Is Protesting Democratic?

What does democratic mean? Depends on who you ask but I’d say it’s fair that most people perceive the concept to mean “the people” are the government – whatever that means and regardless how obvious it is that that’s simply not the case. “The people” are “represented” by politicians in a congress or parliament who were elected by a majority vote. That is to say, the will of the majority over the will of the minority is perceived as the “best”, “fairest”, most “just” way to make political decisions.

Given this ideology, they believe that if the government isn’t doing what “the people” want, then “the people” can change it by protesting. They believe protesting to be their democratic right since after all, they are the government. So a group of like-minded people who want the government to change something coordinate their efforts, raise money, collect signatures, make signs and go out in public with megaphones and make speeches and chant and sometimes they sing songs, it’s all so commercial and theatrical , at least for the protestors and onlookers.

The politicians, on the other hand, have no incentive to engage or acknowledge the protestors based on the merits of the protested issue alone. Regardless what politicians do they cannot be fired and their salaries, benefits and money from lobbyists do not depend on whether “the people” are happy or not. If politicians appear to change their political policies in response to a protest, it’s for political expedience, there are political advantages for them. For every ten protests, maybe one will offer such political advantages and affect policy, maybe.

But if “the people” are the government and their “representatives” have already been chosen to “represent the people” and “the people” are protesting the political decisions of their “representatives”, aren’t “the people” effectively protesting themselves?

And if a small number of people, a minority, successfully influence political decisions by protesting, decisions that affect the entire country, isn’t that minority imposing their will on the majority? A clear contradiction to the ideology of a majority rule as the “best”, “fairest”, most “just” way to make political decisions in a democratic system even though it’s believed that protesting and its consequences are their right in a democratic system.

So in a democracy, the majority elects representatives and a minority can influence the representatives by protesting themselves.

Politics is for the infantile and the insane.

Soldiers aren’t sent to War, they are the War.

When I was doing some work in Germany in 2016, I took the local train from the quaint little German village where I was living to the neighboring town where I was working. The train stop was outdoors right across from a large grass covered field with a couple rolling mounds peppered with yellow flowers. On a sunny day it seemed to go on forever and you couldn’t see what was on the far side at all.

I remember imagining what it must have been like during WWII when such a pristine landscape was turned into a battlefield virtually overnight. How the tanks must have come rolling over the mounds and plowed through the field and yellow flowers in an intimidating show of military might turning innocent people’s lives into fear and suffering. Bombing entire cities to rubble that just days before were hustling, bustling centers of daily life. Killing the mailman, the school teacher, parents and children alike in the name of war.

There is a very distinct recipe to turning people’s lives into fear and suffering, a procedure for destroying physical and psychological normalcy, a process for creating war. The most important ingredient is a lot of young men and women who will do anything they are ordered to do by those they perceive as authority. These are the soldiers, the tools of war, the blunt instruments who have been marinated their entire lives in patriotism, the flag and duty to god and country to the point they shit the colors of the flag. They’ve been indoctrinated since childhood that they have a duty to their motherland upon whose bosom they suckled and who, without which, they’d have nothing. They are carbon-based androids programed to follow orders and kill with extreme prejudice. They aren’t capable of critical thought or compassion because those are treasonous characteristics in a soldier.

After that you add some authority, generals who give the soldiers their orders. The generals are old men mostly, adorned from head to toe with shiny medals and ribbons, sashes and pins bestowed upon them by the powers that be, publicly announcing their heroism and patriotism which commands the greatest respect on sight. The soldiers revere the generals as almost demigods whose stature is to be admired and orders to be obeyed without question. The generals are the catalyst in the recipe that congeal the soldiers into an adhesive whole.

But the generals don’t act independently, they are following orders as well from the powers that be (TPTB). TPTB are the people and organizations that run the world, the superrich, the global governmental organizations like the UN, WHO, World Bank, IMF, NATO and the WEF and the bureaucrats that run them. They all have their agenda of increasing their global power and personal wealth and they use the generals to carry out their diabolical plans who in turn order the soldiers to do whatever their role is in the scheme and voila` war is created.

But the recipe has a fatal flaw, without the soldiers there is no war. The generals aren’t young enough or numerous enough to fight and TPTB and bureaucrats can’t be bothered with such proletarian endeavors, that’s what the disposable soldiers are for. It’s only the soldiers you see on the battlefield or occupying towns and terrorizing the residents.

