The Declaration of Natural Rights

The World Rests on a Symbiosis of Fiat Currency, Oil and War

Freedom on the Seas

Shout it from the rooftops

Jimmy Carr is morally right

Read this or give all your property to the extortionists

Jimmy Carr is morally right

Real Feminism

Feminism is about women taking control of their own destinies. Your body, your sexuality and your orgasm are the fundamental elements of that control. I don’t see how anyone can deny sex. Making people feel ashamed of their bodies and intercourse have been elements of institutional sexism that’s been in place by men who want to keep women insecure. By taking back our bodies, showing them on our own terms and enjoying porn, we make our physical needs and desires as important as the physical needs and desires of men

Bobbi Starr interviewed by Scarlett Stone

Why Marx was wrong

http://iambinarymind.tumblr.com/post/21436905421

Communism as freedom from natural market forces.

Marx and engels thought (collective) 'Man' could and should control these natural forces that had historically controlled him. They foresaw no problems of coordination, calculation or information. Contemporaries such as bakunin predicted the monstrous totalitarian tyranny this impossible dream would necessitate and enable. Futhermore this economic ignorance spread fast, wide and deep into the worlds intellectuals precisely because of this new quest for total power. Hegelian Marxism and in particular leninism called for a strong state to be created by and operated by these same intellectuals. An ideology that promised total power to those who worked in the dissemination of ideas was bound to infect every 'thinker'. Marxism was created in the 'modern' period and Marx reflected this with his revolutionary 'scientific' doctrine. His was an ideology of man's conquest over the vagaries of nature - if we built structures to harness and avoid the elements then we should also control the natural forces of human action that Marx felt to be degrading. A fundamental misunderstanding, whether through ignorance or deception, of these natural forces led Marx to believe they were not only undesirable but could be controlled. This misunderstanding is due to both religion and the states of his time. Religion because that is the source of Adam Smith's just price theory of labour taken by Ricardo and then Marx. And the state because anti capitalist Marxism was concerned with a particular type of dominant landlords and industrialists only made possible by the collective state itself. Like todays 'geo-libertarians' whose ideology is based on 19th century conceptions of landowners, similarly Marx would not recognise the more widely and naturally dispersed economy of today. What would he make of the self employed capitalist plumber? Who is exploiting him? The world of economic power that both Marx and George reacted against was not a world of natural property. The despotic capitalists and land lords these two influential thinkers so despised were only made possible by the vestiges of the old monarchical near feudal system that capitalism itself was soon to brush aside completely. When George spoke of extortionate land owners he referred to individuals who owned whole counties. Such arrangements were entirely dependent upon state granted privilege. todays 'geo-libertarians' take his words without any consideration for this historical context and use them to advocate coercion against property owners on todays scale of a small suburban semi. Likewise when Marx referred to the evil capitalist exploiting the workers he was speaking of individuals granted similar monopoly privileges to those of the aristocratic landlord. It was only through state granted privileges that 19th century capitalists were able to amass the economic dominance that Marx reviled. It is state interference as justified by Marxist socialism that continues to tilt freedom away from his masses and toward those capitalists he so maligned.

back when i was foolish enough to be registered in facebook I caught an exchange between a friend's girlfirend and her mates. they were reacting to the video below (warning contains nudity etc not safe for work etc)


