With the world reopening, and even US blue states and cities repealing mandates, how optimistic should we be? A little bit is warranted but not that much. What we are seeing right now in Ottawa reveals the hegemonic depth of the system that gave us lockdowns, then mandates: it is now capable of freezing your accounts and essentially starving you and your family.
It’s economic warfare.
This was a wild conspiracy theory last year. Now it is very obvious that this is where many governments want to go. We’ve seen examples just in the past week.
The truckers in Canada deployed the crowd-funding platform GoFundMe and raised $9M, until suddenly the platform said that they would not distribute the money yet, pending the release of a clear plan on what the truckers were going to do with it.
Many of us immediately smelled a rat. Sure enough, a few days later, GoFundMe announced that it would not give the money to the truckers but rather to other charities of its choosing. In other words, it would steal the money. That outraged many people, among them Elon Musk, and the Internet blew up in fury. At that point, GoFundMe returned all the money back to the donors.
In the next act of this drama, the truckers went to GiveSendGo, a platform that seems more independent and that pledged to give the money to the truckers. With no promotion or even a clear link on Google on where to send money, the new method raised even more money. This was entirely thanks to uncensored networks where people were sharing information.
But the story was far from over. The platform was hit with denial-of-service attacks from malicious actors and then hacked. The thing went down hard and had to be rebuilt. The data on donors was leaked to the government and then to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who contacted donors under the guise of “doing a story” on the funding. It was a clear attempt at intimidation.
The Minister of Finance got into the act and essentially declared that anyone using these to provide funding to the truckers were engaging in illicit activity — essentially terrorists. Without missing a beat, the Minister of Justice for Trudeau went further to declare that anyone who has given large figures through these platforms “should be worried” about having their bank accounts frozen.
So there we have it on record: the Canadian government has declared that it can freeze anyone’s bank account and seize the contents based on their political views or charitable actions. In the midst of all of this, Trudeau declared emergency powers that allow the government to do this to all non-compliers, and do so without any court order.
The next step in this astonishing drama: crypto. The platform TallyCoin somehow and almost miraculously navigated all the compliance regulations and became a viable way to use crypto to crowd fund, thus bypassing banks (so long as you don’t convert your crypto to dollars).
Very quickly, the platform raised $1M for the truckers. This was all put together by a group of truckers calling itself HonkHonkHodl. That means, of course, hold crypto don’t sell.
Almost immediately, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada’s FBI) sent letters to many crypto exchanges demanding that any assets flowing through their systems that are known to be intended as donations to the truckers must be reported immediately. At the same time, the truckers are being told to leave. Two leaders of the convoy have been arrested.
Yes, all these actions are clearly political, totalitarian, and relying fundamentally on the control of money and finance to shore up regime power and crush political opposition.
For weeks now, I’ve worried that Trudeau would pursue a Tiananmen Square solution. This was the strategy deployed in China in 1989 to forestall the type of regime meltdown that had characterized events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet empire. For a while, it appeared that regimes could be toppled if enough people gathered in the streets. China showed otherwise: bullets, tanks, and arrests of key leaders are often enough to shore up control.
These days, a Tiananmen-style solution takes a different form. With financial intermediaries forced to do the state’s bidding, rebellions can be put down with texts, emails, and a few clicks on an interface. Your assets are frozen, then stolen, and you are left without a job or any financial means at all. Jails aren’t even necessary.
Yes, crypto can help bypass the system, but it still must deal with three huge barriers: 1) the exchanges and platforms deal with enormous burdens in regulatory compliance, 2) the onramps to obtaining crypto are ever more intrusive, 3) the offramps to moving crypto out of digits and into cash are highly regulated. None of this is the fault of crypto. It is a failure of the transition.
As an aside, the one word hardly spoken during this incredible drama is Covid. It was never really about a virus. The world is moving past the virus, and left only with the massive and terrifying state machinery that emerged under the guise of public health, a principle which has oddly mutated into another priority: political health.
Since 2013, I’ve written about the possibility of a privatized monetary system. It seemed like a wonderful ideal. Someday, we will get there, surely, in one form or another. But the transition has become extremely complicated, as government authorities attempt to use their existing regulatory hold on conventional money and regulated exchanges to institute a China-style social credit system.
Even now, I cannot believe that I just typed those sentences, which I used to hear only from very fringy commentators. Now the fringe is the fabric. Anyone who has not paid attention to the conspiracy theories of the last year has failed to anticipate most of the news.
Many of the world’s wisest minds have observed that the main means by which powerful states seize and retain control is through the realm of money. Guns help. Prestige helps. But in the end, it’s the control of money that keeps the people in servitude.
Crypto was once for geeks only. Now it has become a tool for saving the working class from obliteration by hegemonic forces within the ruling-class financial structure. The workers’ revolution is taking a different path from what anyone in the 19th century could have ever imagined: from diesel to crypto to freedom.
