It is convenient that immediately preceding the current credit-crunch, a few notable things happened. The bankruptcy code was changed, and the laws surrounding the payment structure for unsecured debt were changed, which resulted in minimum payments that are about twice what they previously were. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Reserve began targeting higher short term rates (the discount rate) which results in contraction of the monetary base, and a diminution of the supply of loanable funds. If you were a politically connected banking insider, you probably knew all about these turns of events before they happened, and were able to profit immensely.
no third solution
Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics
Category Archives: ponderings
The Rebellion of the Dead
On page 30 of crimethINC.’s latest book, Days of War, Nights of Love:
There is no more commonplace observation than this, but to my knowledge no one has yet set out to study why children and adults experience the passing of time differently.
I’ve thought about that problem before, and the answer to me seems straightforward. As a young child, a single summer vacation represents mathematically a significant portion of your life; a year, even moreso. As we accumulate experience in life, each interval is a lesser part of the whole experience, thus far. To a five year old, who might have 2 or 3 years or real memory, a single summer is immense. To a twenty-eight year old, with twenty-five or twenty-six years of memory, a single summer borders the inconsequential.
But I like the passage so far:
What if he had known he was going to die, what then? Would he have counted backwards from that day, lived differently? Would he have frozen up in the face of that terrible knowledge?
What if I could know in advance when my own death would come? It was waiting ahead of me, as sure as Daniel’s had been, as sure as all of ours are. If someone could look at time from above, taking in the sweep of history all at once, we would all appear as the walking dead, moving obliviously along our preordained tracs towards inexorable ends.
crimethINC. literature (to my limited exposure) is filled with provocative prose, anthemic anti-propaganda. I’ll give the rest of this one a read over the next few days. (h/t: William Gillis)
How Is a Government Established?
If I were to ask the Government man, “How does one go about establishing this organization you call ‘Government’?” he might look askance at me, and wonder if I’m not slow in the head. Once I establish that I am not fit to be institutionalized, I imagine he would give me some spiel about the consent of the governed, to protect and ensure tranquility and community, to provide for the general welfare and defense, etc.
But from whence comes this “consent” of the governed? It cannot be shown to derive from any thing such as proper consent. The “consent” argument is easily dispatched by my parable of The Benevolent Invader.
Besides, my question was “How does one establish a government?” I’ll propose to the Government man, that I would like to establish my own government, and that I would like for the Government to respectfully honor my wish to no longer be a part of that union.
“But, a man can’t form a government! That’s crazy-talk! the Government man might protest.
If it be true that one man can’t call himself a government, then, how is it that a group of men come to call themselves the government? If you can’t call yourself a government, and I can’t call myself a government, how can we call ourselves government?
I am digressing, what I mean to ask then, is this: “Other than the accident of birth, which cannot be taken as “consent” of anything, how is it that you, or a group of you, have come to exercise this Lordship over me?”
Since I cannot choose to form my own government (a government of one) then clearly I have not chosen, nor have I consented, to the government under which I live, since I cannot choose the array!
“Poppycock!” the Statist, objects. “If you jump from a building, you do not get to ‘choose’ whether you live or die. If you are lost in the wilderness, you do not have the ‘choice’ of a Queen-sized bed at the Hilton with a double order of bacon for breakfast! You only have the choice between certain death, and the struggle for survival.”
And so it is, with the State! It is the choice between certain death, and acquiescent survival.
There is one substantive difference, however—and you thought I was done! For shame! Stranded in the wilderness, it is only your inaction, viz. your neglect to choose, which guarantees your demise! This is an objective and incontestable fact of reality. On the other hand, in the realm of Governments, it is the State which imposes this choice upon you.
We can conclude that Governments—in every time and place—have been established, ordained and maintained only through conquest and violent force, or the threat thereof. This can be shown by government’s absolute refusal to permit you to form your own government in a manner other than brute force to which it must, through destruction, submit.
