Greg Canavan

[7 min read]

Dear Reader,

It’s ANZAC Day weekend.

One of the best days of the year.

This year is a special one for me. I’ll get to see my daughter march with my old man for the first time. She’s 12 and has always taken an interest in grandad’s time in the army.

He was conscripted as a 21-year-old and did 12 months in Vietnam, his time cut short by a bullet in the foot in a jungle battle with the Viet Cong.

He never talked to me about that experience. But the generation gap frees up the memory and loosens the tongue, if just a little. He tells her much more than I ever heard.

Of course, the date is a celebration of the coming of age of a nation. Yes, it’s strange that we commemorate our performance in battle as a coming-of-age moment. But it’s not about glorifying war. It’s about your character under extreme stress. You only learn about who you really are when there is a lot on the line. And war is the ultimate expression of that. 

If there was any doubt about the national character following the failed Gallipoli landing and the evacuation eight months later, it was dispelled on ANZAC Day 1918.

That was when a fierce pre-down counterattack on the strategic village of Villers-Bretonneux, in Northern France, drove the Germans out and turned the tide of the First World War.

The war was also the end of individual freedoms, and the beginning of the role of the state. Prior to 1914, for example, you could travel without a passport. Gold was money and governments and central banks had not worked out how to destroy it yet.

The US was still only an emerging power. While there was certainly corruption, it was not rotten to the core as it is today.

And as for Australia? I shudder to think what the original diggers would think of our current crop of ‘leaders’.

In a pre-First World War world, everything was more decentralised and local. The family unit, the local community, the local church…

You looked after yourself and your family and didn’t expect help from the State. For the most part, you preferred the State to stay out of your business. And you’d never even heard of a central bank…

The good news is that we’re likely on a slow shift back to decentralisation. If you read my essay yesterday, you’ll know that blockchain technology is a big part of that. This is the technology that will be the foundation of a new monetary system. It will remove the need for ‘trusted’ (read: corrupted) middlemen, and much more.

So today I’m including an essay from Mike Krieger, who writes the Liberty Blitzkrieg blog. Mike’s written a lot on this topic. And he’s agreed to republish his essay in The Rum Rebellion. You can find the original essay here. 

The Future Must Be Decentralised and Localised

By Michael Krieger

We find ourselves at a moment where the financial and political systems that have dominated for decades are failing in a spectacular and irredeemable fashion. Those who pull the levers are (as usual) attempting to take advantage of the situation by rapaciously snatching and consolidating more wealth and power, while leaving the general public to rot. When faced with such a historic moment, one should assume a certain degree of responsibility to make sure the next paradigm ends up better than the one we’re leaving. If we fail to think deeply about an improved vision and framework for the future, someone else will do it for us.

From my perspective, humanity remains stuck within antiquated paradigms that generally function via predatory and authoritarian structures. We’ve been taught — and have largely accepted — that the really important decisions must be handled in a centralised manner by small groups of technocrats and oligarchs. As a result, we basically live within feudal constructs cleverly surrounded by entrenched myths of democracy and self-government. We’d prefer to be lazy rather than take any responsibility for the state of the world.

We’re now at a point where simply recognising current structures as predatory and authoritarian isn’t good enough. We require a distinct and superior political philosophy that can appeal to others likewise extremely dissatisfied with the status quo. My belief is humanity’s next paradigm should swing heavily in the direction of decentralisation and localism.

Decentralisation and localism aren’t exactly the same but can play well together and offer a new path forward. The simplest way to describe decentralisation to Americans is to look at the political framework laid out in the US Constitution.

As discussed in the 2018 piece, ‘The Road to 2025 (Part 4) — A Very Bright Future If We Demand It’:

‘At the federal level, a separation of powers between the three branches of government: the legislative, the executive and the judicial was a key component of the Constitution. The specific purpose here was to prevent an accumulation of excessive centralised power within a specific area of government…

‘Beyond a separation of powers at the federal level, the founding founders made sure that the various states had tremendous independent governance authority in their own right in order to further their objective of decentralised political power.’

