It took two weeks in Mexico, away from the daily grind in the US, to gain full consciousness about how insufferable and hateful American culture has become. Here I was in beautiful Mexico, experiencing daily life in both resorts and cities, eating glorious and healthy food, enjoying the lovely hospitality of the people, participating in a vibrant commercial life, seeing how people delight in the daily task of living, growing, making life better each day. I saw smiles everywhere, experienced courtesy and kindness everywhere, thrilled in the happy project of beautifying life through manners, decency, and love.

Then I decided to check out the US news to prepare for my return. What I found was the opposite of what I experienced in Mexico. In the US, to be disgruntled, angry, and nasty is a way of life. Official culture is mean. It is whiney. It is everywhere infused with bitter ideological hectoring. Fake news, fake issues, fake outrage, and fake solutions, all backed by a dogged desire to see no other point of view but one’s own and to turn everyone against everyone else, as if suspicion, propaganda, and hate were the real objectives of life on earth.

Ruskies!

First up comes the fake frenzy over Russia Twitter accounts. We are supposed to believe that they swung the election to Trump and away from Hillary, with the underlying presumption that Hillary had some natural right to win the presidency and therefore something artificial or illicit had to happen to cause Trump’s obviously illegitimate presidency. Further we are supposed to believe the Americans are too stupid and undiscerning to observe that she was a terrible candidate with no plausible theme at all, while meanwhile, despite the details of his program, Trump was the most compelling candidate for president in generations. No, his victory had nothing to do with that. Instead, American voters were mindlessly and robotically following the instructions of Russian bots on Facebook and Twitter.

The attempt by the mainstream press to whip up some kind of Red Scare from the Cold War is manipulative at best, dangerous at worst. What’s more, it’s not working. Not even with every major paper and television program screaming about how the Ruskies are coming does the topic trend on Twitter itself. When was the last time you heard a normal person at the gym or coffee shop buzzing about this whole thing? The number of column inches wasted on this malarky is amazing.

One story I read detailed what it was like to work for a Russian-backed troll farm, cranking out fake news all day, seeking traffic, trying to sway public opinion, and doing it cynically, all for the money. As I read the account, my first thought was that this must be what it is like to be a New York Times reporter. What a grind! Every day you have to post 2,000 words on the Russian meddling story, knowing full well that no one will read it and that it is only a thing at all because some people just can’t come to terms with the fact that the old ruling class lost a presidential election.

Take the Guns!

Next we come to gun control. There was another shooting. This is supposed to be firm proof that government needs to confiscate weapons, guns should not be sold, and that only government should have the firepower to keep the peace. But millions of people see these shootings and plausibly sense that the opposite is true. Gun-free zones have turned students into sitting ducks, vulnerable to the most violent person who manages to gain access to targets.

What we need is protection from maicious people. Gun access provides exactly that. More gun control won’t. What’s more, gun control is going to unleash totalitarian powers by the state to hunt down and confiscate property that is actually daily protecting us in ways that the police state cannot and will not.

But will the mainstream news acknowledge this? Sometimes yes, but mostly not. In the minds of the editors and broadcast journalists, the answer to gun violence is preposterously simple: inflict violence against gun owners. Reading this stuff is infuriating.

Hate Each Other!

Next up are the culture wars in which everyone imagines himself to be suffering at the hands at some group that is not his. There is absolutely no possibility of getting along. What you gain comes at my expense so my job is to play the victim in aggressive ways to shame you into disappearing from public life. The population is sliced and diced according to identity: race, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin, class, physical ability, you name it. There is no end to the way we can be divided.

It is through this lens that the #metoo quickly moved from a promising movement to stamp out petty misogyny in the workplace to become a wicked form of revenge porn in which the accused (of anything!) is quickly body bagged and personally and professionally destroyed, without so much as a second look into possible motivations of the accuser and the evidence of the case. In private, many people are horrified at the way this has developed, and also fully aware of the catastrophic implications for women in professional life.

The reign of terror here threatens to cast all women as ticking time bombs in the workplace, gaining advancement through fear, threats, and legal blackmail. For a supposed feminist movement, this is the most self-defeating path imaginable. Those who object, however, are treated to twitter storms of public denunciation and hate, to the point that debate has been chilled and driven to whispers between trusted friends.

Something everyone else knows is that this campaign isn’t really about stopping assault, abuse, and harassment. It is about using “powerful men” in general as a proxy for what these bitter activists really hate, which is the Trump presidency as a symbol of the “patriarchy” in general. In other words, the driving motivation here has nothing to do with facts and truth but everything to do with fanatical ideology – just as with most parts of American culture today.

The Poison Spreads

The corruption of the human spirit here has infused every part of elite American culture. Everyone is protesting something constantly, and you know it from the clothing you wear, your hairstyle, subtle symbols dropped in hand cues, words, and phrases. It’s low-grade warfare nonstop. What used to be confined to college campuses, a lifestyle practiced by the privileged, underemployed, spoiled, and indebted, has become the default mode of being for an entire upper echelon of society that controls all the legacy cultural institutions in America.

The poison is spreading. It affects most movies, most TV shows, most documentaries, most advertising. Not even football serves as a respite from politicization. Where you stand or sit for a song is supposed to say something about your loyalties and therefore your character and personal morality.

Nor is the opposition press somehow better than the mainstream press. They revel in being “un-PC” as an end itself, with nonstop dog whistling about race and gender simply to troll the left, as if that act alone were accomplishing anything other than adding to the division, hatred, and loathing that characterize the American spirit today.

And so, what to read these days by way of news? The only really sensible stuff remaining is on the business pages, where reporters deal with real stuff like profits and losses, products and innovations, trends and trades. Commercial life is all that is left to us – a true sanctuary from the ghastly corruption of nearly all other sectors of American life.

I’ve always thought of myself as a true-blue American, deeply loyal to the great country where freedom found its fullest expression. I could never have imagined becoming an expat. Too much to miss. Too much glory to leave behind. For the first time, I’m not so sure. On the plane coming home, I find myself dreading the conversations, rolling my eyes at the tales of woe from my compatriots, sickened to be browbeaten daily by the parade of piety by the new Victorians from their perches of power.

To heck with it all. Americans have a lot to learn from Mexicans, a country where no one is in charge. That realization that you should not and cannot rule others is the beginning of wisdom. And serenity. Chill, my friends. Be nice. Find and cherish friendship. Work on strengthening your character, improving your manners, minding your own business, and living well and letting others do the same.

The post American Culture Has Become Unbearably Toxic appeared first on Free the People.

After one year, we are not seeing much in the way of real protectionism (beyond the normal), no real crackdown on weed, no greater centralization of executive power beyond what was there. He faced such a huge backlash on his immigration ban that he is not likely to revisit that issue.

So far as I’m concerned, the genuine achievements under the Trump administration can be summed up in two words: tax cuts and deregulation. It’s really happened, for the first time in decades. I’m not just happy about this. I’m stunned. It’s not what I expected. Neither were major themes of the Trump campaign.

It’s the rebooting of Trumpism, the populist savior of the nation/race to become the deregulator and tax cutter.

To be sure, it is perhaps true that Trump does not deserve the credit, at least not all of it. The Republican-controlled legislature was more than ready, following eight years of Obama’s regulatory and tax creep. Something had to give, especially when considering the slow rate of economic growth, which is the underlying reason for the anger and frustration that gave rise to the populist revolt in the first place.

But this revolt was always unfocused. The end result, after year one, is not, however. As the New York Times summarized:

A year marred by public spats between the president and Republican leaders in Congress was capped off with a rewrite of the tax code that cut corporate tax rates, favored business owners and reduced income tax rates, at least temporarily, for most families. The same law opened Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, a goal sought by Republicans for decades.It also eliminated tax penalties in the Affordable Care Act intended to force most Americans to have health care. Ending the so-called individual mandate was Republicans’ most direct blow to President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement after a year of misses and ineffectual attacks.

For the libertarian observer, this is remarkable and commendable. But the ideological tenor of these achievements is rather different from what might have been predicted. Indeed, looking back to Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address, one would not have expected this year to have a very different ending of this year.

His opening salvo was filled with dark musing about nationalism, trade protection as the basis of prosperity, the need for law and order crackdowns, a call for New-Deal style infrastructure projects, and a hint of populist-fueled centralization.

It was an echo of the beginning of his early campaign, a restatement sans the late-campaign rhetoric about repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes. The inaugural messaging seemed scripted by the Steve Bannon wing of the party and certainly not the libertarian or traditional Republican one. It was not only a new administration, the address implied; it was a new kind of ideological underpinning for the entire Republican party and therefore the country. George W. Bush was in attendance and reportedly had some choice words about the sheer weirdness of the scene.

Trump proclaimed:

We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every breath in my body – and I will never, ever let you down…. We will follow two simple rules: Buy American and Hire American.

