It’s quite possible that we are at an inflection point in history. This article by Jeffrey Tucker, The Most Dramatic Narrative Shift in Modern History, was published Feb 8th by the Brownstone Institute. With an economy of words and very clear insight, Jeffery Tucker explains how what he calls a "narrative shift" has occurred.

It's powerful.

It particularly resonates with me because the subject of people all over the world losing faith/belief/confidence in the effectiveness/benevolence/legitimacy of their own governments and institutions is a central element of my forthcoming novel, A Penny for Newton. Unlike the COVID fiasco we've all just lived through (and continue to suffer from the effects of), in my novel the disaster is orders of magnitude worse and lasts for decades, which brings virtually everyone to the conclusion that they were lied to by whatever nation state they loved and patriotically supported all their lives.

I hope you have time to read his article.

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-most-dramatic-narrative-shift-in-modern-history/

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We all learn in high school physics class that mass and energy are the fundamental components of our universe. There are many forms of mass and many forms of energy. Those two categories are the building blocks of everything we know about our physical world.

I would like you to consider the proposition that life and property are the fundamental components of human civilization. We are all born with life (energy) and over the course of our lifetime we convert some of that energy into property (mass). The fundamental elements of being human are that we have life and we gradually convert our life energy into many forms of property.

I’m not prepared to offer a mathematical equivalency the way Einstein did, showing energy and mass are exactly related as E=mc2. For one thing, I ain’t no Einstein.

And it also seems pretty obvious that different people can expend the same amount of energy and produce property of greatly different value. One man can spend 1,000 hours of his life cutting down trees and building a log cabin. Another man can spend 1,000 hours turning a block of steel into watch springs worth many multiples of what the cabin’s value. While Rembrandt could spend his 1,000 hours turning canvas and paints into something worth even more.

So if somebody, someday comes up with an equation showing the equivalency between life and property I think it might look more like Drake’s Equation (illustrated above) for the likelihood of other advanced, communicative civilizations being in our galaxy.

He used these variables:

• R∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy.

• fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets.

• ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets.

• fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point.

• fi = the fraction of planets with life that go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations).

• fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.

• L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

That’s a lot of variables and assumptions to consider.

So I suppose the Life = Property formula might need variables such as:

• Ingenuity of the individual

• Knowledge previously acquired from others

• Sophistication of his tools

• Tenacity of his effort

• All divided by the unwanted coercive interference against his productivity

It would take some serious modeling to begin to approach a formula that accounts for the observable reality that one lifetime might produce X-amount of property, while another equally long lifetime produced 1,000 times more.

But I Digress…

My primary point here is that all humans are endowed with a life force and we all convert that life force into property that we expect will benefit us. Property like food and shelter are at the most basic level.

And just as there is a Periodic Table to categorize all the elements of mass, I suppose someone could construct a much larger Table of Property to organize everything from food, shelter, and knowledge; to money, factories, and Louis Vuitton® handbags.

Understanding this concept of trading life for property (which I would characterize as an imperial reality) leads to a clarity of thinking around fundamental issues of being human and living in a society.

First of all, who owns your body? Who rightfully owns and controls your bones, blood, brain, and organs? I think you own yours and I own mine. If I have a bum liver, I have no inherent right to take your liver. Likewise, if you take the time and effort to learn to speak Italian, that knowledge does not migrate into my brain. It’s just a fact of nature that we are all biologically autonomous.

Secondly, if you spend some of your finite life energy (and we all know it’s finite in 100% of cases) making a million dollars, or a log cabin, or writing some original music, I believe you own that property because you spent your life energy creating it, not mine. So I don’t own any of it. Zero.

If you believe those two premises are valid; that you own your life and you own the property you create with your life — and I think a few billion of us worldwide do believe those two premises — it logically builds to the conclusion of creating a society where people’s daily conduct, their work, their financial system, and their respected rituals and customs inside that society would all be devoted to the protection of individual people and their property.

In that society an action would only be a crime if it was a successful act of coercion. Actions would be moral only when they involve an absence of coercion. And that freedom would be defined as the societal condition of everyone have 100% control over his or her own property.

I invite you to think about these fundamental concepts of human society. To me, they are easy to embrace because they appear to be empirically true and have been true for all of known history. And they are applicable and available to people everywhere in the world, irrespective of their personal circumstances. Anyone, anywhere can decide to acknowledge and believe in the value of each human owning his or her own life and property.

