I usually have something a little more inspirational to say at the beginning of each year, but as I sit here typing a few days after Christmas, I’m grasping a bit in formulating concise and wonderful thoughts, yet all is not lost. Alas, it’s ridiculous to sit here in the comfort of my home office and feel anything other than gratitude and dare I say it, hope. I’m extremely grateful that even amid all the tyrannical lockdowns and governmental attempts to thwart the market, the stores have been well stocked and supply chains have continued to bring those goods directly to my doorstep all through 2020, let’s not lose sight of that. Indeed, it’s simply amazing and mind blowing to think of the untapped and unknown advancements in technology and unthinkable new goods and services that could exist outside of government interventions.
I’m grateful that many are seeing the faltering of the underpinnings of an enormous, single, gargantuan nation-state attempting to speak, nay, dictate, nay, control what should happen with the day to day activities of 331 million individual actors. Courtesy of the Donald Trump era, many on the Left may have begun to question the reality of having a single person reign on high and represent to the world what “we” are thinking and feeling (as if that were possible or even desirable). Sigh, but ever so quickly, those very same people were quick to immediately flip a switch and cheer the election of a soggy old wet suit of a candidate in Joe Biden, an obviously faltering in health career politician with a disgusting congressional track record topped by the 1994 Crime Bill and one of the most uninspiring candidates in recent memory, as if that mattered, to be their new “leader.”
Many on the Right have cried foul regarding the election results but missing the forest for the trees, appear to have missed that there is a chasm, perhaps smoldering for a generation that something has gone awry in this great experiment of representative democracy. Elections have been meddled with for centuries and no doubt meddling is part and parcel to its existence. Politics is connections and getting the goods for well connected entities at the expense of the individual. Politics is violence. The endless cycle and absurdity of “my guy is back in power, all is better in the world,” may finally be being revealed for the farce that it is. For generations, a new election has simply meant a perpetually expanding bureaucratic state, an ever-expanding war state and a continuously operating money printer, echoing the soothing sounds of “brrrrrrrrrr” in the halls of the Treasury. It has meant a violent police state. It has meant countless and never ending regulations inhibiting an entrepreneur from pursuing what they are good at, leaving their skills and services absent from the market, unrealized, unseen and unknown. And yet, there sits something unseen to the majority, certainly unrealized but with the potential to take on Leviathan; there exists Bitcoin.
There also exist people, simple regular day to day people, many of whom joined up with each other and protested the police state over the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Shaver, Ryan Whitaker, Elijah McClain and countless others. Even the most pro-police supporters saw the murder of George Floyd for the awful and abhorrent act that it was, but so quickly this unanimous fueling of anger at the police state was redirected through the lens of the politics of division, pitting man against man instead of man versus the state.
There were other small sparks of hope in that some rightly rallied against deputies who were sent to arrest mothers for taking their children to the park playground and many have defiantly stood shoulder to shoulder with their local businesses and churches in direct opposition to lockdown orders. Alas, a large majority have fallen in line with the lockdown orders and have tacitly supported the shuttering of small businesses worldwide, while granting an enormous handout to large corporations who were allowed to stay open and prosper through it all (that Shop Local canvas bag is doing wonders, though!). This is to say nothing of all the missed cancer screenings, suicides, abuse and neglect that came into existence due to the lockdowns, the outlays of death from which will far outpace deaths from Covid-19 in the coming years. Most certainly the news organizations will be eerily quiet on this subject. Our fearless leaders and their requisite experts will conveniently forget to mention to the masses the disparity in results from Covid-19 with respect to how North Dakota fared versus South Dakota (hint: the virus acted the same despite wildly different government restrictions), or why Florida and California have fared so differently even though one has been on a tyrannical lockdown and the other is wide open? There is no curiosity and there are many more aspects of the virus to be explored beyond these two State comparisons. By now, there is a huge trove of data out there, but we are left with the same tired and misleading messages.
The Left seems eager to install a true fascist in President-elect Joe Biden, who has promised, at a minimum, to institute a national mask mandate, predictably showcasing his lack of true scientific curiosity, for why would there be differences in States that have remained open and those that have locked down? Wouldn’t that be the best way to evaluate what can be working best with regards to the virus, or if nothing else, prove that maybe very little could be done to tame the virus? Nah, let’s just do the same old thing. Over the last four years, Trump was continually alleged to be a real dictator, but what the Left hated the most was that he just acted like a dictator, they seem to be very eager for someone to do some actual dictator shit.
You may be asking yourself, what the hell does this have to do with that fancy hope word that you typed earlier? I can offer this: you, good people who are reading this and have made it this far, it’s going to happen, you’re going to reach someone.
It’s going to happen, you’re going to write an article that no one will read or share a podcast that no one will listen to. Wait, what the hell, that’s not hopeful? Hold on. You’re going to share an article that no one will read, but on occasion it will happen, someone will listen, someone will remember, even if only vaguely. I once wore a Murray Rothbard shirt to a brewery (so brave), courtesy the good folks over at LibertyMugs, and a few people casually glanced at the shirt and continued on with their conversation but, BUT, the bartender said, gesturing at my shirt, “I gotta ask you, who is that?” Having come to hate the term libertarian, as it is interpreted in conventional conversation, I replied, “it’s Murray Rothbard, he was a prolific writer, historian and economist,” and I left it at that. Did I say enough? Did I do enough? I’m not sure and I’m not too worried about it. It’s not up to me to convince everyone of everything, but perhaps I planted a seed. Then again, perhaps not, but I’m not going to make my entire existence be some crusade to extoll the virtues of Austrian economics and libertarian thought into every random conversation that I have. However, if they are interested, I need to become a better storyteller. Sure, I can sit behind a keyboard, mulling over the best phrasing of a particular sentence, but that’s only going to reach a small percentage of people. Damn, did I just make a New Year’s resolution?
It’s going to happen, someone is going to get half of the story on any number of historical events. Someone is just coming out of college, much like myself, stating that they don’t need to be worried about economics, it’s too boring or they just don’t understand it. There is always someone new who might just need a nudge in the right direction, a chance encounter to send them down a rabbit hole of their own discovery process. Hence the aforementioned storytelling. And Bitcoin. If you are talking economics and not telling the wonderfully sordid story of money you’re missing a great opportunity. Oftentimes, I write articles basically calling myself out for lack of knowledge, take from that what you will.
It’s going to happen, the veil will be lifted and when an idea reaches a critical mass, anything can happen. You don’t need all of them, but do you need a small committed minority. I and many others will have been here all along promoting consistent principles of individual liberty in opposition to destructive, collectivist ideologies.
I have something new planned for this website in 2021. A rebranding of sorts; an opening up of sorts; an expansion. It will be a place of random discourse, uninhibited opinion, and ranting and raving on multifarious topics, beyond the merely political, although those will stay in heavy rotation. Stay tuned! And don’t let the bastards keep you down.