Pants prank - Watch MoreFunny Videos

One of the girls commented that as a result of viewing such assaults she wanted to get a pistol. Which is the whole point of weaponry - defensive advantage. The women cannot Chase their male attackers as they are physiologically too slow and you can see the moment that each of them realise they are incapable of doing anything even if they could catch their assailants.
Even stateless legal systems, private streets and private security forces will not be perfectly able to prevent or deter 100% of such problems. (obviously they would be many times more effective than statist attempts).
This is where the final resort is the autonomy of the individual. You can always outsource duties such as food and security but no matter how good your local takeaway it would be irresponsible not to be able to cook just incase the taj Mahal was shut. Equally it would be irresponsible to be completely reliant on 3rd party protection. Freedom and responsibility - two sides of the same coin. A free individual should have at least some small degree of defensive autonomy.
As with the food example, it would be irrational to expect one to prepare food without the necessary tools or to take advantage of the most developed means available if they wished to do so. Who cooks with nothing but their bare hands? One can laboriously chop vegetables the same way humans have done for thousands of years or you could make a much finer salsa or sofrito with much less time and effort by using a blender.
This logic can, should and must be applied to self defense.
Rights are nothing if they cannot be acted upon. The right to self defense is nothing if one cannot act upon it and do so with the tools for the job.
I am talking of course about guns. Simply tools for the job of defense and nothing more. Like a chainsaw, a chisel or a cheese knife they can be abused as offensive weapons - this is no justification for coercively limiting their use, manufacture, sale, distribution or possession. If it were then logically such coercions should be applied to cutlery.
If we return to the video how would such situations be different if the victims had not been disarmed? Would such acts of aggression even be likely to occur? The opportunity costs for these pranksters/criminals are next to nothing under the state. Zero police presence and coercively disarmed victims. The opportunity costs of assault in an armed society rocket to the value the assailant places on his own life. Much less attractive odds.
Women should be the keenest advocates for effective defensive equipment (guns not aerosols of close range seasoning!). Power tools remove crude physical advantage. A tractor driver no longer must suffer the ardour of his scythe wielding forebears. Likewise a diminutive female with an effective mechanised range weapon is on an equal footing with a male cage fighter.
Watch the awesome libertarian film 'The Blindside'. In it you can see tiny Sandra bullock scare a whole gang of aggressive males into submission with the mere suggestion she is armed. I cannot find a clip of the scene anywhere but there follows a transcript of. the gang leader is threatening Bullock's newly adopted son and she doesnt take any shit:

Gangster - Tell him, sleep with one eye open. You hear me, bitch?


Bullock - No, you hear me, bitch! You threaten my son you threaten me. You so much as cross downtown you will be sorry. I'm in a prayer group with the D.A.,
I'm a member of the NRA and I'm always packing.


Gangster - What you got in there, a .22? A Saturday Night Special?


Bullock - And it shoots just fine
all the other days, too!



Now that is fucking feminism!

misallocation

there follows a classic case study of misallocated capital through taxation funded ‘investment’. the story is to be found in Bill Bryson’s account of New York State's canal west. He explains that it ‘made’ new york the industrial capital of the then united states and that in turn the industrial capital of the northern hemisphere.

But Bryson also states that Canada was better positioned to take that position and it had a huge river going deep into its heartlands of natural and agricultural resources.

So, would it not have been better, ignoring the artificial boundaries of states, for the capital that was taxed to fund the NY state canal to have been naturally invested into more promising opportunities in Canada where a pre-existing water bourne transport route was?

Or to put it another way – if you had a million dollars ot invest in the north American continent – would you;

A – build a massive and expensive canal across NY state and then put a factory at the end of it with what meagre funds remained? Or…

B – invest the whole 1 million dollars into a massive factory or number of factories at any number of points along this canadian river?

It’s not a question that needs definitively answering. It’s not a question of which should the gov have spent the cash on. It doesn’t even matter what everyone’s personal opinion is. The only thing that matters is what the aggregate outcome of the free market would be. That is to say what would have been the overall result of the many decisions by countless entrepreneurs as to where to invest. Indeed it may have been the case that the NY canal would have been built perhaps bigger better and faster. Or perhaps both Canada and NY. No one can know and that is the point. No single agency can possibly pick a winner. No hyper computer, or learned council exists or has existed that could consider all the infinite information that is collated and transmitted by the price mechanism and acted on by individuals motived by their own self interest and acting upon their own specialist knowledge.

Government can never pick a winner and it should not be in the business of doing so

why a healthy economy cannot exhibit total employment

unemployment through developments in efficiency frees up individuals to take on new previously impossible jobs. Thus the economy expands as a robot takes over what was previously manual labour for ten men. Now those ten men are available for jobs that previously could not have existed due to the workforce being occupied in manual labour. in other words, prior to the robot there was no supply of labour available to fulfill a demand. following the introduction of the robot, the manual labour is still getting done, now by the robot, but now there are also ten extra jobs made possible by the newly increased supply of labour. everyone’s real wealth increases.