A Warning

But I warn you. When you see these concepts as self-evident truth and you embrace them as your own belief, you will never see our contemporary world the same way again.

You will see coercion everywhere. You will see the plunder of property as a codified social system. You will see theft, fraud, and war as the foundations of every nation state and the essential fabric of every fiat financial system, now and in history.

You will see billions of people born into public debts they did not incur. They are forced to pay the interest on that debt throughout their lives. You will see billions of people who must seek permission from others in order to simply live their lives on their own terms. And you will see that permission is rarely granted.

Because, my friends, we live in nation states where we do not own our lives and we do not own the property we create with our lives. Others own us. All of us. And there is always a prison cell or a gallows waiting for those who oppose that condition too visibly or vocally.

. . . until some of us can quietly build a better social system to supplant the ones we’ve had imposed upon us for thousands of years. At long last we have the technologies we need to protect all of us, but do we have the enough time and do we have the will?

We all learn in high school physics class that mass and energy are the fundamental components of our universe. There are many forms of mass and many forms of energy. Those two categories are the building blocks of everything we know about our physical world.

I would like you to consider the proposition that life and property are the fundamental components of human civilization. We are all born with life (energy) and over the course of our lifetime we convert some of that energy into property (mass). The fundamental elements of being human are that we have life and we gradually convert our life energy into many forms of property.

I’m not prepared to offer a mathematical equivalency the way Einstein did, showing energy and mass are exactly related as E=mc2. For one thing, I ain’t no Einstein.

And it also seems pretty obvious that different people can expend the same amount of energy and produce property of greatly different value. One man can spend 1,000 hours of his life cutting down trees and building a log cabin. Another man can spend 1,000 hours turning a block of steel into watch springs worth many multiples of what the cabin’s value. While Rembrandt could spend his 1,000 hours turning canvas and paints into something worth even more.

So if somebody, someday comes up with an equation showing the equivalency between life and property I think it might look more like Drake’s Equation (illustrated above) for the likelihood of other advanced, communicative civilizations being in our galaxy.

He used these variables:

• R∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy.

• fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets.

• ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets.

• fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point.

• fi = the fraction of planets with life that go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations).

• fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.

• L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

That’s a lot of variables and assumptions to consider.

So I suppose the Life = Property formula might need variables such as:

• Ingenuity of the individual

• Knowledge previously acquired from others

• Sophistication of his tools

• Tenacity of his effort

• All divided by the unwanted coercive interference against his productivity

It would take some serious modeling to begin to approach a formula that accounts for the observable reality that one lifetime might produce X-amount of property, while another equally long lifetime produced 1,000 times more.

But I Digress…

My primary point here is that all humans are endowed with a life force and we all convert that life force into property that we expect will benefit us. Property like food and shelter are at the most basic level.

And just as there is a Periodic Table to categorize all the elements of mass, I suppose someone could construct a much larger Table of Property to organize everything from food, shelter, and knowledge; to money, factories, and Louis Vuitton® handbags.

Understanding this concept of trading life for property (which I would characterize as an imperial reality) leads to a clarity of thinking around fundamental issues of being human and living in a society.

First of all, who owns your body? Who rightfully owns and controls your bones, blood, brain, and organs? I think you own yours and I own mine. If I have a bum liver, I have no inherent right to take your liver. Likewise, if you take the time and effort to learn to speak Italian, that knowledge does not migrate into my brain. It’s just a fact of nature that we are all biologically autonomous.

Secondly, if you spend some of your finite life energy (and we all know it’s finite in 100% of cases) making a million dollars, or a log cabin, or writing some original music, I believe you own that property because you spent your life energy creating it, not mine. So I don’t own any of it. Zero.

If you believe those two premises are valid; that you own your life and you own the property you create with your life — and I think a few billion of us worldwide do believe those two premises — it logically builds to the conclusion of creating a society where people’s daily conduct, their work, their financial system, and their respected rituals and customs inside that society would all be devoted to the protection of individual people and their property.

In that society an action would only be a crime if it was a successful act of coercion. Actions would be moral only when they involve an absence of coercion. And that freedom would be defined as the societal condition of everyone have 100% control over his or her own property.