Localism takes these Constitutional ideas of political decentralisation and pushes them further, by viewing the municipality or county as the most ethical and logical seat of self-governance. The basic idea, which I tend to agree with, is that genuine self-government does not scale well. A one-size-fits-all approach to governance not only ends up making everyone unhappy, it also entrenches a self-serving political and oligarchical class at the top of a superstate which makes big decisions for tens, if not hundreds of millions, with little accountability or oversight. This is pretty much how the world functions today.

While localism implies relative political decentralisation, decentralisation is not always localism. One of the best examples of this can be found in bitcoin. Unlike traditional monetary policy, which is handled in a top-down manner by a tiny group of unelected technocrats working on behalf of Wall Street, there’s no bitcoin politburo. There’s no CEO, there’s no individual or organisation to call or pressure to dramatically change things out of desire or political expediency. The protocol is specifically designed to prevent that. It’s designed to operate in a way that makes all sorts of people uncomfortable because they’re used to someone ‘being in control’. We’ve been taught that centralisation works well, but the reality is political and economic centralisation concentrates power, makes the public lazy and ultimately winds up in a state of authoritarian feudalism.

Bitcoin also demonstrates how decentralisation and localism, though not quite the same, can complement one another well in an interconnected planet. Imagine a world where governance is largely occurring at a local level, but global trade remains desirable. You’d want a politically neutral, decentralised and permissionless money to conduct such transactions. Similarly, a free and decentralised internet allows the same sort of thing in the realm of communications. Regions that can’t grow coffee will still want coffee, and people in New York will still want to chat with people in Barcelona. Decentralised systems allow for the best of both worlds — localism combined with continued global interconnectedness.

The big question all of us should be asking ourselves right now is: When should small groups of people be making extremely important decisions for the masses? My answer would be almost never, yet that’s the world most of us live in irrespective of which nation-state we call home.

The pendulum has swung so far in the direction of centralisation, oligarchy and authoritarianism that the whole thing is breaking down under its own weight. Those in charge are doing everything possible to keep it going in that same direction, but we can’t let that happen. What we need is a new era defined by decentralisation and localism.

Michael Krieger,
Liberty Blitzkrieg

If you enjoyed this post and Michael Krieger’s work in general, visit his Support Page where you can donate to his efforts.

Cheers,

Greg Canavan,
Editor, The Rum Rebellion

On the Road…to Ruin
Bill Bonner

‘There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,’ said Scottish economist Adam Smith in 1777. Today, we begin a long ramble down the road to ruin to look at how much ruin there is.

The trial of Derek Chauvin, a white former police officer in Minneapolis, for the murder of George Floyd, a black man, brought out hints of the ruin to come.

On the Trumpified right, a man in a police uniform can do no wrong. He is the avatar of law and order…of stability…the Praetorian Guard protecting the status quo and exalting the power and glory of the people who control it.

But since the Trumpistas are no longer running the show, the more immediate danger has shifted to the other side — the zealots on the Biden bandwagon.

Process before outcome

On the left, it was proclaimed high and low that Mr Floyd died because of systemic racism. Joe Biden said he prayed for a guilty verdict. This was a remarkable admission…as if he had no faith in his government’s criminal justice process.

But in a civilised society, the process is more important than the outcome. The justice system is based on the idea that you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. No one knows in advance. If they did, why bother with a trial at all?

Instead, a trial — like a market or an election — is designed to discover something — the truth. Until discovered, it is unknown.

Biden didn’t think he had to wait. He hadn’t attended a single day of testimony, but he was sure he knew the correct verdict.

Nancy Pelosi — perhaps drawing on her early years at Notre Dame (a Catholic girls high school in Baltimore) — saw Floyd’s death in biblical terms. He had ‘sacrificed’ himself, she said, so that others might have life and have it more abundantly…

Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice.

