Taxes, Freedom and Life After Prison
I have been too busy to write for a while, but here is something from Larken Rose that is well worth reading:
The Future
Four generations have been inculcated with the belief that government spending creates prosperity. Nothing could be further from the truth – as is now on display for anyone who cares to look. Government spending creates poverty on a vast scale. It is not only that it wastes money, it is that the money that government spends has been extracted from businesses who then no longer have it to increase their productivity.
The government is not just an expensive nuisance, it is the sole cause of unemployment and the primary cause of business failure. The word ‘unemployment’ did not even exist in the English language until governments started to interfere in ‘their’ economies.
We are well past the point of no return. The future is one of a continuing massive contraction in genuine production leading to a massive contraction in wealth creation, employment and standards of living. The only thing that will be increasing is taxation, but only at the level of demand – at the level of supply that will also be contracting because of an increasing inability to pay.
The era of free medicine and cheap food and energy is almost over, as is the welfare state in all its ghastly manifestations. The cock-ups, caused by government interference in the markets, are now coming home to roost. The result will be devastation, with large numbers of people literally starving. Whilst this scenario has long plagued parts of Africa and Asia, when it happens in the West its manifestation will be shocking to those caught up in it. The western world has considered itself immune to such scenarios. It is not. We still remember the Weimar experience, not because it was major, in terms of hyperinflations it was not, but because it happened to white people in the western world.
What other way can it end? The lean years are now upon us. Anyone who is still labouring under the belief that governments can sort all this out and ensure a smooth ending will end up as one of the starving. Government is always the problem – never the solution. Life at the basic level is about survival. Take care of yourself and your family, for no one else will. Help others if you can.
The concept of an all-powerful State is now very wobbly indeed. The final act of destruction will be to take as many of the people with them as they can. There are those that will use their eyes to see what is in front of their face and those that will continue with their head in the sand. The latter will perceive reality with some other part of their anatomy.
Reality Continues to be Denied a Voice
The world economy is on its knees. Unemployment is far higher than official figures show; real economic growth is in negative territory, again, despite official figures to the contrary.
What is the solution? The solution is as obvious as is the fact that it will never be implemented. Get the government out of the way. Cancel the legislation that destroys the incentive to produce real goods and services and thereby jobs and prosperity.
There is nothing that governments can do to build or an economy; they can only destroy an economy. This they have done in an historically impressive manner.
For business to demand that the government ‘do something’ is akin to chickens appealing to the fox for aid with egg production.
If ever people work out what it is that is destroying not only their jobs and their wealth, but the future prospects for their children and grandchildren, then the lampposts throughout the land will be sagging under the weight of the bodies of politicians and central bankers.
End Game
Okay, it’s time to address the end game of what is playing out. To discuss such matters too early is to risk the idea being placed in the category of ‘ridiculously far-fetched’ which then serves to delay even more the point where your audience finally confronts reality. Reality can be ignored of course, but the consequences of so doing cannot (Ayn Rand). Being prepared to look at reality at least presents a chance to predict the best course of action and then to do something.
The end game is now close enough that it can no longer remain in the closet. The banks will fail… every single one of them. It will start with ‘runs’ on banks. Governments will try desperately to print fast enough to restock banks, but they will not be able to keep up. This will be followed by ‘bank holidays’ where withdrawals will be reduced to a bare survival minimum each week.
Prior to this time will come steep (massive) rises in essential goods… foodstuffs will be particularly noticeable. This, and this alone, will force on people the emergent realization that paper money is becoming worthless. This will be followed, finally, belatedly, by the killer realization that government printed money is not money at all. This will be the realization just prior to all hell breaking loose.
The ‘cure’ of endless printing to restock banks will become the unintended vehicle for people to observe that paper money is intrinsically worthless. When it happens it will be shockingly fast, certainly in days, not weeks. It could well be in hours.
When it does happen the banks will just shut. Will the media inform us that this is a possibility beforehand? Throughout this whole crisis, beginning in 1971, the media have proved themselves incapable of predicting anything at all. To be fair, the primary purpose of the media is to report on events that have happened, not to predict them. That is what ‘news’ is. Don’t bother watching telly to find out what is going on. They don’t have a clue and will be caught as unprepared as almost all other people. The end of the world as we know it won’t be on telly as they will be as closed as the banks.
