Tag: You’re Doing it Right

When Currencies Collapse

The problem with fiat currency is the fact it doesn’t have any intrinsic value. Worth of fiat currencies, like the United States dollar, is judged entirely on the decree of the issuer. For example the $5 bill is worth $5 only because the state, which issues the currency, says it’s worth $5. On the other hand commodity based currencies hold intrinsic value, they have actual worth through their utility. If a culture decides to base its currency on wheat, probably not the best commodity to use as it spoils but that’s beside the point, each currency unit would be a fixed amount of wheat. Let’s call this hypothetical currency the Whollar (wheat dollar because I’m super creative), and each Whollar is fixed at 1 pound of wheat. If you take your Whollars to a bank you can exchange them for their value of wheat, so taking 100 Whollars to the bank would result in you walking away with 100 pounds of wheat. Since wheat is a staple foodstuff it has actual value in its utility.

Fiat currencies are easily manipulated but fail to hold value once trust in the currency is lost. While the state may say the $5 bill is worth $5 sellers in the market place may assign it a value of zero. Once faith in a fiat currency is lost it no longer because usable for the exchange of goods and at that point real trade resumes. The faith most people hold in Greek money has vanish and in its place comes the return of barter:

In recent weeks, Theodoros Mavridis has bought fresh eggs, tsipourou (the local brandy: beware), fruit, olives, olive oil, jam, and soap. He has also had some legal advice, and enjoyed the services of an accountant to help fill in his tax return.

None of it has cost him a euro, because he had previously done a spot of electrical work – repairing a TV, sorting out a dodgy light – for some of the 800-odd members of a fast-growing exchange network in the port town of Volos, midway between Athens and Thessaloniki.

In return for his expert labour, Mavridis received a number of Local Alternative Units (known as tems in Greek) in his online network account. In return for the eggs, olive oil, tax advice and the rest, he transferred tems into other people’s accounts.

The only common item everybody has to make exchanges is their labor and the reason people make exchanges is to fulfill wants. Why would I work for two hours programming a computer in exchange for something that won’t allow me to fulfill my wants? If United States dollars or euros won’t buy me food, shelter, and clothing then they are of no use to me. On the other hand I can directly exchange my labor for those wants.

Bater isn’t ideal as it can be complicated but it’s far better than exchanging your goods and services for worthless paper that won’t buy you similar goods and services due to inflation and lack of faith in the currency.

As fiat currencies continue to collapse we’re going to see more people resorting to barter.

Gunny Mutual Aid Succeeds

Just an update on the request for help received by Erin of Lurking Rhythmically, she not only received enough donations to purchase a carry pistol but had some money left over:

I have been advised by certain knowledgeable people that I should not disclose the exact amount I raised lest I invoke the dread gaze of the IRS, but I do want to say that you folks went far above and beyond what was necessary to help me acquire a carry pistol, a permit, and training. I will be sending out thank-you notes later this week.

I don’t mention this solely because I want to demonstrate the goodwill of the gunny community, but I also want to bring it up as a demonstration of mutual aid succeeding. We’re deluded by the state and its supporters that we individual are unable to help one another, we’re told that the state is necessary to ensure all have what they need. Of course such statements are lies and acts of charity such as the above mentioned prove how well helping one another can work.

Mutual aid happens whenever one person comes to the assistance of another. Donating money to a family who recently lost everything is an act of mutual aid, helping neighbors clean up their property and rebuild after a flood is an act of mutual aid, and helping a person in need obtain the tools necessary for self-defense is mutual aid.

One thing I’ve witnessed as our society moves more towards statism is the reduction of mutual aid. When somebody loses their job but still needs to pay their bills and feed their families they are less likely to be helped by their fellow neighbor, instead they turn to the state and because the state has already stolen money from the populace to fund its welfare system individuals are less inclined to help one another. Its a vicious cycle, individuals refrain from helping one another because they’ve been forcefully stolen from to fund the state’s welfare system, and the state continues to point to the apathy they created as proof that money must be stolen to help those in need. We don’t need to be enslaved to this vicious cycle, we can break free of it, we need only help on another.

Time and time again I witness exceptionally generosity from the gunny community and it makes me absolutely proud to be apart of it.