Huh? Was it worth dying just to convict Derek Chauvin? Why not just not die and leave Chauvin a free man?

Collective responsibility

The ‘sacrifice’ idea only makes sense if the goal goes far beyond putting Chauvin behind bars.

Contrary to the Christian faith, and to thousands of years of jurisprudential, moral, and philosophical enlightenment, today’s activists want to put a whole race of people — whites — on trial.

They are responsible, say the prosecutors, not only for Floyd’s death, but for a long list of crimes, from slavery to Nagasaki.

Communism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, Nazism, Brutalism in art and architecture, sugary cereal, plastic in the ocean — the white race is where the buck stops for them all.

The typical white man is flummoxed. He doesn’t hate black people. He didn’t kill George Floyd or throw a plastic water bottle in the Pacific. Why should he take the rap?

Individual responsibility

But collective guilt has a long and sordid history. At the time of the Great Sacrifice — the crucifixion — Pontius Pilate asked the Jews if they wanted him to release Jesus.

No, they replied. They preferred to have Barabbas — a thief — spared. As for Jesus: ‘Crucify him. Crucify him. His blood is on us and on our children!’

Jesus had made it clear — especially in his story of the Good Samaritan — that all people would be judged by God individually.

It didn’t matter that he was a Samaritan; he who had come to the aid of the man in need, while others passed him by.

The law, too, has long recognised that people should be held accountable for their own crimes, not for those of others.

Collective guilt

But civilisation walks backward from time to time. Centuries after the crucifixion of Christ, pogroms against Jews were excused as ‘justice’ for the collective guilt they bore.

Taking it a step further, in Poland during the Second World War, the Nazis made it a collective crime to give aid or comfort to Jews. Not only would the person who committed the infraction be punished, but so would his whole family.

Likewise, when a German soldier was killed by Polish partisans, a whole town might be massacred in reprisal.

And now, collective guilt is back. ‘White privilege’ is to blame for everything from higher COVID-19 death rates in black neighbourhoods to higher incomes in white ones.

(Dear, long-suffering readers must be wondering what this has to do with the economy…but hold on…we’re getting there.)

When civilisation goes into reverse, the means get upstaged by the ends. People lose confidence in the integrity of the process; they want results.

If what is most important to you is ending systemic racism, for example, or saving the planet…or winning a war against terrorists…or preventing a bear market on Wall Street, for that matter…you might very well conclude that any means necessary is OK.

Murder? Theft? Counterfeiting? Price fixing? Redistributing income? Sure, why not?

In the news yesterday was this report from Business Insider:

‘Warren Buffett caught the attention of the World Economic Forum’s Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab, who said he’d like to “have a discussion” with the billionaire investor.’

Uh-oh. Schwab wants to give Buffett a good ‘talking to’. Why? Berkshire Hathaway CEO Buffett is not on board with using shareholder money to signal management’s virtue:

‘Last year, Buffett said companies should focus on creating shareholder value, and not invest in social causes like climate change. “This is the shareholders’ money,” he said.

‘Schwab said the “art of good management today is to create a balance” between shareholders, and stakeholders, as in society as a whole. He said for companies not buying into the stakeholder concept, they’re going to be “on the wrong side of history”.’

Why hold back?

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen lit up like a lighthouse. Reuters reports:

‘U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday pledged to aggressively tackle climate change using all the tools at her disposal, warning that a failure to do so effectively and promptly could undermine economic growth.

‘“We are committed to directing public investment to areas that can facilitate our transition to net-zero and strengthen the functioning of our financial system so that workers, investors, and businesses can seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents,” Yellen said.’

When you think you know what is most important, you’re not going to let a few ancient rules stand in the way, are you? 

And when you think you know how to improve the world — for you have the TRUTH — why hold yourself back? Why not insist that everyone and everything get in line?

More to come…on the road to ruin…

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
For The Rum Rebellion

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