Author: Christopher Burg

Agorism’s Greatest Contribution

When people think of the counter-economic strategy advocated by Samuel Edward Konkin III they usually think about it in terms of toppling the State. While Agorism as a strategy can be useful for wounding the State I think its greatest feature is the establishment of enterprises divorced from the State.

So-called legitimate businesses are more often than not coupled to the State. Consider all of the technology companies that reside in the United States. The rely heavily on the State to defend their intellectual property. Patents and copyrights are an American technology company’s bread and butter. Without the State to subsidize defending their intellectual property, technology companies would find themselves facing an even vaster sea of competition than they already do on the international market.

Above ground agricultural enterprises, likewise, have become dependent on the State. Without the State’s crop and livestock subsidies many agricultural enterprises would likely collapse.

Statism isn’t a permanent condition. There isn’t a single chunk of land on this planet that has been ruled by the same state for all of human history. States come and go and with them the enterprises that rely on them. Agorist enterprises, however, can survive the collapse of states because they were never reliant on states to begin with. If anything, the collapse of a state will benefit an Agorist business.

Agorist enterprises can ensure goods and services continue to be provided when a state inevitably collapses. That is probably a greater overall contribution than its ability to injure states through counter-economics.

Rules of Evidence Don’t Apply

The legal system of the United States has a concept of admissible and inadmissible evidence. If, for example, a prosecutor uses evidence that was acquired illegally, it is supposed to be thrown out. However, this concept like most concepts developed to protect defendants is little more than a fairytale told by politicians, judges, and law enforcers to create the illusion of legitimacy in the minds’ of the masses. In reality there are a lot of options for those who wish to submit “inadmissible” evidence. Parallel construction is one such option:

The Special Operations Division receives raw intelligence from the NSA’s surveillance programs, including from the mass surveillance programs revealed in documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. DEA agents in this unit then analyze the surveillance data and disseminate leads to federal and local police nationwide. But the information comes with a catch. Law enforcement can’t use it to secure search warrants or in any way reveal the intelligence community as the source of their leads. Instead, they must find another way to justify their searches and broader investigations.

[…]

The convoluted and secretive process of building a case to obscure the use of underlying intelligence, known as “parallel construction,” is meant to protect the intelligence community’s sources and methods, according to internal DEA documents. It also often deprives the accused of a fair shot at defending themselves in court because some of the evidence against them is not made public.

If a domestic law enforcement agency is given evidence by the National Security Agency (NSA), it’s not supposed to be able to use it because the NSA is supposed to be prohibited from spying on American citizens. So when the NSA finds evidence that is of interest to a domestic agency, it gives the agency the evidence and orders them to make up a story about how it was uncovered by the agency’s personnel. The agency then works in reverse. It creates a story about how it discovered the evidence. After charges have been filed the defendant has no knowledge of the NSA’s involvement and therefore can put up a meaningful defense.

You may get your day in court but does it really matter when the court is rigged to favor the prosecution?

Firebirds

Humanity has enjoyed its position as an apex predator for only a brief period of Earth’s history. And while this time at the top was fun, the time to hail our avian overlords will soon be at hand:

The claim is that the birds pick up burning twigs from existing fires and drop them elsewhere to start new blazes. This would flush out prey hidden in the brush.

It starts with them using fire to flush our prey but it will end in them using fire to flush humans out of their cities!

Welcome to Costco, I Love You

I’m starting to believe that Costco may actually love its customers. Seattle implemented a ridiculous tax on sweetened beverages. As usual for sin taxes the politicians who championed this tax claimed that it would promote healthier living. What it actually did was jack up prices and piss people off. But Costco, unlike so many businesses throughout the country, decided that it wasn’t going to take the fall for government induced price increases:

Mega-chain Costco isn’t feeling the surge either and put in big black numbers how much the new tax is costing their customers. Not only that, they’re putting signs next to the price display that tells shoppers where they can get their fizz fix outside the city!

More companies should do this. I know if I owned a retailer, all of my prices would be posted as what I’m charging and what the government is charging. Most businesses just post the price so the customer doesn’t see just how much they’re paying the local, state, and federal governments for goods and services that they had no part in creating or brining to market. Costco also deserves bonus points for twisting the knife by pointing out to customers that they can get soda are normal prices outside of the city.

When You Just Want to Mess with Your Subjects

If you watch a politician being grilled by the press, you can often see the disgust in their face as clear as day. Politicians don’t like being questioned by lowly plebs but they usually put up with it because it helps them uphold the appearance that they care. The Prime Minister of Thailand isn’t one of those politicians:

Thailand’s prime minister has evaded journalists’ questions by bringing out a life-sized cardboard cutout of himself and telling the reporters to quiz it instead of him.

Prayuth Chan-ocha then turned on his heel and walked off, leaving the mock-up behind, to bemused looks and awkward laughter from the Government House press pack.

I appreciate how upfront he is about not giving a damn about what the plebs think. It’s too bad this kind of honestly wasn’t more prevalent amongst politicians. Perhaps if it was, the masses would see the government for what it is instead of what they want it to be.

Cliven Bundy Walks Free

A few days ago the case against Cliven Bundy, the man who had the guts to defend his property against federal agents, was dismissed. While a lot of people have talked about the dismissal of the case, usually with statists screaming in outrage, I think the reason the case was dismisses is the most noteworthy element:

An hour earlier, Bundy sat stoically in prison garb and shackles as a judge dismissed the case against him, two of his sons and a militia supporter, saying federal prosecutors violated the men’s rights to a fair trial by withholding evidence.