The corollary is the traditional socialist position. 19th century Fabians were concerned with full employment and were opposed to technological development and industrial progress as it ‘threatened’ the full employment of their trade union clients. Thus their conception of economics could not permit expansion as it was based in stasis. Everyone had to have a job and no job could be automated or removed through efficiencies. Thus there were never any excess workers available to make new jobs, services and products possible. The fabians must have realised this as I believe it was the basis of their eugenicist focus on population growth. Like other collectivists awarding medals for mothers who added their burgeoning offspring to the peoples’ workforce, the fabians needed population growth to provide the extra workers required for economic growth. Their social policies were opposed to the capitalist mechanism of doing more with less and so their economic policies became dependent upon ever increasing birthrates.

This of course was to be achieved through tax funded incentives and subsidies (todays ‘nudges’). Obviously they completely missed the Misesian observation that you cannot tax an economy into growth

Methodological Individualism

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodological_individualism

Methodological individualism is the theory that social phenomena can only be accurately explained by showing how they result from the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.[1] The idea has been used to criticize historicism, structural functionalism, and the roles of social class, gender roles, or ethnicity as determinants of individual behavior.[citation needed] It is promoted by the Austrian School of economics in interpreting economic developments.

Mark Blaug, known for his work on the history of economic thought, has criticized over-reliance on methodological individualism, "it is helpful to note what methodological individualism strictly interpreted ... would imply for economics. In effect, it would rule out all macroeconomic propositions that cannot be reduced to microeconomic ones, ... this amounts to saying goodbye to almost the whole of received macroeconomics. There must be something wrong with a methodological principle that has such devastating implications."[2]

OH THE HORROR! I cannot imagine how unsettling Mr Blaug must find such a dangerous notion.
I do feel sorry for such academic statist macro economists. Pity them as they whinge that the logical result of methodological individualism is the complete negation of any and all macro economic tampering. As if it were a bad thing! The presumption being that macro economic thought and state manipulation exist and therefore must be unquestionably both necessary and desirable. His other implication being that both him and the rest of em would be out of a job and out of their comfy world of power, influence and privilege. mind boggling.

politically correct transport

I will endevour to avoid the erroneous term 'public transport'. It is neither owned by nor operated for 'the public'. and neither can it be. once you understand the falsehood that is 'public ownership' and 'democratic control' then the mythological infantile propaganda that encourages us to believe we all somehow own a tiny share of everything called 'public' and that we somehow control this through the 'democratic process' will cease to hold you under its misleading thrall.
I would revert to a slightly more old fashioned term 'mass transit'. that is to say buses, trains, trams and planes. any transportational vehicle that can convey a number of unrelated individuals from point to point. notice that this appears to be broadly the same definition as that of the more current 'public transport' however there is a very important distinction between the two. Mass transit does not imply 'public ownership'. Mass transit comes from a time before the state siezed control of mass transit. private bus companies competed for custom offering cheaper fares and better service. one did not have to lobby for a route to be created in your area. if there was a demand then an entrepreneuring firm would emerge to supply that demand in the pursuit of profit. likewise for trains and trams and the exception that proves the rule - planes. How is a plane categorically different from a bus in this context? it is not and yet you will never hear the airline industry referred to under the umbrella term 'pulic transport'.
it was realising and accepting the implications of the above history that made me examine my previously unconsidered instinctual views of mass transit. coming from the place i do during the time we live in, my view of mass transit was coloured by the socialist outcomes of 'public transport' - that is to say its miserable and complete failure. upon discovering that mass transit had once been private, thriving and successful before its socialist takeover I realised it was not necessarily the actual idea of mass transit i hated but the reality of socialism-perverted 'public transport' that i had reacted against.
i no longer feel the need to defend the car against the bus or train. shorn of their political identities and associations their significance dissipates to a more natural level somewhere alongside the choice between white or brown bread. i do not particularly bother with such debates in favour of either 'side'. if only all such options were free to develop and propser in a natural economic environment users would be free to choose, their decision based on natural merit alone rather than which has been least politically molested.

now that the intro to this blog post has exceeded in length and possibly quality what i originally had in mind let me get on with it:

the reason i digressed into semantics is because I wanted to compare a form of public mass transport, a form of private individual transport and another form of transport that politically falls somewhere between the two. the first public form is a train, the second private form the car and the third the more problematic bicycle. the politcally favoured and promoted bicycle would not fit into the category 'public transport'. my politics hating mind could not compute. how could i refer to politically favoured forms of transport if they would not all fit the categorical umbrella 'public transport'? then i hit upon 'politically correct transport'. It covers the unjustifiable idollatory of collective solutions such as public transport but can also include the Gaia worshipping unpleasantness that is commuting by bicycle (I happen to love recreational bicycle use and abuse but hated having to go to work on the fucking thing)

finally to the point...

