to write this here so I don’t have to keep repeating it.

1. You are wealthy at birth. By wealth, I am referring to the net present value of your life’s earnings, discounted at a reasonable rate—or at least what was a reasonable rate before our current inflationary economic system.

2. There are those who believe it is unfair that you should be wealthy by right of birth. These people are frequently (but not always born wealthy by virtue of wealth within the family). This wealth is necessary because many of them would not earn any wealth during the course of their life otherwise.

3. The goal of the system in which you are embedded is to strip of you of that (in their eyes) “undeserved” wealth. After all, any fool can be born. Why should they be wealthy?

4. The means of stripping you of your natural wealth is by inflationary means, which increases the discount rate so much that the net present value of your future labours becomes zero (you can learn how to perform NPV calculations here ).

5. The role of government in all of this is to deliver you into this system. To this end, you are educated to be passive, docile, and ignorant of financial matters. You are blinded from this reality by a succession of atrocities and entertainments.

6. Government must handle your education so that you will cooperate with the system. Among the first things you learn is that government and its agents are your friends. Consequently, in early primary school you were introduced to firemen (your friends), the police (your friends), the principal (spelt ‘pal’ because he is your pal).

7. Any group that does not recognize the primacy of government must be eliminated. Hence, the Branch Davidians, the home schoolers, the FLDS (see here, for instance), and even the Muslims are demonized. The differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are emphasized and expressed as a reason for their demonization.

8. We must be educated to be divided, for if we were to unite, there could be unpleasant consequences for the architects of the system into which we have been born. We are divided by age into cohorts, and any social mixing of these cohorts is discouraged. Similarly we are divided in school by grade (A, B, C, D, and F, although those are not given much any more) similar to the alphas, betas, gammas, deltas, and epsilons of Huxley’s Brave New World.

9. The coming goal is to place controls on all forms of economic activity so that the flow of money can be tracked from your employer or business to your pocket to your local merchants.

10. The plan requires top-down control of all activities.

11. All transactions could be taxed. But what if we bartered. Or what if we used something outside of the system as money. Like the stone wheels of Yap, if we trusted each other, the commodity used might not change hands, merely ownership. Consider two individuals. One has money in Canada. One has money in Singapore. They wish to exchange, in order to move the money. But the money doesn’t move, only the ownership changes. In a system based on trust, no money crosses the borders. And the powers that be cannot trace the ownership, for it is purely conceptual. But this can only work if we trust one another and have respect for rights of ownership.

12. Our respect for the right of ownership has been degraded by the politics of democracy. Each of us is a participant in a scheme by which the majority expropriates property of some minority for some purpose. Actually, the expropriation is ordered by a majority of politicians each of which can claim they were voted in by the population of a particular area (not always a majority). We may or may not agree with the expropriation, but have little ability to change it.

13. The remedy is trust. Trust and faith in ourselves, and in each other. And distrust in authoritarianism.