Ben a while since I shared a Rothbard quote:
"We have to look differently at taxation. We have to stop looking at taxes as a mighty system for achieving social goals, which merely needs to be made “fair” and rational in order to usher in Utopia. We have to start looking at taxation as a vast system of robbery and oppression, by which some people are enabled to live coercively and parasitically at the expense of others. We must realize that from the point of view of justice or of economic prosperity, the less people are taxed, the better. That is why we should rejoice at every new loophole, new credit, new manifestation of the “underground” economy. The Soviet Union can produce or work only to the extent that individuals are able to avoid the myriad of controls, taxes, and regulations. The same is true of most Third World countries, and the same is increasingly true of us. Every economic activity that escapes taxes and controls is not only a blow for freedom and property rights; it is also one more instance of a free flow of productive energy getting out from under parasitic repression.
That is why we should welcome every new loophole, shelter, credit, or exemption, and work, not to shut them down but to expand them to include everyone else, including ourselves."
From:
'The Myth of Tax “Reform”'
Almost 20 years ago and nothing has changed and everything this man said has been proven true over and over again.
“We bomb them endlessly and then wonder why they are mad at us.”
It’s funny, I’ve had a few friends and family members who are legitimately concerned now that we could be in danger. That “what if we get bombed?”
And all I can think is that entire generations in the Middle East have grown up with this fear as a permanent part of their lives. They never knew a time, in a dozen countries, in which they didn’t have to wonder “what if we get bombed?”
What do you think that does to a culture? What do you think that does to their view of the west and Israel? After 50 years how could you *not* think that the US deserved to be destroyed? What else do they even know?
None of this is confusing. These are the stupidly obvious and self evident results of the bullshit our govts have been engaged in.
https://blossom.primal.net/7d794799b5234ce5fd4bb1e6e1ccff11928b355c9b7189bad51454dc1bcc3488.mp4
Ron Paul, the Mises Institute et al have done a lot to spread the ideas of Liberty around the world, precisely, accurately and consistently.
The American government and its cronies on the other hand has contributed a great deal in making people around the world distrust, misunderstand and hate the idea of Liberty. It's the State that people ought to be hating. Not the ideas it falsely claims to support.
The government is not its people.
And the people are not their government.
Freedom has very little to do with democracy and everything to do with natural rights, self-ownership, natural justice and the non-aggression principle.
To think otherwise is brainwashed doublethink.
Liberty is not an American idea. Neither is it Christian or Western. It can be understood and embraced by any reasoning individual.
I can comfortably embrace my own religion and culture while being a libertarian. Because unlike socialism or nationalism, libertarianism is not an ideology that requires the creation of an ideal 'libertarian man'. It's just a legal theory about where violence is appropriate and not appropriate in social relations.
It doesn't require the spread of a state's 'soft power' or 'hard power'. It doesn't require a power vacuum to be filled by an entity that contradicts its principles. It does not require bombing millions of innocent civilians.
Then what is the correct source of laws and ethics?
Reason.
Through Reason, one can identify "ought's" that are non-contradictory and consistent.
(And this also presupposes an acceptance of the existence of free will. Without that, one cannot be a libertarian or an advocate of freedom.)
Reason is the real and correct source of the natural rights to life, liberty and property.
Not observation, evidence, feelings, statistics or data. If that is so, then slapping someone and saying "See? I just slapped that person and felt good about it, and hence he doesn't have rights" would be a valid thing to say.
And one cannot argue about the absence of Reason without using it in the first place, making the endeavour a falsehood.
And from these rights, the principles of self-ownership, non-aggression, natural justice, presumption of innocence, homesteading, proportionality, punishment et al are derived.
And these principles serve as the correct foundation of the law, which all human beings abide by.
And the law is simply a set of ought's, violating which opens the violator to a sanction of violence.
A true liberal, or someone who will be called a libertarian in contemporary times, will hold the view that only the defense of the natural rights to life, liberty and property is valid grounds for the use of violence.
Based on this, the modern liberal policy recommendations fall apart:
Homesteading and just assignment of property rights is the correct solution for the problem of public goods.