The entire speech had chilling echoes of interwar revanchism. Where is that agenda now? I’m not seeing any serious movement in the direction of real trade protectionism beyond the pulling out from trade agreements. And despite what you heard, leaving TPP doesn’t necessarily imply a new “fortress America” policy. As for immigration, US policy has been an amazing mess long before Trump, and certainly a no-Muslims policy doesn’t really count as much of an achievement.

Once the dust of this year settles, Trump can claim a huge legislative victory in much-welcome tax relief. Deregulation of many sectors is proceeding a quick pace, with the repeal of “net neutrality” at the top of the list, but including specific reductions in red tape in energy, environment, and labor. The ethos of what has actually been accomplished is not buy and hire American; it is more from the Reagan era: get government off our backs. In this respect, there has been notable progress.

Not surprisingly, the economy is growing again (on paper in any case). The unemployment rate is low. Corporate profits have hit a record. Price increases are negligible. Consumer confidence is high. We’ve got a very long way to go to get American incomes rising again, but this is a start. Certainly the opposite policy of pillage and regulate wasn’t working. All the American business sector really needed was some relief from decades of tightened controls.

This is a reminder: nearly everyone underestimates the power of enterprise to act today on the anticipation of a brighter future. Enterprise is clever, resourceful, creative, forever outwitting every attempt to control and direct it. It survives and thrives despite government’s attempted regimentation. When political leadership takes just a few steps to loosen its grip, it’s celebration all around.

Will it continue? Let us hope. And despite what you read in the mainstream press about how “unpopular” all of these legislative and executive initiatives are, there is nothing unpopular about renewed prosperity. It’s been so long since Americans have experienced real economic growth and real increases in income, it’s going to feel very good.

Now a final word on Donald Trump himself. It is perhaps true that in my commentary since 2015, I took his populist/nationalist language too seriously. If his most dominant trait is flexibility in policy so he can claim something or anything as an achievement, this is all to the good. He has proven to be a master of marketing. Maybe he has figured out that less government is more saleable than more.

In many ways, all these trends do indeed look like a new American greatness. It is just taking a different form from that which had been variously promised or expected. It’s not about closing borders, restoring law and order, or centralizing executive power. It’s about giving freedom a chance. Lord knows that nothing else has worked.

A version of this piece ran at the American Institute for Economic Research

The post How and Why Trumpism Rebooted Itself appeared first on Free the People.

There is a reason that Bitcoin is being called Digital Gold. This is all just silly. We know how to make money: you print it. It’s far cheaper to print than mine. A paper standard will save a tremendous amount of resources that can go to other purposes.

There is a plausibility to the claim. We do know how to make money substitutes that appear to work just as well as what we used to call money. The costs of mining operations are huge and discovering new deposits has to be funded. It involves speculation and drains financial and time resources, all to find the thing we already know how to make (more or less) with paper and ink.

Keynes Contra Gold

J.M. Keynes agreed. He wrote a monograph in 1923 (“A Tract on Monetary Reform”) that condemned governments for depreciating currency, warned of monetary instability after the war, and then…dropped a bomb at the close of the book. He said that the gold standard is too inflexible for modern times. It has to go. Indeed it is a “barbarous relic” should be replaced by a money wholly managed by the central bank.

Thousands of economists for decades followed Keynes’s view, each of which imagines himself to be the central bank chief, ready to impose his own vision of what monetary power can accomplish.

Gold belongs to the past, not to an age of scientific central planning, or so went the refrain. The old-fashioned gold standard, with its limits and discipline and self-managing logic, just has to be destroyed. And so it was, for many decades, until 1974 when all that was left of it was demolished.

Digital Gold

There is a reason that Bitcoin is being called Digital Gold. It was structured to operate the same way as the classical gold standard minus the sponsorship of government. It requires no centralized management. You have to expend resources to become the first owner of the initial resource. There is a finite supply of the specie payment. Payments are finally settled when made. Bitcoin is the gold standard ported over to the digital age.

In gold mining, as the price of the metal rises, the inspiration for finding and mining more deposits rises, along with the profits of the mining industry itself. It is just the same in Bitcoin. During the mad runup in price of 2017, miner revenue has gone through the roof. This sadly means that transaction fees are way up too and hence the growing popularity of alternative crypocurrencies.

Now we are seeing the same argument against the gold Standard used against Bitcoin. It is said to be wasting massive energy. “The amount of energy used by computers ‘mining’ bitcoin so far this year is greater than the annual usage of almost 160 countries,” says the Business Insider.

Salon rails against the trend:

Here is a chart from the United States alone.

Map Courtesy of Crescent Electric

At current prices, mining is worth it, perhaps not for individuals but for whole mining pools. But what about the social and environmental costs?

Worth the Cost

To search for an answer, let’s revisit the case of the costs of gold standard. In 1983, Roger Garrison wrote an article on the topic. He points out that all costs are really opportunity costs: the thing you gave up in order to get what you have. The gold standard is rightly contrasted with the paper standard that replaced it. What are the costs of the paper standard? This is the fair question if we are going to assess whether the gold standard is somehow worth it.

Moreover:

So the costs of the paper standard include the inflation risk, political opportunism, the explosion of government debt, the vast expansion of government power, the building of cartelized money and financial institutions, the politicization of money, the destruction of savings and investment (in light of zero-percent interest rates) and the rise of endless boom-bust cycles.

The experience with Bitcoin underscores other costs. Bitcoin works on a trustless basis that ideally requires no established credit or identity. That makes Bitcoin far more inclusive of unbanked populations. There is zero chance for identity fraud. There is no chance of someone acting like you to spend your money. To prevent this for national money and existing payment systems, the banking industry spends as much as $11 billion, which is five cents on every one hundred dollars spent.

Payment Systems

Even then, it’s a disaster for your personal finances. You spend your money in an unusual way, you are nearly guaranteed to get a pushback from your credit card company. Even then, every few years, your cards are declared stolen and you have to get a new one and change the numbers on every online merchant website. If you have done this for 10 or 15 years, there is a huge paper trail of defunct credit cards on your websites.

Mining Bitcoin is costly is not some arbitrary imposition. In addition to payment-systems problems, there are the problems of the nationalized money system, which is so loose and confusing that no one knows for sure if we are in a boom or a bust or something in between or both. The uncertainty of Fed policy has reached epic proportions, and makes the confidence expressed by Keynes seem laughable in retrospect.

Also, that mining Bitcoin is costly is not some arbitrary imposition. It’s a fallacy to believe that the electrical costs are a waste. There is work to do to confirm transactions and operate the protocol. This will be true until someone can come up with some other system.

Put it all together, the gargantuan costs of the nationalized paper-money system, and compare it to the updated version of the gold standard, which is cryptocurrency, and the costs of mining Bitcoin don’t seem so high after all. The acquisition of any resource worth having involves a cost. Paper money is nearly costless to produce, and has destroyed so much for so many centuries. All the complaints about the costs of Bitcoin mining should be considered in that light.

This article originally appeared on Vellum Capital.

The post Bitcoin Mining Is Costly, Just Like Gold Mining appeared first on Free the People.

“The alt-right is looking to expand its ranks,” declares Salon, “and prominent leaders of the notorious white supremacist movement apparently believe that leftists are an ideal target for their recruiting efforts.” This follows a huge investigative piece that appeared in The Nation, in which a reporter from the publication attended a number of alt-right events, where leftist ideas are newly fashionable.

Salon then warns leftists not to fall for it:

There is truth in that statement. Anti-semitism and racism have been a core part of the attacks on the market for centuries, which raises some interesting questions about the anti-market left itself.

The Salon claim also understates the full-on anti-liberalism of alt-right ideology, a topic that forms the thesis of my book on the topic. Indeed, in its origins, this outlook was formed in opposition to the world-transforming power of markets. It is rooted in resentment of the expansion of liberty and prosperity of the early 19th century, and the fear that capitalism would break down old hierarchies, traditional attachments, and national borders. The revolt they favored was always a revolt against the market.

Trolling the Left

It’s true that in modern times, in the United States, this gang gained public attention by first attempting to pass themselves off as libertarians, hanging out at meet ups, conferences, and taking over subreddits. It worked for a while, given the libertarian commitment to free association and free speech. But then people got wise to the game. Over the last year, many leaders within the libertarian community have doubled down on an effort to preserve the integrity of libertarian ideas and make sure they were not compromised by this gang.

Libertarianism then became a low performer for recruitment. That’s when the shift became apparent. The new language of the alt-right is all about denouncing corporate capitalism for failing to do its bidding. They say that capitalism is too politically correct, is excluding them from social media, is declining to let them use financial tools to raise money, and is generally promoting their enemies in cooperation with the media.

The left often accuses capitalism of doing things for which it is not actually guilty, such as excluding the poor, exploiting workers, ravaging the earth, and so on. The alt-right, however, is mostly attacking capitalism for things that corporations are, in fact, doing and doing well. These people are not popular people, and their views have proven poisonous for venues like Twitter and Facebook, and are banned not for PC reasons, but simply because they reduce the value of the platforms.