Chinese people in the United States, especially first- and second-generation immigrants, have historically paid little attention to politics because Chinese culture does not encourage civic engagement. We are either too busy making money to support our families or we think the games that politicians play do not affect us.
To be honest, I was like that, too. But the pandemic has made me realize that the decisions made by local elected officials do affect our actual lives!
During 18 months of online classes, my son was completely unengaged in school and wasted his time all day, every day, playing video games. But San Francisco Board of Education members Gabriela López, Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga did not recognize or try to fix the problem — instead they focused on renaming schools.
Then they ignored protests from the Asian American community and canceled the merit-based admissions system at Lowell HS. Adding fuel to the fire, Collins blatantly discriminated against Asians with her racist tweets. “Many” Asian Americans “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead,’ ” she wrote, and added, “Being a house n—-r is still being a n—-r.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: NFL Hires Obama-Era Attorney General Loretta Lynch To Fight Brian Flores’ Discrimination Lawsuit. “In his lawsuit against the NFL, Flores is accusing the organization of pervasive racial bias and has named three teams — the Broncos, Dolphins and New York Giants — as defendants. Now, in quite a twist, it will be Lynch, the first black woman appointed to head the Justice Department, who will be defending Roger Goodell’s shield and those who’ve been accused of racial bias in hiring practices…In his CBS interview [Wednesday], Mr. Flores was asked if ‘clubs have the right to hire the person they think is the best qualified for the job or the person they feel is right for them?’ Mr. Flores responded, ‘They do. That’s very reasonable to me…’ That is exactly what we did.”
As Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr once quipped: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) can surely relate. Despite having ten months of data and the levers of monetary policy in hand, inflation has overshot their projection for 2021.
On December 15, 2021, the Federal Reserve released its Summary of Economic Projections, which reports the median, central tendency, and range of projections for inflation and other macroeconomic variables submitted by FOMC members. FOMC members are instructed to make projections based on the assumptions that the Fed conducts monetary policy appropriately, as they see it, and that the economy is not affected by any further shocks. The median FOMC member projected inflation at 5.3 percent for 2021. The central tendency was 5.3 to 5.4 percent and the range was 5.3 to 5.5 percent. Hence, most FOMC members projected 5.3 percent inflation for 2021, and none projected inflation in excess of 5.5 percent. These projections can be used to forecast the price level, as shown in the figure below.
Figure 1. Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCEPI) and Forecast of PCEPI Based on FOMC Projections
It is worth noting that at the time when the Summary of Economic Projections was released, Fed officials had access to at least ten months of price level data for the year. The personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI) for October had been available since November 24 and inflation had been relatively high up until that point. If prices continued to grow at the same rate as they had over the first ten months of 2021, annual inflation would have clocked in at nearly 5.5 percent––the high end of their projections. In projecting 5.3 percent inflation for 2021, the median FOMC member was implicitly saying they expected inflation to fall over the last two months of the year.
They were wrong. Inflation did not fall. Prices climbed above the Fed’s forecast in November and remained elevated in December. Inflation averaged 5.6 percent for the year—exceeding the entire range of projections offered by FOMC members in December.
Why did FOMC members underestimate inflation? The assumptions underlying their projections offer two explanations, neither of which is very satisfying.
Recall that FOMC members are instructed to make projections based on the assumptions that the Fed conducts monetary policy appropriately, as they see it. Perhaps the Fed did not conduct monetary policy appropriately. That would explain the poor projections. But it would raise an even bigger question: Why can’t a majority of FOMC members ensure that monetary policy is conducted appropriately?
Recall further that FOMC members are instructed to assume the economy is not affected by any further shocks over the projection period. All else equal, an unexpected decline in total factor productivity or surge in nominal spending would cause prices to rise more than expected. But it is hard to point to any such shocks over the period in question.
The FOMC made its inflation projections in mid-December, with just sixteen days remaining in the year. Although the precise price level data was not yet available, FOMC members were aware of the events that had unfolded in November and nearly half of December. It is difficult to imagine how a shock big enough to cause a 20-basis point miss would have gone unnoticed by the well-briefed members of the FOMC.
I chalk it up to wishful thinking. Fed officials were not yet willing to tighten monetary policy. They hoped inflation would get better on its own. It didn’t, and their projections underestimated inflation as a result. That’s understandable. But we should keep this error in mind when considering future FOMC projections.
When we got to Atlanta, the band in the hotel bar was the worst thing we’d ever heard. But it didn’t matter. Nothing could cloud our outlook. Brock Adams and Joe Califano could have sat down at our table. Ralph Nader himself would have been welcome, so infected were we with the spirit of vast superiority to the humdrum concerns of daily life that the Ferrari confers, or something like that. I mean this car does one thing. It makes you happy, really happy.