As the mainstream media insists on beating the war drums louder and louder, I look out over the center of Bucharest, Romania where I live and the main thoroughfare full of cars with people living their lives, going to work, shopping, taking their kids to school and imagine the street, overnight, being filled with armored trucks, foot soldiers and tanks like in WWII Germany because some general ordered them to do so the day before. The sounds of explosions off in the distance demolishing old world buildings that have stood for hundreds of years. Terrorizing anyone who disobeys their commands, in the name of national security. How quickly life as we know it can change – as 2020 showed – due to TPTB, the generals, the soldiers and politics.

If only the soldiers had the character to realize what they were being ordered to do was wrong, the courage to refuse to obey the orders, and the honor to not disgrace themselves by doing something they know is wrong. Peace and humanity in the world begins at the bottom with the soldiers, not at the top with TPTB or their puppet bureaucrats and generals. Those people are irrelevant as is voting for them.

The Christmas Truce in WWI demonstrated how quickly and decisively soldiers can end war. The soldiers on both sides began singing Christmas carols and came out of their opposing trenches and drank wine, sang and laughed. They had nothing against one another, they didn’t even know one another so why fight? The war was suspended by them regardless what the generals said. If they could have just continued that, the war would have been over because – as the truce demonstrated — soldiers aren’t sent to war, they are the war.

Animal “Rights” Part Deux

The animal rights movement began taking shape right around the time when humanity began to master its environment and people’s lifespan lasted longer than ever before. With never-before-seen luxuries and an improvement lifespan, the homo sapiens suddenly had the time to ‘think’ and so they did.

Although human abuse was seen as customary and vastly ignored, the treatment of animals began to gradually garner the attention of those who began to believe that animals had rights, -the same ‘rights’ as humans- in the hopes that things could change for them. But what exactly are rights? Can a ‘right’ be quantified, documented, observed, and tested? Can a ‘right’ be looked at by other rational beings and -in consensus- be determined to exist? Could a ‘right’ be established to exist if we ask the 5W’s (who, what, when, where, why) of writing?

The truth is that a ‘right’ is merely a human concept, a made-up amalgamation of our left and right side of the brain going back and forth seeking to rationalize the world around us in the hopes that we can act in a way that benefits us. It is all subjective at the end of the day, and to think otherwise is a betrayal of what makes us human; our ability to process the world in a rational way by using logic and empirical thought to come to conclusions. 

But establishing the objectivity of something subjective such a ‘right’ or a ‘feeling,’ is merely the beginning. Just like how ‘rights’ are subjective, so is the tendency of humanity to treat certain species differently across a variety of jurisdictions across the globe.

In Asia, Africa, and many parts of South America, we see that dogs aren’t bathed, spayed, or neutered or even chipped, instead we see that they are simply another dish in the vast food repertories of these continents. Why? Well, because humans in these regions tend to be poor and so they need to find a cheap way to get their calories and dogs fit the description. 

On the other hand, in the west, a dog is seen as a miracle from the good lord himself and so they must be protected at all costs! Don’t you dare not having them chipped, neutered or even bathed unless you want the cops at your house. Breeding them en masse to make a profit is okay, breeding them to fight other dogs is not okay. Want to kill your dog? Not okay! Want the vet to do it for you? Very okay! 

Cows, pigs, chickens etc. are bred en masse in the west and all across the globe to create a never-ending supply for food for us, the human race. How come they have no ‘rights’?

What makes certain animals favorable and what makes other animals savory? I’m just asking ’cause I know nothing will ever change, humanity is just riddled with aging teens.

Credit Score

Most people believe they must maintain a good credit score and that having a good credit score is a social signal that they are financially responsible. The truth is exactly the opposite.

All fiat money created by central banks and the treasury is debt. When someone swipes their credit card or takes a loan, new money is created by the banking system and loaned to the consumer. It’s money that isn’t backed by anything other than legal tender laws that compel you to use it. They are just entries in a database or pieces of paper with drawings on them, for all intents and purposes, they are counterfeit. The same as you or I or any counterfeiter would do at home, the central banks and the treasury do by legal proclamation.

When the consumer pays the debt off, the principal is deleted from the accounting books, destroyed, and the bank keeps the interest. The counterfeit has been laundered and the counterfeiters keep the profits. This has concerning consequences for the banks such as: if all debt were paid off, there’d be no more money in circulation. So how do they ensure that people keep borrowing? The invention of the credit score.