why not use a favourite emotive opinion twister of the statists against them next time the ole 'public transport' slanging match rears its ugly head. I refer to the big bad 'Think of The Children'!

present them with the aformentioned three options - train, bicycle and car.

now consider which you would rather put your child on...

how safe will they be on a bicycle in traffic?

how secure will they be trapped on a train full of unpredictable, unpoliced strangers?

and now consider whether they might wobble into a ditch or get mugged whilst safely ensconced within the comfy private confines of a car.

which two do the state endlessly promote and subsidise and which does the state endlessly persecute and charge?

now tell me who is genuinely concerned about the fucking cheedlren

how to defend from the goal line

In terms of national defense do compulsory team sports instil this mad idea that one cannot defend from the goal line? You often see rugby teams defending from their own try line. If they did nothing but defend in this way then they could not lose. However they would not gain anything over their opponents in order to win either. Thus they must stray from their own defences and open themselves to risk in a gamble. Because the whole point of team sports is to win, the team cannot remain the ever vigilant peaceful isolationists such as Switzerland. So when we come to debates regarding national defense I get told that it is impossible to defend from the goal line; that 'we' must 'defend' aggressively with overseas misadventure. The opportunity to externalise the cost of the sporting gamble enables monarchs, rulers and democracy voters to indulge in risky behaviour such as interventionism and invasion.

how to see past the nose on your face

what you will hear if you dare raise the possibility of roads without the state – 'but what if one company became a monopoly and charged sky high prices making huge levels of profit whilst offering terrible service?'

the gigantic and obvious truth this excuse for a challenge ignores is that the state currently has a just such a total monopoly. There is no point fearing a future possibility of monopoly when we currently suffer a present certainty of monopoly. The state (in the uk at least) makes more from road taxes and fuel duties than the roads cost them on maintenance and construction – this difference is their profit. Percentage-wise it is colossal. So the anti-anachists' fears regarding roads are in fact description of the status quo.

why the state?

In the same way that the onus is on monotheists to prove all other gods false and justify theirs as the one true god, the onus is on statists to explain not only why other nation states fail to conform to their own ideal but they must also explain the absence of world government.

If government is natural and necessary why is there no global government? If it is so preferable why does the world seem to overwhelmingly not prefer greater conglomeration of coercive power? why do nation states fight fiercely to defend their individual sovereign existence in an anarchic global order. why is this principle of individual sovereignty violently prohibited at any level other than the nation state?

a radically economic view of cooking

Not only is eating out more economically efficient (due to the cast iron laws of comparative advantage, specialisation and the division of labour when not impeded by minimum wages, regulation and restrictions on the use of land) but it is safer. Most accidents occur in the home and most of them are the result of cooking – a specialist skill and a hazardous past time. Not only is it best not to waste time learning and practicing the art of preparing food but it is safer. Totally free markets in medical, household and buildings insurance may perhaps offer lower premiums to customers without kitchens. Save all that real estate cost on space, all that cash on specialist equipment and protect yourself from burns, cuts, poisoning, onion tears, odours and risk burning the house down.

who invented the internet

Some statists, or more accurately anti-anarchists, may claim that the internet is not the product of the market but was developed by the state for the military. This may well be historically accurate. However the free market has clearly taken the idea and developed it far beyond its original limited scope into the resource it is today. but more importantly making the case that the internet has its origins in coercive action does not justify or legitimise the state in any way. The implication would be that the internet has its origins in the state and that absent the state we would not have the internet. This is an a priori statement that cannot be proven. That the state invented the internet does not preclude the development of a similar or better system in a non coercive society. If the state had not monopolised communications from the very inception of its history then things may have been very different. The state has claimed monopoly over communications throughout history – postal services, telegraph services, telephone services. It is only in the last ten years or so that most states have de-nationalised such communication services. These industries are still licensed, heavily regulated and cartelised for purposes of control and profit. But my point is that absent the state, communications may have developed differently. For example digging trenches across entire continents, and burying millions of miles of the precious metal copper (all centrally controlled) may perhaps not have been the most effective way to implement such networks. Perhaps radio (a technology contemporaneous with wired telecoms) would have been the choice of non centralised society. Perhaps in this non state world we would have had mobile telephony fifty to one hundred years sooner. Perhaps competing telecoms networks would have innovated new services to entice custom. Perhaps the age old human dream of the video phone (up there with the similarly state-prohibited flying car) would have come to fruition far sooner. Perhaps wired networks were the best choice and wireless televisual and radio services would have been more plentiful without the costs of nationwide broadcasting if simply piped into the home. Perhaps nothing would have ever been broadcast. Perhaps private commercial enterprises without the opportunity to offload IP type enforcement onto the state, would have opted for physical media to avoid free riders rather than mindlessly spewing their content free to all. (I'm thinking postally delivered wax cyclinders, vinyl discs, vhs cassettes etc)

