Category Archives: Libertarian

Queen Elizabeth II has passed away after 70 years on the throne. This is the longest reign of any British monarch and the second longest reign ever for the monarch of a sovereign country.

The United Kingdom has been plunged into a period of national heartbreak. Whether it be on social media, in peoples homes, or on the streets, British citizens everywhere have voiced their grief and condolences at the news.

And yet outsiders, especially libertarians, seem puzzled by this ostensibly bizarre, sentimental attachment the British have towards their ruler. How can a nation be so enamored with someone above their station?

When thinking about politics, libertarians can often become too focused on dry, abstract concepts, and overlook ones that many people value, notably culture, community, and history.

Queen Elizabeth II was a great unifier among the British people throughout the countrys ups and downs over the past 70 years. She was a constant figure to rally around who provided soul and national pride, someone who bound together the cultural heritage of the Commonwealth that makes trade and communication easier between peoples.

A representative for Britain across the world, utterly devoted to her duty with resolve, consistency, and humility.

She saw World War II and the ensuing rebuilding of the country, the troubles in Ireland, the Cold War, the industrial unrest that brought Britain to its knees, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and more recently Brexit.

Yet to a libertarian, monarchy is a form of evil. If all humans are to be equal and free, then nobody should have unjustified authority over another; there must be legitimacy, and birthright is certainly not a source of legitimacy in the 21st century.

Of course, this is a completely valid principle on which to construct your politics. The problem is that the real world is not valid, nor is it principled. We are not starting from scratch; we are dealing with nations where institutions, customs, and networks have developed over time, all around the world.

Hierarchical authority exists in every system, whether it be democratic, fascist, communist, or even anarchist. The question of politics is to organize society so that said authority maximizes certain values.

Libertarianism is about the sanctity of the individuals right to go about their life unhampered, on the condition that they do not harm others. Thus, society should be structured around that very principle.

Democracy is an important facet of this: it is the way we attempt to ensure accountability and renewal in governance. But democracy is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end.

Libertarian principles have a strong current of anti-politics. Political decision making, where collective resources and will is used to achieve ends, should be minimized, while private decision making should be maximized.

I can think of no greater nightmare than unchecked, radical political forces having the audacity and entitlement to enact their vision on the populace to reshape a society in whatever twisted image they feel is right at the time.

So why would a libertarian want the highest authority to be political? Why would we make heads of government, who wield hard, active power, also heads of state?

It is often said that the monarchy is useless because it doesnt do anything, but that is exactly the point; it is the unmoving, apolitical bulwark against the political nonsense we all hate. The monarch occupies positions, not to enact anything significant, but to prevent others from occupying them.

I enjoy the fact that every week, the prime minister, the head of government, has to humble themselves and bow to someone who has been around for far longer than they have. I enjoy the fact that the armed forces swear allegiance to the crown, not the political wing of the state.

They are, in essence, conditioned to defer to the embodiment of the nation, the land, and its history, and not the short-termism, greed, and psychopathy of politics.

Constitutional monarchies typically do not have secret police or gross overreaches of government power. They consistently have solid records on stability, civil liberties, and the rule of law.

It is no coincidence that the execution of the Tsars led to the horrors of communism, and the execution of Louis XVI led to imperial France under Napoleon.

This is the great tradition of British politics, law, and philosophy. Unlike in most of continental Europe, we do not deal in grand political visions and all their chaos. We value discovery, cynicism, experimentation, and pragmatism, all anti-political, and thus libertarian values.

We have no time for heavy-handed, radical politics, where everything we know and grew up around is cast aside every four years and subject to whatever theories some maniac has read in a book.

As a libertarian Brit, I do not feel less free knowing the head of state is unelected.

I feel less free when the single-payer National Health Service (NHS) makes me wait half a year for anything beyond a simple doctors appointment.

I feel less free knowing how our horrendous bureaucracy and tax system eats up swathes of public resources.

And I feel less free when the government imprisons people for making fun of others on the internet.

These are the fault of politics and of government, and that is where our attention is most needed. Rest in peace Queen Elizabeth II, long live the King.

For more content on the topic of liberty and monarchy, be sure to check out our short video on the topic by clicking on the button below.

This piece solely expresses the opinion of the author and not necessarily the organization as a whole. Students For Liberty is committed to facilitating a broad dialogue for liberty, representing a variety of opinions.

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You can be pro-freedom and a royalist - Learn Liberty

The following editorial published in the Dallas Morning News on Sept. 4:

The conservative Texas Supreme Court defended democracy.

Voters deserve better options on the ballot, but if the past two election cycles in Texas have taught us anything, partisan politicians will do all they can to keep candidates off the ballot if they dont conform to a party ideology.

Thats why it was hardly surprising to hear that Texas Republicans were trying to expel Libertarians from the ballot last week.

Thankfully, the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court saw through the gimmick employed by leading state GOP politicians, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon, former Collin County Judge Keith Self and state Sen. Angela Paxton, among others.

The court dismissed an emergency petition to remove Libertarians from the ballot that came nearly four months after supposed violations of the Texas election code.

According to the petition, 23 Libertarian candidates allegedly did not pay their filing fees. The court decided that was irrelevant. Even if the candidates did not pay the fees, the request to remove them from the ballot is not an appropriate remedy at this stage of the election process.

Not only is it inappropriate, it is a blatant attempt to manipulate the system.

Republicans are hardly alone in trying to limit greater choice on the ballot. In 2020, Democrats were able to get candidates from the Green Party removed. In the same election, Republicans tried and failed to erase 44 Libertarian candidates.

This time, the state Supreme Court dismissed the petition due to untimeliness and the lack of explanation as to why the Republicans waited so long to bring the petition.

Access to the ballot lies at the very heart of a constitutional republic, the court wrote.

We couldnt have said it better, and we are grateful that our states conservative justices demonstrated that rule of law and respect for democratic processes are still the order of the day in Texas.

Access to alternatives is especially frightening to partisans these days. As big-party primaries increasingly serve extremist views, middle-of-the-road voters are looking for options where they dont have to hold their nose in the voting booth.

History tells us just why Republicans are so worked up this time. Patrick won reelection in 2018 by 5 percentage points over Democrat Mike Collier. A Libertarian candidate took 2% of the total vote.

This year, Patricks running against Collier again, and it is competitive again, so is there any wonder why he wants to shoo Libertarians?

Third-party candidates too often are too far out there to consider. But its becoming increasingly hard to distinguish how big-party candidates are any better. Sometimes they are more extreme.

The presence of third-party candidates on the ballot can serve as moderating influence, especially when it forces major-party candidates to think about appealing to a broader electorate.

That may not have been the Texas Supreme Courts intent. But it is the consequence. And for that we can be thankful.

But there is something we are even more thankful for. At the end of the day, the court protected democracy against a partisan ploy.

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Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas GOP tried to keep Libertarians off the ballot - Victoria Advocate

THERE cannot be any debate about it. The Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army-National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF) is an enemy of the Republic. After all, it is a rebel group whose members took up arms with the main intent of eventually taking over if not a major part of the Philippine territory, then its entirety.

And this is where we have to take issue with how Sen. Loren Legarda has painted the CPP-NPA-NDF as otherwise.

