Free-Man's Perspective

How to Fix Detroit in 6 Easy Steps

The news is full of stories of Detroit, and understandably so. It’s an unmitigated disaster. But I know how to fix it.

Seriously, I do!

I have a plan that would cost the state of Michigan nothing – not a cent. It wouldn’t cost DC anything either, and it would turn Detroit into the most thriving city in North America. As a bonus, it would give the remaining property owners in Detroit a financial windfall.

Here’s the plan:

The federal government (in writing) forbears taxes, regulations, laws, and impositions for a hundred years to the area of the current municipality of Detroit and to all persons and commercial entities resident there.
The government of the state of Michigan forbears taxes, regulations, laws, and impositions for a hundred years to the area of the current municipality of Detroit and to all persons and commercial entities resident there.
All municipal government agencies within Detroit are disbanded.
All state and federal offices within the city of Detroit are disbanded.
The federal government guarantees that entry and exit to/from Detroit will remain unchanged from the current conditions, and that no obligations will be placed upon residents of Detroit in any other place.
Federal and state governments immediately cease all payments to residents of Detroit. (They may resume payment to those persons if and when they are no longer resident in Detroit.)

The final legal document would be more complex than this, but those are all the main points necessary.

What this plan does is to return Detroit to its natural state – to the way it was managed when the first settlers arrived. (In other words, not managed at all.)

And think of the money that will be saved by Michigan and the feds. Billions per year.

And Then…

And then we have a free for all… and a good one. Think of Hong Kong, but easy to get to.

Businesses would begin to relocate the next morning. Hundreds of them, thousands of them. The people who still owned and lived in their homes would be offered lots of money for their properties.

Libertarians and conservatives, disgusted by the gang in DC, would load up and drive to Detroit. Productive former residents would return. Thousands of opportunity-seekers, anarcho-capitalists, and pot-smoking hippies would be gathering their money and buying property.

Detroit would, within only a few years, become the coolest city on the planet – by FAR.

But, But…

“But there won’t be any police!”

“There won’t be any courts!”

“It will be non-stop murder, death, and mayhem!”

You wanna bet? Do ya? (And you don’t think Detroit has non-stop mayhem already?)

The people who come to Detroit would be coming to escape from their chains and to be productive. These are precisely the kinds of people who clean up a town. And with no taxes to pay for a hundred years, they’d have plenty of extra money to spend on whatever services (security or otherwise) that they wanted.

The Truth

The truth, of course, is that the state and fed guvs will never agree to a plan like this one, for a single reason:

Because they fear it would succeed.

They’ll let every last person in Detroit rot before they’ll let a group of producers live free of their chains.

Detroit returned to its natural state would expose the great lie of the government game – that we can’t survive without them.

Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.com

Featured image courtesy of Albert duce, wikipedia.org

Thomas Jefferson: “We Failed”

Thomas Jefferson – one of my long-time heroes – was convinced that he and his friends blew the chance they had to establish true freedom in America. I know that a hundred thousand self-praising textbooks, speeches, pundits and songs claim that Jefferson and the rest established freedom, but that’s NOT what Jefferson thought, and that is NOT what he said. (You can choose whom to believe for yourself.)

Nearly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, he was of the opinion that the founders did not fully live up to the moment presented to them.

Here is a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Cartwright on June 5th, 1824. Jefferson’s words are in plain text and my modern paraphrasing of the lines are in italics:

Our Revolution presented us an album on which we were free to write what we pleased. Yet we did not avail ourselves of all the advantages of our position.

The Revolution gave us a shot at real liberty, but we blew it.

We had never been permitted to exercise self-government. When forced to assume it, we were novices in its science. Its principles and forms had little entered into our former education. We established, however, some (but not all) of its important principles…

We weren’t prepared for what we had to do.

We think experience has proved the benefit of subjecting questions to two separate bodies of deliberants. But in constituting these bodies, [we have] been mistaken, making one of these bodies, and in some cases both, the representatives of property instead of persons.

We thought our legislative structure would protect us, but they were bought-off right away.

This double deliberation might be obtained just as well without any violation of true principle, either by requiring a greater age in one of the bodies, or by electing a proper number of representatives of persons, or by dividing them by lots into two chambers, and renewing the division at frequent intervals, in order to break up all cabals.

What we really needed was something that would break up parties and factions.

George Washington said almost the same thing about parties, by the way. Here is a section from his Farewell Address of September 17, 1796, with my paraphrasing again:

All combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character…are of a fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction; to give them an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party.

All political groups are fatally dangerous. They gain inappropriate force and displace the will of the people.

A small but artful and enterprising minority of the community, and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans, digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

Small groups of clever and dedicated men will corrupt the actions of government, making it serve their own ends.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then address popular ends, they are likely to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to usurp for themselves the reins of government.

No matter if these groups do some good things, they will still take over government.

I think history says that Washington was right; parties did destroy the public good, and continue to do so.