In other ways, however, the market – which is no respecter of persons or ideologies – has been a great friend to the alt-right. Amazon sells their books. Their podcasts are hosted by capitalist firms. Their publishing venues are based on the profit-and-loss model. The market has done the same for red and green ideologies too. The market is a tool for everyone without exception.

Tribal Barriers

It’s also true that the market has always provided a main impetus for breaking down tribal barriers. It thinks in terms of individual rights because it is designed to appeal to individual minds. If your goal is the promotion of group solidarity and exclusion, it is not a good tool. Its watchwords are inclusion and empowerment of everyone. It was the gradual liberalization of markets and the technology and universalist values that came with it that ended slavery, promoted minority and women’s rights, and created this thing we call the middle class.

It makes perfect sense, then, that the alt-right would reveal itself to be anti-liberal not just in politics, but also in economics. In fact, it should make the left uncomfortable that the alt-right feels at home with the economic ideas of socialists, and not for the first time. What has always united the Hegelians of the right and left has been their shared opposition to the free society. The details of the critique and proposed alternatives are different depending on the tribe, but that economic freedom itself is the target of both is nothing new.

Recall that in its early days, the Nazi party called merely for boycotts of Jewish businesses, and even instructed party members to use no physical violence. This was April 1, 1933. The hope was that this would inspire a nation to cause bankruptcy to the Jews and drive them out of the country. It didn’t work. People continued to deal with Jewish doctors, grocers, and intellectuals. The next step was absolutely necessary: the Nazis abolished the market itself with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. History has shown us that if any tribe seeks to control the market, they will have to abolish it first.

The Blending of Left and Right

The alt-right’s turn toward overt anti-capitalism is neither surprising nor new nor counterintuitive. The revolving door between the left and the right has been going around for two centuries. People like John Ruskin or Thomas Carlyle might have been non-Marxists and conservatives in every respect, but they targeted the market as the most feared enemy of their agenda for social and economic control. The Progressives too, split between their right and left branches, each anxious to use the state to stop the market drive that spreads the benefits of prosperity to all people.

The strange way in which the far left and right are bound up with each other has been noted by consistent liberals for a long time. Their membership is fluid, wrote Max Eastman in 1956, observing that “every judgment and choice, every trait and mode of behavior, that once had given meaning to the word ‘Right’ is now supported and approved by those whom all agree in calling ‘Left’ or ‘Leftist.’”

Equally, there have been periods in history when what used to be called left was suddenly called right, as illustrated in the magically adaptive mind of Werner Sombart, who easily made the journey from Communist to Nazi.

In the much-truncated and cartoonish remake in the presidential election of 2016, many observers noted the odd way in which it was difficult to distinguish the platforms of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump: anti-trade, pro-“worker”, promising universal health coverage, and generally railing against globalism and capitalist financial power. That they hated each other was not a surprise. This fits the narrative of history in which political tribes save their most vituperative attacks for those closest to them in outlook.

(Fortunately for the American people, the winner of that election has come to discover that deregulation and tax cuts are more popular among the public than protectionism and executive centralization.)

The alt-right’s turn toward overt anti-capitalism is neither surprising nor new nor counterintuitive. It doesn’t just stem from anti-Semitism, even if that is a seemingly inevitable part of it. Collectivism of all sorts and every form stands opposed to economic liberty. Just give it time: all types of collectivism end up sounding more or less like each other.

This article originally appeared on FEE.

The post Of Course the Alt-Right Is Against Capitalism appeared first on Free the People.

If we did not learn to dominate nature, our existence on earth would be short-lived or constantly threatened by beasts, pests, and weather. What happened to the candle? Hang around any holiday party now and you will find out. They are back in a big way. It’s not just for religious services and dining tables anymore. You see them everywhere. I was at a gathering last night in a pretty posh home where there must have been 100 candles burning, on every shelf, table, and window. It was glorious. It gave all rooms a luxurious glow, and it elicited from us some deep nostalgia, a sense that we are connecting with the past.

Primitive but Meaningful

And it’s not just holidays. Candles have become a weirdly huge part of our lives. We burn them all the time and for any excuse we can think of. What is this about? Maybe it’s about celebrating one of the first great inventions in history: fire.

If we did not learn to dominate nature, our existence on earth would be short-lived or constantly threatened by beasts, pests, and weather. Humans are physically weak compared with other animals – which is why a safari is truly terrifying – but we do have one great asset: our minds. It is this we used to control fire. We can never stop being reminded of this great achievement. Perhaps this is why a controlled fire makes us feel safe and secure, and points to a meaningful life.

Poets and philosophers have pointed to fire as the metaphor for creative thought. When humankind learn how to create and control fire, we could sterilize food and make it taste better. We could stay warm in winter. We could light up the dark. We learn to make fires to create a sense of community.

The theme of fire was central to the earliest religions. It was a symbol of our survival and capacity for making progress happen through human ingenuity. Poets and philosophers have pointed to fire as the metaphor for creative thought. It is fire in the mind. The fire of invention. The fire of romance. The fire of art.

There is pure delight in capturing that fire from the gods, controlling it to the point that it lives on a small wick and burns in a stable shape while a glass or tin container reliably protects us from its terrors. It’s a symbol of what human hands can do: capture and control nature, even something as potentially ruinous as fire, and make it our servant instead.

And think of the fireplace and its popularity in our homes. They are no longer necessary. It’s been nearly a century since we’ve had other ways to heat our homes. And yet we still want fireplaces. We want them in all our rooms, even hotel rooms, even if we don’t use them. We even put pictures of fire in our fireplaces, just to impart the psychological sense of warmth. The romance is still there after all these years.

The Scented Candle

I was asked to bring a gift to a party last week and got me thinking about something that everyone wants besides single malt scotch, something that is affordable. Part of the rule was that you couldn’t spend more than $10. I knew the answer: a scented candle. Everyone loves them!

But try to find one for under $10. It’s not easy. I finally did. I bought an extra one for myself. Now I know why it was discounted. It didn’t smell that great. If you want one that smells like cedar, pie, or cookies baking, you are going to pay more for a candle of any substantive size.

Of course you could go all in for a lime/basil/mandarin candle for $350. From there, you can go lower with many options from $200, $100, $50, or flip the site flow from lowest to highest and discover that there are essentially no bargains to be had at all. You are going to be out $18 for a scented candle of a decent size, and there is nothing you can do about it.

No consumer is willing to spend solely out of sympathy for the plight of the seller. This is all a bit shocking given how much we’ve come to expect lower and lower prices on everything not controlled by government. There are bargains everywhere (shoes, food, software, everything) thanks to the advent of digital commerce and rivalrous competition for product and price. Not so with candles.

Price Dictates Cost

The candle market is highly competitive. Why aren’t prices falling lower and lower? The first and most common explanation is that these candles cost a lot to make and therefore those costs are passed on to the consumer. But this is a fallacy. Cost does not determine price, else paperclips (which require an amazing amount of capital input to make) would be $1,000 a piece, and a Renaissance masterwork painting (the costs long ago borne and the painter long dead) would be a few bucks.

The Candle Makers Petition was not necessary after all. In a rivalrous market, the causation runs in the reverse. People are willing to pay a certain price for a product. This is a signal to producers how much they can invest and spend in order to create it. If the demand isn’t there, the product isn’t produced at all. No consumer is willing to spend out of sympathy for the plight of the seller. We buy only if and to the extent that we expect to benefit relative to what we shell out. Final price, then, determine the costs that producers are willing to bear in order to bring the product to market.

All of which is to say: you are paying for that candle because you want it. It is the right price insofar as the exchange takes place. If the consuming public suddenly decided that scented candles aren’t a thing, the leftover inventory will be dumped hard and fast, and you will be able to find candles for the same price as a fast-food burger. Or perhaps as the competitive process rolls forward, we’ll see prices bid lower and lower by new entrants to the market.

I want those days to come soon.

The Candle Bubble

In the meantime, I admit it, I’m willing to pay the price in the midst of this candle bubble. Just gotta have them. It’s irrational by any standard. But there is something about watching that contained fire, and smelling the crazy smell, that thrills me, and, apparently, you too.

I don’t want to read by it. I don’t want to depend on it. I prefer my switches and bulbs for practicality. But here we are today: we consume prehistoric achievements of the human mind as a luxury good. And we are willing to pay way too much to do so.

That Candle Makers Petition was not necessary after all.

This article originally appeared on FEE.

The post Why Are Scented Candles So Darn Expensive? appeared first on Free the People.

Kai Weiss: Let’s start off with an easy question. What was the purpose of writing this book? Why was it important right now to take a closer look at the right-collectivist movement?

