“In 1913, Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment, giving it the power to levy permanent income taxes on the American people; estate taxes, gift taxes, capital gains taxes, and corporate taxes followed soon thereafter, while other permanent forms of taxation have been introduced in the decades since. This money has since come to be widely referred to as "government revenue" rather than "the peoples money." But the federal government does not confine its spending to the peoples money; rather, it borrows extensively, supporting a ballooning administrative state whose agencies are so numerous and ill-defined that there is no authoritative reference for exactly how many there are. The Federal Register, the Online Federal Register, the US Government Manual, the Sourcebook of United States Executive Agencies, the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, FOIA.gov, and USA.gov all list widely differing numbers and definitions of agencies. These agencies function as both rulemaking and rule-enforcing bodies, collapsing all three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial) into one in their own operations. This eliminates the checks and balances that the authors of the Constitution put in place to constrain the power of the state, subjecting the American people to a growing thicket of laws that they have had no part in making and have no electoral capacity to alter or repeal. As a result, an illusion is created that the government has its own power.”

[Written by Daniel Hughes and Natalie Smolenski, excerpted from “The Satoshi Papers: Reflections on Political Economy after Bitcoin”]