And here’s what Samuel Adams thought about the citizens allowing small groups of men (like parties) to choose candidates for them:

I hope the great Business of Elections will never be left by the many, to be done by the few; for before we are aware of it, that few may become the Engine of Corruption–the Tool of a Junta.–Heaven forbid!

And to confirm the corruption of Congress that Thomas Jefferson mentioned, here is a letter that Samuel Adams wrote to his friend Richard Henry Lee on January 15th, 1781:

Is there not Reason to think that even those who are opposed to our Cause may steal into Places of the highest Trust? I need not remind you that Men of this Character have had Seats in Congress from the beginning.

And just to add one more voice, here is what Benjamin Franklin said to the Constitutional Convention on June 28, 1787:

I believe, farther, that this [constitution] is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.

There is more that could be said on this subject, but it is almost superfluous. What matters is that we get the primary point:

The best of the American Founders were fully convinced
that their shot at freedom would fail or had failed.

So, what does this say about all those fancy speeches and songs about “the land of the free“?

And if we don’t have freedom, what is it that we do have?

Paul Rosenberg
Thomas Jefferson: “We Failed”
FreemansPerspective.com

Bitcoin Should Get Ready For an Attack

Bitcoin – poorly understood and frequently talked about ignorantly – is a wonderful new financial tool… and a very timely one. But because of its virtues, it is about to be attacked.

But before I explain how, why, and my recommended responses, let me get everyone up to speed on what this stuff really is:

Bitcoin is digital cash. You do not get an account, you get a wallet. Holding Bitcoin on a computer is the same as holding government money in your wallet.
Bitcoin is distributed. There is no central office and no central computer… anywhere.
Bitcoin can’t be printed up, like national currencies. It has to be ‘mined’, and this requires special computers, lots of calculations, electricity and a bit of luck. It’s neither free nor easy.
Bitcoin is limited. Only 21 million of these things can ever exist, and they can only be mined on a very specific schedule. (About 11 million exist now.)
Bitcoin can’t be changed. Bitcoin is a specific computer program and cannot be changed by any single party. It is a specific set of rules cast into a computer program, and since that program is open source, it can be checked by anyone to assure that there are no secret back doors.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Every transaction is recorded, but real names are not. While it is not properly anonymous, it can be used anonymously if you do simple things like never using the same address twice. (There are even ‘laundries’.)
Bitcoins are oblivious to borders, laws or rules. This is simply computer code – nothing else matters.

Why The Fiat Masters Must Attack Bitcoin

I say that Bitcoin will be attacked for the simple reason that it is the anti-fiat currency… and a lot of very powerful people have their entire kingdoms built upon fiat currency and its central banking game.

It is actually very similar to gold and silver in its overall effect: If Bitcoin, or gold, or silver – or any combination thereof – ever became dominant, no one could play games with the world’s money and skim from millions of people at once… or run welfare states in defiance of economic reality.

The bankers do not want to lose their positions, and if they let this alternative currency take over, they will. So, they will have to attack. In fact, I am sure as I can be that they are doing it already.

I should add that there are socialist types who love this development because it could destroy the greedy bankers, but I don’t expect them to deter the attacks to any significant extent.

The Attacks

It is important to understand that the system is not invulnerable. It’s certainly not easy to attack (like a Cyprus bank account), but attacks both small and large are possible.

I’m not going to describe large attacks, as I don’t want to give anyone ideas. You can either believe me that they are possible, or not. These big attacks, however, would not be easy, and would have side-effects. So, I don’t expect to see them first. First, Bitcoin’s enemies have to win the PR war.

There was a great line in the movie Gladiator that applies right now:

You have a great name. Before they destroy you, they will have to destroy your name.

I’m not sure it’s fair to say that Bitcoin has a great name among the general populace, but it certainly does among the best and brightest of the younger generations. And this great name is spreading rapidly in places like Cyprus, and among people who fear a Cyprus-style mass theft coming to their area.

Gold and silver are the traditional ways of avoiding predation, but trying to cross a national border with precious metals these days is to invite theft and punishment. (This was not much of a problem before the 20^th century.) Bitcoin, on the other hand, can be moved world-wide, instantly, from the comfort of your chair.

So, the first attacks will be combined with a PR war. The point will be to scare people away. “You’ll get ripped-off!” will be their emphatic meme.

Do not underestimate fear, by the way: Humans are hard-wired to over-respond to it. Fear works, which is why power-mongers always use it. And these people also own, influence or control the broadcasting systems that consume nearly all of the Western world’s attention.

So, the first attacks will be those that we are already seeing: Malicious hackers breaking into whatever clustered systems they can and stealing. (Or running Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] attacks.) They are attacking exchangers, wallet hosting services, and so on – anything largish that can be hit. They are already publicizing these attacks, but I expect more and better.

The coming attacks will be publicized rapidly – with stories and releases prepared ahead of time – and will paint the worst possible picture. Afterwards it will be seen that the first loss estimates were wildly high, but that won’t matter to the people who see the headlines on the evening news. Joe and Jane Obedient will believe the worst.

