Deep Liberty

Schools in western democracies teach that the main way we can cause social change is by voting. What schools don't tell you is that there's more than one way to vote. Every economic action you take is another form of voting -- and those votes are probably more important than the ones you cast at the ballot box.

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For example, if you're against the war but work in the defense industry, then you are actually "voting" to continue the war through your efforts. This concept can be applied deeply in your life. The idea is that if everyone acted according to their true desires and best interests, that the world would be a much better place.

Another way to think of it is to imagine everyone in the world making the same decision as you. If everyone worked in the defense industry, would the world be a better or a worse place?

With this idea in mind, I would like to propose the concept of something that might be called "Deep Liberty": changes you can make in your everyday life that reflect the values of individualism:

• Make sure your job reflects your core values. Not just what you do on a day-to-day basis, but how the fruits of your labor are applied in society. For example, refuse to work for the government, defense contractors, transportation companies that are involved with troop movement, companies that sell products to the government or the military, etc.


• Minimize your debt, and thereby minimize interest paid to banks. If necessary, sell your house and move into a rental.


• Move some of your money into foreign currencies or stocks


• Educate your kids at home and not in government schools


• If you live in a city full of corruption, like New York, then move to someplace honest, where your tax dollars and the other fruits of your labor support a healthy system, rather than a corrupt one


• Reduce your consumption and increase your savings


• Buy gold


• Minimize your taxes within legal limits, and don't let yourself be driven by the fear of an audit (or, worse yet, feel that you need to pay "extra")


• Consider moving to a state that doesn't have a state income tax


• For stocks, favor buy-and-hold instead trading (no tax due until you sell)


• Barter for things when you can


• Be conscious of the companies you buy products from. How will they use the money you spend? Who do they buy from? Where do their profits go? (boycotting companies that advertise on Fox is an example of this)


• If you ever serve on a jury, apply individualist values to the case


• Cancel most or all of your credit cards. If you really need a card, try switching to a debit card


• Refuse to accept social security payments, unemployment compensation, food stamps and other forms of welfare


• Minimize your use of oil: get a high-mileage car, drive less, work from home, etc


• Academia is the source of many of today's "diseases" of the mind, including new flavors of socialism, distorted models of the economy, etc. When choosing a college for yourself or your child, be careful that its values reflect your values

The cause of the Great Depression

In the years after WW I and before the stock market crash of 1929, the Fed was used to help bring England out of a depression. The approach taken was to transfer American wealth to England by establishing artificially low interest rates and inflating the money supply, weakening the dollar relative to the pound. That caused investors, businesses and individuals to move resources, including gold deposits, from the low-interest-paying US to the higher-interest-paying UK.

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Artificially low interest rates encouraged stock market speculation. However, as a result of the movement of wealth out of the country, industry wasn't as strong as people thought, so it eventually collapsed, and the Great Depression began.

Notice any similarities to what's going on today? Artificially low interest rates? Yep. Inflating the money supply? Yep. Weakened dollar? Yep. Stock market speculation? Yep. The net effect is a transfer of wealth out of the US, only on a much larger scale than before.

I'm not saying the current actions will lead to another Great Depression, but they will certainly be damaging to the economy and the country.

Executive Order 11110

There is a rumor that's been circulated in several videos and books that JFK was assassinated because he signed Executive Order 11110, which supposedly stripped the Federal Reserve of its power to loan money to the Treasury at interest.
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The truth is that Executive Order 11110 authorized the printing of $4B in silver certificates, should the occasion arise -- it had nothing to do with stripping anything from the Fed, and it wasn't even an instruction to actually do the printing, only an authorization to do so. A similar order had been written in 1957, just six years before.

JFK did nothing that threatened the Federal Reserve in the slightest. He was a life-long socialist and globalist; he helped devalue the dollar and transfer American wealth to foreign countries.

Executive Order 11110 was later rescinded by Reagan with Executive Order 12608 in 1987, well past the time when silver certificates were withdrawn from circulation and when the US went completely off of the silver and gold standards after Nixon backed out of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971.

Is the US approaching fascism?