The more fundamental offense committed by Legarda, to my mind, is that her cavalier treatment of the leftist ideology, where she collapsed a broad spectrum of different shades of red into one homogeneous entity, has done all leftist ideologues a total disservice. In her desire to defend progressive people espousing leftist platforms from being red-tagged, she, in fact, carelessly simplified and offered them up for further red-tagging.

We can only second-guess Legarda's real intent, but what she has done is practically summarize and homogenize the dynamism of what comprises the left, equating the ideas of those who adhere to left-wing politics and who espouse a more progressive political platform with the CPP-NPA-NDF. This is a highly irresponsible simplification.

To be left or right is determined by someone's view of the economy. Being on the left means believing that globalization should primarily serve humanity instead of the interests of global corporations, that corporate interests should be regulated to protect the environment because they wouldn't do so if they are left alone, and that corporations should have social responsibility and should not be fixated on profits only. A leftist believes in economic regulation and in protecting the marginalized, even if it means interfering with the operations of the free market. Hence, leftists believe in minimum wages and price controls. They believe in taxing the rich more, and using taxes to finance social programs that would even include investing in the arts. While some leftists are socially authoritarian, most leftists are socially libertarian. They adhere to individual freedom, and would support divorce, same-sex marriages and abortion. They oppose the death penalty.

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Being an activist for these causes, and questioning state authority, when done peacefully and under the ambit of laws, should not and cannot be considered as dangerous to the Republic. Under these rubrics, I am personally a leftist who is also a social libertarian. My score in the political compass test is a minus 6.88, with minus 10 being the score for being perfectly leftist, and a minus 7.23, with minus 10 being the score for being perfectly libertarian. I am not even a centrist by all accounts.

There has been too much confusion in the way popular and ordinary discourse has branded the left as essentially communist, and then further committing an egregious error of associating communism only with the armed left. Some even go to the extent of associating the left in general, and communism in particular, with authoritarian regimes. This is the ground from where red-tagging emerges as a pejorative, where liberal-progressives who espouse leftist and libertarian beliefs end up being lumped together with Marxist, Leninist and Maoist rebels, and worse, terrorists.

This corruption of political labels and categories has to end. Being leftist is different from being an armed rebel, in the same manner that being an activist does not necessarily mean that one has taken up arms to topple the government. Likewise, it is a fallacy to contrast communism with democracy, considering that there are communist and socialist parties that compete in democratic elections in countries like India.

The ideal response to red-tagging is to clarify that not all kinds of red should be tagged as enemies of the state. Environmental activists who propose green economies tend to be leftist in orientation, and so are feminists and gay activists. Organized labor unions tend to be leftist in orientation. The hatred being espoused by many diehard Duterte supporters and Marcos loyalists toward liberal activists, that even translate to their dislike of the US Democrats, is misplaced simply because they are premised on fallacious imaging and assumptions. There are many good people who are fighting for socially relevant causes that under these misinformed rubrics would fall in the category of enemies of the state. A cursorial look at history would reveal that practically all major social benefits that people now enjoy, from wage protection to social amelioration policies, are largely the result of leftist and progressive activism. These include giving ayuda (financial assistance) and educational assistance.

It is here that Senator Legarda's statement may have done a lot of damage, when she irresponsibly and carelessly implied that good leftists and social progressives engaged in social activism and legitimate criticism are in the same basket as the armed cadres who impose revolutionary taxes, bomb cell site towers, conscript children and arm them, all with the intent of eventually toppling the government. What she did only further forced the misinformed hatred toward anything left to fester, and its adherents to double down in their prejudices and biases.

Having said this, it is important to point out that much as taking up arms can never be countenanced, there has to be an understanding of the backstories of people who rebel against government. While one cannot condone political violence, there should be an open mind to the reasons why people rebel. Certainly, being displaced by land grabbing capitalists, and being targeted for persecution by paramilitary groups on the mere suspicion of being a rebel, would push people to take justice in their own hands. It is hypocrisy to justify Chao Tiao Yumul's rampage as an act of desperation but condemn those who rebel. Much as we condemn the violence, it is a fact that the state failed them.

The solution to political violence is not red-tagging but to make sure that the interests of the marginalized are served by legitimate institutions of the state. And the better response to red-tagging is to show that some types of red are, in fact, essential in achieving that end.

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Red is a spectrum - The Manila Times

PSC GIVES GRANT OVERSIGHT TO UTILITIES; AGENCY SAYS IT IS A VIOLATION: A recent decision by Marylands Public Service Commission allowing electric utility companies to access millions of dollars in federal grants without public oversight or input violates the commissions regulatory responsibilities, the state agency representing ratepayers said this week in its latest filing. Aman Azhar/The Baltimore Banner.

DEATH OF ELECTIONS BOARD MEMBER COMPLICATES AGENDA: Malcolm L. Funn, one of two Democratic members of the State Board of Elections, died unexpectedly Tuesday of complications from hernia surgery. He was 77. The Calvert County residents death comes at a critical time for the state elections board, as it works to certify the results from the July 19 primaries and sets rules and procedures for the upcoming general election and it adds some uncertainty to the boards short-term agenda and work product. Josh Kurtz/Maryland Matters.

LIBERTARIAN: LONG-SHOT WIN TO GOVERNORs HOUSE: Libertarian David Lashar acknowledges his bid to become Marylands next governor is a long shot. But, he says, this is not a no-shot situation. Nationally, Democrats are feeling the drag from President Joe Bidens low approval ratings and an economy heading for recession. Closer to home, Republicans have nominated a candidate for governor, Dan Cox, who attended then-President Donald Trumps Jan. 6, 2021 rally at the Ellipse before a mob overran the U.S. Capitol building. Pamela Wood/The Baltimore Banner.

POLITICAL NOTES: SCHULZ CONCEDES, PRETTY MUCH: As counties across Maryland completed ballot counting from the June 19 primary on Friday, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kelly Schulz issued what amounts to a concession statement that night. Robbie Leonard conceded in the Democratic primary for Baltimore County states attorney on Friday, after having a slim lead in initial returns on election night. Danielle Gaines and Josh Kurtz/Maryland Matters.

OPINION: THANK OUR ELECTION WORKERS: With some races still undecided and more ballots left to count, the 2022 Maryland primary election is not yet behind us. But as the final votes are tallied, we should all take a moment to thank the thousands of our neighbors who rolled up their sleeves and made this election possible. Every poll worker, election judge, canvasser, volunteer, candidate and vote counter deserve our deepest thanks for making democracy work. Nate Tinbite, Ananya Tadikonda and Matt Post/Bethesda Beat.

PEROUTKA CONSPIRACY THEORIES DATE TO 9-11: Michael Peroutka, the Republican Partys nominee for Maryland attorney general, hosted a series of five radio shows in 2006 devoted to arguing in support of 9/11 conspiracy theories questioning if the terror attack was the work of an elite bureaucrat who had demolition charges in every building in New York City and even suggesting if those who died after a hijacked plane hit the Pentagon were killed elsewhere. Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski/CNN-TV News.

BLAIR LEAD WIDENS, THEN SHRINKS IN MO CO EXEC RACE: In the Democratic primary for Montgomery County executive, pitting David Blair against Marc Elrich for the second time in four years, Blair, at the end of Saturdays canvass, held a wafer-thin 21-vote lead, down from a 134-vote edge at the conclusion of the tally a day earlier. Louis Peck/Bethesda Beat.