Perhaps air ballons or tethered kites would have been a cheaper, earlier and more easily achievable form of signal intermediary than trillion dollar orbital space satellites. Perhaps the somalian post state mobile phone telecoms explosion shows the possibilities.

The possibilities are endless. But my point remains that just because the state does something does not follow that that good or service is impossible absent state involvement. Who is to say that in a totally free market telecoms companies would not have innovated a system similar to what we call the internet? Bastiat's that which is not seen. The internet is hampered by its origins. It was never meant to do what it does now. Its foundations are limited. Who is to say that the alternative anarcho-web would not have been more able to adapt and grow.

Even saying that 'just because the state did it first does not mean the market would not have done it later' does not go far enough. My point is that the state may have hampered and otherwise impeded the development of such goods and services to the point where the state was the only actor capable of such ‘innovation’ at that time.

Freedom of money equals freedom full stop

Attack the System » Blog Archive » Greeks Adopt Alternative Currencies as Economy Implodes

Links to numerous examples of failing centralised fiat systems and emergent voluntarist markets.

August Landmesser

Spot the free thinking individual among the sheep

You know the social ostracism you receive upon even verbally challenging a universally resented state tyranny such as taxation, now imagine the courage it took to do this.
August Landmesser deserves at least enough seconds of your life to go read the wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser

criminal enterprise

Can you imagine working for a company that only has a little more than 635 employees, but, has the following employee statistics..







29 have been accused of spouse abuse



7 have been arrested for fraud



9 have been accused of writing bad cheques



17 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses



3 have done time for assault



71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit



14 have been arrested on drug-related charges



8 have been arrested for shoplifting



21 are currently defendants in lawsuits



84 have been arrested for drink driving in the last year







and,







collectively, this year alone, they have cost the British tax payer



£92,993,748 in expenses!







Which organisation is this?







It's the 635 members of the House of Commons.







The same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to



keep the rest of us in line.







What a bunch of ‘toss-pots’ we have running our country - it says it all...







And just to top all that they probably have the best 'corporate' pension



scheme in the country!!







If you agree that this is an appalling state of affairs, please pass it on



to everyone you know.

Anarchism without Hyphens

Karl Hess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Hess

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no
vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” – Karl Hess, for Barry Goldwater; attribution to Cicero.

Any man who holds true to the above belief, can weld and was a friend of Murray Rothbard has go to be worth reading.