[…]

U.S. District Court Judge Gloria Navarro said federal prosecutors acted recklessly and engaged in a “deliberate attempt to mislead and distort the truth” by failing to turn over evidence that could have helped exonerate the four defendants.

People often make the mistake of believing that the government seeks justice. However, it’s usually not justice that the government wants but a prosecution. Oftentimes a government prosecutor will go to great lengths to prove an innocent individual’s guilt. Government prosecutors have done everything from withhold evidence to use scientifically unsound forensics to put people behind bars.

Bundy was lucky that his case was being run by a judge who felt that the withholding of evidence was grounds enough to dismiss the case. Many innocent people aren’t so lucky.

People Are Going Batshit for Crypto

People are going batshit for crypto. When the Long Island Iced Tea Company changed its name to Long Blockchain its stock jumped by 50 percent. Similarly Hooters’s stock jumped by 50 percent when it announced its blockchain rewards program and Kodak, which I didn’t realize was even still around, enjoyed a stock increase of 60 percent when it announced its blockchain-based currency. It seems like the mere whisper of the word blockchain is enough to get investors excited.

Let us return to Long Blockchain though. When the company announced its name change it justified it by claiming that it was going to buy cryptocurrency mining hardware. After baiting investors Long Blockchain announced that while it was still planning to invest in cryptocurrency mining hardware it didn’t have a definite timeline:

But today Long Blockchain announced it was scrapping the stock offering. The company says that it’s still planning to buy bitcoin-mining hardware. However, Long Blockchain says that it “can make no assurances that it will be able to finance the purchase of the mining equipment.”

Every time Bitcoin’s price increases detractors claim that it’s a bubble that will soon burst and leave everybody who invested penniless. Little did they know that Bitcoin itself wasn’t the real bubble but the technology it’s based on, blockchains, was. And yes, when the mere whisper of adopting a technology causes your stock to significantly jump in value, you’re operating in a bubble.

War is Good for Business

Working in the military-industrial complex must be nice. While companies in other industries are forced to market their own goods and services, companies in the military-industrial complex enjoy subsidized marketing from the United States government:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration is nearing completion of a new “Buy American” plan that calls for U.S. military attaches and diplomats to help drum up billions of dollars more in business overseas for the U.S. weapons industry, going beyond the limited assistance they currently provide, officials said.

President Donald Trump is expected to announce a “whole of government” approach that will also ease export rules on U.S. military exports and give greater weight to the economic benefits for American manufacturers in a decision-making process that has long focused heavily on human rights considerations, according to people familiar with the plan.

Not only will military attaches and diplomats provide free marketing but since the weapons sold by the United States have a tendency to fall into the hands of its and its allies’ enemies this proposal could create a continuous cycle of sales. First the United States sell weapons to one of its allies then those weapons fall into the hands of its allies’ enemies then the allies need to buy more weapons to fight off their enemies.

Policing Even Less Dangerous than Last Year

A lot of people, especially those involved in or somehow connected to law enforcement, believe that policing is a dangerous job. However, policing doesn’t even make the top 10 list of dangerous jobs. Not only is policing fairly safe but it has been becoming safer for decades:

The number of police officers killed on duty dropped to near a 50-year low in 2017. As of December 28, 2017, 128 officers died in the line of duty. That’s down 10% from 2016, when 143 officers died, according to new data from National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

Perhaps it’s time to do away with the practice of letting police justify their violent actions by claiming that they have a dangerous job and just want to go home at night. Their job isn’t all that dangerous and those who are working jobs that are actually dangerous seem to manage just fine without gunning down everybody who looks at them wrong.

The United States of Rome

I’ve been on a huge Roman history kick for the last several months. Currently I’m reading Rubicon by Tom Holland. I’m a bit over 200 pages in and it has been an excellent read. The history itself is fascinating but the various parallels between the twilight of the Roman Republic and the United States are also worth noting. For example, the Romans had a similar strategy when it came to justifying war. From page 152:

The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their preemptive strikes were defensive in nature.

Like the Roman Republic, the United States never performs a preemptive strike without first convincing itself that its target is an eminent threat even if there is no plausible threat. Furthermore, the Romans had a similar attitude towards the “rights” of its citizens. From pages 202 and 203:

At stake was the issue of what to do with Catiline’s henchmen. Many were of good family, and it was forbidden by the severest laws of the Republic to execute any citizen without a proper trial. But did the state of emergency entitle Cicero to waive this sacred injunction? Caesar, still nervous that the hysteria might sweep him away, proposed the novel idea that the conspirators should be imprisoned for life; Cato, opposing him, demanded their execution. Here, in the clash between these two men so matched in talent, so opposite in character, was the opening salvo of a struggle that would eventually convulse the Republic. For now, it was Cato who emerged triumphant. A majority in the Senate agreed with him that the safety of Rome was more important than the rights of individual citizens. And besides, who ever heard of imprisonment as a punishment? The conspirators were sentenced to death.

Like in the Roman Republic, the rights of Americans end where the politicians’ perception of safety begins.

The Founding Fathers put a lot of effort into emulating the Roman Republic and that effort wasn’t wasted. As the United States marches into its twilight it continues to emulate the Roman Republic as it marched into its twilight. Perhaps the next stage of the United States will be a monarchy as well.