This is a part of the Bitcoin Infinity Academy course on Knut Svanholm’s book Bitcoin: Independence Reimagined. For more information, check out our Geyser page!

Violence and Silence

Around the time that these words were written, a protest fund worth around 70 million dollars intended for the protesters of Hong Kong was frozen over “money laundering” by HSBC, acting under pressure from the Chinese government. “Not your keys, not your Bitcoin” is, despite what anyone might believe or wish for, just as true for the traditional banking system as it is for Bitcoin. Credit card companies, banks, and even Internet providers have immensely powerful tools for shutting people up at their disposal. Most of them are, fortunately, very reluctant to use these tools most of the time, but only because of the damage to their reputation a misdirected freezing of someone’s funds could lead to. When not asked but ordered by a powerful enough authority to do so, most of them won’t blink before ruining someone’s life because of an alleged connection to “terrorism.”

“Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check.”, Murray Rothbard once concluded. Regardless of your opinion on the legitimacy of the state, it is undeniably very risky to grant any institution this kind of power over people. You might like your government now, but if the “other side” wins the next election, you might not be too happy with a system that automatically grants them power over people’s lives of this magnitude. The creepy thing about letting a third party decide what rules apply at what point in time and to whom is that the system might function perfectly fine until the day that it suddenly doesn’t. You can’t see it coming. That’s the scariest part.

People in power very seldomly give up that power willingly. While this observation may seem obvious, it is less obvious what power truly is and where it truly resides. Voters seem to miss the target all the time and keep on voting for parties that suggest that giving politicians more power is a good idea. Regardless of where on the right/left spectrum the parties of most democracies today land, they all want themselves to have more power over other people. The right-wingers become more and more conservative rather than libertarian, more protectionist and nationalistic than pro-free trade, and so on. The left-wingers are, well, left-wingers, so they naturally want to increase taxes and control people’s finances to a greater extent. Not to mention their self-harming tendency to focus on more and more cosmetic issues, like the political agenda-de-jour of the social justice movement. Deregulation, less governance, fewer taxes, free speech, and more personal responsibility are values that almost no politician rallies behind any longer. Furthermore, there’s a tendency among the political class and the old media houses to hide their pompousness by introducing vague terms to mislead the public, such as the “political compass,” “filter bubbles,” and various distortions of the term “common values.” There’s a strong connection between their not-so-subtle joint effort agenda, pushed by established media and politicians, and the recent rise in distrust of politicians in general. After the Internet came along and provided alternatives to whatever political opinions the establishment wanted to promote, political brainwashing machines have started to creak in their joints.

Hate speech is a term obviously coined by someone who hated speech. Nothing is as important to a society as free speech, and as discussed earlier, the only alternative humans have to speech when it comes to resolving conflict is violence. When lawmakers try to treat the symptoms of a societal problem with political band-aids such as hate speech laws, they not only fail to address the root cause of the problem, but undermine the very system that is protecting the victimized minority that the new law is supposedly designed to protect. Not only that, but they also cement the old group-think that labels people with categorizations that an unbiased society isn’t supposed to take into consideration. *Diversity *is a term commonly used to describe everything except what truly needs to be diverse in a society, namely people’s opinions. Instead, the word is used to describe cosmetic traits, such as skin color, gender, age, or sexual preferences. Governments all around the Western world brag about their “diverse” parliaments, focusing only on the superficial whilst pushing a more and more unified political agenda. Anyone who dares to question if politicians and journalists are really qualified to conjure up solutions to supposed climate problems, for instance, is labeled a conspiracy theorist and anti-science. For anyone who has read any dystopian fiction in general, and Orwell in particular, the alarm bells should have sounded a long time ago.

Anyone who wants to be able to freely express his or her opinions in the future would be wise to act sooner rather than later. Your top priority should be to secure your financial freedom because without it, you’re on a leash, and you have no reliable guarantees whatsoever. Money is a linguistic tool we use in order to express value to each other, and at this point in time, there is no nation on earth where people’s ability to use money unhindered is protected by free speech legislation. Bitcoin, in particular, should be protected by free speech laws since Bitcoin is entirely made up of computer code and mathematics. If a law hinders you from expressing mathematics, you can instantly discard that law book as deeply immoral. Right now, this holds true for most law books in existence. This is not to say that anyone should actively break the law or not, just to emphasize that being moral is one thing and following the law another. Think hard and deep about where you stand on these issues. Chances are that there’s nothing you can do about the society you were born into, but quite a lot you can do to increase your personal independence.

While you’re at it, think about taxes. Think about who really pays them. Businesses need to be profitable in order to survive, so whenever a business is taxed, they will have to raise the prices of their products and services. Therefore, it is always the consumer that ultimately pays the tax. This is true for every tax there is.

VAT and sales taxes, for instance, are just a small part of the total amount of taxes that raise the price of a product, ultimately paid by the consumer. The employees of the company producing said product are probably paying income taxes, forcing their employers to pay them higher salaries. Employees also live in houses and have to pay real estate taxes, which ultimately forces the business owner to pay them more. Not to mention that the company itself needs to be physically located somewhere. A real estate tax is supposed to be a taxation of property owners, but in reality, it’s always the consumer who pays the bill in the end. The tenant will have to pay rent, and if there’s a real estate tax on the property, the owner will have to charge the tenant a higher monthly price.

All taxes ultimately punish the consumer, either through higher prices or a smaller supply of products to choose from. Prices can’t be raised indefinitely, and some companies go out of business instead, lessening the competition between the remaining market actors and punishing the consumer even more. The taxes collected might be used for things a consumer would want anyway, like health care or education, but always through a process more ineffective and more expensive than that which a truly free market would provide. In a truly free market with sound money, the division of labor mechanisms of that market would give us close to zero marginal costs for all products while at the same time disincentivizing people from overconsumption. True sustainability instead of mere buzzwords.

About the Bitcoin Infinity Academy

The Bitcoin Infinity Academy is an educational project built around Knut Svanholm’s books about Bitcoin and Austrian Economics. Each week, a whole chapter from one of the books is released for free on Nostr, accompanied by a video in which Knut and Luke de Wolf discuss that chapter’s ideas. You can join the discussions by signing up for one of the courses on our Geyser page. Signed books, monthly calls, and lots of other benefits are also available.