I invite you to think about these fundamental concepts of human society. To me, they are easy to embrace because they appear to be empirically true and have been true for all of known history. And they are applicable and available to people everywhere in the world, irrespective of their personal circumstances. Anyone, anywhere can decide to acknowledge and believe in the value of each human owning his or her own life and property.

A Warning

But I warn you. When you see these concepts as self-evident truth and you embrace them as your own belief, you will never see our contemporary world the same way again.

You will see coercion everywhere. You will see the plunder of property as a codified social system. You will see theft, fraud, and war as the foundations of every nation state and the essential fabric of every fiat financial system, now and in history.

You will see billions of people born into public debts they did not incur. They are forced to pay the interest on that debt throughout their lives. You will see billions of people who must seek permission from others in order to simply live their lives on their own terms. And you will see that permission is rarely granted.

Because, my friends, we live in nation states where we do not own our lives and we do not own the property we create with our lives. Others own us. All of us. And there is always a prison cell or a gallows waiting for those who oppose that condition too visibly or vocally.

. . . until some of us can quietly build a better social system to supplant the ones we’ve had imposed upon us for thousands of years. At long last we have the technologies we need to protect all of us, but do we have the enough time and do we have the will?

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When I was a kid in Canada Nov. 11th was about remembering the millions of people killed in the world wars.

I remember sitting in a classroom trying to visualize some poor bastard in a cold, muddy trench being overrun by German soldiers. Maybe shooting one or two with his clumsy, slow-firing rifle just before being bayoneted to death and slowly dying in the slop while realizing he’d never see home again as the frenzied shouts in German began to fade from his awareness.

My dad served in the Canadian infantry during WWII when V-2 rockets were raining on London and his comrades were reduced to traces of fabric in the bricks of bombed buildings. (The one thing he mentioned.)

Like virtually every other veteran back then, my dad never traded on his service. I never heard anybody say ‘thank you’ to him. He didn’t expect it. He was never pissed off if a store sold Christmas items before Nov 11th. Never expected a discount at the restaurant. Never talked about people ‘disrespecting veterans.’

War was to be avoided. The people who died were seen as victims. Both wars were seen as massive tragedies. Many eventually saw them as completely avoidable.

Then Vietnam happened.

The United States lost to what Secretary of State Kissinger called “a fourth-rate power” (just as it failed to win in Korea) and the truth emerged that years after US politicians knew Vietnam was un-winnable they continued to waste US and Vietnamese lives in order to save face and get re-elected.

58,220 recent US high school graduates and millions of Vietnamese lost their lives for absolutely nothing beyond an uptick in the Dow Jones and the careers of dishonest politicians.

Today US tourists and businesses flood Vietnam. US airlines offer daily flights to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, you can stay at a lovely Hilton Hotel and enjoy a Starbucks coffee. The communist “dominoes” never fell and never threatened the US ‘way of life™’ as we were repeated told would happen if those kids didn’t keep dying for us.

Thus, many people lost confidence in the credibility, competence, and honor of the military industrial complex and the hawkish politicians they purchased every election cycle.

SO . . . the public relations folks in the military vowed that next time would be different.

And when 9/11 happened the military, the intelligence “community,” and the defense/war industry exerted maximum controll of every aspect of US news and public relations.

Journalists were “embedded” with troops as relentless cheerleaders for the war. Touching, emotional profiles were featured of wounded or killed soldiers. Virtually zero coverage was given about the ”other side’s” losses. No touching profiles about their maimed kids.

Stories about US drones bombing weddings and funerals, about bombing civilian rescue teams that arrived, about bombing the wrong buildings and hospitals, and especially about how there was never a credible plan to ever stop the wars — were all suppressed, even if it meant crushing the 1st Amendment and putting leakers/truth-tellers in prison.

Questions about the legality of the invasion of sovereign countries were never asked nor answered. Even to this day.

Instead the NFL owners were paid millions by taxpayers via the military to have players on the field for the anthem - for the first time ever.

Every major sporting event suddenly started with an honor ceremony for the military.

And on the brand new social media, millions of pro-war memes were created and circulated to encourage the validity of warfare as a LEGITIMATE way of solving problems and the death of millions of civilians in foreign countries as NECESSITY.

So now November 11th has been morphed into a day to openly encourage more war — and warfare as a PROFESSION. Soldiering as a desirable CAREER for high school kids. (With the permanent standing army the Founders specifically warned against.)