HAIRE BEATS McMILLAN IN ARUNDEL EXEC PRIMARY: Edgewater County Council member Jessica Haire became the Republican nominee for Anne Arundel County executive Friday, defeating former Annapolis Del. Herb McMillan. Dan Belson/The Capital Gazette.

OPINION: COX WIN PUTS HOUGH IN A TOUGH SPOT: Republican Sen. Michael Hough, who was unopposed for the nomination for Frederick County executive, awoke to this nightmare scenario on Wednesday after the election: If he refuses to support far right wing gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox, he will alienate the GOP base in the county, making it impossible to win. But if he backs Cox, he will alienate a sizeable minority of Republicans, a number of independents and virtually all Democrats, making it extremely difficult to win. Editorial Board/The Frederick News Post.

HANNA THROWS SUPPORT TO BATES IN CITY STATES ATTY RACE: As expected, defense attorney and former prosecutor Roya Hanna is ending her independent candidacy for Baltimore states attorney, all but ensuring Democratic nominee Ivan Bates will become the citys next top prosecutor. Hanna had dropped out of the Democratic primary race in March but planned to run as an independent in Novembers general election. There are no Republicans running for states attorney. Alex Mann/The Baltimore Sun.

BATES HAS A PLAN FOR SQUEEGEE WORKERS: Ivan Bates said he has a plan to get squeegee workers into diversion and employment programs like those championed by Mayor Brandon Scott as soon as he can take office in January. It would rely on issuing citations to the workers for violating Marylands pedestrian laws. Lee O. Sanderlin/The Baltimore Sun.

SHELLENBERGER WINS: Baltimore Countys incumbent states attorney beat back an upstart primary challenger and will move on to the November general election. On the final day of counting, incumbent Scott Shellenberger added 182 votes to his nearly 2,000 vote lead and edged out Robbie Leonard. Bryan Sears/The Daily Record.

FORMER DEPUTY BEATS SHERIFF IN CITY: Theres a new sheriff in town. After a week of early voting, primary night vote tabulations and six days of counting mail-in and provisional ballots, challenger Sam Cogen emerged as the winner in a heated contest for Baltimore sheriff that pitted him against his former boss Sheriff John Anderson, the citys sheriff of more than three decades. Emily Opilo/The Baltimore Sun.

ANNAPOLIS CITY HALL ENTRANCE PROTOCOLS TIGHTENED: After several difficult confrontations with a man who makes frequent visits to Annapolis City Hall, where he has recorded heated encounters with city employees and posted them on YouTube, Annapolis officials are overhauling security protocols. From installing a metal detector to ending Mayor Gavin Buckleys open door policy, visiting City Hall will be a different experience. The new security measures went into effect July 22. Rebecca Ritzel/The Capital Gazette.

JUDGE JOSEPH MURPHY, 78, DIES: Judge Joseph F. Murphy Jr., former chief judge of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals who ended his judicial career in 2011 as a judge on the state Court of Appeals, died of cancer Wednesday at Stella Maris Hospice. The Cockeysville resident was 78. Fred Rasmussen/The Baltimore Sun.

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State Roundup: PSC gives grant oversight to utilities; death of elections board member adds uncertainty to work; Libertarian a long-shot for...

Near the end of July, Andrew Yang - whose previous political projects include an unsuccessful run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, an unsuccessful run for the 2021 Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City, and what initially looked likely to be an unsuccessful new "third party," the Forward Party - announced a re-launch of that last effort.

While it's still called the Forward Party, Yang's vehicle is merging with two other (also previously unsuccessful) "third party" efforts, the "Renew America Movement" (co-founded by Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey, who will co-chair "new" Forward) and the "Serve America Movement" (chaired by former Republican congressman David Jolly of Florida).

The merger, Yang tweeted, creates "the biggest 3rd party by resources in the United States."

He may be right about that: The Libertarian Party, which previously held claim to the title of "third largest political party in America," seems to be circling the drain after a four-year internecine fight culminating in a Memorial Day weekend "takeover" by a Republican astroturf operation, the "Mises Caucus" (disclosure: I've been a partisan Libertarian since 1996, but have re-registered in my state as "no party affiliation" and cut off my meager financial support for the national organization pending a hopeful libertarian re-"takeover" of the party).

But are the "resources" Yang speaks of enough for the Forward Party to realize its vision?

In a July 27Washington Post op-ed, Whitman, Jolly, and Yang tick the usual "moderate" boxes. They're against "polarization." They believe most Americans "want to move past divisiveness and reject extremism." They want (and are trying to create) a party that "reflects the moderate, common-sense majority."

And therein lie two problems.

First, while most Americans seem to agree that "polarization" sucks, most Americans are also, well, polarized. They may think of themselves as "centrists" or "moderates," but so do their neighbors, who all have very different ideas about where the "center" really is.

Second, to the extent that a "center" exists, it's already well-covered by a Venn diagram of Republican and Democratic policies and constituencies.

As the late L. Neil Smith once wrote, "great men don't 'move to the center' - great men move the center." Within the context of electoral politics, the same is true of any party that hopes to actually create systemic change. The Overton Window (the spectrum of the politically "acceptable"), like most windows, has its handle on the edge, not in the center. Change comes from the edge and its ability to change the minds AT the "center."

The news may not be all bad for the Forward Party's prospects, though. While its rhetoric is "centrist," its stated priorities focus on individual freedom and its specific policy proposals - Ranked-Choice Voting, Nonpartisan Primaries, and Independent Redistricting Commissions - are at, not beyond, the edge of the aforementioned Overton Window: Good ideas that most people like but that the "major" parties refuse to touch.

Will they excite voters enough to move the needle? Time will tell. But time may be running out on American democracy.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Third party hopes to move things 'forward' | Columns | reporter.net - Lebanon Reporter

This is a transcribed version of a special edition Bitcoin Magazine podcast with Aleks Svetski and Michael Saylor having a long-form conversation about the implications of Bitcoin and its effects on the world.

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[00:00:13] Aleks Svetski: The level of craziness and the level of intervention and the level of kind of like. What Alan Watts would call do-goodery. right. You've got people who, whether their intent is good or bad, irrespective their process is a little bit ridiculous.

And ESG is one of these examples, right? It's trying to pretend your way into prosperity. It's, you know, let's let's wrap corporations and institutions and companies, and at some point individuals into another set of arbitrary rules for the stated purpose of saving energy or doing social good, or, you know, good governance or whatever, but you actually end up doing the opposite.

So, you know, in many ways, Bitcoin ends up in the firing line of that, whether we like it or not, and we can be as apolitical as we want about it. But, you know, there, there comes a point where you need to sort of draw the line and say no, you know, this is. We're jumping off a cliff here.

This behavior is ridiculous. You know, Sri Lanka, I saw Marty bent, posted something about Sri Lanka today, who was one of the first countries, you know, messing around with this ESG stuff. And, you know, they're having a collapse of food and energy and all this sort of stuff. So I feel like it's tricky.

It's it sounds nice and principled to be apolitical, but at the same time, it's almost impossible to kind of stay apolitical when everything is becoming political.

