no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics

Category Archives: Conspiracy Theory

Enabling the Surveillance State

June 9th, 2009

For the record: the omniscience offered by red-light cameras, or mall security cameras networked together and available to State agents upon demand, is horribly frightening, and yes, the general apathetic reaction to the surveillance state likely means it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

Case-in-point:

You feel like Big Brother’s watching. I just hope he is.

—Kim Gold, 48, Wilmington, DE resident. [Virtually Everywhere You Go… They’re Watching]

Ms. Gold, I think you need to re-read George Orwell’s 1984, or if you prefer, watch the movie. Because if you had even the faintest fucking understanding of what “Big Brother” actually is — the symbol of the omnipresent totalitarian State, where thought is crime, the end of human dignity and the death of liberty — I pray to whatever god you believe in, that you’d be singing a far different tune.

Apologetics and rationalizations, like those offered by Gold, or her fellow Wilmington resident Joann “If-you’re-not-doing-anything-wrong-you-don’t-have-anything-to-worry-about” Smagala, don’t rile me anymore. What I find most dreadful (and ironic) is not the degree to which most people apathetically accept these encroachments, but the degree to which they’ve been gone willingly with the program.

Multi-megapixel cameras tucked neatly inside cell phones and PDAs the likes of which would make Maxwell Smart go ga-ga, each containing a tracking device able to give more-or-less precise GPS location at practically any time, and each capable of keeping a more-or-less permanent record of our interpersonal communications, combined with all the transparency and openness of Teh Interweb (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) — hell…

“Big Brother” doesn’t need clandestine operatives to spy on the people, doesn’t need to install cameras on every street-corner, or televisions that watch us. We are already providing, for free and without question, far more information than we’d ever consider giving up if we thought we were really being watched.

All Your Internets Are Belong to Us

May 29th, 2009

A few weeks ago I commented on some ridiculous “informed consent” cyber-security bill. At least one commenter reacted to my claim that this sort of thing is the first step down a perilously slippery slope, saying essentially: look, this is no big deal. Granted, I conceded that in my post. There are plenty of smart and industrious people in the world who’d be more than willing to reverse-engineer the crap out of the software “feature” required by the cyber-security bill, and they would likely distribute this patch, so the effort seems like a dead letter. Fine. I stand by the underlying thesis, however, and I’m not sure how I didn’t hear about another bill making its way through Teh Government, which would grant the president unprecedented cyber security powers.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced in the Senate would allow the president to shut down private Internet networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to demand security data from private networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.

I’m not sure how anyone, once vested with this sort of power, could possibly refrain from abusing it.

How 80,000 Jobs Disappeared

November 24th, 2008

According to the Financial Times (all the news that’s fit to print), in the last week, the world’s economies lost 80,000 jobs. I have one question: How?

Seriously, how in the hell does something like this happen? The world did not stop turning.

These 80,000 people don’t want to be poor. They don’t want to be unemployed and unproductive. They didn’t choose to reduce their standards of living. They didn’t just decide that all of their needs, now and forever, have been met. No, all of these people still need food, shelter, warmth, leisure, whatever. Everyone still wants goods and services; everyone still wants stuff, and those needs can only be satisfied by production, which requires people.

As long as needs and wants remain unsatisfied, it doesn’t make sense that people are losing jobs left and right.

The idea that resources have been allocated towards the production of goods and services that aren’t really wanted, is the very essence of the Austrian take on business cycles. This is the crippling malinvestment that squanders capital, destroys wealth, and leaves people jobless. The joblessness is the very real personal side of malinvestment.

Not unless we assume that most of these people were simply not producing anything that anybody really wanted or needed, does it make sense. But it’s not their fault that they engaged in such unproductive activities, as individuals they were simply responding to incentives in the form of wages.

Following the paper trail, as it were, something had to make these wages possible, something had to tolerate or even encourage the misallocation of so many scarce resources, towards the production of things for which there was never any real demand. Something exogenous had to destroy all of our productivity.

We didn’t do it on our own.

That something is price inflation. And inflation is always caused by manipulation of the money supply by a central bank. Far from “stabilizing” the economy, or the money supply, by creating money from nothing they are capable of indebting everyone, controlling everyone.

Jobs, wealth, productivity, capital: all squandered, destroyed. And now they say, “The free market has failed you!” Now, they say, “You need Government more than ever before!”

The very people who claimed stewardship for your safety, your well-being, your economic prosperity are the ones responsible for so thoroughly eviscerating all those things. Those who created so much on paper, to expropriate the real, do you reward their deception? Do you reward their abysmal failures with more of your blood, sweat, tears?

Do you believe them when they say, “You need us, now more than ever”?

no third solution

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