A few thoughts:

-- Habeas corpus has been suspended
-- The President has claimed the right to suspend the Constitution (and elections) in a time of crisis, without even a clear definition of a crisis
-- People are being arrested and/or beaten for stupid reasons: not trimming their lawn to the right height, etc
-- Insane amounts of security involved with anything related to travel
-- Travel forbidden to people who are on certain "lists"
[[MORE]]-- The US has a Department of Homeland Security
-- Secret prisons
-- Torture is sanctioned by the government
-- The US started wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, the same crime the Nazis were tried for at Nuremberg
-- More than one million people have now been murdered in Iraq as a result of the US occupation
-- Ralph Nader claimed (see youtube) that a Congressman told him that Congress was afraid to start impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney because they had threatened to nuke Iran and suspend elections if they did
-- The abomination called the Patriot Act, which now allows self-written search warrants, among other insanity
-- The US now has more people in prison per capita than any country in the world (more than 2M total, with more than 5M more in jail, on parole or on probation). With 5% of the world's population, the US has 25% of the world's incarcerated.
-- The press in the US are corrupt, with control of nearly all media resting in the hands of just 5 large corporations
-- The political parties are corrupt, offering voters a faux choice between candidates who only differ with regard to superficial issues
-- Congress is corrupt, driven by the power of lobbyists and large corporations, and have passed one unconstitutional law after another
-- New passports already have ID chips
-- Gradual but continuous erosion of 2nd amendment rights

Oh, and for those who are contemplating refusing to get a Real ID -- if the UK experience teaches us anything, it's that you better also be prepared to live completely off the grid if you do that. Doing any kind of banking, having a job, traveling, etc, will all likely require you to have ID.

The Science of Manipulation

Interesting video, "Deceiving Images, the Science of Manipulation": http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/deceiving-images-science-manipulation

One of the key take-aways for me from the video is that all words, regardless of the speaker's intent, invoke a frame or context, which is then used as part of the listener's evaluation process.

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I don't see use of this knowledge so much as manipulation, as its title says.  Rather, this sort of understanding of communication is key when you're trying to get something across to a large audience.

The point they made is that in order to communicate your message to the masses, it needs to be properly framed. The particular words that are used has a huge impact. The words can (should) still be genuine and true, but they should also be carefully chosen to have maximum impact -- particularly in advertising.

What are some ways that a potentially controversial political message could be polished by invoking the right frames?

For example, instead of "Abolish the Federal Reserve," it could be:

--> Stop the government from stealing your savings
--> Eliminate the hidden tax of inflation

Here's a few more politically oriented ideas along these lines:

End the occupation of Iraq. Bring our troops home.

Your paycheck is worth less every week because boat-loads of money are being printed to pay for the occupation in Iraq, which dilutes the value of your money

The amount you are being paid in social security is being reduced every year -- not by giving you fewer dollars, but by making those dollars able to buy less by printing so many of them

Guess who benefits first when the government prints lots of new money? Wall Street. Guess who gets hurt most? The middle class and the poor.

When the government prints new money, it is robbing from the poor and giving to the rich.

You are being taxed without your consent, by a hidden tax called inflation.

Guess how health insurance companies make more money? Not by providing more service, but by declining claims. Do you really want all health care in this country to be controlled by insurance companies?

When illegal immigrants get free health care, they are stealing from the American Taxpayer.

Illegal immigrants don't pay taxes.
A few short ones:

Privacy is your Right

End the Iraq Occupation

Stop the Theft

Inflation is Theft

Original US central banks

Here's a quick summary of the original US central banks:

Bank of North America (formed before the Constitution was written) -- did not have its charter renewed by Congress, and closed in 1783

Bank of the United States, formed in 1791 (encouraged by Hamilton) -- fought by Jefferson, its charter was not renewed by Congress in 1811

Second Bank of the United States, formed in 1816 -- fought by Jackson, its charter expired in 1836
Jefferson's portrait is now on US $2 bills.
Hamilton is now on US $10 bills.
Jackson is now on US $20 bills.

What have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost so far?

In addition to the more than one million Iraqi lives that have been lost in the war, so far, what has the financial cost been?

"The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion through the next decade, or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate scheduled for release Wednesday. ... In the months before the March 2003 Iraq invasion, the Bush administration estimated the Iraq war would cost no more than $50 billion."