Jeffrey Tucker: Right collectivism is on the rise around the world, both in Europe and the US – and in Latin America, as a response to the perceived weakness of the far-left. What people do not understand is that right-wing collectivism is, in fact, a coherent ideology. It’s not just purely reactive, it’s not just anti-leftist. It is for something, and – I think very crucially and critically – it’s anti-liberal. And many people do not understand this. What happens typically is that you get well-meaning people who decide they don’t like left-wing socialism, and they are looking around for movements that they can join to oppose them. And some of them might have libertarian impulses, or they might just simply want freedom. They don’t understand what they are getting involved with these right-fascist movements that have a deep and rich anti-liberal agenda that dates all the way back to the early 19th century.

The purpose in writing the book was to discuss this alternative tradition of statism. It’s another way to control people, it’s another cultural model for managing society from the top-down. That’s what we are talking about. The reason my book makes a contribution is that there has not been much talk about this in many decades – especially for Americans this is the new kid on the block. And people are so naïve, they don’t even recognize it when it’s staring them in the face. They don’t understand it. And I know this to be true, because within the last several years I have been at gatherings of libertarians for example, and had a speaker stand up, and advocate that magical combination of views: anti-immigrant, anti-trade – or mercantilist protectionist, in favor of strongman, top-down management of society, a worship of police, a despising of the free press, and a putting down of intellectuals.

That’s the rough outlines of the ideology, all these points, all combined into one speaker. And people can go sit there, and think: “Oh that is a fascinating view.” They are completely oblivious about what this could actually mean, and where it actually comes from. So the purpose of my book was really to trace out a family tree of the rise of what I call right-wing collectivism, but I think is more accurately called right-Hegelianism.

What distinguishes right-collectivism from other sorts of collectivism? In which way is it different?

That is a classical right-Hegelian view: the end of history is with the nation-state. Right-collectivism is different from left-collectivism because right-collectivism throws out the parts of socialism that the bourgeoisie tends to despise the most. One of the things that annoys the middle class and the bourgeoisie about left-socialism is that it tends to be against religion, it tends to be suspicious of family, and it tends to want to take people’s property in various forms of regulation, taxation, and so on. Right-collectivism or right-Hegelianism is very happy to give you your religion, your family, and your property so long as all these institutions serve the nation-state. The nation-state becomes really the central unit of right-Hegelianism, it becomes the focus, really the end of history, “the source of happiness” – which actually is a quote by Donald Trump.

That is a classical right-Hegelian view: the end of history is with the nation-state. The people organize according to nationhood and dictated to by a great leader. All of this has a history: This concept of nationhood by itself deserves to be unpacked because we don’t really know what that means anymore. In particular libertarians and liberals cannot discuss this topic of nationhood with any kind of intelligence or coherence – which is another reason I wrote my book: to help people who are opposed to despotism, to tyranny, in favor of freedom, think and talk about important topics like nationhood in a way it’s coherent.

Would you say that nationhood is inherently evil, or can it also have positive manifestations?

There are five bad ways to conceive of nationhood and one good way. The five bad ways are race, religion, language, geography, and dynasty – like a shared dynastic, a hierarchy or something like this. Those are the five bad ways because all of these ways conceived as nationhood are potentially coercive to you – whether you want to exit or enter, there will be conditions.

If you don’t speak the language, you’re excluded. If you do speak the language, you are included – you may not want to be included, by the way, but you will be included. And this is true for religion, for race, for geography, for dynasty, and for language. All five of these are coercive in an inclusionary way and coercive in an exclusionary way. So when people talk about the nation, you really need to stop them, and say: “Hold on, do you mean race, language, religion, geography, or dynasty?” And chances are that they will be a little shocked and go “a little of both, a little of all of those things.”

A liberal view of society permits people to have a wandering sense of nationhood. But wait a minute, you can’t just be a little of all those things. But the fact that I’m a white Catholic with a dynastic history which traces back 300 years in this country, and I live in this country, does that require anything of me in your vision of nationhood? Am I allowed the right to exit? Either intellectually or physically? These are the critical questions, and if you get this wrong, you are potentially erecting something like a prison state.

So what is the one way which nationhood makes sense? I think we have to go back to a brilliant lecture from 1882, by Ernest Renan, a French historian, who gave at the end of the liberal era the best summary of what nationhood is, and it really comes down to an affair of the heart: Where are your affections? What do you love the most in life? What association, what group-based association seems to elicit the best in you, the things that you love?

In that sense, I can be an American, and feel pride in my country, and in my Americanness. Or, I might read a book about Portugal, and fall in love with it, and consider Portugal my nation. There is nothing wrong with that. A liberal view of society permits people to have a wandering sense of nationhood. It doesn’t forbid attachments, but it asks that your attachment extends from the heart and never be coerced by others. In that sense, we can legitimately talk about nationhood, but it’s a very tricky topic, and I’m highly suspicious of people who are constantly throwing out this weird nationhood, and talking about national identity – the nation as the source of our happiness, without ever being willing to explain to us what precisely they mean by that.

When it comes to religion as an aspect of nationhood, there’s an interesting book by Rod Dreher from The American Conservative called The Benedict Option, who doesn’t necessarily advocate for building a Christian nation, but he basically says that all Christians should come together, collaborate, and retreat from society.

Full retreat might work for monastic life, but it can’t for an enterprising life in commercial society. Rod Dreher has turned against liberalism, and how that manifests itself is a little bit random. And one of the reasons why I wrote my book is to warn people that if you are against liberalism, you might be trending in a left-Hegelian or right-Hegelian direction – and I think he’s trending in a right-Hegelian direction, even though he doesn’t know it. This idea of a Christian nation, of course, is true, but you know, Rod Dreher I think identifies himself as being Eastern Orthodox. There are many Christians in this country that do not regard this as Christianity. I think he was raised a Roman Catholic. There are many Christians in this country who wanted to exclude Roman Catholics from immigrating into this country because they did not believe they were Christians. So Christianity is a big, big category that extends all the way from the Quakers of Pennsylvania to the Russian Orthodox of Belarus. And if you look at the two groups, they virtually have nothing in common, so Christianity is not the basis of a group identity, and it certainly cannot be the basis of nationhood.

As for retreating, on a practical level, that can be non-destructive and even valuable, insofar as it means taking greater control of your domain and bearing full responsibility rather than outsourcing that to the civic culture. Dreher’s sense of the corruption of our times is too despairing for my tastes. He goes way too far to inspire his desired end of complete civic detachment. I wish he could be more precise to say: the political sector is corrupt to the bone but the rest of civic culture contains vast health and vibrancy. How can you start a business, have a successful career, or live a good and full life if you are completely detached from the source of life in society? Full retreat might work for monastic life, but it can’t for an enterprising life in commercial society.

Right-wing “populist” Viktor Orbán, for example, often talks about his goal of retaining “cultural homogeneity” in Hungary. Let’s say you are a Catholic, isn’t it in a way natural to want to be, to live with other, “like-minded” Christian people, or is that a falsehood where you go down the road to collectivist thought?

No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that – I generally do not. That’s the reason we have Churches, that’s why we have Sunday. And you can look at other traditions like the Hasidic Jews that tried to extend their sense of identity to pervade many aspects of life: who you marry, the ceremonies, your education, and so on. And sometimes these actually can become very coercive.

It turns out that in a market economy, there is a strong economic reason for continuing integration. On the other hand, if you enter into them voluntarily, I don’t see a problem with that. Group identity of that sort is not necessarily bigoted. However, I think it’s important to remember that in order for groups like that to thrive and do well, they have to be relatively small, and they generally have to live within the context of a liberal society, which can, in fact, tolerate smaller cells of homogenous identity, so that’s one point –and that’s fine.

But the second point is this: within a market society, there is a constant tendency towards integration, ever more mixing of groups. You cannot stop it because talents are widely dispersed. There have been politicians in the past that tried to become homogenous on their own choosing. The earliest origins of the Nazi party, of National Socialism in Germany, was “Do not hurt the Jews, use no acts of violence, but just stop doing business with them.” This is 1932. That did not work of course. Because if you want better vegetables, you will go to the Jewish grocery. You need a heart surgery, you are going to go to the Jewish doctor, and so on.

It turns out that in a market economy, there is a strong economic reason for continuing integration. There may be people who you despise, but actually, you find value in them in terms of voluntary exchange. The Nuremberg laws were passed as an emergency measure because you could not get people to become homogenous voluntarily. You have to do something to force them to become that way. So when I hear about people longing for homogeneity, the question is, let’s say I have a preference every once in a while for being heterogeneous. What will you do about it? That’s the question.

There is one very interesting theory that conservatives and leftists each like in their own way, and I would love to hear your opinion on it. It is by David Goodhart, a British journalist, and his theory is that you get the populism that you are seeing right now because there are two different kinds of people: there are “somewheres,” and there are “anywheres” in society. The “anywheres” are cosmopolitan, urbanized people who just want to live and travel around the world and don’t have any attachment to a group identity, while the “somewheres” are the people who do have some sort of group identity, want to keep their roots, and they want to live with “their” people. And because the “anywheres” are mostly in power, and – from the point of the “somewheres” – are dictating the lives of all others, there’s this backlash. Is that a comprehensible theory, or what do you think is the reason for the rise of populism?

