While we are battling against the woke crazies and their “gender-affirming care,” there is something else to worry about as the ruling class is “gaining absolute, centralized control over the American economy.” And the means is digital currency, writes Edward Ring.
One of the most fundamental expressions of freedom Americans take for granted is the ability to conduct transactions using cash. The fact that ordinary Americans can settle debts and sell goods using cash may not be fully appreciated until cash is taken away.
That is to say, you don’t get tracked by the gubmint if you use cash. But if the government establishes a digital currency it will know everything, and tax everything, and have your access to the economy halted if you are a threat to “our democracy.”
Then, of course, there is climate change and the absolute necessity of reducing energy consumption of fossil fuels. The bottom line is that the green transition means reduction in energy use for ordinary people in America.
I guess that I am not as exercised as Edward Ring. That’s because I think that the total-surveillance state is just as crazy an idea as Five Year Plans. The whole point of a human society and an economy is that you cannot dictate everything. The only way the world works is to give everyone as much latitude as possible and let them get on with it. Then, of course, you come down like a ton of bricks on cheaters and frauds.
But political elites since the Dawn of Time have thought that, like an army marching to the border to repel invaders, human society needs strong leadership from the top.
(Actually, the Germans decided after World War I that even an army needed to push responsibility down as far as possible. That’s why their soldiers in World War II were worth about 50 percent more that allied soldiers.)
But chaps like George Gilder say that the opposite is true, that the economy and human society advance by “surprise,” the surprise of creativity. His idea comes from Claude Shannon’s information theory based on his notions on entropy.
And, by the way, the internet runs on digital data streams that insert information into fake-random noise.
So I say that the idea of a digital currency where the gubmint knows everything, and taxes everything, won’t work. And the green energy revolution won’t work. Instead it will Make Things Worse.
But meanwhile our liberal friends are fit to be tied. I was to a liberal bookstore, Third Place Books, today and scanned the titles in the Political Science section. I’ll tell you, about 97.2 percent of the titles are about the diabolical threat of extreme right-wing Trumpian insurrectionists. I even saw a title about how the far-right is corrupting the youth with people like Candace Owens and Turning Point USA! (Note that even La Wik refrains from stigmatizing TPUSA as far-right.)
See, I think that if our liberal friends had half a brain they would say to each other: yes, we want justice and equality, but is gubmint programs really the way to do it? Because, after all, The Science says that you can’t have an egalitarian society with big-government programs.
Why not? Because The Science says that politics always ends up with the rulers corruptly handing out benefits to their supporters and impoverishing the society as a whole. The handouts might be to their family, to their ethnic group, their party supporters: doesn’t matter. Handouts end up impoverishing a society.
Yes. My take is that our liberal friends are idiots; that they will end up crashing their rule of about one hundred years in the dumpster. Their problem is that they cling to their Savior Faith that they are the saviors of all the oppressed peoples of the world. And that faith prevents them from admitting that their programs and activisms Make Thing Worse.
Trouble is that things will only get better after regime change, and regime change is often rather a messy business.