Invading foreign countries and killing people wholesale is sold as a legitimate insurance policy against any risk of a lower standard of living for us back home.

And we are decreasingly asked to remember that poor bastard in the WWI trench, who lost his life only because a teenager shot a Duke in a far off country of little significance.

Instead we’re asked to thank the people KEEPING WAR ALIVE today. And to worry that early Christmas decorations might offend their honor.

And it’s all by careful design and driven by financial and industrial interests that require trillions of taxpayer dollars.

And it works! Because most people think exactly what they’re TOLD TO THINK BY AUTHORITY FIGURES.

“Yay, war! Yay, war! Yay, war! All praise to warriors and their profession of making our lives so much better."

For my part, I still just think about that poor, naive kid in 1916 who died 100% needlessly in a cold trench far from home because a teenager in Sarajevo shot a rich Duke causing three cousins who each ruled Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary (all of whom were grandchildren of Queen Victoria who ruled the UK) to fight over which of them would milk the family tax cows of Europe for the next few decades.

And largely because of the shitty treaty created by the political braintrust at the end of WWI, another 60,000,000 people had to die because it gave rise to yet another politician wanting total control of all the tax cows in his region.

Remembrance Day? I just remember to say screw all the politicians of the world and hope that people will one day stop dying and killing for any of them or encouraging anyone else to do it.

That can only happen when we build a better system to supplant human governance at the barrel of a gun, which is what eight billion of us live under, whether we admit it or not.

Humanity deserves a better system. There’s something to Remember.

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Great article from that addresses some nuances of what many of us think should be an no-brainer: Individuals are important and have legitimate rights that groups don’t have.

…yet you know that many people are antagonistic to that principle.

This analysis is worth your time.

The Freedom Scale

Why Do People Hate Individualism So Much?

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents…

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2 years ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Cook

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This is a relatively quick overview of what is being engineered in back rooms right now by the people who want to control EVERY aspect of your life and property.

Listen, in particular to because she really studies this subject and she sees what is coming for all of us.

You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson

"Fighting The Digital Dollar" - Panel at Bitcoin Amsterdam Conference

🎙️ On this panel from Oct. 10th 2024 in Amsterdam, we discussed CBDCs, stable coins, "going cashless" - in China, UK, Thailand, Israel and more…

Listen now

2 years ago · 1 like · Efrat Fenigson

….and please share this with any friends who actually care about not being owned and controlled by their politicians.

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There are many observations that can be drawn from this information but my mind goes to all those billions of people paying half their lifetime production in mandatory taxes to be “kept safe” by the nation state they happened to be born in realizing, when asked, they don’t feel safe at all.

And the vast majority of these poor souls will be bystanders in countries that never provoked any trouble. Although, you could tell the 77% of Romanians who are worried about WWIII that maybe their country shouldn’t have joined the most belligerent military alliance on the planet. (NATO) But, of course, decisions like that are socially engineered in ways those voters don’t even realize exist. (If they even get a vote.) That’s also why 64% of people, on average, believe their own country should spend more on the military.

Speaking of social engineering, I’ve spent the last few months in the UK and there are so many talking heads lamenting the UK’s paltry military spending they are now on the TV more than dog food commercials. (The British Army Has Shrunk to its Smallest Size Since the Napoleonic wars. Note: The above linked article makes no mention of how many nuclear warheads and atomic subs the Duke of Wellington had at his disposal to deter Napoleon. But, hey, more money!!)

None of us knows the future and I’m sure the sane among us want no wars anywhere. But I believe that, unfortunately, most people think exactly what they are told to think. And right now they are being told WWIII is more likely than not to be just around the corner.

Americans work hard. They produce an enormous amount of value every year. They create billions of dollars in new real estate and building construction, power generation and distribution, air, land and sea transportation, food production, information technology, medical and scientific advances, not to mention billions more in arts like music and movies. The US economy is a juggernaut of production and human advancement.

But for all that effort from all those millions of productive workers, managers, and innovators, the biggest Industry and the biggest Export of the United States are rarely spoken about.

America’s #1 Industry

Even some of the highly visible contenders pale by comparison to #1. The entire US energy industry takes in somewhere around a $1.5 trillion dollars annually. That includes all the oil and gas, electric power, renewables, coal, nuclear, and the distribution of all the above.