[00:01:41] Michael Saylor: So I, I think that you have to engage in the political dialogue. That's true. But you also could do it in a constructive way, or you can do it in a destructive way. For example the ESG narrative is just used by a competitor to undermine another competitor. So the oil companies used ESG to get people to shut down nuclear power plants.

Okay. So if you are, if you're going to be effective, you need to identify who your real enemy is. Your enemy, the enemy of the nuclear power plants. Weren't people that wanted to protect the environment. The enemy of the nuclear power plant was lobbyists paid off by oil companies to shut them down. And if you actually put, if you actually put that front and center, you'd probably be much more effective.

[00:02:33] Aleks Svetski: actually.

[00:02:34] Michael Saylor: When online gambling was shut down, it was Indian reservations funneling money through fundamentalist Christian organizations to a lobbyist in DC that convinced politicians that gambling online is an abomination of the eyes of God. Okay. So if you're supporting online poker, you could declare a war on, you know, like all of the evangelical Christians and 25 million Southern Baptists, but they weren't really your enemy.

You're your enemy. Your enemy was a couple of marketing people working for a casino on a reservation that actually, you know, staged a gorilla marketing effort. And if you were to go to every church, And protest against the churches and say, you know, the churches are our enemy and Christianity is the enemy.

You would've picked a fight that you can't win. That was unnecessary. The ESG objections to Bitcoin don't come from environmentalists. They don't come from institutional investors. Are, they come from alt corners. It's the proof of stake networks that pay the lobbyist to lobby the politicians.

They write the op-ed pieces. They plant the stories. They pay for academic research. All of this stuff is sponsored by the other crypto competitors. And so if you were to say, oh the Europeans are stupid or the politician is stupid, or the environmentalist or enemy or big companies are enemy, or the institutional investors are enemy.

You would basically be chasing a red herring, right? You effectively, what's going on is your enemy wants you to go to war with someone a hundred times as big as you, and they're laughing their ass off and you're taking the bait, right? It's like I go into a town, you know, and there are two gangs and they each have a hundred warriors.

So I kill one of the warriors from one gang and I pin it on the other gang and I kill one of the guys from the other gang and I pin it on the first gang and I leave town and I wait for the two gangs to kill each other. And then I come back and take over. You see, as there was, this was all just a false flag, operation of sorts.

So yeah, that doesn't mean you can't get engaged with politics, but you probably should keep in mind, you know, who you're really competing against generally. It's competitors are weaponizing the political process to defeat their arrival. Right. And if I'm gonna do it right, I have to wrap myself in the mantle of being environmentally friendly, or I have to be doing it for the public.

Good, right? Like my competitor, whatever is bad for the environment. And then I get some politician to do that, and the politicians are gonna want some moral justification, but ultimately if you follow the money, you'll find that, that they're just supporting another competitor. And it works both ways.

Right? Ironically the oil companies buried the nuclear power companies using the political process. And then later on you know, the solar and the wind people bury the oil companies using the same process. They're just weaponizing the political process. So you can't not engage, but. You can be a little bit more thoughtful about how you engage

Figure out who really is, who is driving the narrative. And generally most of these organizations they're influenced by their donors to do whatever is right. You know, it's interesting. If you look at the American diabetes association who gives money to the American diabetes association in order to fight diabetes

[00:06:15] Aleks Svetski: it's not like Coke and Pepsi and all those guys or the candy companies.

[00:06:20] Michael Saylor: and and when you and when you read the ma head, it says something like we don't really know what causes diabetes. Okay. But we do know what causes diabetes but the organization doesn't wanna say what causes diabetes, because. To a certain degree, their sponsors have have a vested interest in no one deciding what causes diabetes.

It's better. If it's just an unfortunate disease that we can treat with expensive drugs.

[00:06:48] Aleks Svetski: Yeah, but see, at what point does one draw the line and stop playing within a false Overton window, right? Because that's what all of these things seem to be. I guess what I'm hearing from you is that the strategy is, you know, U use their Overton window and use their arguments. , you know, kind of like a, almost like an Aikido, you know, flip the energy back their way versus, you know, the other strategy being more confrontational and just saying no, that I will not operate in that Overton window.

This is true. And this makes sense over here, not over there. So I dunno it's a tricky one. I mean, I'm obviously more confrontational when I see something stupid. I need to point out that it's stupid because it's stupid. And it's it's a tricky one.

[00:07:37] Michael Saylor: Yeah I think it's complicated. Your best strategy is to is the strategy, which persuades the people with the power to support your point of view, right? if you don't persuade the people with the power to support your point of view, you haven't succeeded. So you just gotta figure out how to do that.

Generally, I find that being constructive and cheerful and educational is a lot more effective than being toxic and confrontational. Look on Twitter. If you're toxic and confrontational, you just get blocked and then you have no influence over anybody that follows that person ever again.

So. And it, you know, if you walk into a mayor's office and you're toxic and confrontational, you just get kicked out and that's the end of that. And they just assume that whatever you liked is wrong and they, and not only do they not give you what you wanted, they go outta their way to, to not give you what you wanted because it's personal.

So I think you never really wanna make it personal. And you that phrase, those, that gods would destroy. They first make mad.

And the other point is, you know, do you wanna succeed or do you just wanna fight? Right. because the, I, if we come back to sun zoo and the like, right, the ideal thing is to win the war without fighting,

Not to engage in a hundred battles that you win. Right. And so coming back to Bitcoin, what you want is for every nation, organization and individual to embrace it and support it. That's what you want. So if you're if you're spending a lot of time to tell the world why somebody is stupid and has character flaw, right? You're ripping somebody else down, but that's not building a Bitcoin, right? Ultimately you gotta choose your fights very carefully. And I think there's some fights we're taking.

For example, I think it's reasonable to fight the gold bugs because we both agree with sound money, but every dollar invested in gold is a dollar non invested in Bitcoin. And that's a battle we can win. We should win because it's a benefit to them when they switch. It's a benefit to Bitcoin when they switch. Right. I don't think it's all that constructive to fight a battle to eliminate the, you know, the Euro like. The odds of actually persuading 20% of gold bugs to abandon gold and adopt Bitcoin as the reserve currency are a lot higher than the odds of persuading 20% of the Europeans to stop using the Euro and leave the EU.

You see? So, so there's some battles that just, I don't think make that much sense and other battles make a lot of sense. They're ones that are winnable and by the way, the best battle is, if you must fight a battle, the battle you wanna fight is against ignorance. And the past in favor of the future, everybody wants to go into the future, knows they're going into the future.

And you'll find, I would think 95% agree if I said, do you think modern technology can make your life better? I think you find not everybody. Some people would say I wanna live off the grid, you know, with. 19th century tech but most people would say, yeah, modern technology is generally better and I wanna embrace it. So if you look at the really powerful entities and companies that grow very rapidly, they grow by not forcing people to make a difficult decision. you know, I give away free Facebook. I give away free Google. Like how hard is it for Google to spread to a billion people? They give it away for free. They don't tell you, you have to abandon your religion or abandon your nation, or abandon your citizenship or fight with your government or fight with your employer. They just give you a free search. So, so I think that the best thing is just give people, technology. Technology represents something better in the future that came out of human ingenuity. The, and if you can do that, you don't have to fight with anybody. You're just at your pure education. The next best is if you must fight is fight a battle to persuade people that they're better off buying a Bitcoin than buying a rental apartment as a store of value, or they're better off buying a Bitcoin than buying a bar of gold and explain to them why Bitcoin is better than a bar of gold or better than a rental apartment, or better than, you know, a bunch of lumber in the back of the house. And, you know, if you frame it like that, right, the nation of Lumber's not gonna get offended. I mean, we're probably the gold bugs get a little bit upset, but a again at the end of the day, they're the most organized. What about all the other, you know, person that wants you to buy three apartment units and Airbnb them on the weekend in order to like retire that person's not gonna fight you back.