This is all manipulation, obviously, since people are being ripped-off in government money, on gigantic scales: millions of thefts at once. Heck, every productive person in the West has about half their earnings taken from them every year in the form of taxes, not to mention the 5-10% they lose every year in the form of inflation. To compare these things to a few stolen wallets is a sick joke. But, such is the state of the West at this sad moment: The large abusers are sanctified and the innovators are demonized.

What to Do About It

Here’s my list:

Be prepared. Don’t let it shake you. Don’t compromise your beliefs.
Tell others to prepare. Tell people to expect attacks and a PR war. Tell them to upgrade their security and to be personally ready. Bitcoin will be called all sorts of things: A Ponzi, a fraud, a tool for terrorists, a threat to civilization, and so on. It’s not fun to have those accusations hurled in your face, so expect it and get ready for it.
Prepare for the worst. At some point we may need an alternative to the government-owned Internet. Setting up our own systems will not be hard or expensive, but it will require action on our parts. Learn about mesh networks and packet radio. Those who can code should think about writing new high-latency protocols, or reviving old ones like FidoNet.
Do not rely on Internet exchangers. We should all be grateful to Bitcoin Exchanges, but they are vulnerable and will soon enough be compromised or shut. The future lies with over the counter (OTC) exchangers.
Keep having fun! Bitcoin has been a gas – don’t let go of that. Adapt, improvise, overcome! Yes, there will be more bad days from here on, but don’t let them steal your joy for any length of time. Hold to the good, reject the fear. Do what resonates within you; do what makes you feel good and creative and productive.

Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.com

Death by Government 20x More Common than Death by Criminal…

Before I shock you with disturbing facts, let me ask you a question: How important is reality to you? That’s a strange question, I know, but think about it for a second. If reality makes you uncomfortable, what should you do?

Should you ignore it? Should you face it anyway? Should you find reasons to get rid of it?

You will find nothing in this article about amendments, laws and judges. What you will find here is a fact that has been passed-over by the gun control argument.

Here it is; it’s really simple, so think about it for a few seconds:

The anti-gun arguments presume that the state is morally superior to individuals.

Even though they seldom say it explicitly, the gun control proponents believe that average people are too violent and erratic to hold guns. They want the government – the state – to take our guns away because only the state is responsible enough to handle serious weapons.

There is, however, a gigantic problem with this: States are far more dangerous than individuals.

20x more dangerous…

That’s a demonstrable fact, by the way, not merely an opinion. I ran the numbers, and it isn’t even close.

According to the UN’s statistics, total number homicides in which guns were involved in 2010 (or the most recent year reported) were 93,414.

I am as sure as I can be that those numbers are juiced – I have too much experience with the UN (another set of stories, for another day) to think that they left their agendas outside as they crunched these numbers – and I am going to ignore the inclusion of thousands of deaths in Mexico and other places that should be attributed to the US War on Drugs. I’ll accept the numbers as they are.

So, let’s say that guns are legitimately and primarily involved in all of these 93,414 cases. Maybe you think that’s a pretty bad argument for the moral superiority of individuals. But if so, take a deep breath and gather your moral courage. You ready?

The death rate for states is more than 20 times as high.

This figure has been well-documented, by the way. If you want to check it, start with political scientist R.J. Rummel’s Book, Death By Government. (The actual figure may be higher than 200 million.)

So, 93,414 x 100 = 9,341,400 people killed with guns over a century. That’s a bad number, but it’s less than 1/20th of the 200 million who were killed by governments.

And so we see reality at odds with conventional wisdom.

Also, the 200 million deaths attributable to governments were over the course of the 20th century, when the average population was far less than what it is now. Population-adjusted, states are probably 30 times more deadly than individuals.

If you think I’m misstating this, please run the numbers yourself.

Death by government is far more likely than dying during a criminal attack

You know this from your personal experience too:

How many fistfights have you seen among the 200 people who live closest to you in the past couple of years? Maybe one? Maybe none?

Among the 200 or so states in this world, there have been at least 30 fights over the same time.

The numbers say that states fight much, much more frequently than do individuals. And they certainly kill far more people when they do fight.

By any objective standard, states have to be considered far more aggressive and violent than individuals. So, who is it that should be really holding the weapons?

The usual argument to the contrary, by the way, goes like this:

GuvBoy: Okay, maybe lots of people were killed by governments, but there were different leaders then!
Freethinkin’Boy: And the morals of politicians have improved? Have their operations substantially changed? They still have the same capital city, right? And they still have a small group of men gathering up all the taxes and ordering everyone else around, right?
GuvBoy: Yeah, but now we have modern, enlightened democracies!
Freethinkin’Boy: I see… please tell me this: Precisely how and when did they become enlightened?
GuvBoy: <Silence>

Such arguments, of course, actually have to do with people being emotionally tied to government and afraid to consider otherwise.

The fact is, most people don’t want to hear that the powers in charge are violent – no matter how well documented it may be. But if reality mattered most, it would be the flawed individuals who got the guns, not mega-flawed states.

Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.com