Anarchism without Hyphens
There is only one kind of anarchist. Not two. Just one. An anarchist, the only kind,
as defined by the long tradition and literature of the position itself, is a person in
opposition to authority imposed through the hierarchical power of the state. The
only expansion of this that seems to me reasonable is to say that an anarchist stands
in opposition to any imposed authority. An anarchist is a voluntarist.
Now, beyond that, anarchists also are people and, as such, contain the billionfaceted varieties of human reference. Some are anarchists who march, voluntarily,
to the Cross of Christ. Some are anarchists who flock, voluntarily, to the communes
of beloved, inspirational father figures. Some are anarchists who seek to establish
the syndics of voluntary industrial production. Some are anarchists who voluntary
seek to establish the rural production of the kibbutzim. Some are anarchists who,
voluntarily, seek to disestablish everything including their own association with
other people; the hermits. Some are anarchists who will deal, voluntarily, only in
gold, will never co-operate, and swirl their capes. Some are anarchists who, voluntarily, worship the sun and its energy, build domes, eat only vegetables, and play the
dulcimer. Some are anarchists who worship the power of algorithms, play strange
games, and infiltrate strange temples. Some are anarchists who see only the stars.
Some are anarchists who see only the mud.
They spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed
is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is
not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be
free. After that it’s all choice and chance.
Anarchism, liberty, does not tell you a thing about how free people will behave
or what arrangements they will make. It simply says that people have the capacity
to make the arrangements.
Anarchism is not normative. It does not say how to be free. It says only that
freedom, liberty, can exist.
Recently, in a libertarian journal, I read the statement that libertarianism is an
ideological movement. It may well be. In a concept of freedom it, they, you, or we,
anyone, has the liberty to engage in ideology or anything else that does not coerce
others, denying their liberty. But anarchism is not an ideological movement. It is an
ideological statement. It says that all people have a capacity for liberty. It says that
all anarchists want liberty. And then it is silent. After the pause of that silence, anarchists then mount the stages of their own communities and history and proclaim
their, not anarchism’s, ideologies—they say how they, how they as anarchists, will
make arrangements, describe events, celebrate life, work.
Anarchism is the hammer-idea, smashing the chains. Liberty is what results and,
in liberty, everything else is up to people and their ideologies. It is not up to THE
ideology. Anarchism says, in effect, there is no such upper case, dominating ideology. It says that people who live in liberty make their own histories and their own
deals with and within it.
A person who describes a world in which everyone must or should behave in a
single way, marching to a single drummer, is simply not an anarchist. A person who
says that they prefer this way, even wishing that all would prefer that way, but who
then says that all must decide, may certainly be an anarchist. Probably is.
Liberty is liberty. Anarchism is anarchism. Neither is Swiss cheese or anything
else. They are not property. They are not copyrighted. They are old, available ideas,
part of human culture. They may be hyphenated but they are not in fact hyphenated. They exist on their own. People add hyphens, and supplemental ideologies.
I am an anarchist. I need to know that, and you should know it. After that, I am a
writer and a welder who lives in a certain place, by certain lights, and with certain
people. And that you may know also. But there is no hyphen after the anarchist.
Liberty, finally, is not a box into which people are to be forced. Liberty is a space
in which people may live. It does not tell you how they will live. It says, eternally,
only that we can.
the dandelion, Spring 1980 by Karl Hess
found at
http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Karl_Hess_forprint.pdf

cant do better than this

just a lazy redirection of a blog post but easily worth the click through. If some other guy has already said it then why reinvent the wheel. http://attackthesystem.com/2012/03/02/no-one-notices-no-one-cares/ angry, exasperated, just how we all feel.

if you need cheering up check out the always hilarious and excellently written fred http://www.fredoneverything.net/Abdulah.shtml

the spark that just might end the state...