A good credit score requires a perpetual state of indebtedness and repayment. The more you borrow and payback (i.e. the more interest you generate for the banks) the higher your credit score. The less you borrow (i.e. the less interest you generate for the banks), the lower your credit score. In other words, if you are financially responsible and don’t buy things you can’t afford, live within your means you will have a lower credit score like that of someone who borrows a lot and doesn’t pay it back. Those who judge you based on your credit score don’t take this into consideration. It’s a false dichotomy, you either have a high credit score or you don’t, the reasoning is irrelevant. Credit scores have become so prevalent that they are used in almost all facets of society as a judge of one’s character similar to the Chinese social credit score. Credit scores are considered when applying for a job, renting an apartment, requesting utility services, buying insurance and even a phone plan.

However, if you are so financially irresponsible that you are perpetually in debt, if you chronically buy things you can’t afford, if you live beyond your means you will have a high credit score and be considered a responsible member of society. In fact it’s fair to say that the more interest you generate for the banks, the higher your credit score. If you deprive the banks of interest income, the lower your credit score. And the banks have the government on their side. An institution $32 trillion in debt will punish you for not paying your debt to the banks. It’s a perversion that bears no resemblance to reality.

Consumers are trapped by this mindset even though they have no idea how a credit score is calculated. They just know they must be in constant debt and pay it off faithfully. Nor is one’s credit score under their control. Any business can report you to a credit bureau for anything they choose and there’s very little you can do about it. Were you late with the rent? The landlord can report you. Did you move and forget to cancel your contract with the electric company? They can report you. Businesses and those who stand to profit can unethically leverage credit bureaus to their advantage. They report outright lies as a form of extortion to pressure people into paying even if they don’t owe it and there’s nothing you can do about it.

That’s why credit cards are so prevalent and seen as a symbol of success. The gold card, the platinum card, American Express. That’s why college seniors with no job prospects receive applications for pre-approved credit cards. That’s why people swipe their credit card for benign purchases like a Big Mac or a pair of socks.

People are as addicted to their credit cards as they are to their phones. You want to get back at the bankers, the billionaires? Stop using your credit card, live within your means, be financially responsible and stop being a slave to your credit score.

Breaking Relativity


Two fundamental concepts humans have defined to describe the world around them are spatial dimensions and time. These are human concepts, no other form of life on the planet utilizes them, cares about them, they are uniquely applied by humans trying to model and understand the physical world.

We define the concept of spatial dimensions to be height, width and length. In order to quantify those dimensions, a standard measure is required that also occupies those dimensions against which we can make a relative observation.

Early civilizations used the size of someone’s feet or the length of their arm. Eventually international standards were agreed upon such as the British Imperial and Metric systems. We have tools that encode those standard measurement systems like a ruler, a yardstick, a tape measure etc.

Einstein’s theory of relativity treats time as a ubiquitous, abstract phenomenon without form or description.  Something that can only be measured but not seen or touched. I define the concept of time to be relative motion in spatial dimensions. Relative motion is essential for life like electrons around a nucleus, photons bombarding plants and nuclear fusion in the sun but it was humans who categorized those physical phenomena into the concept of time. Life did just fine for billions of years without a formal concept.

In order to quantify time, a standard measure of relative motion is required against which we can make an observation of other relative motion. Any relative motion between two inertial reference frames can be used. Early civilizations used sun dials to measure the relative motion of the earth with the sun by measuring the relative motion of a shadow with the face of the dial. Hour glasses use the relative motion of grains of sand from the top capsule to the bottom. Eventually international standards were agreed upon such as the Universal Coordinated Time (UCT). We have tools that encode UTC like a watch, a clock, a cell phone etc. A clock is a relative standard measure of time (relative motion) because the hands move relative to the face and to each other.

Time is a concept and concepts are not bendable, twistable, fungible or anything else you can do to something physical. Concepts are ideas, thoughts and time and spatial dimensions are concepts we use in order to communicate “where” and “when” effectively. A 15th century native American telling someone to meet him at the “big willow” when the “sun is directly overhead” is using the concepts of space and time in order to communicate effectively. So is telling someone to meet you at the “Hard Rock” at 2:00 PM. The concept of time makes sense since telling someone to meet you somewhere doesn’t do much good if you don’t specify when.