So I think if you fight that asset war, there's a hundred trillion dollars there, right? We're 500, we're less than 500 billion. So Bitcoin can can increase by a factor of 200 from here simply by getting people to change their asset allocations. And you know, so between that and technology, those are just educational pursuits. And then you're gonna ha you're gonna have competitors that'll say, yeah don't use Bitcoin use my BI use my proof of stake thing and do it without electricity. And you're gonna have to explain that without the electricity, you don't have a commodity, you have a security and a security needs to be registered and taken public with full and fair disclosures.

Cuz it's centralized you. You need to explain that in a cheerful constructive way, but you need to explain it and then you, maybe you need to explain how. Yeah, regardless of all those things, right? The Bitcoin network is 10,000 times more secure and more reliable and more long lived than the other thing.

And so you have to explain that, but you're better off. I think a classic marketer would say you're better off to segment the market. You're better off to say, Bitcoin is digital energy. It's a commodity, you know, you buy it because you can't stockpile oil and you don't wanna own 37 rental apartments and you don't wanna carry gold bars through airports.

That's why you buy Bitcoin. These other things, they're securities their software companies and software programs. If you wanna invest in apple or Google or Facebook or some proof of stake network, they're all investments, make sure you got full and fair disclosure, make sure you know, who owns it, make sure you know what to expect, but their investments in technology companies and Bitcoin's competing. you're gonna warehouse soybeans for a decade. Yeah. It's competing against steel and oil and natural gas and land. And it's it's a digital property, digital commodity, and it's the highest form of digital commodity. It's digital energy. It's IOR to last forever. You can oscillate it at a thousand megahertz.

It's a cool thing. Let me tell you all about it. If you segment the market like that. No, it's like, I guess I'd like some of that. What else is digital energy? There's another network a hundred times smaller, you know, check out the market cap of the other proof of work networks. They're one, you know, there are 50 basis points, 70 basis points of Bitcoin.

So they're like I think I wanna own the one that's a hundred times bigger.

Okay. And just and then go knock on the next door. there's a lot of doors to knock on, right?

[00:15:28] Aleks Svetski: a good framing. That's a good framing. I mean, I mean, what about all the people who are kind of fed up with all of the overreach and shenanigans, particularly over the last two years? You know, cuz there seems to be, I mean, when I've been out there pitching Bitcoin, there seems to be a craving for the message that I know is more adversarial, but people seem to be.

Wanting or craving, like how do

[00:15:59] Michael Saylor: that's, there's a political party and a political message, which is, you know, the libertarian party reflects that message less government,

Right? The Republican party, you know, reflects a slight difference from the democratic party and the libertarian party reflects a bigger difference. The Ron Paul libertarian party.

Kind of aligns closest with what the Bitcoiners would say. I think I would say join that party, pursue those politics, but I would brand them as libertarian or brand or create that party. I don't think I would conjoin it with Bitcoin. See if your position is you think the government's overreached fiscally, you don't agree with their foreign policy, you don't agree with the tax policy.

You don't agree with their domestic policy. You don't agree with their energy policy. You don't agree with their medical policy. You don't agree with their education policy. You don't agree with their trade policy, their tariff policy, their domestic manufacturing policy, their labor and union policies.

Sure. But that's politics. You know what I mean? Like that's a lifetime of fights. And remember back to laser eyes, each one of those fights is just as hard. In fact, probably a lot harder than the Bitcoin. So I think that if you said you have to win all those fights for Bitcoin to be successful, right?

You're kind of, you're picking a hundred other battles to fight and it's counterproductive and destructive because we need those people, right. There are people that, you know, in the democratic party, we need them to support Bitcoin. There are people in the Republican party, we need them to support Bitcoin.

You might disagree with Republican politics. You might disagree with democratic politics. the majority of the country. I don't know if it's 50% or 80%, but the majority of the country disagrees with the libertarian party. Otherwise they would've elected somebody by now. So those are political fights and yeah.

The Bitcoin community is is very aligned with a lot of those views. Right. And so am I, but my point is, yeah, you don't need to fix, you're now dealing with the 50% other problems in the world,

Right. You're trying to fix the schools and fix the hospitals and fix the foreign policy and fix the fiscal policy.

And you're trying to, let's say it a different way. Why's the currency collapsing because of all these policy interventions. So if you wanna fix the currency, you have to fix a hundred things that are radical, that are highly confrontational that are that no one can agree on. If you wanna fix the Fiat currency, or you can simply educate people that Bitcoin is better than gold and Bitcoin will be a million dollars a coin, and you're not gonna fix any of those other things.

You're just gonna fix Bitcoin. And you're gonna make everyone that supports Bitcoin a hundred times as powerful.

So you see, like, do you wanna actually incrementally do good or do you just wanna fight? Cause I don't, you know, I think that if you just wanna fight, right, you can also go to Ukraine and you can fight on one side or the other side.

It's not clear to me. Like we fought in Iraq for 20 years. What did we fix? Like, like how much energy do you have to fight over this? And I would say there's noth, there's no reason why you can't get involved in politics if you want to. I just think that conjoining the politics, it's a mistake for Bitcoin to become associated with one party or the other party like is Bitcoin pro-abortion or anti-abortion I don't think it's either of those things.

Right. It's better to stay neutral and stay Switzerland. At the point that the Bitcoin becomes politicized at that point 45, 40% of the country will reject you reflexively without listening to a word. You say,

[00:20:15] Aleks Svetski: Yeah. I agree with that. I think

[00:20:16] Michael Saylor: What let's pick any of a hundred challenges we have in this country name one thing out of the hundred biggest disagreements we have that we have worked through in a civil fashion in the past 10 years.

[00:20:28] Aleks Svetski: yeah. Zero. Yeah.

[00:20:30] Michael Saylor: but so, so there, there aren't many Alex there aren't examples of six political successes in the last 10 years.

We don't have many, but there are plenty of examples of technology, successes, Uber technology success. Apple, Google Netflix, Facebook Disney, plus what's up all the games, even arguably cryptocurrency Bitcoin technology, successes. We have many. And why, because technologies are neutral apolitical, and there's a general consensus in this country that we are technology leaders, not every country, right?

