Jag läste en entusiastisk artikel om ett ämne jag inte kan mycket om: bitcoin. Författaren, Austin Lee, tror starkt att (den amerikanska) högern kan segra om nog många människor gömmer sin förmögenhet i bitcoin, eftersom då staten förlorar sin förmåga att beskatta medborgarna och därmed också möjligheten att med välfärdsmedel få miljoner av människor från tredje världen att bosätta sig i väst.
The closest historical analogy is the fall of the USSR. Just as the perestroika-induced dissolution of the Soviet government freed the Russian people and eventually restored the Russian Orthodox church, so too will a Bitcoin-induced bankruptcy of the US government free the American people and ultimately restore traditional American culture.
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Though they do have leaders and centers of power (the State Department, Harvard, the New York Times, Hollywood), the left is not centrally controlled. What we face is “institutional leftism.” The people of the left do what they do because they are responding to incentives. These incentives are obvious: it is easier to steal than to build, easier to capture the state and use it to seize others’ wealth than to create their own. With that looted money and power, they gain status, and more money and power.
What opposes the left? Borders of every kind. Ethical conventions that tell us not to covet our neighbor’s wealth. Patriotic conventions that prevent them from busing millions over the border to bust our elections. And legal conventions that limit the ability of the state to seize our property.
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For the left, what is yours is theirs. And what is theirs is theirs. If you exclude people from your nation, your company, or your wallet, you are racist, sexist, and homophobic. Conveniently, their justification for excluding you from their institutions is the same: because you are racist, sexist, and homophobic. With the same words, they erode your borders while shoring up their own.
We now understand the state of affairs. We need to protect our borders, our money, and our land. But we’re not going to win a war of words with the left. They control every major media outlet. And while we can win elections, we can’t truly win political battles. The right has nominal Republican control of 33 governorships, 69 state legislative chambers, the House, the Senate, and the Presidency — but one year later, there is still no wall.
So we need something more powerful than words and politics to protect our borders. That something is cryptography.
Cryptography is the border that can’t be busted
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Now let’s talk about the second part of the equation: how Bitcoin is the ultimate form of right-wing protest. Forget the NFL or the latest ephemeral Twitter dustup. As Thoreau said, there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil for every one striking the root.
Bitcoin strikes the root.
If Bitcoin becomes as popular as Twitter or Facebook in the United States — and it is well on its way — it will hobble and eventually eliminate the ability of the state to tax. As Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman predicted in 1999, without the ability to tax, the incentive for capturing the state enters a steep decline.
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As the process accelerates, the entire economy goes dark, and we have actually starved the beast. The only receipts governments will receive after that event horizon are voluntary, crowdfunded contributions. This proposal is far more radical than anything a Republican Congress could even pretend to support, let alone vote for. That is why it will work. As Larry Page would put it, “10X is easier than 10%.”
In practice, the process of going dark may be much faster, because the smartest and richest would be among the first to defect, and because they are by far the most heavily taxed. So we would need far less than 50% of the population to enter the blockchain economy to bring the US government to its knees.
The transitional state will last for years, or decades, and be messy beyond belief. Endless media denunciations of the unpatriotic tax evaders will result in billions of free advertising for the dark economy. Some vocal Bitcoin-rich folks will likely go to jail. Many more will see the writing on the wall, and leave the US with their newfound wealth, or even give up US citizenship (eventually perhaps to return when things calm down). Many politicians will be found denouncing digital currency one day, and then revealed to be major holders of digital currency the next day.
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But once the economy has fully gone dark and the state is no longer a vehicle for systematic looting, everything will change. Change the incentives and you change the behavior. Remove the incentive for capturing the state and you remove the political behavior. No taxation, no welfare state. No welfare state, no attraction for illegal aliens. Bitcoin is the proton torpedo into the heart of the Death Star.
Essän är väldigt positiv till sin idé och jag vill fråga de som kan detta om bitcoin är en rimlig strategi för libertarianer eller neoreaktionära att förhindra bidragsdriven massinvandring. Problemet för idén i Sverige är såklart att skatten i Sverige baseras på inkomst snarare än på förmögenhet.
Det andra spörsmålet gäller Sverige och är enklare: jag är övertygad om att svenskarnas vilja att betala skatt minskar när staten av allt fler betraktas som en fiende. Jag tror att detta är ytterligare ett hot mot samhället framöver. Sverige blir som Mexiko.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-bitcoin-buycott/
Tillägg: Efter en stunds funderande kom jag på en stark invändning mot artikelns tes. Det är i dag skattefritt att äga guld. Man kan lika gärna köpa en guldtacka om man vill undvika förmögenhetsskatt.
Det är först när man har fungerande valutasystem utanför staten som det också går att smidigt betala som man undviker skatter på riktigt.