I don’t think it’s completely comprehensible, and it sets up a very interesting irony actually, because there is no doubt that the rise of heterogeneity into a country that is unprepared for will create a backlash, and that backlash itself will become the major threat to liberty in that country. This is the great irony of all this: The problem is not the immigrants, the problem is the response to the immigrants. We have seen this again and again. F.A. Hayek actually writes that the rise of the Nazis was fueled in part by the growing heterogeneity of Jewish immigration itself, that it’s one thing to have Jews from Germany and from Poland, but when Russian Jews are bringing in new kinds of cultures, that gives rise to a totally unjustified, but populist resentment, which then becomes the source of authoritarianism and intolerance.

Populism is only a problem when expressed politically. It’s for this reason actually that F.A. Hayek himself was cautious about Muslim immigration to Great Britain, and spoke out with some concern about this – not because there was anything wrong with Islam, or that Islam can’t be integrated into British society. That’s not what he said. What he was concerned about was that their presence could be used as a kind of excuse for authoritarian crackdowns, for unscrupulous politicians to feed people’s irrational fears to create a kind of despotic response. To me, that’s a very interesting fact.

But here is what I think is wrong with that observation: a lot of times you don’t even need immigration to cause this paranoia. Just as an example, before Trump was talking about the problem of Mexican immigration into the US, all the polls showed a great deal of pro-immigrant sentiment in this country – and immigration had been declining for many years. If the US ever had an immigration “problem,” it would have been 30 years ago – it wasn’t three years ago. So Donald Trump was able to manufacture a kind of panic out of nothing, just by tapping into people’s fears.

He kept saying: “We’ve got a problem, we’ve got a problem, we’ve got a problem,” and people listened to this and go: “Well, I didn’t know we had a problem, but he says we have a problem. I guess we have a problem.” And there’s a very base element to the human mind – and this is why all the right-Hegelian fascists have been very successful – that we fall back to thinking of personal identity. “Who am I? I am Christian, I speak English, I’m white, I’m male, I was born in Texas,” and so on. When we get lost and confused, then we begin to think our primary value is really biological and historical – and this is where populism becomes a very serious danger.

I don’t think, by the way, that populism would be a danger at all if we had a free society. If populism expressed itself in the form of people buying lots of junk food, binging lots of Netflix, and buying stupid things from Walmart all the time, I don’t mind that kind of populism – that’s peaceful, that’s beautiful. Maybe I don’t like your taste of music, I maybe think your food is terrible, but it’s fine by me. Populism is only a problem when expressed politically.

Would you say that all the right-wing “populist” movements that are gaining steam around the world are more or less fascist – or at the very least problematic, or are there also movements where you see some positives?

It’s very difficult to speak about that because I can’t know the specifics of for example the case in Austria, or the case in Germany – it’s very difficult for an outsider to look at these kinds of movements. The older I’ve gotten the less I trust my political instincts on other people’s countries because it can be very complicated. But I will tell you about the US’ case: Donald Trump has done some terrible things. He’s also done some very good things. They are happening at the same time.

Let us be free to choose and associate and speak – live how we want to. Just as an example:  last week, his head of the Federal Communications Commission rejected net neutrality, which was a kind of price control over the use of internet, so it was a deregulation measure. The same week his Justice Department refused a merger between Time Warner and AT&T because Time Warner is the owner of CNN – he doesn’t like CNN, and he tries to punish a media that he doesn’t like, which is really an attack on free speech in the name of anti-trust. So one is good, one is terrible.

It’s a mix of things, and I think as liberals we need to be principled. We need to look at these cases and call them on a case-by-case basis. If a fascist regime cuts taxes and deregulates industry, we should say: “That’s good.” But if that same regime keeps out immigrants, sets up trade barriers, centralizes executive power, and unleashes the cops on drug users, we should say: “This is evil and it must be stopped.”

My main concern is that as an intellectual we need to be constantly celebrating the free society and constantly celebrating liberalism as an alternative to the despotism of the left and the despotism of the right – and I genuinely believe that our position is a third way, by just saying that society is better off left alone. Let us be free to choose and associate and speak – live how we want to. We won’t create a perfect world. But it will be the best possible world we can have. And most importantly: the liberal solution is the one that’s most compatible with human rights and human dignity. That’s the message to me that we constantly have to hammer home, and it’s a message we should never get tired of delivering. Because liberalism is what gave birth to civilization as we know it, and we must protect and guard it and treasure and fight for it if we want to keep it – because it’s constantly under threat from both sides, the left and the right.

On the history of right-collectivism, you wrote that Hegel is the start with the release of his book Elements of the Philosophy of Right in 1820. In which way has Hegel influenced collectivism – obviously communism – but how did he influence the right collectivists?

There was at the time he wrote the book and he became such a powerful philosophical voice in Germany lots of confusion about what was happening to the world – liberalism had already been unleashed, a new middle class was being created, dynasties were being overthrown, people had new kinds of mobility, families were being defused, because people had new choices and options, and the dynasties and hierarchies of history were giving way to new forms of social engagements, new forms of enterprise, and new levels of mobility. And there was a great deal of concern by 1820-or-so, where we are heading. Everyone had a sense that we are heading somewhere, there was a sense of a new direction to history, and Hegel stepped forward and tried to define how that looked like. He created a sort of historiographical map of the way history works. And it just so happens that his map was independent of human action and human choice.

The left-Hegelians culminated in Marx, the right-Hegelians culminated in Hitler. It was as if he created a meta-narrative for how we might imagine our place within the structure of this bigger thing called the wave of history. And in his vision – and all Hegelians think that there’s some kind of wind blowing in the structure of history, we are just carried along by it. That’s an appealing idea for people who don’t like the idea of just freedom, just life unfolding according to human choice. They want to believe that there’s some kind of logic, some sort of grand vision at work. And in his vision there’s a culmination point of history – because history can’t have a direction unless it has an endpoint, and so the endpoint in the Hegelian point of view was – and it’s always this way – “All powers to the Prussian state, the Prussian Church” – that’s it. Because somehow the state always ends up being this magical thing that people think is going to solve all our problems. The left-Hegelians took his vision further and said: “Well, this is right, there is a direction to history. But it’s not just in Prussia, it’s all over the world, it’s humanity itself that’s being buffeted by these giant winds.”

Mises was the one that alerted me to this. You know, sometimes a great intellectual like Mises says something and it changes your whole outlook. In a lecture in 1956, just in passing, he said the Hegelians split into two factions: the right-Hegelians and the left-Hegelians. The left-Hegelians culminated in Marx, the right-Hegelians culminated in Hitler. This is a passing comment he made, and it was the most fruitful observation I’ve ever heard, because it helped me reconstruct these ideological tendencies, and this is what led to my book.

Do you think that there’s any kind of direction that history has?

I think liberalism itself had this tendency in the late 19th century: the liberals all believed there was some kind of inevitability to the idea of progress. That now that we have discovered the key to peace and prosperity, humanity will never go back. And they were wrong. They were just wrong. And I think we need to be cautious about this, my friend, I really do. History really is built by the choices we make. And we can make very bad choices, and we can make very good choices, and I think that that is the proper conception of the molecules of history. It really comes down to the choices we make, and I think that is the correct liberal view.

What I was quite shocked about was that in one chapter you were quite vicious on T.S. Eliot, who is mostly seen as a conservative. Russell Kirk, for example, traced the history of conservatism in his The Conservative Mind “From Burke to Eliot”. Could you elaborate on how T.S. Eliot fits into right-collectivist thought?

Yes, but one quick comment on Russell Kirk, and if somebody reads this and wants to correct me on it they are welcome to, but I’m almost certain that I’m correct about this: this was a later edition of the book. T.S. Eliot was added to later editions, but F.A. Hayek was included in earlier editions and was excluded later.

So I knew Russell, he had dinner at my house several times, he was a friend. He trended anti-liberal as the years went on. And when he first wrote that book in 1954 he did not think of conservatism as being anti-liberal, he thought of himself as a Burkian – certainly, Burke is part of a liberal school of thought. As time went on he ever more tried to distinguish his writing of conservatism from classical liberalism, which I think is very regrettable.

You know exactly where these guys are going. If you think Eliot is a liberal you only need to read Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. T.S. Eliot has a top-down view of what society should look like, and how it should operate – like a snobbery, an elitism that overcame his liberal impulses if he ever had any – I don’t think he ever did actually – but he celebrated elites, hierarchies, a kind of trickle-down theory of cultural enlightenment, and it would not surprise you at all to see him putting down and disparaging the products of capitalism, which in fact is what his most famous poem The Waste Land is all about. It’s about mass consumer culture, which is capitalism – so give me a break. And it will not also surprise you, given the time in which he was writing, that he was highly sympathetic to eugenics, and wrote in favor of it, and worried about the decline of the race by being mixed with inferior peoples. It all follows.