history creeps up on ya. No-one foresaw the collapse of the soviet union. CIA docs evidence as much. quite often historical change appears to erupt from nowhere because the contributory factors are almost infinitesimally and imperceptibly gradual. Imagine a worn tap dripping into the bath of an abandoned house. the drain is blocked and, even though the tap drips perhaps only once a day, eventually all those drips add up. Over time the bath fills, it overflows and the water permeates the floor. The timbers become sodden and begin to rot. The weight of an overflowing bathtub is too much and the floor collapses taking with it the corner of the house. The neighbours are shocked - what on earth caused the apparently sudden collapse of the house!?
Life is what happens when you're making other plans and that is no more true than when applied to anarchist dilletante whitterings over 'strategy'. Should we back Ron Paul, is politics the answer, what about agorism, seasteading, freeman legal challenges, survivalist escapes, expatriation, secession?
When the state ends (some states, a state, any state), and it will end - just a matter of when not if - I surmise it will be the result of a number of factors but the time and manner of its collapse will be unexpected. And the following is one such possibility. Just a tiny fragment of news to which I imagine most people, even within the bizarre, intertwining, otherwise unrelated worlds of interest that I follow, will ascribe no great import. Mobile Money Africa - How Bitcoin will Revolutionise the way Africans Transact.
We all know fiat currency is one of the foundations of the state. Any alternative is a lightning strike of hope for the prospects of individual freedom. Every school of thought you follow (and I say this because I guess my small readership come from a variety of freedom loving backgrounds - Freemen, Libertarians, Anarchists, Conspiracists and any mixture of these and more)will have theoretical, critical explanations of fiat currency and the evil it enables. if this foundation is weakened then the inherently unstable edifice of the state will come crashing down.
As Africa develops apace, new demand is outstripping old supply. I refer to infrastructure. Millions of people are beginning to climb from the poverty that hundreds of years of the shitty end of statism has foisted upon them. As markets emerge and commerce develops, the infrastructure of banks, currency and their attendant systems is non existent. In the ageing western world our now woefully corrupted supply systems developed symbiotically alongside demand. Africa, China, India and South America are bootstrapping and fast. In Africa they do not have to invent the telegraph, then the telephone, then the mobile phone and then mobile internet. As soon as individuals could afford such technologies they could be purchased from ready developed markets such as the far east, just across the Indian Ocean. So now you have millions of people, their commerce untethered from the shackles of outmoded communications but restricted by factors beyond their control. Namely security and banking. the state reserves such essentials for itself lest anyone think their parasitical institution dispensable. How can a travelling salesman, lorry driver or fisherman transact, exchange, transmit and store the capital necessary for commerce in a state barely capable of anything other than the crudest forms of extortion (thats taxation if youre new here). These economic actors are coercively prevented from fulfilling the market demand for banking and security that they and others clamour for. Instead they are left to operate their peaceful win/win exchanges without the mechanisms we take for granted. Imagine how much business your company could do without BACS payments? Without being able to 'wire' money to your suppliers or receive such from your clients everything rather grinds to a halt. Economies regress to geographically limited primitivism. Africans cannot trade in cash as the physical environment is hardly conducive to the secure transportation of large sums.
As a result Africans have rapidly and wholeheartedly taken to "Mobile Money'. In the absence of the ancient wired communication networks the west has in the past benefited from and now, is restrained by, Africa uses mobile communications. Those cheap tv ads you see offering to buy your old mobile phone handset? thats where theyre all going. If you were to instigate a nation-wide communications network right now today starting from a blank canvas, by far the most economic choice would be wireless. No-one in their right mind would spend millions digging holes and burying mile upon mile of semi-precious metal. The state still does but then what do you expect? No, Africa is connected by mobile phones and it is this technology that also came to be utilised to overcome their other problem - banking. Some of the early mobile networks had functions whereby users could exchange and even transmit their Pay As You Go credits - the key word being CREDIT. 'Money' has taken many forms throughout history from nuts, to shells, to coffee beans, to fancy rocks, metals, coins, promissory notes, and now phone credits. the original idea behind enabling users to transmit their credits was that family members could spread and share phone usage but this quickly became used to transmit meaningful sums for the purposes of trade and payment. It became possible to charge credit to your phone and both store and transmit that capital to others from the handset. In some highly developed urban areas people no longer had to carry cash. Phones had become the African debit card. I read an excellent article on this phenomena (sadly i can no longer find the link in my notes). As ever do not take my word for it. do your own research - it is a fascinating development and one which you will find few MSM outlets covering.
But finally i must come to the point. These transactions and credits are currently denominated in terms of nation state fiat currencies. Funds can be and are tracked for the purposes of extortion (taxation) and regulation (racketeering). The article to which i linked above has excited my interest as it hints toward a historical development of seriously large scale implications. If the African mobile money networks move toward a decentralised, non-state, 'uncontrollable,' incorruptible currency system like Bitcoin, we may see gigantic ramifications. As it stands Bitcoin has huge potential to bring about the kind of change we desire. Right now it is of interest for a small number of technology and economics geeks. We do not have the critical mass to push it over the edge into the widespread uptake the currency is capable of. The above article may suggest that this impetus is coming and coming soon but from a source unexpected by the forums of geeks and trolls who mutter about such things.
Before i get too carried away i must say that Bitcoin is widely misunderstood even by those who support it. Again please do your own research and draw your own conclusions (as if I need deign to even suggest such a thing). Bitcoin is not natively 100% anonymous but it can be made so very easily indeed. Now imagine however many hundred million Africans in fast moving economies beginning to transact in untaxable, uninflatable currency! The agorist dream come true. As the old heartlands of statism - Europe & America - decline in entirely predictable super inflationary corruption, the new rising markets in Africa, India, China and South America may, just possibly, break free of state control.

what is it good for? absolutely nothing. say it again!

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron…Is there no other way the world may live?

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

shamelessly ripped off from the excellent http://attackthesystem.com