The theory of special relativity theorizes that time contracts which is why the speed of light is measured the same from any inertial frame of reference. But the motion of light relative to an inertial frame of reference defines a clock, a measure of time and if it is the same from all inertial frames of reference, then it defines a universal measure of time. A clock that naturally “adjusts” to relative motion to remain constant. A “God” clock.

This creates a logical fallacy. The special theory claims there is no universal measure of time so time is relative which is why the speed of light is constant as measured from any inertial reference frame. If the theory is correct, it explains the existence of a universal measure of time from any inertial reference frame which contradicts itself.

What is a Store of Value?

In economic terms, when people talk about a store of value, they’re talking about an economic good that retains its exchangeable market value in the short-run and the long-run. All value is individually subjective so exchangeable market value is the assumption that consumers and producers in the aggregate feel confident that there will be a coincidence of subjective exchangeable value between them at any time so they can use the good in trade.

This means that two people both value the good in trade independent of its current market price and are willing to trade it independent of the price of the good being traded for. If the trade doesn’t happen, it’s not for lack of subjective exchangeable value on both parts, it’s because they couldn’t agree on a price.

If they both value it but one is not willing to trade it in exchange for something else independent of the price of the good being traded for then it’s not a store of exchangeable market value. It’s a personal store of value based on personal preferences and values and it is not a medium of exchange.

For example, gold has been a store of exchangeable market value for thousands of years but certain types of gold coins have numismatic or sentimental value to collectors and they will not trade them regardless of the price offered. Those coins do not store exchangeable market value.

Whether a good is a store of exchangeable market value in the short-run and the long-run or not depends on its economic fundamentals. The short-run price of a store of value will vary but its fundamentals will ensure that it has a coincidence of exchangeable market value in the short-run and the long-run that can be used in exchange whatever that value might be at the time.

Key point: a store of exchangeable market value doesn’t mean a high price in the long-run, it means that the good will have a coincidence of exchangeable market value in the short-run and long-run regardless what the market price is at any given time.

A store of value has to be durable so that regardless what happens to it physically, the nature of the good is difficult to destroy so it can be used in exchange. An ice cream cone doesn’t make a good store of value since the ice cream will melt and all you’ll be left with is the cone. But since gold and silver are fundamental elements, regardless what form or state they are in, they’re still gold and silver. That’s true for any precious metal so precious metals are durable.

A store of exchangeable value has to have utility and value across diverse markets so that even if it loses value in one market, it still has value that can be exchanged in others. This diversity of value is what insures that the good will have exchangeable value in the short-run and the long-run. Although a bowling ball is durable and difficult for the consumer to destroy its value is limited to the context of bowling and doesn’t have diverse value in other markets. The long-run value of a bowling ball depends on the demand for bowling and bowling alone. If the demand for bowling dries up so does the value of bowling balls so bowling balls don’t make a good store of value.

The nature of gold, silver and other precious metals as natural elements make them durable and they have utility and value in a large number of markets: adorning furniture, adorning clothing, jewelry, electrical circuits, heat shielding etc. Precious metals have the sort of durability and market diversity that makes them a good store of exchangeable market value that can be used in exchange at any time.

Even if I don’t need gold or silver, given their market diversity, I feel confident that others will accept gold and silver in trade at any time so I’ll accept them as well in order to trade them later.

Is Bitcoin a store of exchangeable market value?

Is a Bitcoin durable, is it difficult for the consumer to destroy the nature of it? If you keep your Bitcoin wallet on any hardware device – computer, cellphone, memory stick, external hard-drive — and they are damaged beyond repair then your Bitcoins have been destroyed. There are certain measures that can be taken to attempt to recover the wallet but nothing is guaranteed. If you live in an area where you lose electrical power and/or Internet, cellphone connectivity then your Bitcoins cannot be exchanged and since you can’t do anything with them, they are worthless at that point in time which is the antithesis of a store of value.

Does a Bitcoin have diverse market utility and value? No, the only use for a Bitcoin is on the Bitcoin blockchain. The long-run exchangeable market value of a Bitcoin depends on the demand for people to use the Bitcoin blockchain to transact business. If that demand dries up so does the exchangeable market value of Bitcoins.

