Free-Man's Perspective

I’ve been warning Bitcoiners that we needed to be the adults of finance for quite some years, and I’m pleased to say that we’ve come a long way in that direction. I still see more juvenille behavior than I’d like, but progress has clearly been made.

I bring this up because we’re only one or two sovereign debt crises from Bitcoin becoming a major asset. How we behave now will matter a lot more than how we behaved eight or ten years ago. Continue reading “Are We Ready For A Sovereign Debt Crisis?”

My friend, Harry D. Schultz, died February 22^nd, at his home in Monaco.

Harry had a long and productive life. Born in Milwaukee in 1923, he was shipped off to Shanghai toward the end of World War II, where (while still in the service) he learned to trade everything from silks to currencies, but especially gold.

Upon returning, he owned and operated a series of small newspapers, mostly in California. Ultimately he sold them off, moved to Europe, and founded the modern practice of jurisdictional arbitrage for individuals, calling it Perpetual Traveling.

For more than 45 years, Harry published his International Harry Schultz Letter, an iconic financial newsletter like no other. He was also a highly paid financial consultant during this time, mainly helping individuals navigate international finance.

Along the way, Harry raced in the Grand Prix, influenced a generation of economic and libertarian thinkers, and much more. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he built a small hospital to help the suffering Afghani people. He did this simply because it needed to be done and because he was able to do it. That’s the kind of man he was.

And, he was my friend.

Rest in peace, Harry. You will be remembered and missed.

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com

Closing Out The Ancient Era

What we’re calling the ancient era is the period before the great collapse of 1,200 BC. Folliowing that was an intermediate period of breakup and change that ran from 1,200 BC to 800 BC, sometimes called “the dark age of the Greeks.” The time after about 800 BC is what people call Classical Civilization; it was the era of the famous civilizations of Greece and Rome. Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L5, P1”

People remember Bruce Lee as a fighter or as a movie star. But as it happens, he was also a thoughtful man. Bruce had his gaps and flaws, of course, but he also left behind a lot of useful thoughts. And since so few people know about these ideas, I’ll cover them here. (I never knew Bruce, who died while I was a teenager, but a friend of mine did, and a friend of another friend knew him very well.)

Bruce forged most of his ideas while developing and testing martial arts. In other words, his ideas came from direct application to the real world; they faced hard, objective standards. If he stuck to some old technique, merely because of its pedigree, he was likely to be hurt. That’s a must-learn environment, and it refines ideas in a hurry. Continue reading “The Wisdom of Bruce Lee”

At about 1,200 BC the Hebrews, for the first time in their now-long history, found a place to settle down. And that place was Canaan, in roughly the area of modern Israel. Egypt had previously controlled this area, but their control collapsed completely at just this time, giving the Hebrews the opportunity they needed. Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L4, P4”

As of this morning, May 8^th, our site is being updated, integrating both Bitcoin and Lightning into our subscription process. We’re also offering a discount for Bitcoin subscriptions.

As we do this, our subscription rates are rising to $129. per year and $12.50 monthly. They’ve been at their present level since our inception in 2011, and we can’t put it off forever. For Bitcoin, subscriptions will be $119. per year.

We’re not expecting any difficulties, but if any arise they should be resolved quickly. 

While most people missed it, there was a thriving gold economy in the early 2000s. It was centered around e-gold (a system for trading digital gold) and it involved billions of dollars per year in transactions. It was also a magnificent adventure.

In just a moment I’m going to quote a passage from the forward to Carl Mullan’s book on e-gold, called Better Money. (At Carl’s gracious request, I wrote that forward.) But before I do, I want everyone interested in silver and gold to know that their metals could be the doorway to excitement and prosperity… right away and not someday. It was done then and it could easily be done again. Continue reading “The Missing Gold Economy”

Daily Life

After about 1,150 BC, new and different models of life took shape. The Greeks, Romans and similar peoples were farmers and traders as before, except that they were careful to self-govern… to avoid rulership. They began using iron and generally living productive lives.

Under these conditions, the people of the Greek islands began to create science, as we understand it. Before then, people certainly invented things, but they focused on the uses of things, not their operating principles. The Greeks began to study why things worked the ways they did. Continue reading “Earned Knowledge, L4, P3”

I recently did a wide-ranging podcast with Gabriel Custodiet of The Watchman Privacy Podcast. 

I thought we covered a lot of interesting subjects, including some that I seldom write upon. 

Listen Here

I’ve advised people to get and stay out of debt for a long time, but even so, I didn’t fully understand the affects of debt until the Covid time hit us. As the mayhem spread, I struggled to understand the level of compliance with what would have been, at any other time, criminal medical advice: To take an untested vaccine, and one that didn’t even fit the definition of a vaccine. (Until the definition was rewritten, of course.)

Certainly compliance was driven by massive applications of fear. And, certainly, it was accompanied by exceptional levels of guilt, as in “You’ll be responsible for killing Grandma!” Still, there was more to it, and that extra piece, I soon enough realized, was debt. Continue reading “Debt And Compliance”