We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day “Schumer-Manchin won’t reduce inflation, won’t reduce the budget deficit, and it won’t reduce the world’s temperature. What it will do is transfer some $369 billion from taxpayers and drug companies to the pockets of green energy businesses and investors. It will tighten the hold that politicians have on the allocation of capital, as they pick winners and losers with their grants and tax credits. Everyone will get a nice warm feeling as they pretend they are cooling the climate.”
– Wall Street Journal ($), commenting on the latest abomination to pass through the House of Representatives. It points that the supposedly “green” parts of this bill will, according to Danish “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, reduce the estimated global temperature rise at the end of this century by all of 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit in the optimistic [United Nations scenario] case. And meanwhile China proceeds apace with building coal-fired power stations.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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As if quoting it to four decimal places means anything. If it’s going to do sod-all, then say it’s going to do sod-all. Because it’s going to do sod-all.
Yet more government spending, taxation and regulations.
It has nothing much to do with C02 emissions – as the People’s Republic of China produces vastly more C02 emissions than the United States.
Is it a deliberate effort to destroy the United States? Or do the people who voted for this, including the two “moderate” Democrats in the Senate, really believe that government spending, taxes and regulations do not matter?
Who knows – and for practical purposes it does not matter if the Democrats are evil or just misguided.
What matters is that Democrats, due to the rigging of the elections of 2020 (with vast numbers of fake “mail-in ballots” what we call in Britain “Postal Votes”) HAVE THE POWER – and they are using that power to destroy the United States, whether or not they are doing so intentionally.
Those people who said, quietly, that the rigging of the 2020 election did not really matter (that everyone should “stop making a fuss” about it) have been shown, yet again, to be utterly wrong.
The Democrats are also destroying what is left of the Rule of Law – although the FBI and “Justice” Department bureaucracy were corrupted as long ago as 1993.
In a better system putting in corrupt people in the bureaucracy would not matter that much – because the power of the “Justice” bureaucracy would be limited. But the United States government (using the Depression, World War II, Cold War and “the Mafia” and “war on drugs” as justifications) undermined the limits on the power of the “Justice” bureaucracy long ago – turning the Federal “Justice” system into a Conviction Machine – often for “crimes” that are not crimes at all.
People who think that the United States is a “safe haven” for their investments could not be more wrong – the United States is ruled by bandits – that is what “Social Justice” (the belief system of people such as Attorney General Garland and others) is – theft and other criminality.
The “Social Justice” criminals do not just control the streets of American cities – they also control the Congress and the Executive Branch bureaucracy.
If this continues, the United States of America will fall.
But with this bill, Schumer has finally managed to create the domestic military force that Obama yearned to control. 87,000 new IRS agents – 1740 per state (average). (For non-US people, the IRS is the one truly feared US agency.)
And the IRS, over the Obama and Biden admins, has been accumulating ammunition at a staggering clip. People wondered why they would buy so much given the number of IRS employees who might use it. Now we know.
This is a coup, and the reaction is going to be awful. I’m on some distribution lists that are rather blowing up today, and are no longer dealing with theoretical concepts. Combine all of that with the raid on Trump, and passion is high.
bobby b – correct.
All those people who said “America has become Big Government country – but there is still the Rule of Law and protection of basic liberties” have been shown to be wrong.
The real test will be in the Midterm Elections.
If there is yet more election fraud, more mass “mail-in ballots”, voting without proper I.D., and electronic voting machines (which are “not connected to the internet” – till it turns out that they ARE connected), then all bets are off.
People who have invested in the United States need to get their money out NOW – otherwise it could vanish in the same way that the “Hundreds of Billions of Foreign Exchange Reserves” that Russia used to have, vanished – Mr Putin was a total fool, he forgot the basic rule “if you can not put your hand out and physically touch your money – YOU HAVE NO MONEY as soon as the lights on the banker computer screens are turned off”. The banks serve the regime – indeed, they basically they are part of the regime (along with organisations such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard).
American Citizens who can not leave must prepare for hard times – economically and politically.
The interesting thing about this is that it is the Wall Street Journal saying it.
I have been learning a whole new respect for physical gold.
(And common ammunition too, of course. The ultimate currency.)
But Trudeau opened many eyes concerning the safety of any bank asset in the West. It’s only an asset when you still have permission to access it.
bobby b
I have been learning a whole new respect for physical gold.
The thing about physical gold is that it is more a holding pattern rather than an investment. Although its price does go up and down its value basically stays the same. IF you want to grow your money you have to invest it in enterprises that use it to create new value, and that is entirely done with fiat currency. On the periphery there is some investment being done in crypto, but the heavy hand of government is working to destroy that particular competitor.
FWIW, it is perfectly possible to make great money in a collapsing economy, and if you are smart and keep your money’s value, there will be a lot of bargain basement buys available in the next few years. For that, holding your value in gold may be wise, at least in part. Though you might want to carefully consider where you keep your gold. There is plenty of precedent of the government confiscating gold too.
It is also worth mentioning something that isn’t widely known in the west, namely that the Chinese economy is on the point of collapse, mainly due to a massive banking crisis. The cause is complicated, but essentially it is due to massive overbuilding of real estate in a manner not at all dissimilar to the dutch tulip crisis. Chinese real estate is largely a huge ponzi scheme where people buy houses that aren’t built yet, and the builders use that money to suck in new suckers. And now the Chinese people, who have put their whole life savings in this nonsense because of promised, “guaranteed” 10%, 20% or more annual ROIs. Now they have realized they have been duped and are trying to withdraw their money. So the government is shutting down banks to prevent a run, and there are riots in the street — in China. It is not at all good. The Chinese economy is hugely invested in this and if the real estate market collapses, China will be in real trouble.
But, Mr. Westerner, don’t smile in schadenfreude that Communism and Tyranny has been proved wrong. The echoes of a Chinese economic collapse or even contraction will reverberate through all Western economies in pretty dramatic ways. A huge amount of Western government bonds are in the hands of the chinese government, often bought with money out of this huge ponzi scheme. And if they stop buying then our profligate government will have no more magic money and that will lead to riots in OUR streets. Heck we already have them. Not to mention that China makes many of the crucial items that make for our dulce vita. And we have forgotten how to make them in the west.
Don’t disagree. It’s a ratchet to keep from sliding down when all else is sliding down. Right now, a holding pattern is welcome.
We’ve been making outlandish returns in equities for some time, and so gold was not on my radar. But it is now, just until things turn around again.
May I ask for advice in buying gold? or diamonds.
Links would be fine.