Speculative value is not the same as exchangeable value. In other words the fact that the price of Bitcoin fluctuates wildly – it lost 80% of its price in one year and 24% in one weekend — isn’t a characteristic of a store of value. The speculative value depends on the speculator not using, not exchanging his Bitcoins on the blockchain but rather continuing to hold them in hopes of recovering from the wild price dips and the price climbing in order to profit from continued speculative demand. A store of exchangeable market value must have a coincidence of market value that can be used in exchange at any time in the short-run and long-run regardless of the price.

Since people hold their Bitcoin in speculation, it decreases its exchangeable value rather than storing it.

Intellectual Property

There is no such thing as ‘Intellectual Property’, it’s a politically contrived concept meant to provide legal economic privilege for some at the expense of others – as is the case with all political economic intervention.

IP is the concept that physical property represents ideas and those ideas are also property and they deserve protection under the law. It’s the concept that ideas, people’s thoughts, can be ‘stolen’ and stealing is illegal. How is this strangely magical connection made between a physical product and someone’s ideas? Is it assumed that some of us are witches and warlocks and can read people’s minds and steal their thoughts for ourselves?

What is stealing? Stealing is taking something that doesn’t belong to you without the owner’s permission and the owner no longer has that thing because you took it. To steal ideas and thoughts would mean the ability to not only read someone’s mind but also to delete those ideas and thoughts from them so they no longer have them. Obviously, IP must be based in the dark arts.

IP is so perverted, the concept of stealing must be redefined in order for it to be legally implemented. When real property, like a car or wallet, is stolen the act of stealing ensures the owner no longer has the item, otherwise it wasn’t stolen. Only in the fantastical, mystical world of IP can something be stolen and both the owner and thief be in possession of it at the same time.

Regardless how uncomfortable, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth. So let’s assume that it’s not some sinister voodoo at play and remove mind control from the analysis and we are left with the truth that people can’t steal ideas and thoughts. It’s embarrassing that this needs to be pointed out but politics is for the infantile and the insane and IP is political so the nonsense makes sense.

So, if people can’t steal the ideas of others, what does IP actually do? IP is the fraudulent idea that if you produce a product and receive IP rights from the government for that product, nobody else can legally produce that product or something similar without paying you for the permission to do so. It creates legal barriers to entry and competition. Any such economic impediments lead to an inefficient allocation of resources, less innovation and invention and a monopoly position for the holder of the IP rights. In other words, one person benefits economically at the expense of everyone else.

The argument in favor of IP is always the same: ‘How can I profit from my idea if anyone is free to copy it?’. First of all, since we’ve established people can’t read minds, if you don’t want your idea copied, don’t put it in the public domain and certainly don’t sell the product of your idea. Once you sell a good though, it belongs to the buyer and he can do anything he wants with it including copy it. Secondly, this argument implies that any product that is profitable must enjoy IP rights and we know that’s not the case. Most products on the market are not patent or copyright protected, so how do those producers profit? By continuous innovation and invention, by building a better mousetrap, by providing a quality product at a price consumers can afford. In short, by continuously working at it. IP laws relieve producers of such proletariat responsibilities and allow them to profit from legal protections like royalty. In fact, that’s what paying an IP holder to produce or use his product is called: a royalty.

Like all political programs, IP laws get abused. There are attorneys who do nothing other than go around buying up patents and copyrights and then look for potential violations so they can sue for infringement. Nothing is produced, there is no innovation, no invention just a legal privilege being passed around for profit. IP laws are just another way politicians have found to legally redistribute wealth to a favored legal class, another economic perversion.

Artificial Intelligence?

The definition of intelligence is a philosophical question for which there is no one, objective answer so if we don’t really know what intelligence is, we can’t know what the concept of Artificial Intelligence is either.

The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used in popular culture is a marketing slogan to sound impressive, technologically advanced and important, it’s not. What is called Artificial Intelligence is just a system of hardware and software. People who don’t understand technology and computer systems are easily impressed by the language with no real comprehension of what it is or does or how it does it.

Voice recognition technology – which has been around since the 1950s — records voice patterns digitally and then matches a speaker’s voice to those patterns to come up with a ‘best guess’ decision of what the speaker said. In order to personalize the system to a specific speaker’s voice, the system must be ‘trained’. That means the system takes multiple samples of the speaker’s voice in order to calculate an average set of digital patterns to come up with a ‘best guess’ decision of what that specific speaker said. Sometimes these systems work very well but if you’ve ever encountered a voice recognition system when calling customer support and gotten the old “did you say …? “, that’s because the system couldn’t find an acceptable pattern match to your voice so it prompts you to say it again.