You will receive three warnings. The first is what you are reading right now. The second will be when you go to get some ‘money’ out of your ATM and your card is refused. The third will be when you go to the bank to ask what is going on and you find an armed guard in front of a locked up bank. Get the joke? People will die from this bad joke, but it won’t be from laughing.
I flew into London yesterday to have lunch with sixteen of the most famous gold minds in the world today. It was a sumptuous affair where the Moet and great wine and food flowed freely. They were in celebratory mood at the ‘price of gold’. They are wonderful people and I had a great day. I regard them all as friends. However, very few of even these worthy gentlemen have even an inkling of the magnitude of the game afoot, none that I am aware of had actually done anything whatsoever to prepare for the end game other than hold some physical gold. That is not enough. Ever heard of non-perishable foods? If you don’t have any then such gold as you have will be spent buying them.
I am not sure now how many more articles I will be writing. The more than eleven years that I have spent trying to warn people as to what is happening is coming to an end. The end game requires that we all try to take care of our own. The time of concern and worry over humanity in general is almost over for a while. Such nobility requires a higher level of potential survival than is in our immediate future. I have no regrets over the time and money that I have spent writing, talking, organising and beseeching. If I have caused even one person to prepare then it was worth it.
I have run two blogs: one for the mainstream and one for those who have more understanding of the events unfolding. Usually I just write and then decide which site I will put it on. Oddly enough I have found that the last two articles that I have written I have posted on both sites. I can no longer pull my punches and speak conservatively. We are now down to the nitty-gritty end game.
Signing off over a beer in Vienna.
Taxing Online Retailers
The new excuses for seeking to impose an online retail tax is to provide a level playing field to the fixed position retailers that are already paying the tax.
This is a necessary switch of justifications by The State. Their excuse for retail (and most other) taxes in the past has been that the retailer enjoys all the infrastructure provided by the government and must therefore pay a contribution toward it. Now they want it just because they need it and it is there. The reality is that The State is desperate to increase its income. Anywhere they feel that they can confiscate wealth will do just fine; the justification for doing so can be thought up later.
What is largely overlooked by The State in its myopic grandiosity is that online stores would struggle to exist were it not for taxation. It is the disincentive provided by taxation that has forced retailers and consumers to flee to the internet. Internet retailing only came into existence because of taxation; the taxations advantages for the consumer of internet shopping far outweigh the inconveniences. If The State now tries to apply taxation to online operations then one of two possibilities will eventuate.
1/ They will be successful and online operations will be severely hamstrung or, more likely, forced to close down. These businesses will not return to fixed position having already been forced out of that modus operandi through taxation. They will simply cease to be profitable and thus cease to exist… along with the jobs that they provide.
2/ They will not be successful and more and more fixed position retailers will get the message and make the switch to online.
Either way The State is caught up in a dwindling spiral of falling revenue. The State is busy killing its golden goose and in so doing is speeding up the process of its own demise. Good riddance.
The Product of The State is Chaos
The withdrawal of gold from the monetary system in 1914 resulted not only in the unprecedented destruction of human life, property, culture and wealth of World War 1, but the upheavals of the whole 20th century. The distortions of paper money brought to power, for the first time in recorded history, those wielding an intellectual justification for the repression of humanity.
Socialism and Communism openly sought control over the lives of ‘their’ citizens to a degree that had never even been contemplated in previous centuries. Family were set against family, children were set against parents and producers were re-classified and factioned into ‘workers’ and ‘bosses’. The institutional pillars that had been volitionally built up and refined over thousands of years were defiled and pulled down. The resultant chaos reached its zenith with a slaughter of innocents such had never been witnessed in the whole of history. Hundreds of millions lost their lives in the 20th century wars, pogroms and famines caused by the strivings of The States for total control.
The idea of total control resonated with governments throughout the world. What began in 1825 as a fringe political movement by the Saint-Simonites, had, less than 100 years later, become the template for international governance. Democracies themselves adopted the notion that they existed to forcefully guide ‘their’ citizens in their day-to-day activities. Substantial inducements were provided in the form of government handouts to those who conformed to the new orthodoxy. State welfare, first developed by the Kaiser and Bismarck in Germany as a way of controlling the recently released serfs, was admired and imitated by other governments seeking to further control their own people.