You do enough research in this area, you don’t overly get surprised; you know exactly where these guys are going. It might start with some snobbery, that leads to a kind of elitism, a celebration of the king, and “Blood and Soil,” and then, of course, goes on to pseudo-science that celebrates eugenics and resents capitalism – and I’m sorry to say, but this is T.S. Eliot. And you could probably describe what I wrote as being “vicious,” but believe me, I was toning it down. Because I’m telling you, Mr. Eliot is not from Great Britain. He was from St. Louis. He’s an American. He emigrated to this other country, and put on a costume of some British aristocrat and dedicated the rest of his literary service on behalf of a tradition that wasn’t even his. I smell a rat in this guy’s work, and I very much resent it actually, and I’ve lived with it for far too long.

It’s funny that you mention it because I was describing in a casual conversation with a friend all about T.S. Eliot and I went on this tirade similar to what I’m saying to you now – and she said to me: “Wow, what did he ever do to you?” And I said: “Oh, I’m sorry, he died not long after I was born.” She said: “Oh, I thought … It seems so personal for you.”

You have both in conservatism or even liberal conservatism – I’m thinking of Röpke, Nisbet, Jefferson, and so forth, this kind of advocacy for natural authority, a natural elite so to say, which develops in society. Is that in and of itself bad?

The best solution is just to embrace the liberal tradition. It is not, and I try to make this very clear in the book: that when I talk about right-Hegelianism or right-wing collectivism, I’m really not talking about conservatism. Certainly not talking about Tory-, Burkian-style conservatism – I’m not even talking about traditionalism as such, like the Joseph de Maistre-variety, I’m not even talking about religious fundamentalism as such. I am really talking about an ideological apparatus that detaches the motion of history from choices from individuals themselves. It’s a pure ideology, and I don’t think conservatism in that classic British sense, or even in the classic European sense, is necessarily ideological. It’s a kind of impulse, a preference, a caste of mind, an affection. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things, and I really do want to separate out that classical form of conservatism from what I’m talking about.

Though what I would say if you want to immunize yourself completely and fully and wholly from right-Hegelianism, the best solution is just to embrace the liberal tradition, which I have a very broad definition of what that is, and basically extends from St. Thomas Aquinas all the way up to Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard – so I think it’s a big tradition. And it’s not complicated, it just says that society is best off when people are permitted to say what they want, to do what they want, to believe what they want, trade with whom they want, so long as they don’t hurt anybody else. That’s it. That’s why I think the core of the liberal claim is that we should resist trying to manage the social order towards any particular end other than freedom. To me, that’s the core of the liberal claim. If you believe that, then I want you on my team.

There’s a bit of confusion – or at least I have a problem with – seeing right-collectivism on the “right,” and also when I’m thinking about “right” I’m thinking about Edmund Burke. It’s kind of difficult to comprehend why both are on the same side.

You could hear a speech by Bernie Sanders and hear a speech by Donald Trump, and 80 percent was basically the same. I get that, and I’m not sure I entirely understand why we continue to use these terms “right” and “left.” But the reason I do this in the book is that I somehow want to distinguish Carl Schmitt from Karl Marx – and they are not the same person. Strangely they have a lot in common, but – certainly Karl Marx never knew Schmitt, but he would despise him, and vice versa. These are different flavors of a poison that turns out to be equally deadly, but they definitely taste different.

And honestly I think there’s another sense where we use the terms “right” and “left” that is not in reference to the tradition of German philosophy, but rather returns to the positioning of the French parliament: for the old regime, or for revolutionary liberalism, and that’s where it gets a little bit complicated. Your view on the French revolution, this can get to be a very messy issue. Mises himself celebrated the ideals of 1789, he had a great deal of affection to the French revolution as it was briefly conceived, but the results I think were definitely indefensible. So in that sense, that’s not the way I mean “right” and “left.” I want to very carefully distinguish this from something like Burkian conservatism.

But I want to use the terms in the same way, because here in the US the rise of neo-Nazi movements – as incredible as that may seem – they certainly think of themselves as being on the right. So in a sense, it’s out of deference of their own self-description, even though you will find very similar views between the far-right and the far-left – in our election season in 2016, you could hear a speech by Bernie Sanders and hear a speech by Donald Trump, and 80 percent was basically the same.

For the last question I initially wanted to sound very pessimistic so that you can have an optimistic ending, but then I read in your book: “When it comes to politics, it’s the 1930s all over again.” What hope is there?

What I mean with that is literally that when it comes to politics, it is the 1930s all over again. So my hope is that politics are not going to matter as much anymore in the future. I think politics is doomed, it is so disgusting – like, why do we keep doing this? Why can’t our politics basically be liberal? I don’t know, but I think the future of liberalism is outside of politics. It’s within technology, it’s within education, it’s within culture, and more and more people who believe in human dignity and human rights and human freedom and human flourishing need to pursue other avenues for realizing their dreams besides an exclusive focus on political organizing and that sort of thing. This is definitely my sense.

Thanks for the interview!

This article originally appeared on Austrian Economics Center.

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Those who held their nose and voted for the Republican didn’t like his antics or views; they simply observed that once these people take office, they aren’t even real people with much decision-making power. They just become part of one of two tribes that compete and cooperate to rule everyone in arbitrary ways. Choosing between the tribes is a strange calculation based on value primacy, life priority, and calculation concerning the least-dangerous threat.

The left is getting nuttier, the hard right is getting scarier, and the entire enterprise of political control seems ever more outmoded.  The Alabama case provided no good option for people. It’s no one’s fault in particular that this happens. We’ve all been here before, as recently as the 2016 presidential election. This problem has been building for decades and is likely to get worse, as the fanatics who inhabit these realms become ever more intense.

The left is getting nuttier, the hard right is getting scarier, and the entire enterprise of political control seems ever more outmoded. Over the last century, we’ve seen these gigantic government institutions with hegemonic power. All that remains is the struggle for who gets to control them and these elections are the public vehicle we’ve traditionally relied upon to render a decision.

It was once believed that mass elections like this would bring peaceful outcomes to the struggle. Not so any more. It only pushes the conflicts into the future. The seething over the results begins as soon as they are announced, and the cries for revenge follow in short order. It is particularly dangerous when the results track racial and gender demographics so closely, inviting everyone involved to regard his or her neighbor as an enemy.

This winner of this election declared that his victory had united the state. That’s absurd. The losers will be madder than ever and swear that they too will have their day.

Direct Elections

It’s a decent time to remember that under the original US Constitution, the Senate was not supposed to be decided by a people’s vote. The Senate was appointed by state legislators. The idea was to temper the populism of the House of Representatives, ensure that every state had solid representation as a regional government, and provide some stability to foil democratic upheaval.

Then the Progressive Era came along, with its near-religious attachment to voting as a means of decision making, its aspiration for a unity state, and its distrust of constitutional restraint on the powers of the federal government. In 1913, the 17th amendment of the US Constitution was ratified. The stated intention was to eliminate perceived corruption and legislative deadlocks.

Sure enough, it did end some deadlocks, enabling an expansion of government power that would not have otherwise been possible. It also fundamentally changed the structure and political dynamic of Congress itself. The devolved structure of American government was upended and political rights of the states declined. The Senate became another version of the House, directly elected and thereby subject to the same demagoguery, factionalism, and demographic recrimination that characterized elections for the House.

Indeed, the struggle never ends, but it really should.

If you understand something of the times in which this amendment passed, you can discern the whole motivation: unleash centralized power to lord it over the whole nation, without the limiting factors of the stodgy, regionally attached, and power jealous Senate filled with people who actually believed in the idea of federalism.

It was all of a piece: the creation of the Federal Reserve, the legalization of income taxation at the federal level, and the direct election of the Senate. It was a triple blow to the original constitutional structure designed to limit government power.

Alabama Decided Nothing

The morning after the amazing display of the special elections, we are being told precisely what the voters decided in Alabama. In fact, the voters as a whole decided nothing. And President Trump, who thrives on conflict above all else, tweeted the point. “The Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!”

Indeed, the struggle never ends, but it really should. It’s hard to imagine who precisely benefits from these frenzies besides the rulers who gather the spoils from this bloodsport. And part of doing that is to render all results in absolutist terms: this person won and this person lost. But that’s just a numbers game, and heavily influenced by voter turnout.

In reality, the voting decision is taken on the margin. You very likely vote for someone not because you like him or her but because you fear the alternative even more. When elections become polarized, the hard core begin to rally as if losing were an existential threat. The sound bites become short, the talking points more incendiary, and the incentive to lie and smear rises.