Any pattern recognition system, regardless if it’s voice, facial or anything else, is implemented in the same way. Multiple samples are taken, a pattern of weighted averages is calculated and then matched to the input the system is given to come up with a ‘best guess’ output. What is called AI is no different in that regard. The only difference is how it comes up with the weighted averages.

AI uses what are called neural networks which aren’t really neural, neural refers to the brain and nervous system. Computer system don’t have brains or nervous systems but using language that mimics human physiology maintains the illusion of intelligence. AI neural networks are just interconnected networks where each node in the network is connected to all the other nodes. It’s an attempt to mimic how science believes the human brain works – are we seeing a pattern here?

Similar to voice recognition systems, an AI network is ‘trained’ by giving it multiple samples of data from which it calculates a weighted average pattern. Neural network training does this by beginning with a random set of parameters, giving the system input, running it all the way through the network and measuring the difference between the input and the output and adjusting the parameter values accordingly until an optimal set of values is reached. The parameters that define this weighted average pattern are stored on disk and matched against input to come to a ‘best guess’ output.

What does this say about Artificial Intelligence? It says that AI can’t do anything that we didn’t ‘train’ it to do. Put another way: we taught AI everything it knows but we can’t ever train it to know everything we know. This simplistic but accurate characterization means that AI can never become more than what we allow it to become and never ‘know’ more than us since it’s knowledge base depends on us.

Larger AI systems like ChatGPT, Google and IBM are investing millions in AI in order to throw as much processing power at it as possible to stay competitive. In essence they are using brut force to come up with faster response times and make it seem more like you’re talking to a human. But in truth, there are hundreds of computers being used in the background just to draw you a picture of a black Nazi officer.

Ironically, the biggest flaw in AI systems is the lack of humanity, the human factor, the missing characteristic the propaganda is trying to create. AI systems can’t drive defensively, they can’t hear a driver ‘gunning it’ to catch a stale yellow light and know not to proceed when it gets the green because the other driver might still be in the intersection. When you tell an AI system to draw you a picture of a WWII Nazi officer, it doesn’t know that there weren’t any black or Asian female Nazi officers, it’s just regurgitating what it’s been ‘trained’ to do.

AI systems also don’t know the difference between what represents reality and what doesn’t so with so much AI generated content on the Internet now, it’s consuming its own output as input and producing perverted representations. It’s the technological equivalent of inbreeding.

There are AI systems that can identify a new problem and ‘train’ itself on how to solve the problem but how to identify and ‘train’ itself was also programmed by someone. The propaganda gives people the impression that AI systems can think independently like humans and once up and running can autonomously evolve like Skynet in ‘Terminator’. Any deviation from what we expect it to do is not autonomous evolution, it’s a bug that was introduced by the developers. At the end of the day an AI system is just a bunch of hardware and software doing exactly what we programmed them to do. Sometimes it works really nicely, sometimes it’s complete shit and hinders problem solving rather than helping. But that’s exactly what you would expect from a bunch of nuts and bolts so it’s actually working as expected if you have realistic expectations.

AI is a nifty new technology that has its niche` and its uses but that’s all. The concerning part about it is that, like all new technology, the powers that be will find a way to weaponize it and use it against humanity.

Is Government Productive?

Some people will argue that just because the government does something, anything, that it’s being productive. But whether someone, an organization or government is productive or not depends on the value of what is done and the costs to do it. If the costs are greater than the value then it’s consumption. Productivity means taking resources and putting them together in such a way so as to create something new with a greater value than the sum of the resources individually.

My grandmother’s arts and crafts club used to take penny pipe cleaners and twist them together to make Christmas tree ornaments. They sold them for a nickel creating three cents of value for each one since the pipe cleaners alone were only worth two cents.

As an employee, your employer gives you resources to work with and you produce what he decides would add the most value to the company and he shares that productivity with you in the form of a paycheck.

Your lawn is overgrown and needs to be cut so you take your lawn mower and time and energy and mow the lawn. You value the freshly cut lawn more than when it was overgrown so you were productive.  