And the car did one more thing for me. It reaffirmed my belief in America. It may sound strange to say that a $45,000 Italian sports car reaffirmed my belief in America, but, as I said, it’s all part of Western civilization and here we were in America, the apogee of that fine trend in human affairs.
And, after all, what have we been getting civilized for, all these centuries? Why did we fight all those wars, conquer all those nations, take over all that Western Hemisphere? Why, for this! For this perfection of knowledge and craft. For this conquest of the physical elements. For this sense of mastery of man over nature. To be in control of our destinies—and there is no more profound feeling of control over one’s destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast. And if the lowly Italians, the lamest, silliest, least stable of our NATO allies, can build a machine like this, just think what it is that we can do. We can smash the atom. We can cure polio. We can fly to the moon if we like. There is nothing we can’t do. Maybe we don’t happen to build Ferraris, but that’s not because there’s anything wrong with America. We just haven’t turned the full light of our intelligence and ability in that direction. We were, you know, busy elsewhere. We may not have Ferraris, but just think what our Polaris-missile submarines are like. And, if it feels like this in a Ferrari at 130, my God, what can it possibly feel like at Mach 2.5 in an F-15? Ferrari 308s and F-15s—these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?
RIP. Needless to say, read the whole thing. The ending is a hoot, too:
But the story ends on a sad note. The movie that this incredible car traveled all that way to be in will be called Don’t Eat the Snow from Hawaii, so maybe Western civilization hasn’t quite been perfected yet.
FIGHT THE POWER: “You may have noticed a truck in front of the parliament buildings in Ottawa that has a wooden shack on it. It has kind of a Beverly Hillbillies vibe to it. The other day they built a deck on the roof of that shack and installed one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite dishes. They are now livestreaming from the location and there is no way anyone can block them from doing so or shut them down via cell towers. Its totally self contained.”
The National Institutes of Health has repeatedly failed to comply with congressional requests for documents related to its involvement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, instead forcing agency personnel to “shred notes and other documents” referencing the Chinese Communist Party-run lab and its work with the U.S. government during the Obama administration. Members of the Republican House Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote a letter to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Director Xavier Becerra urging the release of the documents, which could prove highly relevant to the origins of COVID-19. “Rather than be transparent with Committee Republicans, HHS
The six stations plotted going back to 1988 taken together show no significant warming taking place, with some stations in fact showing a modest cooling trend for January.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resorted to invoking the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history to try to control the protests over COVID-19 restrictions. Most notably among Trudeau’s response was the decision to freeze bank accounts of protestors and expand the reach of anti‐money laundering (AML) laws.
Although taking people’s money away, even if temporarily, surely limits their ability to legally protest, Trudeau carefully defended his decision by stating,
We’re not suspending fundamental rights or overriding [Canada’s] Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We are not limiting people’s freedom of speech. We are not limiting freedom of peaceful assembly. We are not preventing people from exercising their right to protest legally. We are reinforcing the principles, values, and institutions that keep all Canadians free.
In invoking the Emergencies Act, we are … broadening the scope of Canada’s anti‐money laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payments service providers they use. These changes cover all forms of transactions––including digital assets such as cryptocurrencies… As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order.
Those familiar with monetary and financial policy will undoubtedly recognize the clever play on “KYC” (or, know your customer), but the focus of Representative Davidson’s bill is on protecting self‐hosted wallets from unwarranted prohibition or restriction.
Holding cryptocurrency in a “self‐hosted” wallet is merely the digital equivalent of holding physical cash in a traditional wallet. It gives the owner complete control over what’s held inside it and the extent that they want to maintain their privacy. Representative Davidson is right to point out the same cannot be said of cryptocurrencies held in wallets or accounts maintained by third parties because, in the eyes of the federal government, relying on such third parties effectively waives an individual’s right to financial privacy.
So, while financial privacy should already be protected by the Constitution (namely, the Fourth Amendment), preventing the government from being able to prohibit or restrict the use of self‐hosted wallets is a much‐needed policy improvement. And it seems that it’s a step forward that is needed now more than ever.
When considering what cryptocurrencies mean for liberty, cases when authoritarian regimes freeze the bank accounts of activists and rivals serve as stark reminders of how little regard for individuals such governments have. Sadly, Trudeau’s decision demonstrates that this kind of oppressive behavior is not unique to authoritarian governments.
On Monday, a would-be assassin went into the campaign offices of Louisville Democratic Mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg and attempted to shoot and kill him.
How are they planning on funding road maintenance if they do this? The whole point of those taxes is upkeep (and diversion to bike/pedestrian improvements). On top of that, the taxes in most states aren't high enough to offset the cost increases caused by the democrat imposed supply restrictions.