This election served as a very public reminder (as if you needed one) that politics has become as preposterous as it is dangerous. What’s so frustrating about these election spectacles is that they have nothing to do with creating the good life. For that we have to look elsewhere, such as the newly emerging light we are seeing on the economic horizon. For the first time in decades, there is a chance that the job market is becoming active again, that incomes will rise, that inflation is solidly tamed, that the young generation will have new opportunities, that new products and inventions will continue to improve our lives.

None of this has anything to do with smears, epic struggles, revenge fantasies, and winner-take-all scenarios. The prospect of an improved economic environment is due to market forces that are gradually crawling out from under the burdens of bureaucracy, taxation, and regulatory strangulation that has characterized the work of government in all living memory. If we follow this light far enough, we can see a better way toward social and economic organization, one that relies on the voluntary means rather than the impositions of government power whether elected or unelected.

This election served as a very public reminder (as if you needed one) that politics has become as preposterous as it is dangerous, the prospect of ruling other people will always attract manipulative psychopaths, and government as we know it is a truly terrible way to order society.

This article originally appeared on FEE.

The post This Bloodsport Needs to End appeared first on Free the People.

Among the crypto rich, it’s hip to be poor. You must be tight. Stingy. No signs of wealth. So, yes, you could be living it up. Instead, you have become addicted to seeing your net worth rise and rise…oh, and rise further, and further, and rise again. And more. The only trick is not to die before you do something with it. That seems pretty easy, for the most part.

What You Spend Today

Here is the problem with using (as versus merely saving) Bitcoin. There are no lack of options for how to spend (sell) it. But you do that, and then you don’t have it. You spend $1. That’s $2 you won’t have in maybe one month. You spend $50K on a car. Wow, that could have otherwise turned into $100K and you could have bought two cars. Then instead of a money-earning thing, you have a stupid car that just gets you from here to there same as your previous car. So you decide to drive the old thing, as supposedly embarrassing as it is.

Your next car will be a Tesla. You could throw down for one today and not feel it. But that $75K expenditure becomes $100K you will not otherwise have in a few months, maybe. Too risky. It’s better to take the bus.

It’s the same with dressing well. Honestly, who even cares? Every stitch of clothing is money that could be earning money in your crypto wallet, spun gold like Rapunzel’s hair, except that the strands keep growing. So you wear your old jeans, hoodies, and sneakers left over from the last time you splurged 24 months ago.

Ideal Expenditure: Zero

Among the crypto rich, it’s hip to be poor. You must be tight. Stingy. No signs of wealth. You could give to charity, but why? In six months, your gift could be multiplied by five times. You can become a beloved benefactor of great causes. Someday. Surely the charity will make it until then.

Even better, show signs of poverty. You shop at Walmart, thrift stores, and sell every stupid thing you have on eBay – why did we buy so much stuff in the past? – so that you can buy more crypto. You brag to everyone at how little you spend on anything at all. Every bargain is a badge of honor. You will not get lunch. You kidding me? That’s $9 that will soon turn to $18 and buy two lunches. Why would anyone do that?

Forget fat and happy. Crypto millionaires are emaciated and penurious.

They are called the HODLers, the people who forego today’s consumption for…something tomorrow. Sure, the money will go somewhere. Maybe it is a yacht. Maybe a home. Maybe even that Maserati. Endless travel to…New Zealand, which is the only place people really want to go anyway. Dream on.

In the meantime, you are addicted to the habit of turning all income to crypto, living like a pauper, looking like heck, staying away from the malls and the first-class tickets.

You have never been richer in your life. You have never lived poorer.

In the Bitcoin community, you dare not show signs of wealth. Someone might think you are poor.

Magic Internet Money has become the real thing, if by real you mean digits on a computer screen. You could go to the movies but that is folly. Wait a week and you can torrent the thing and watch on your iPhone—  if it is not busy mining Bitcoin Platinum. Or maybe you give in and go once, but you sneak in your own beer and popcorn because who wants to pay those prices?

Remember the old days when Bitcoin was $350? People lived it, spending like crazy on liquor, fast cars, temporary romantic partners, and dancing on boats. What were they thinking? If they had done differently, these people would have been billionaires, not merely millionaires. Never make that mistake again. If you have to buy something, make it CryptoKitties.

What’s Really Real

Magic Internet Money has become the real thing, if by real you mean digits on a computer screen. The digits are all that matter. It’s zero after zero, added while you sleep. There is nothing in this room that compares. Nothing on this city block. Nothing in this city. All physical things kind of look ridiculous. The only reality is virtual.

Think back to the great inflation of the Weimar period when the spenders were savvy and the savers were chumps. The irresponsible knew the score and the prudent old-worlders languished in ignorance of the new times. The whole of society turned upside down. The culture of thrift became a culture of panicked consumption.

And why? Because the money failed. It was caused by extreme inflation that devoured savings in a short period of time and led even to starvation. Here is what hyperinflation can do when there are no real options to nationalized money.

Repudiate Profligacy

Well, the great Bitcoin bull market is the opposite. This is the crypto deflation in which the monetary unit becomes ever more valuable in terms of goods and services — if there should ever come a time when people actually spend the stuff. Society is turned upside down, yet again, to become a world in which the frugal rule and those who spend just don’t know what’s what. It’s the perfect foil to a century of inflation.

It’s a new way to live, one that repudiates profligacy in all its forms. Weimar led to Hitler. The great global crypto deflation will lead to something else. Maybe it will be freedom. It is building a new class based not on inheritance or privilege but merit and savings. These people have stolen nothing. Instead, they have put their faith in something new, and not just a new technology. It’s a new way to live, one that repudiates profligacy in all its forms.

People say that Bitcoin enthusiasts are banking on an illusion. Maybe it is the opposite. Maybe it is they who have finally embraced the core truth that what you spend today only eats up potential wealth tomorrow. After 100 years of bad money, that truth has evaporated from public consciousness. Bitcoin reveals it anew.

This might be the real lasting legacy of the blockchain technological revolution: the restoration of frugality as the basis of wealth-building from which the whole of society will benefit.

This article originally appeared on FEE.

The post How to Live Like a Bitcoin Millionaire appeared first on Free the People.

Also this year, a man who had a profound influence on me – so quiet, so cautious, so tender – passed away, leaving this earth with beautiful memories. I’m still in awe of his love, courtesy, earnestness, and passion for knowing more. His name was Ward S. Allen, author and scholar. He is as present with me today as he ever was when we used to sit together and talk. Only his physical body has lost its life but that’s not what really constitutes the fullness of our lives. His spirit lives on.

Bourbon for Breakfast

It was Dr. Allen who first served me bourbon with a morning coffee, an act that shocked me with its unconventionality. He was a man of the old world, a scholar in ancient languages, and the perfect gentleman. That he would add bourbon to a morning coffee gave me a window into what it is like to think and act independently. It prompted a big thought: we should not accept the conventions of our time as always right and normal. There are other ways to be, and being free involves being open to new experiences.

I met him at a time when I felt ready for a new way. I had just moved from the D.C. area and I was ready for something authentic and not political. I met him, and part of me wanted to be just like him. We went on idyllic morning walks, and I felt like I was gaining a window into the best of Old South gentility. I would ask him about his habits. He urged on me a new morning routine. He said that the worst possible way to begin the day is with the news. Instead, the day should begin with walks in nature, readings of poetry, reflections on the writings of the ancients, and deep puzzles involving spirituality and philosophy.

With people we admire, we take part of them and add it to ourselves, appropriating what we find most inspiring. I tried it for a few days. It didn’t work for me. The whole thing felt contrived. I was restless. Without the news, my mind would constantly drift from deep thoughts into the trivial one: I wonder what’s in the news? After about a week of this, I gave it up. I realized that I could not be this man. I’m different from him. There is not one way. His routine worked for him and mine for me. There is no betrayal of a would-be mentor in declining to adopt every thought and action.

Once I attended a large party in which he was being honored for his lifetime of scholarly achievement. I met many people who had been his students. In so many of them, I could detect just a hint of his influence in the way they spoke, a slight point about demeanor, a bit of a speech affect, their career paths, and so on.

We all do this with people we admire. We take part of them and add it to ourselves, appropriating what we find most inspiring. It’s one of the ways great people achieve immortality on earth, by leaving living memories of their character and ways.

But what was his single most infectious trait? It was his quiet joy, expressed through his perfect manners and his quick and warm smile. More precisely, it was his habit of eschewing anything that smacked of despair, anything hateful, anything that wallowed in disparagement and complaint. He liked life. Nay, he loved it. It’s amazing how rare that trait turns out to be. His students caught on to it and carried with them that same attitude.

His demeanor, which seemed so natural and inevitable, made the world more beautiful. It brought calm, carefulness, and courtesy to his corner of the world. He never sought fame. He only wanted to be good. I wonder: how hard had he worked to become that way, or was it just baked in to who he was? He surely had struggles. Why is it that they didn’t show on him and yet mine so eat at me?