Like let's say we lived in a fundamentalist religious theocracy that fought that technology was evil from Satan and we would all burn in hell and they were against new FAL gadgets. Then maybe the technology strategy wouldn't be a good one in that country. Like I, for example, I don't really think in North Korea, right North Korea, Cuba they're against property rights. right. They'll murder you for trying, saying, I wish to own private property, right? That's a felony. Okay. So there are certain jurisdictions where they're very hostile to to a property strategy. There are theoretical jurisdictions where it be, they be hostile to technology strategy. Although it's practical matter. Most people like technology, like even the north Koreans, they were into hacking. Right. I mean, they must totally love the guys that hacked the Sony servers right. To steal all that contraband. So they're not against that. So, so we're back to this question, right? What can you accomplish? I think Alex, I'm 50. I'm 57. And so I've, you know, I've gotten dozens of patents and I've launched dozens of businesses and I've had lots of ideas and I love them all. And I've had thousands, tens of thousands of employees, and I've tried different things and I've spent billions of dollars doing different things. And what I've learned over the course of my life is generally you overestimate what you can accomplish when you have a passion for a good idea, and you underestimate the maintenance cost and you underestimate how challenging it's going to be to to profit and to enjoy that idea. So like you, if you have a good a good business, you have to factor a huge amount of energy. If you work full time to maintain that business, it'll stay effective. As soon as you say it's like I launch a restaurant and then I go and I open up another restaurant, the other side of town and that's successful.

So I go to Chicago and I open up a third one and then I go to San Francisco and open up the fourth one. And then, you know, I go to Miami and open up fifth one and I get back to, you know, New York city where my first restaurant is and all my customers are gone and my employees quit, you know?

And then the New York times is writing an article about how my restaurant used to be good, but now the food is garbage. And then the other restaurants, you know, the partners like default on something or the landlord basically triples the rent. And pretty soon I've like gone bankrupt, you know, some politician rezones my district.

And what you realize is you underestimate all of the challenges you overestimate, what you can accomplish, and people get bored very quickly. So they, you know, they tend to wanna go on and fight the next fight. It's like, you know, like, Napoleon charging, he lost an entire army charging into Russia on the path to Moscow stupid.

But then he charged into Egypt, Napoleon lost an army in Egypt. Okay. Really then, you know,

[00:24:40] Aleks Svetski: Germans did the same thing.

[00:24:41] Michael Saylor: and the Germans are the same thing, you know, and the Americans, you remember Charlie Wilson's war, Charlie Wilson's war is all about how stupid the Russians are to go in Afghanistan and how Americans gleefully made fun of the Russians were being so stupid as to go in

[00:24:55] Aleks Svetski: Then did the same thing.

[00:24:57] Michael Saylor: I think we did the same thing. It's like, you know, the human can, by the way, Julius Caesar lost an army in Egypt, right? It's a never ending story, which is people always overestimate what they can accomplish. I launched about 10 businesses. The first one is still. The winning business, right? The first one, and what I found is that one you really had to focus on with your heart and soul. And generally what you find is in your thirties, someone hits it big and they launch a successful business and then some, and then they think two years later, what's my next big success. And they have this idea. They're just gonna knock off five big successes in a row. Okay. And everybody, eventually they hit that in Tropic frontier where they can't compete anymore.

And it's, it could be thought of a different way. There's probably 10,000 things you can do that you can acquire, that you can buy, that you can launch that you can do. There's probably a hundred of them that you can be competitive in. Where you are as good as the best person in the world.

Everywhere else. Yeah. You got it in the business, but you're not world class, maybe a hundred and there's probably one of them that you can be competitive in and make a profit at and grow consistently better at over time, such that you stay competitive.

So that threshold of enter the market, be profitable, make money in the market and grow forever against the smartest, most competitive people in the market that is 10,000 times harder than a, can you just do it? So people tend to pick fights that they can't win and then they pick fights that they win, where they win the battle, but they lose the war.

It's like, okay, you, okay? So what are you gonna do if you actually get Russia? Okay. Like you're not gonna be able to govern it. You wanna fun read the history of William, the conqueror, William, the conqueror, you know, rose through, through unfortunate circumstance.

He was an orphan and he rose to conquer Normandy and was a success, got everything he ever wanted, you know, got married, had kids, perfect life. And then he decided he got in his head that he was the rightful heir to the UK. And he had to charge across the channel and conquer Britain. And he's thought a thousand years later is this great, awesome guy, William, the conqueror.

That's his name? He's the only guy in a thousand years that ever conquered Britain. But if you read the story of what happened, he had only took him a couple of weeks to conquer Britain, but he couldn't govern Britain. His entire life fell apart. His family fell apart. His wife turned against him, his son declared war on him.

He fought two civil wars against his own son. And eventually he died at war with his own children, you know, and was rolled into a ditch penniless, you know, couldn't even afford a funeral, this greatest of all conquerors of a thousand years. And if you read the biography, the conclusion is he overextended bit off, more than he could chew because he had a massive ego. And so the story of people with massive egos wanting to write the wrongs of the world, Is throughout history, everywhere in every business, every company, you know, like it's a 99% mortality rate in my business, they all fail because of bad acquisitions. The reason software companies fail is cuz the CEO has to keep expanding.

They have to keep growing. And if you can't grow and they either try to grow organically and they break the company or they grow through acquisitions and they break the company and it's literally like 99% likely. It's just, that's what happens. And so when you look at that, the conclusion you come to is if you have one good idea, get up every day and figure out how to spread that message or how to protect that good idea. Like we, we shouldn't be trying to fix 27 other problems in the world. What we ought to do is make sure that no one corrupts the Bitcoin code. It's more important for example, that we don't F with the network and screw it up. It's more important that we protect the integrity of what we have. And 98% of the world doesn't even know what we have. And so educating France or educating Germany on why the auto adopt nuclear reactors or getting in some massive fight over, you know, government overreach in the medical business, all of these things are just other battles. They're for somebody.

But, you know, if you really wanna be a nuclear activist, I would say you should be 150% focused on That thing. Right. Don't tie yourself to any other thing.

[00:30:01] Aleks Svetski: you mentioned before. We haven't seen any political wins, which I agree with. But we've seen many technological ones. Do you think we've seen any cultural or social sort of wins or revolutions or come up ins in the last couple decades?

[00:30:18] Michael Saylor: I mean, I guess the progressives could argue that. I mean, they've, there have been a lot of progressive, you know, agenda items that have made good progress over time.

[00:30:27] Aleks Svetski: Is that more political or cultural or do you kind of place them in the same bucket?

[00:30:33] Michael Saylor: Yeah. I think they're the same.

[00:30:35] Aleks Svetski: Interesting. Okay. What makes political and cultural the same in your.

[00:30:38] Michael Saylor: There are cultural war, but let's take Critical race theory, right. Or something going on in the school system or or teaching any particular theories in school. The reason they're political is because the government controls the school system and the government, you know? And so the political unions contribute to the party which contributes, you know, guidance to the government.

The government changes the rules to to spread a certain policy through the schools,

To the extent that the government has power over, over whatever right.

[00:31:11] Aleks Svetski: So it becomes cultural in that sense. So it's kind of like top down cultural enforcements that have. Bottom up emergent culture, which is, I mean, naturally how it was anyway,

[00:31:22] Michael Saylor: Look, politics matter. Right. So there's no doubt, like, like politics shut down the nuclear power industry.

Politics do matter in a lot of places, politics resulted in say single family homes, getting subsidized by the government via Fred Mac and Fannie Mae. And that drove down the cost of home mortgages and it drove up the price of homes and it it shifted the dynamic and it enriched a lot of people in the real estate industry.

Right. So politics do matter. I'm not saying they don't matter. What I'm saying is that if you're in, if you believe that Bitcoin is good for the human race and good for the civilization, you should limit your political engagement to what's good for Bitcoin and not get involved in all the other political fights.