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See: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2007-10-23-wacosts_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Here are a few other ways to think about it:

-- More than $120,000 for every person in the state of New York.
-- Almost two and a half times the entire financial output of the state of New York in one year (gross state product)
-- About twice the total amount received from Federal income taxes in one year
-- Four times the cost of the entire social security program for one year
-- Close to the entire amount of income received by the Federal government in one year, from all sources (taxes, duties, social security, etc)

Why I like New Zealand

-- Very against the Iraq war (even use of an Air NZ jet to just ferry Australian troops to Saudi Arabia caused a huge flap in parliament)
-- Anti-nuclear (they don't allow US warships to dock anywhere in NZ, since the US Navy refuses to certify that don't carry nukes)
-- Simpler tax system (income tax form is like 4 pages long, no death taxes, no capital gains taxes on the sale of your home, extremely low property taxes)
-- A sane legal system that doesn't grant obscene financial awards
[[MORE]]-- The country isn't run by lawyers (the contract paperwork to buy a house is like 4 pages long)
-- Of course it's beautiful
-- Only 4M people in a country that's about two-thirds the size of California (only 1M people on the entire south island)
-- English-speaking
-- Low levels of violent crime
-- Gun ownership is legal (although they do have a strict safety-focused licensing system) and there are lots of hunters in the country
-- They understand and appreciate personal liberty, and have been known to demonstrate or riot when the government tries to pass laws that might undermine those rights
-- They have one of the strongest currencies in the world (it's a commodity-oriented currency, like the Australian and Canadian dollars)
-- Their politicians have a reputation of being among the most honest and least corrupt in the world
-- They have run a tax SURPLUS for the last few years
-- No one hates NZ; they're not quite as neutral as Switzerland, but close
-- People here know how to fix things and keep them for a long time; it's not a throw-away consumer society

One way to look at emigration is to think about what our forefathers did. When the government in England got messed up, they left and found someplace better. When Germany and the rest of Europe went crazy during the World Wars, lots of people left there to come to the US. It's really just the natural flow -- why stay and support a system that's crumbling and that you don't really believe in?

The smell of fear

Fear is a driving emotion for many people. The fear-mongering is everywhere: TV, newspapers, schools, work, travel, etc. The interesting thing is, once you start to listen carefully, that the fear provocations are always followed by some statement about what someone is going to do for us (to us) to "help".
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And yet, the things that they are making people afraid of are largely nonsense. How many people in the US have been killed by Islamic terrorists? Compare that that to serious issues like heart disease or even the flu (which kills 40,000 people per year), and you can start to see some of the absurdity. Yet people accept it, and are somehow convinced that it's OK to spend trillions of dollars on a war and to kill more than a million people. For what? How can anyone possibly feel more secure after taking actions like those?

The same is true for the war on drugs: the US now has the largest number of people in prison of any country on the planet. The descent into fascism is what should be scary....

Why a declining dollar matters

When interest rates are not set by market forces, the result is mis-directed investment. The Fed is currently holding interest rates artificially low. In recent years, this has resulted in booms in the stock market and in housing. Low interest rates also impact the value of the dollar, since holders of dollars would be motivated to sell them and buy currencies where they can invest at higher interest rates.

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In addition to provoking booms (and the inevitable busts that follow), a less visible, but equally important effect of artificially low interest rates is a massive transfer of wealth from the US to countries with stronger currencies. This happens in several ways. Capital flight for interest / yield reasons, as described above. Imported goods become more expensive, transferring wealth from US consumers to those companies in the form of increased cash flow. And the sale of US-based dollar-denominated assets at artificially low prices -- which is the reason why so much US infrastructure is now owned by overseas investors (refineries are owned by the Arabs, much of Los Angeles downtown is owned by the Japanese, etc). Those transactions are transfers of wealth because they are happening at below-market prices.

The interesting thing is that this is exactly what happened in the years before the Great Depression in 1929. The Fed artificially lowered interest rates in an intentional move to prop up the British economy. Massive amounts of wealth were transferred to England. The low rates triggered stock market speculation with a resulting boom & bust. The economy couldn't recover quickly after the stock market crash because the foundational strength was gone. The difference today is that the amount of wealth being moved out of the country is much greater -- which leads one to believe that the ultimate result has the potential of being much worse....