Emergency measures, put into place in 1914, were never removed. Security papers remained the norm. It became impossible to travel without a passport (a hitherto unknown concept) and impossible to drive or open a business without a licence. In much of Europe (including Vienna where I now live) even moving house or checking into a hotel requires registration with the police.
The people who had been liberated by the gold standard of the 19th century were demoted back to citizens, a much nicer sounding word than serfs. As such they were bound to uphold standards dictated by The State; woe betide them if they didn’t. No longer were actions governed by conscience… the voice of internal reason, but by the external iron-fist of The State’s security apparatus… the police and legal system.
The concept of individual rights, without which no freedom can exist, became a subversive, anti-State crime. Individuality is of course inherently anti-State, but never before in history had this been admitted by those who would rule our every waking moment and reduce us to worker ants. Everything became forbidden unless specifically permitted. Never before had there been an attempt by any State to justify the repression of ‘its’ people. Prior to this point they just did it because they could.
All States, no matter the announced brand, became underpinned by the delusion that as a governing group they held a superior wisdom to the masses. All property became the de jure property of The State; even the family home could be legally confiscated in the name of the ‘public good’. The International Socialist Movement gave the brute force of The State what it had always craved: the veneer of intellectual and philosophical respectability.
The stern dictates of gold had imposed its own disciplines, not only on individuals, but on governments. The vast majority abided by its disciplines and lived free, decent, secure and civilised lives. Absent the disciplines of gold, morality, education, responsibility, the concept of right and wrong and even spirituality began to break-down. Without the natural laws that stem from an honest money, society began to collapse.
When the natural order and general prosperity, borne of the interaction of free people with an honest money, were dismantled, all hell broke loose. The immediate failure of emergent State control of the economy and people was visibly demonstrated by social chaos and rising poverty. Unemployment, a hitherto almost unknown phenomenon that did not even enter the dictionary until the late 19th century, grew alarmingly. Riots and scenes of general disorder became regular occurrences.
These dismal results, brought about directly by the newly conceived State Almighty, were adroitly turned on their head to become the justification for The States’ existence. “Look what would happen without us” “Look how people would behave if we were not here to control them”. “We must have The State otherwise there would be chaos”. In that manner, control by The State for philosophical reasons, was joined at the hip of control by The State for the avoidance of social unrest. The disease became the cure.
The political imperative of the 20th century was the attempt to turn back millennia of rising consciousness and social progress and to force mankind back to the level of obedient, Palaeolithic dirt-scratchers dependent for their survival upon great and mysterious forces that only experts could comprehend. Needless to say the push was not initiated by the newly freed working people themselves, though the ignorant were quickly co-opted to the cause through welfare handouts.
Today we live in a world, where not only do we own nothing that cannot be taken from us by legislative whim and where even the product of our labour is confiscated in an amount finely judged to be just bearable, but where our mind itself can be confiscated. The casualties are locked up in psychiatric wards or, when psychotropically neutralized, left to blindly ramble the streets of our inner cities in pursuit of their next handout. With the mind no longer functioning properly all that is left is the urge of the body to survive.
That stumble-bum on the street corner with the blank, staring eyes is the logical conclusion to the mad dreams and schemes of The State. Lest you look down on that bum, you would do well to remember that s/he was once an independent entity. If you doubt this then, the next time you see one of these unfortunates, say: “psychiatric hospital” and see the eyes fill with fear before they lurch away.
Whether this has been an accident, or whether these actions have been outlined, designed and effectively implemented is beside the point. The State is a primitive organization that knows only violence. It passed its use-by date back at the dawn of the agricultural era. Just keeping out of way of The State is no longer an honourable option. It is time for active resistance; indeed the lack of resistance can only be understood in terms of people having already lost their minds; if not to psychotropic drugs, then to the erroneous perception of self-interest. Where else does honour and decency and hope for the future reside if not in the mind of the individual?