Legislation I Can Actually Support

It’s not often that I see a piece of legislation that I can support in its entirety but that what House Congressional Resolution 107 is:

Expressing the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.

Whereas the cornerstone of the Republic is honoring Congress’s exclusive power to declare war under article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of Congress that, except in response to an actual or imminent attack against the territory of the United States, the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress violates Congress’s exclusive power to declare war under article I, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution and therefore constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under article II, section 4 of the Constitution.

A resolution that is aiming to actually enforce a clause in the Constitution that restricts the president’s power by moving to impeach our warmonger president? Hell yes, sign this damn thing and get the impeachment hearings underway! After this gets done I hope to see every member of the legislature bring impeachment hearings against one another until all of the three branches of government lie entirely empty.

I know the chances of any of my hopes happening are almost nil but I’ve always believe a man should dream big.

Taking Back What is Rightfully Theirs

Utah is looking to take back what is rightfully theirs:

Lawmakers who want to seize control of federal lands are pushing a legal battle they insist is winnable despite multiple warnings their effort is highly unconstitutional and almost sure to fail in court.

Utah is poised to become the first state to pass a package of bills that demand the federal government relinquish claims to huge sections of public land. A proposal that advanced Wednesday demands that by 2014 the federal government cede control of nearly 30 million acres — nearly 50 percent of the entire state.

It’s surprising how much land the federal government claims ownership over when you get into the western states. The federal government claims ownership over 70.2% of all land in Utah and they want it back.

The article made a good point that the passage of this bill will likely fail to be recognized by federal courts. Such a ruling is almost guaranteed because of the conflict of interest involved in allowing a court controlled by the federal government to rule on matters directly benefitting the federal government. I don’t see this succeeding but I believe it’s important because it brings to light a problem, the amount of land and natural resources the federal government claims to own.

You’re All a Bunch of Socialists


Meme obtained from Facebook

Ludwig von Mises was the man when it came to economics. At a time everybody was preaching the great new planned economy Mises stood, at time, entirely alone in his advocacy of the free market. The Austrian tradition of economics is named so because Mises and his cohorts met at a bar in Austria called The Green Anchor to discuss topics related to economics.

Mises was a total bad ass who wrote large volumes about his theories in his spare time. He also didn’t take shit from anybody and the meme at the start of this post relates to an event where he got fed up talking about distributing income and stormed out of the meeting while calling the other attendees, “a bunch of socialists.” Here’s a short clip explaining Mises’s hijinks:

The man was right, knew he was right, and refused to submit to argumentum ad populum . Refusing to submit to ideas simply because a majority believe them to be true is something we can all learn from the late great Mises.

Maryland’s May Issue Carry Permit Process Ruled Unconstitutional

The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and Alan Gura won another court victory, this time in Maryland:

BELLEVUE, WA – A federal court ruling in Maryland, that the Second Amendment right to bear arms extends beyond the home and that citizens may not be required to offer a “good and substantial reason” for obtaining a concealed carry permit, is a huge victory, the Second Amendment Foundation said today.

Ruling in the case of Woollard v. Sheridan – a case brought by SAF in July 2010 on behalf of Maryland resident Raymond Woollard, who was denied his carry permit renewal – the U.S. District Court for Maryland ruled that “The Court finds that the right to bear arms is not limited to the home.”

The ruling can be found here [PDF]:

IV. CONCLUSION

The Court finds that Maryland‘s requirement of a “good and substantial reason” for issuance of a handgun permit is insufficiently tailored to the State‘s interest in public safety and crime prevention. The law impermissibly infringes the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The Court will, by separate Order of even date, GRANT Woollard‘s Motion for Summary Judgment and DENY Defendants‘ Motion for Summary Judgment.

You know who’s a sad panda? The Brady Campaign [PDF] (I grabbed a copy of their case docket just in case they decide to toss this one down the memory hole). Apparently they had a vested interest in this case (page 70):

Woollard v. Sheridan (U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland)

The Brady Center is assisting the State of Maryland in this case, brought by the Second Amendment Foundation and Raymond Woollard, challenging the validity of Maryland’s handgun permit process. The named defendants include the Secretary and Superintendent of the Maryland State Police, Terrence Sheridan, and three members of Maryland’s Handgun Permit Review Board.