Is there any evidence, any argument that government can be productive? That they can do something, anything that has more social, economic value than the resources they use would have individually? How do you measure social, economic value in a country of 320 million? Ask every single person and then take an average? Estimate it based on random samples? Even if you could, everyone is an individual with individual preferences and values. The concept of public utility or social value is just an idea, an abstraction used to simplify and obfuscate economic parameters on a large scale. It doesn’t exist in reality and cannot be measured in any meaningful way.

Where does a government get the resources it uses? Taxation, fees, fines, permits, licensing any number of revenue generation schemes that people in society are obligated to pay or face penalties up to and including jail. They also confiscate land and natural resources under the guise of law. All resources the government has were taken from someone else. What are the costs to society, the economy? Resources taken from one sector of the economy and redistributed to the government can no longer be used for productive activities in the sector they were taken from. This is called opportunity cost and it’s immeasurable. Although the government might do something with those resources, there’s no guarantee it will benefit the sector they were taken from more than those resources could have benefited that sector directly.

Resources are used most efficiently by those who own them because there was a cost to acquire them. When government takes resources, they have no incentive to use them efficiently because it didn’t cost them anything to acquire them. They know that regardless what they do with those resources, they can always take more. Government waste is well known and documented. Wasting resources is consumption, the opposite of productive.

The government has a $32 trillion debt from borrowing to cover operating costs. That debt imposes an inflation tax on the entire economy leaving less wealth for private innovation, invention and productivity.

By its nature, the state is a consumer of resources, not a producer of wealth. Although all of these costs cannot actually be measured, there is no evidence that anything the government does could produce more value than it consumes.

The Argument of Nothing

I can create, invent, make up straight from my imagination any phenomenon I want. Since I just made it up, obviously it doesn’t exist in reality, it’s not real. And because it doesn’t really exist, its existence cannot be proven or disproven, so any argument made in terms of its existence can be made with confidence that it cannot be disproven. Any attempt to prove or disprove the imaginary phenomenon will be a logical fallacy of one form or another. This is what I call the ‘Argument of Nothing’ and its power to control people cannot be overstated because it is an impenetrable argument with applications in all facets of society especially religion and politics. It’s extremely powerful in persuading people’s minds to believe things for which there is no evidence, no proof and no reason.  

For example, most people would admit that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist, that it was just a childhood fairy tale created over the ages for children. But it’s impossible to prove Santa Claus doesn’t exist because you can’t prove something doesn’t exist that doesn’t exist. You also can’t prove Santa Claus does exist but the human mind is more susceptible to accepting something that might be true than it is to rejecting it because there is no proof. It’s the ‘better safe than sorry’ philosophy of life. Blaise Pascal is known for ‘Pascal’s Wager’ in which individuals engage in a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of a God. There is no proof a God doesn’t exist so since a God might exist, better safe than sorry so they choose – at least ostensibly – to believe. Churches leverage the ‘Argument of Nothing’ to recruit and retain members by confidently preaching religious dogma that they know cannot be disproven and with enough pomp, circumstance, showmanship and fear, they can convince people it might be true so it’s better to be safe than sorry with eternal damnation.

This can be done by anyone with anything. I recently figured out why some people win the lottery multiple times. It’s because a descendant is traveling back in time and giving their ancestors the winning numbers so they’ll have a fortune to inherit in the future. I can’t prove it’s true, but you can’t prove it’s not. The ‘Argument of Nothing’.

The argument of nothing is a powerful tool in politics and is most effective with phenomena that have an aire of plausibility but cannot be validated by the average person. For them it’s more of an abstraction that exists somewhere in society without form or detail, it just is. For example, even if you’re not a medical professional, most people believe viruses exist. So if propaganda is spread that there is a new, deadly virus it’s impossible for a suburbanite to know if it’s true or not. They’ve never seen a virus under a microscope and wouldn’t know one if they did. It could just as well be a complete fabrication, nothing but a political manifestation to push a political agenda (i.e. money and power) and there’d be no way for the 9-5er to disprove it, the ‘Argument of Nothing’, but better safe than sorry with your health!

Are carbon based fuels creating a climate crisis? Those claiming they are can’t prove it but you can’t prove it’s not.  Better safe than sorry. ‘Argument of Nothing’.

Does ‘Artificial Intelligence’ pose a national security threat? Those claiming it does can’t prove it but you can’t prove it doesn’t.  Better safe than sorry. ‘Argument of Nothing’.

Translate »