There is no such thing as market failures except in cases where natural rights are violated.
There is only government failure.
Positive and negative externalities are subject to the defense of natural rights.
There is no asymmetry of information because no-one can possibly know everything all at once.
Cost-benefit analysis is not grounds for the violation of natural rights.
Culture, custom and tradition is acceptable only where natural rights are not violated and subject to reform in areas where they are.
Revolutions and wars which violate these rights are principles are unjust.
The ideas of the 1991 reformers and the self-described classical liberals of today in India are not conducive to their goals.
This applies to most Indian 'free market' advocates from public choice, chicago and neoclassical schools also. Basically, people who quote a lot of Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Coase (and surprisingly, even Keynes) et al.
Economic ideas = between decent to good
Legal, ethical and political ideas = between inconsistent to downright terrible
Conducive to increasing state capture and crony capitalism
To their credit, they identify the necessity of checks and balances, transparency, separation of powers, rule of law and due process (Sprinkle in the words 'freedom of' and 'freedom to' here and there).
But they fail to *consistently* identify the necessary and unnecessary contents of a law, what constitutes a good law and a bad law, who does the checks and balances, the nature and corrupting characteristics of power and the state, what the law should and should not consist of, the correct methodology in coming up with a law and what exactly the so-called due process consists of.
Any attempt at exploring this faces a charge from them as being utopian and unrealistic because they do not like the concept of objective truths in the realm of politics, ethics and law. For them, truth exists on a spectrum, so it is always subject to falsification. Everything in this field is subjective to them. The goal of objectivity in this field is, for some reason, un-intellectual to them. They scoff at it and deplore it. Maybe because they want it to be determined by a political authority that calls itself the state, who knows.
Thus, for them, it is okay for an authority to 'make' laws, as long as it abides by the necessary principles mentioned above.
Both a priori reasoning and a posteriori observation of what has happened since 1991 should tell us that their reforms has enabled crony capitalism, regulatory capture, special interest politics and an ever growing state.
Clearly, like the ideas from post-independence India of socialist central planning, the reform movement of state-driven capitalism, i.e., interventionism, has failed at making India a free and prosperous country.
Something is clearly wrong and we can all agree on that.
These intellectuals talk a great deal about why the 'west' is 'advanced' and 'civilised'.
And a lot of cultural, genetic, situational, historical and religious factors are cited as reasons for India not being so.
But why not point out the legal and ethical factors?
When you have a society where
1. Laws, the set of words that determine where violence is appropriate and not appropriate
2. Ethics, a set of norms that tell a person what he ought and ought not to do
Are all considered as pseudo-sciences where there is no truth except what the state or a majority mandates it to be, you will have a broken society.
This is a major reason why the west is in decline. They have forgotten what made their societies advanced and civilised in the first place:
A Tradition of Reason.
I'm not a cypherpunk and I have massive respect for Strike.
But if you have the option to buy and sell non-KYC sats P2P, please do it.
If you don't, please start taking steps to create those avenues for yourself as soon as possible.
IRL Meetups, online groups, trust networks, whatever it takes.
If you're an introvert, stop being an introvert. Take classes or something. It's not something 'we' need to do. It's something 'you' need to do.
What's the golden rule?
I'm curious to know if this is true
Zeus can know who and where and I'm sending and receiving payments when I use the LN address feature right?
And also curious about the extent to which the Olympus LSP has access to similar information.
Fiat Law.
Aka Positive Law.
When you disconnect from overarching narratives and actually start reading the words that the legislators, executors, interpreters and enforcers of a 'positivistic' law are abiding by, you start realising something:
Behind every leglislation, ordinance and government order is a group of intellectuals, usually residing in the jursisdiction's capital city or somehow close to the power elite, who has never run a business or worked a job writing laws and pretending that he is helping people, when he really isn't.
'Policymaking' in a positive law system is a slippery slope towards becoming out of touch with market realities, moving ever closer into the inviting and enticing arms of power and tyranny. Once they get a taste of that power trip that comes with being able to bludgeon others and subjecting them to their will, there's little chance of going back.