To qualify for a handgun carry permit in Maryland, an applicant must establish that he or she is an adult; has not been convicted of a felony or misdemeanor for which a term of over 1 year imprisonment has been imposed; has not been convicted of drug crimes; is not an alcoholic or drug addict; and has not exhibited a propensity for violence or instability that may render the applicant’s possession of a handgun dangerous. Additionally, the Superintendent of the State must determine that the applicant “has good and substantial reason to wear, carry, or transport a handgun, such as a finding that the permit is necessary as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger.”

Plaintiffs contend that the State cannot require handgun permit applicants to prove the above, as it deals with “the exercise of fundamental constitutional rights, including the right to keep and bear arms.” They allege this violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs are asking for permanent injunctive relief against the enforcement of the provisions regulating handgun permits.

On March 22, 2011, the Brady Center filed an amicus brief in the case arguing for dismissal of the lawsuit.

Too bad, so sad. SAF is proving to be the unstoppable behemoth of the litigation world and Alan Gura is their super weapon. I wonder how the Brady Campaign feels right now knowing they have been entirely ineffective at stopping those of us who believe in the right to keep and bear arms from advancing.

Either way this ruling is big. It not only abolishes Maryland’s ability to issue permits on a willy nilly basis but also sets a precedence, which will allow people in other “may issue” states to challenge such barriers between their right to carry a means of self-defense. I wonder who the next violator of the Second Amendment will be to fall before the might of SAF.

Innovation Trumps Government Regulation Once Again

Most people have likely heard about the shortage of electromagnetic spectrum. For those who haven’t there exists a finite amount of spectrum that can be used for the transmission of wireless signals and people have recently been stating that we’ve run into a barrier: we’re fast running out of spectrum for new innovations.

To regulate this spectrum the United States established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who auction off spectrum to the highest bidders. The result of this is that multi-billion dollar companies are the only ones who can actually afford to license spectrum and therefore small competitors are kept from entering the market, which is exactly how the big money players like it. Effectively the FCC has wiped out competition for AT&T, Verizon, and other holders of electromagnetic spectrum.

Looking at the electromagnetic spectrum demonstrates a stark difference between how government busybodies attempt to solve problems and actual intelligent individuals attempt to solve problems. The government saw a potential shortage, stepped in, and gave themselves a monopoly on determining who can and can’t use spectrum. Innovators saw a potential shortage and began to work on ways to bypass the problem, a goal that they’ve made some great strides in:

A striking demonstration of a means to boost the information-carrying capacity of radio waves has taken place across the lagoon in Venice, Italy.

The technique exploits what is called the “orbital angular momentum” of the waves – imparting them with a “twist”.

Varying this twist permits many data streams to fit in the frequency spread currently used for just one.

The research paper can be found here. I’d be a liar if I claimed to understand what they’re doing on any technical level but their conclusion leaves me with hope:

5. Conclusions

Our experimental findings that EM OAM can be used for increasing radio transmission capacity without increasing bandwidth is likely to open up new perspectives on wireless communications and radio-based science. History tells us that Marconi invented the wireless telegraph and from that the communication world spread its branches in all directions [1]. All current radio communication services are based on various forms of phase, frequency and/or amplitude modulation of the EM radiation in the form of EM linear momentum (i.e. integrated Poynting vector or energy flux). In order that many different broadcasting stations are able to transmit simultaneously without overlapping their radio signals, Marconi suggested that the total available spectrum of radio frequencies be divided into many non-overlapping frequency subbands [23]. Now, the wide use of wireless communication has unavoidably led to the saturation of all available frequency bands, even after the adoption of artificial techniques that increase band capacity. We have experimentally shown that by using helicoidal parabolic antennae, the use of OAM states might dramatically increase the capacity of any frequency band, allowing the use of dense coding techniques in each of these new vortex radio channels. This might represent a concrete proposal for a possible solution to the band saturation problem.

Moreover, our experimental findings demonstrate that the spatial phase signature was preserved even in the far-field region and for incoherent non-monochromatic wave beams. These results open up new perspectives not only for wireless communication but also for physics and astronomy, including the possible detection of Kerr black holes in the test general relativity [21].

We can effectively increase what we’re capable of doing with wireless spectrum without having to obtain more of it. Innovation is the only hope we have of solving problems and innovation is something the state never attempts. Since the state enjoys monopoly control of whatever it desires it has no reason to innovate, instead preferring to sit on its laurels. Free competition is the solution to humanity’s problems, not government regulations.