Fear of Mortality

I was not with him in his last days. It had been a long time since I’d seen him. But I can know with confidence that he feared not death. I know he embraced it with love, and I like to think he knew for sure that his was a life well lived, according to his own lights. My father, too, had that kind of death. I want that kind of death too, and yet I fear I’ve not earned it.

Waste not one day. Hurt no friend. Celebrate every benefactor. Spread goodness. Eschew hatred. Mortality. It terrifies us. So much of what we believe about ourselves is driven by fear of it. Whole sectors of science are devoted to forestalling it. Our religious traditions are shaped by this idea that we can continue to live after what we call death, and we are urged to take the right steps to make it so. Dealing with it makes us ask fundamental questions. Who are we? What is our purpose? How can we do what we do better, as a way of making our lives more meaningful to ourselves and others?

My takeaway from this year might sound like a cliche: be grateful for every minute of your life. It’s the most precious thing of all. Do nothing with deliberation to diminish its quality. Embrace everything that is bright and beautiful around you, and, insofar as it is possible, reject that which is dark, depressing, and despairing. Waste not one day. Hurt no friend. Celebrate every benefactor. Spread goodness. Eschew hatred. Produce and make value, whether big or small.

Friendship and Benefaction

In particular, I think of the institution of friendship, built on bonds of trust and mutual giving. We should treasure friendship as a delicate fruit and never take it for granted. We should never take risks that would possibly shatter or throw out those investments we’ve made in others and others have made in us.

The most tragic feature of identity politics is that it seeks to drive wedges between people based not on character or personality but on biology and perceived group identity. This penchant will always collapse into cruelty. To the extent it harms the institution of friendship, it is unleashing evil in this world.

The longer we live, the more we discover the value of friendship. Our friendships become a stream of spiritual income for us that builds throughout our lives. We draw on them both professionally and personally, and for far longer than we might believe in our youth. In the same way we seek never to waste or destroy our property, we should do the same with our friendships, always striving to appreciate, celebrate, and protect the presence of others in our lives with whom we share a connection. That means developing the maturity to tolerate imperfections, to work through miscommunications, to give without expectation of return, to trust even when the evidence suggests it is a mistake, and to show the kind of love we would like to be shown if our roles were reversed. To practice this kind of empathy requires a conscious rejection of identitarianism as an ideology.

The longer we live, the more we discover the value of friendship. Thirty years ago, I made a friend when I was just beginning on the road to learning, writing, speaking, and finding that thing that would define for me a template for understanding the world. For some reason I can’t quit identify, his lectures at my university touched me so deeply that I decided to make his calling my calling. Today, after all these years, I work for him, FEE president Lawrence Reed. That deep history means everything to me.

I say that I can’t entirely recall why his lectures so shifted the course of my life (and countless others’). But I do recall this much: One of the principles Larry taught me that day is that what we call wealth is bound up with what we choose to value. It’s not really about GDP, balance sheets, and net worth in monetary terms. It’s about finding that which makes us truly happy and having the freedom to make a choice to embrace it.

Every day is a gift. Let me close this reflection by noting that one of the people who is faced with a health crisis is another example of a benefactor in my life. I had reached a point where I needed one voice to comfort me, one tender hand to lift me up, one small nudge to say that I’m valuable. He did that, in a quiet way, and gave me that priceless gift: the confidence I need to continue my life journey. There is no repaying that.

We all have limited time here. We know this. Every day is a gift. Let us look to the best examples of those who have come before to be good friends, delightful companions, beautifiers of the world around us, healers insofar as life gives us that chance, and champions of the betterment of the quality of our lives and those of others whom we love, in whatever way we understand that.

In honor of my friend now deceased, add just a shot of bourbon in there to add unexpected delight.

This article originally appeared on FEE.

The post Be Desperately Grateful for Life Itself appeared first on Free the People.

So much confusion out there! Having followed this technology from 2010, here are the ten points I find most salient about Bitcoin and the entire cryptoasset sector.

Good money emerges from exchange and entrepreneurship.

1. It was not invented by government. From the ancient world, it has been claimed that money (right and proper money) is the domain of government, at the very least to guard but also to invent, impose, and manage. In the late 19th century, an entire school of economic thought grew up around it: the State Theory of Money. Georg Friedrich Knapp’s treatise by that name came out in 1905 (English translation 1924) and helped entrench the nationalization of money in central banks. Bitcoin shows that the theory is wrong. Good money emerges from exchange and entrepreneurship, as Carl Menger said.

2. It was not invented by academia. The Bitcoin protocol was released by an anonymous programmer on a small email list and then put into the commons. Economists – to say nothing of political scientists and sociologists – were entirely out of the loop. This is fascinating because mainstream intellectual hierarchy puts academia at the top and everyone else underneath. The black robes rule the course of history and everyone else is their benefactor, it is said, as if there were a structure of production for ideas. The problem with this theory emerged in the age of capitalism, when the practitioners, not the theorists, starting getting all the good ideas. Then the backlash came in the 20th century: the experts would manage society. Now we are finding out something amazing: the best ideas come from those with boots on the ground.

3. It’s not all about Bitcoin. In some ways, the high-flying returns on the headline cryptocurrency are a distraction from the genius of the underlying technology: the distributed ledger called the Blockchain. This technology has spawned a financial sector just as large as Bitcoin itself, with thousands of applications, including every form of contracting. Blockchain could even lead to an upheaval in the relationship between the individual and the state. The critical thing to understand about the technology is this: it is a better way than we’ve ever had to document and enforce ownership claims. If you do not understand what this sentence means, I’m sorry but you do not understand the value of this technology.

Governments are an annoyance, not the authors of history.

4. The old regulations won’t work. This technology is completely new, whereas all existing financial and regulatory machinery is based on muscling legacy technology to perform in a certain way. Retooling the regulations to fit simply won’t work. It is only going to create messes, slowing down but not stopping, progress. Legacy bureaucracies and stakeholders will fight and fight but nothing can stop this revolution, which is borderless and digital, making it impossible to control. Moreover, every regulation reduces competitiveness and entrenches incumbent firms. Do you think if government had banned, for example, horseshoes, electricity, internal combustion, or flight that this would have actually stopped these ideas from becoming reality? Governments are an annoyance, not the authors of history.

5. Money will be competitive. Many people see the current goings-on as a struggle between the dollar and Bitcoin. That is too simplified. The real struggle is between national money monopolies and a newly competitive system. That competition occurs between cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets. People want to know who the winner will be. This too is old-world thinking. The competitive process will never stop. Winning will be temporary, and a new challenger will rise up and take the top spot. This is a new world. No living person knows what this is like because money has been protected from market pressure for so long. In particular, Americans are going to have to get used to a world in which the dollar is no longer king.

New players are crawling out of the woodwork by the day.

6. Banking and credit will change. The whole institution of central banking is premised on the idea of a money monopoly which thereby enables full control and macroeconomic management. Crypto doesn’t have to be number one in order to wreck this presumption. It only needs to bust the monopoly. With a market cap of half a trillion dollars, this might have already happened. Moreover, distributed networks weave together money and payment systems, so old-world payment processors will be next to fall. New players are crawling out of the woodwork by the day.

7. The unbanked have rights. Some people estimate that the unbanked of the world population is two billion. That is surely an underestimate. Think of the developing world but don’t limit it to that. Where I live, the unbanked are everywhere, and they are that way for a variety of reasons. Maybe they fear the privacy intrusions. They have lifestyles and sources of income that fall out of the mainstream. They might have sketchy professions. Or they are too young. Maybe it is a family issue or they fear getting roped into the system. Whatever the case, they still retain economic rights, and Blockchain tech gives them options for the first time. This is the population that will fuel the entrepreneurship in this sector.

No ideology can stop this.

8. No one will be in charge. Blockchain has no central point of failure and no overarching controlling force. Financial intermediaries are not out of the picture but they are not essential. The systems of the past evolved into cartels; the systems of the future will be increasingly decentralized with non-stop disintermediation. Anyone who seeks full control will wake every day to the reality of shattered illusions. This goes for huge financial firms and also governments. Traditional policy rationale is rooted in the presumption of the preeminence of a single vision. The decentralized future will be rooted in the reality of nonstop disruption. No ideology can stop this.

9. It’s a template for everything. Bitcoin isn’t really about Bitcoin. It’s about human liberty. We are not happy to live in cages of anyone’s construction. The goal of human life is to find a way to freedom. Governments and their lackeys laughed and dismissed this whole revolution, circa 2009 to 2017. There is no way the bird can escape, they said. Now it is too late.

10. No one knows the future. No one could have anticipated this would happen. No one can know what lies in store for us. The future will be crowdsourced. This seeming chaos will find itself toward orderliness, and massively improve life on earth. That is how it should be.

This article originally appeared on FEE.

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