The other political fights make you toxic cuz half the politicians, right? Pick a, take a position, right. And you're gonna actually alienate 30, 40% of the politicians. And you might need those politicians. There's if we come back the way a company act. Right. Like, let's take the Disney corporation.

No, you know, the Disney challenges they've got in Florida of late with Disney world, they got political

Companies, shouldn't be political. They shouldn't express political preferences this way or that you're, you know, you remember the old phrase shut up and sing.

You know, you, if you're a singer, you want everybody in the audience to love you for your song. As soon as you start to express a political opinion, whether it's right or left or whatever it is, then there's gonna be some in the audience that's gonna take offense. And you've just diminished your ability to spread your actual message. So the question is, what are you trying to do?

Are you trying to sing a song or are you trying to actually spread a political message? If you were a really good rock and roll singer? I wouldn't say go on stage and say gold sucks. Bitcoin is good. You know, like. right, because your agenda is to entertain the audience, right? So be profe being professional means keeping your personal views out of your professional platform. So I, I just think generally, if you're gonna be professional, if you're professionally pursuing the agenda of fixing the energy and the civilization via Bitcoin, and if you believe that Bitcoin is great technology, which is, will be great money, which could be a great currency, which can fix a lot of things. You're better off to just stay professional and cheerfully, constructively advocate for Bitcoin. You're gonna find people that disagree with you and they hate you, or they hate Bitcoin. But like, if some, when somebody that's really a critic or a hater on say Twitter, when they say something really offensive, I don't go and directly attack them.

That's not gonna persuade anybody. They have 5 million followers that follow them because they respect what they have to say. So if you attack that person, you alienate their followers. And if you engage in a debate with anybody about any subject, other than Bitcoin you're potentially alienating followers. So, I mean, so, in this particular case, the constructive engagement is just is if you're gonna troll, somebody is to say, you know, you have that point of view. There are some people that happen to have this point of view. And this is the reason they have this point of view. And here is a place you can go to get more information, right?

Like you, you can turn a conversation 90 degrees. Like sometimes you think the Bitcoin is bad because you think it's a currency, but did you know it's actually, we think of it as a property, not a currency. Someone will say, Bitcoin is bad, cuz it's bad for the because it's a currency and I like the us dollar.

See the article here:

How To Spread Bitcoin Adoption To Everyone - Bitcoin Magazine

In Ukraine, libertarian think tanks and politicians are already making plans for the period after the war. The future of Ukraine was one of the major topics at the Europe Liberty Forum 2022 on 12 and 13 May, organized by the Atlas Network, the leading global association of libertarian think tanks. The event was originally due to take place in Kyiv, but was moved to Warsaw because of the war.

One of the guest speakers was Maryan Zablotskyy, a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament and of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy's ruling party. Zablotskyy also used to be a member of the Ukraine Economic Freedom Foundation, a libertarian think tank founded in 2015. Income tax in Ukraine, Zablotskyy said, was recently lowered to two percent, and numerous regulations and tariffs have been abolished.

We are currently the most economically free country in the world, he tells me.

It is beyond extraordinary for a country to cut taxes and abolish regulations while it is at war. Normally, in wartime, governments massively increase taxes and expand their reach. In 1942, the US government passed the Victory Act, causing the top tax rate to skyrocket to 88 percent, a level that rose further, to 94 percent in 1944, as a result of various surtaxes. In Britain, the top tax rate rose as high as 98 percent in the 1940s, and in Germany it climbed to 64.99 percent in 1941.

We believe that we are stronger when we are economically freer, Zablotskyy said.

Due to the billions of dollars in international aid flowing into the country, Ukraine is an anomaly of history: a country engaged in a bitter war that is more economically free than ever. The goal, Zablotskyy says, is to ensure that these economic reforms, which were adopted as temporary measures, remain in place after the war.

After the war is a phrase that echoes repeatedly throughout the Europe Liberty Forum.

No one from Ukraine discussed how the war might end, instead they focused solely on the opportunities that will arise after victory. Nataliya Melnyk, representative of the Bendukidze Free Market Center in Kyiv, said it would be wrong to aspire to rebuild Ukraine.

We cannot aim to return to the conditions of the pre-war period, we need to create something new, Melnyk explains

She speaks of a window of opportunity and refers to the findings of the Heritage Foundations Index of Economic Freedom, which ranks Ukraine as the most economically unfree of 45 countries in the European region. In the global ranking, Ukraine comes 127th, trailing countries such as India and Nicaragua. The Heritage Foundation identifies Ukraines property rights, rule of law and labor market regulations as the greatest deficits.

Roman Waschuk, Canadas ambassador to Kyiv from 2014 to 2019 and now Business Omdudsman for Ukraine, takes a more nuanced view: Ukraine is not as economically unfree as the Heritage Foundations Index and other statistics would have us believe. Such rankings only evaluate official statistics, which fail to capture Ukraines enormous shadow economy, Waschuk explains.

Many people in the West, he says, have been surprised by the fact that Ukraines army is in a far better state than they assumed. And the same, Waschuk says, is true of the countrys economy.

Especially in the IT sector, which according to Nataliya Melnyk comprises at least 250,000 technology specialists, companies make extensive use of tax loopholes. The top rate of tax in the Ukraine used to be 20 percent, but there is a regulation that allows individual entrepreneurs to pay just 5 percent. Actually, Waschuk says, this tax was originally designed for small-scale sole-traders, but it has also been used by entrepreneurs, including IT specialists.

Everyone agrees that there is an urgent need for reform, especially as so many of the regulations in force in Ukraine date back to the Soviet era of the 1970s. Tom Palmer, Executive Vice President for International Programs of the Atlas Network, suggested that Germanys post-war Minister of Economics Ludwig Erhard, who introduced the market economy after the Second World War, could serve as a model for the future Ukraine. There are also frequent calls for a Marshall Plan for Ukraine. Palmer believes that it is not a Marshall Plan that will help Ukraine, but only market-economy reforms similar to those introduced by Erhard.

Palmer is undoubtedly right. The economic course charted by Erhards free-market policies clearly contributed more to the Federal Republic of Germanys subsequent economic miracle than the Marshall Plan, named after the then American Secretary of State George C. Marshall, which provided aid to relieve the suffering and hunger of populations across Europe after the war. The programme had a volume of $13.1 billion. Despite the British receiving more than twice as much from the plan as the Germans, Great Britain did not develop anywhere near as well as Germany. While the British were governed by socialists, Erhard introduced the market economy in Germany having already devised his policies during the war.

Libertarian think tanks in Ukraine have closer links to the countrys politicians than similar think tanks in most other Western countries. Alexander Danilyuk, co-founder of the Free Market Centre, was Ukraines finance minister from 2016 to 2018, and Zablotskyy, a member of parliament, believes that a majority of Ukraines parliamentarians subscribe to libertarian principles. However, the libertarian Atlas Network also helps Ukraine in a very practical way.

Atlas has raised $2.3 million to date in support of Ukraine. Germans and Americans who belong to the network not only contribute money, but also supply medicines, night vision equipment, drones and body armor to Ukraine. An article in The Spokesman-Review appeared under the headline: In Ukraine, an informal web of Libertarians becomes a resistance network.