Because words are used as legitimizing tools for power and violence, they start to take on different meanings, falling prey to twisting, manipulation and misuse to serve the interests of the power elite.
This isn't about capitalism or socialism, democracy or monarchy, liberalism vs conservatism, which I am starting to understand as battles that distract humanity from the more crucial question:
Whether laws are made by fiat or discovered by reason, i.e., positive law vs natural law.
Revolutions and uprisings with the goal of bringing about a natural law-based order will merely replace the existing power structures with a new one, often pursuing means that contradict the ends.
Education and awareness can't fix this because pursuing the universality of it as a 'positive' goal will leave it open to corruption by the power elite, also often pursuing means that contradict the ends.
Checks and balances cannot fix this because those doing the checks and balances are often the ones with the reigns, leading to them removing the checks and balances.
The nature of power is to corrupt.
And there is no power more corrupting than a territorial monopoly on violence.
No man is capable of wielding it because it isn't in his nature to wield it wisely.
A man who is capable of wielding it wisely will be one who does not seek it but rather abolish it.
Fiat money, Positive law, Government monopoly
The trinity of tyranny
cdk and mintd Version 0.12.0
https://github.com/cashubtc/cdk/releases/tag/v0.12.0
Delivers end-to-end BOLT12 offers and payments, adds BIP‑353 address resolution for BOLT12 payments, and introduces cdk-ldk-node, an integrated Lightning backend that lets a single binary run both a Cashu mint and a Lightning node with full BOLT11 and BOLT12 support. It also adds a local, admin-focused web UI for cdk-ldk-node with dashboards for channels, invoices and offers, payments, and on-chain activity. On the data layer, the release expands storage with PostgreSQL via the new cdk-postgres crate and accelerates the shared SQL stack (cdk-sql-common) with statement caching and structured, namespaced/global migrations. Operationally, the mint now exposes explicit start and stop lifecycle methods, enabling graceful startup and shutdown of background services. Wallet keyset management has been clarified with renamed APIs that separate local storage from network fetches. The MSRV is updated to 1.85.0.
This is what happens when people change the meaning of what 'theft' means. Doublespeak at its finest.
God was, is and never will be dead.
"வானுக்குள் ஈசனைத் தேடுவதை விட, உன் ஊனுக்குள் தேடு!
ஒளியாய் வருவார்.
அழியாத பேரின்பம் அருள்வார்."
Search for God up above, in other people, in the world around you.
You come to the conclusion that God is dead.
That God is death.
Search within.
And then there is light.
And then there is goodness.
Revealing itself in the dark abyss.
Filling it up with eternal bliss.
Filling it up with perpetual life.
You know the 20's do not miss you right?
Let me guess, everyone talks face to face all the time.
Here, we gotta ask for permission to start a business or build a house.
You should leave.
The world feels fake here.
We've got forever wars, mass surveillance, perpetual inflation, lies and propaganda everywhere.
Whatever 2065 has, has to be better than this.
Out there, it looks like things are real again.
No taxes, no wars, no mass murder, no inflation.
You do not want to remember what it was really like to be here.
Out here, time is an illusion. You don't think about the future. You just think about the next day, the next week, the next month, or if you're lucky, the next year.
If you've forgotten that, then that's why the 20's are warning you not to come back.
Have you left yet?
You don't get it.
The 20's wasn't just about smartphones, vertical videos and memes.
It was about escaping into stories created by other people.
Actually ignoring those close to us.
Screens always in your face.
Noise from the past, present and future.
Just noise.
The 20's do not miss you.
None of us do.
Maybe it's time we left.
Sadly, too much resource usage.
Battery, data, memory, everything.
And it seems to get worse on this front with every update.
To improve your Bitchat experience:
1. Use https://bitmap (dot ) lat/ to find where the conversations are happening
2. Use the 'triple tap on bitchat to clear chat' feature to the maximum possible extent as a moderation tool
3. Press forward slash in the text bar to access additional functionality
Bitchat feels like an actual town square