Transportation is another behemoth that tallies around $1.5 trillion dollars annually. And that’s for all freight trucking, passenger and cargo airlines, railroads, maritime shipping, public transit and all of the supporting logistics and warehousing.

I think it’s fair to say that those expenses impact all of us. Chances are everything in your home spent some time on a truck, and a lot of it had to arrive from some place so far away that a truck can’t do the job. And we all have energy bills to pay, not to mention all the food we buy.

But each of those is still a fraction of our total annual expenses.

So what’s #1? What demands more than anything else? Governance. The absolutely massive boulder we all carry on our backs throughout our entire lifetimes is the cost of our own governance.

In the US in 2024 that looks something like this:

• Federal Government Spending: $6.9 trillion according to the US Treasury Department.

• State Government Spending: $2.9 trillion, however $1 trillion of that comes from the Feds, so call the State portion $1.9 trillion annually, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.

• Local Government Spending: According to the Urban Institute, cities, townships, counties, school districts, and special districts spend about $1.9 trillion annually.

These add up to $10.7 trillion every year out of a total GDP of about $29 trillion. This is money you pay. And unlike flying on a passenger jet or turning up your furnace, these are mandatory pay-or-go-to-prison expenses that we all have to pay before we even think about those orthodontics for our kid or getting new tires on our car.

And I won’t even get into all the promises made to people expecting Medicare and Social Security in the future and how many unfunded trillions those add up to. The yet-to-be-born will inherit that bondage — and still be relentlessly told how free they are. Free as long as they keep up the payments, otherwise it’s prison for them too.

There is no industry on earth that takes in $10 trillion a year, never mind a single industry in America. The cost of your governance - people controlling you - is the #1 Industry in America by a very wide margin.

(And yes, I know that some of what is provided for that money would be things I’d volitionally agree to buy. But I’m not interested in paying a giant government agency to control the importation of French cheese or another agency to slap a big tariff on that Italian motorcycle I’d like to buy. Plus I’m very confident the services I do want could be had for a lot less money.)

America’s #1 Export

You might have heard, even using the government’s own monkey numbers, the federal government admits the US National Debt is now north of $35 trillion. And another trillion gets thrown on that pile every few months now.

Just this amount burdens every living taxpayer to a debt of $269,000. No matter how long you live and how much you pay, this personal obligation never gets smaller.

So how does a government “keep taxes low” while scattering money like a supernova distributes radiation?

The short answer is; it prints it. But we know places like Zimbabwe and Hungary tried that and ended up with inflation rate percentages in the thousands annually. Sometimes the value of their money was cut in half in a single day.

So how can the US print trillions of dollars every year and not have the same thing happen as Zimbabwe? In a word, hegemony. Dominance of all global matters.

Thanks to it’s 750 offshore military bases and US troops stationed in 159 foreign countries and its open belligerence to any country that will not fully align itself with US interests, the US can force - and I mean force! - other countries to trade in US dollars for most of their big ticket expenses. If they want something costing billions, they need to buy it in US dollars.

And equally important, America politicians can also force these other countries to accept US dollars when the US wants to buy anything from them. So when the US buys machinery from Germany, mobile phones from China, pharmaceuticals from India, and cars from Canada it never has to pay in the local currency.

Instead, the American government can just print up some fresh trillions and hand it to people outside of the country. Zimbabwe couldn’t do that. Hungary couldn’t do that. And we’re talking about trillions of dollars every single year.

So America’s #1 Export is…inflation. Even the other big export sectors like planes, industrial and construction machinery, and computers are only about $100 billion or so each. Everything pales to the inflationary money the US spends worldwide. Print it for free - force people to accept it - then boast about your great country and its good standard of living! Nice. Keep the whole field tilted so all the marbles roll one way.

In a way, this is nothing new. A couple of centuries ago the British did it. Back then they had the warships and the big geographic footprint to dictate terms to everyone who had something they wanted. Now America is doing it. Maybe China will be next. The victims are always the little guys trying to get through life without being robbed of what they worked for. But they always get robbed. Because all Nation States are giant coercion machines that plunder in order to exist and to exert governance over their domestic victims…sorry — beloved citizens.

Someday we’ll have peaceful human governance that people only purchase by volitional choice and can opt out of when they want. Until then nobody is actually living in Freedom. That why we’re constantly told we are.

Americans work hard. They produce an enormous amount of value every year. They create billions of dollars in new real est…

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