We Won’t Pay

People in Greece are finally coming to terms with the abusive relationship they have with their government. While some have opted to riot in the streets others are looking at a far more peaceful, and effective, solution to the problem: starving the beast:

The people who could ultimately give Greece the coup de grace are not the kind to throw stones or Molotov cocktails, and they have yet to torch any cars. Instead, they are people like 60-year-old beverage distributor Angelos Belitsakos, people who might soon turn into a real problem for the economically unstable country. Feeling cornered, he and other private business owners want to go on the offensive. But instead fighting with weapons, they are using something much more dangerous. They are fighting with money.

Belitsakos is a short, slim and alert man who lives in the middle-class Athenian suburb of Holargos. He is also the physical and spiritual leader of a movement of businesspeople in Greece that is recruiting new members with growing speed. While Greece’s government is desperately trying to combat its ballooning budget deficit by raising taxes and imposing new fees, people like Belitsakos are putting their faith in passive resistance.

The group’s slogan is as simple as it is stoic: “We Won’t Pay.”

An elegant solution if I do say so myself. The business owners are pissed and have decide they’re no longer going to pay the state for services that aren’t being delivered. Good on these people. Violent actions against the state seldom succeed because the state specializes in violence. Trying to take on a specialist rarely succeeds unless you are also a specialist. Looking at the riots in Greece, namely the unspecified nature of the rioters’ aggression, allows one to see that the people of Greece are not specialists in the use of violence, they aren’t even capable of targeting the entity that is responsible for the current economic hardships. On the other hand the state can only wield its capacity for violence so long as they can continue paying those it employs as agents. When money is no longer flowing into the state’s coffers they will eventually be unable to pay the military and police, at which point their threats of violence against the people become meaningless as they can’t be backed.

The problem with refusing to pay the state comes in getting a large enough base of taxpayers to sign on; something that can be difficult when the state threatens violence against those who don’t pay the demanded tithe. If these business owners succeed, if they get a large enough percentage of the population refusing to give the state money, they have an opportunity to resist the present austerity measures being imposed upon them. I wish these people luck. The government of Greece violated the coercive contract it foisted upon the populace so there is no argument to be made for the people complying with the government’s demands.

Synthesizing Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine

We all know getting cold medications with the active ingredient pseudoephedrine, like Sudafed, is a huge pain in the ass today but fortune has shined upon us as it is actually an easy to synthesize from N-methylamphetamine [PDF]:

A quick search of several neighborhoods of the United States revealed that while pseudoephedrine is difficult to obtain, N-methylamphetamine can be procured at almost any time on short notice and in quantities sufficient for synthesis of useful amounts of the desired material. Moreover, according to government maintained statistics, Nmethylmphetamine is becoming an increasingly attractive starting material for pseudoephedrine, as the availability of Nmethylmphetamine has remained high while prices have dropped and purity has increased [2]. We present here a convenient series of transformations using reagents which can be found in most well stocked organic chemistry laboratories to produce psuedoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine.

I love irony. A hat tip goes to Uncle for this handy guide.

Kickstarter Demonstrates the Effectiveness of Voluntary Giving

I’m a huge fan of voluntary charity, which is why I like the idea behind Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a service where people can post ideas in need of funding and people can voluntarily donate money to the ideas they like. In essence Kickstarter has established site based on a form of mutual aid and they’re kicking some major ass:

Kickstarter is off to a running start this year. As Alexis Madrigal reported, the crowdfunding platform saw its first two million-dollar projects in one day, within four hours of each other, and a third reached that benchmark this past Monday. Earlier this month, people on the site pledged more than $1.6 million in a 24-hour period, more than doubling the previous record, which had been set the day before. Now, Carl Franzen of Talking Points Memo is putting that cash flow in perspective. He reports that the company is expecting to bring in $150 million in funding total this year — more than the $146 million provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency charged with supporting the arts (many Kickstarter initiatives are art projects of one kind or another).

Instead of using government coercion to take money from people and redistribute it to others Kickstarter simply asks members to donate money to project they want to see happen. Kickstarter’s success demonstrates that people are more than willing to give to causes they support, a fact that many collectivists deny.