Productive individuals are the last bastion of sanity in a world that is not going mad, but which has already gone mad. The fully expressed horror of The State Almighty is already upon us. North Korea is what awaits all of us if we do not quickly change the course of events. Other than feebly awaiting the natural purge of a monetary and social apocalypse and futilely mumbling over one’s beer, what should one do? Active resistance should not be violent. Whilst the pent up frustration naturally tends to violence, violence cannot be the answer. To do violence is to stoop to the level of The State. If we do that then we have already lost and The State has won. States that are violently overthrown are, of necessity, followed by equally repressive States. Violence bears only more violence, witness the French and American Revolution.
It is not the people who occupy positions of power within the apparatus of The State who are the enemy. It is the system of The State Almighty itself. The people who inhabit such systems are just the mentally enfeebled representatives of normal human frailty. The weakness cannot be eradicated, but the system that gives it succour can. It is the monolithic beast of The State that is the enemy, not the people who give it life… contemptible though they may be. The State cannot be destroyed by taking vengeance against its representatives, it can only be destroyed by the destruction of its support mechanism.
The answer is withdrawal from the system in such a manner that one’s property is out of the reach of those who consider it there’s to take and squander. Those of us who are naturally productive have much resistance to this idea, but there is no other way. It is in the area of surplus productivity that The State is most vulnerable, for it is our natural reluctance to cease producing that The State relies upon. Without the activities of its productive citizens there is nothing to fill The State’s coffers. This is the Achilles’ Heel of The State. Without money in the coffers The State loses its ability to bribe and coerce which will almost immediately lead to its collapse. It is that simple. The State is a parasite. Productive people and entrepreneurs are its host. There is no other source of wealth. It is time to withdraw our capital, wealth, property and surplus production from the marketplace.
It is time to refuse to produce real and valuable goods and services in exchange for silly pieces of government paper with numbers written on them. It is time to stop being the backbone of a system that is despicable and can only lead to further ruin and human degradation. In this life you do not get what you deserve, you get what you are prepared to put up with. We have put up with this for almost a century… far too long.
Certain Truths
“Certain truths are increasingly held to be self-evident by we the people. First of all, everybody can see that the economist class that owns banks and governments are a despicable breed of human being who feel that by virtue of their privileged birth and education they can steal from the public at will. The second is that this whole sovereign debt charade is just a continuation of that mentality in the pockets of every last citizen for the remaining drachmas pesos dollars and pounds that are slowly but surely accruing at the top of that putrid food chain. And the third emerging reality is that the game will continue until governments are toppled by the people from whom they are stealing.” – James West
Greek Tragedy
Greece is the spearhead in the final push for The State (Europe Inc.) takeover. It is hard to know for sure who runs who, The State or the Banksters; what we do know is that The State holds the legislative power; that makes The State 100% culpable.
At a time when the Disunited States of America really needed someone able and willing to stand up to the banksters, they saw fit to elect a political Toy-Boy as president. The loudest, and seemingly most influential, voice in Europe is a pip-squeak, pip-brain demagogue out of France. The State has gone past the point of even realizing that it is the problem. They now truly believe that the survival of The State equals the survival of the people. The State has degraded to its most intellectually inbred, effete and dangerous low point. It is now a completely unprincipled, blind force bent upon total subjugation of ‘its’ people and survival of The State for its own sake.
If the world really needed a further lesson in the misguided (let’s be kind) belief that it is wise and safe to hand over control of our lives to ‘leaders’ then the current situation is as good a lesson as history can provide.
Should the people of Greece attempt to pay the tribute being demanded then it will become ever more difficult to halt the march of international totalitarianism, which, unless repulsed at some point, is the logical and inevitable result of ANY form of government.
The Chinese, North Koreans et al are at least honest. They give no pretence to democratic ideals. They understand, as few in the west do, that government is simply the utilisation of legalised theft backed by a monopoly of force and waged by a small minority against the vast majority.
“It is the workers and the pensioners who are paying the debt”
Ioanna Lagonika – striking electrical engineer, Athens
It is always the workers and pensioners who pay for all debts of The State Mr Lagonika. That is the nature and the modus operandi of The State. Who else do you think is going to pay? Who else do you think has ever paid?
The Greeks in the street are fighting for the freedom of every single one of us. This is the first real salvo in a worldwide war of liberation… never mind the bleats from C.I.A.-controlled groups like Anonymous. The real tragedy is that the Greeks still don’t understand what it is that they are fighting for.
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