The libertarian program for Ukraine is clear. When we talk about the new Ukraine, we mean three things above all, says Nataliya Melnyk, fighting corruption, rule of law, and economic freedom.

Maybe it sounds a bit dramatic, she says, but freedom is our religion. Throughout the Atlas event, at every opportunity, people implore each other: Next year in Kyiv.

Rainer Zitelmann is a German historian and author. His latest book is Hitlers National Socialism which was published on 22 February 2022.

More here:

How Ukraine Could Become the Most Libertarian Country in the World Once Peace Is Achieved | Dr Rainer Zitelmann - Foundation for Economic Education

As someone involved in healthcare (public and private) since the 70s, I have written so many columns about Georgias lame response to COVID that it is hard to determine where to start. But I will give it the old school try, starting with the misconception spread by libertarians that we have done a good job on COVID prevention in Georgia. We have not.

First, it would be good to understand how COVID spread across the U.S.

It first hit the U.S. with a vengeance in high population-density blue areas like New York and California. So, at the beginning, cases and deaths were much higher in these Democrat-controlled areas. But that changed as the pandemic spread.

And, as opposed to other nations, COVID became a political issue in the U.S.

Democrats thought President Donald Trump was doing a horrible job of controlling the pandemic. Republicans trusted that he was doing well and believed Trumps claim that rising case numbers were only due to more testing. Objective studies now prove that the U.S. did much more poorly than other democracies. A report in Infection Control Today notes that the data does show that the United States is below average in the world and among the worst in the developed and high-income nations.

By September of 2021, death rates were much higher in red counties. Per one objective study, the coronavirus death rate among the 20% of Americans living in counties that supported Trump by the highest margins in 2020 was about 170% of the death rate among the 1-in-5 Americans living in counties that supported Biden by the largest margins.

And that trend continues to this day, including in Georgia. Compare socialist Vermonts cases (12 per 100,000) with Georgia (35 per 100,000). Then look at vaccinations: Georgia- only 57% fully vaccinated (with about 40% of them boosted) versus Vermont at 82% (63% of them boosted). So, more people are getting it here and they are sicker when they do. The question is why?

The answer is that in our nation and state populist politics has gotten in the way of modern healthcare practices.

In February and March of 2020, our nation and states were in crisis mode, although CDC guidance was hamstrung both by politics and general incompetence. Many states, particularly the blue ones, began taking strong actions on their own to control the spread.

But it took until April 2 that year for Gov. Brian Kemp to eventually get around to issuing a shelter in place executive order, finally joining 42 other states that had already done so. Local Georgia Boards of Health are virtually powerless to act under state law (and they still are).

So, counties and cities must take action when the state does not.

The Georgia Municipal Association (GMA) model ordinance declared a much-broader public health state of emergency. However, many local governments were also slow to act to approve it. For example, where I live in Peachtree City, the libertarian-oriented then-Mayor issued a very weak emergency order. Plus, it had numerous major holes in it compared to the GMA model. Among the shortcomings: restaurant in-dining was still permitted, and day care centers were still open, as were hair and nail salons, gyms, fitness centers, pools and so on.

So, the virus spread.

Due to lack of leadership by Kemp, Georgia is still behind the blue states and the nation regarding COVID measures. And he is getting way with it due to the destructive libertarian streak in the GOP and the failure of some of the media to point out our factual shortcomings.

What concerns me is that there are still non-healthcare people spreading misconceptions. There are still people incorrectly pointing to President Biden getting COVID (which has been like a cold for him because he was vaccinated and boosted) and saying that is proof the vaccinations dont work.

They ignore the fact that without the vaccine, he might have died.

In conclusion, please look at the data before saying measures like masking and vaccinations do not work. Ask healthcare professionals rather than believing talking heads.

Jack Bernard, a former health care executive, was the first director of health planning for Georgia. Hes a former chairman of the Jasper County Commission. Given events of late, he now describes himself politically as a former Republican.

More here:

Opinion: Where Georgia blew it on COVID - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Nation-building is arduous work. Microstate-building, maybe less so.

But don't tell that to the libertarian architect of a seven-year campaign to further subdivide the tempestuous Balkans by turning a tiny, neglected sliver of woodland on the Danube into the Free Republic of Liberland.

"I realized from the beginning that building a country is not a summer job," says 38-year-old Czech Vit Jedlicka.

He and his fellow Liberlanders have recently recommitted to their U.S.-based lobbying effort, seeking to get their republic recognized internationally so they can make it a free-trade zone with the status of a state.

A July 9 filing with the U.S. Justice Department confirms Liberland's ongoing cooperation with a New York-based lobbyist and "global political and business ambassador" pursuant to the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA.

In a region where relations between nations are frequently tense, including a recent diplomatic dustup between Serbia and Croatia over war memorials, Liberland's neighbors appear to have gotten used to the idea.

Serbia regards the project as a "frivolous act" but no threat so long as it stays on the western bank of the Danube, which marks its border with Croatia.

"Our ties with Serbia were very friendly from the beginning," Jedlicka, who lives in the Czech capital, Prague, told RFE/RL's Balkan Service recently.

Liberland's "closest partner" is the Vojvodina provincial government in northernmost Serbia, he added.

We believe that in the near future [Croatia] will recognize the great economic benefit that will be realized by [the] creation of Liberland."

Croatia was less accommodating initially, routinely blocking access and even detaining visitors, including Jedlicka, for alleged border violations.

But Jedlicka said, seemingly without irony, that they've since built "strong ties" to the Croatian secret service since some Liberland citizens "are in contact with them frequently."

"It seems their interest in Liberland grows over time," he said of the Croatian authorities.

Call It What You Like

Jedlicka, chairman of a Czech libertarian NGO, and his wife, Jana Markovicova, a former licensed massage therapist and self-described "first lady at Liberland," proclaimed the aspiring state's existence in April 2015.

They described it as 7 square kilometers of no-man's-land that had gone unclaimed by either Croatia or Serbia since Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991.

It has a flag, a coat of arms showing a tree, the sun, and a bird soaring over the river, and -- in keeping with Jedlicka's aversion to government interference -- hopes to base its economy on a cryptocurrency, the "merit."

It has already been active in virtual and crypto projects, including a futuristic-looking Liberland Metaverse that is admittedly a "work in progress."

Its website claims upward of 500,000 citizenship requests, although RFE/RL could not confirm that figure. It also claims 1,000 "citizens" and 10 "diaspora villages."

And it says it has "diplomatic relations" with six UN member states, including Haiti, and purports to have representations in 74 spots around the world, including places like Switzerland, Venezuela, and Afghanistan.

But it's also missing one of the 20th century's most widely cited touchstones of independence, along with defined territory, a government, and a capacity to deal with other states: a permanent population.

Liberland is uninhabited, and no country has ever formally recognized it.

Are Microstates A 'Thing'?

There are currently seven microstates across Europe, of various renown, most of them wealthy and established centuries ago.

Four of them are monarchies and another is the domain of the Roman Catholic Church, so their histories are not necessarily steeped in democracy. They are: Vatican City, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Malta, San Marino, and Sovereign Order of St. John.

The main thing that sets microstates apart from larger states is their size, or lack thereof. But in his 2012 book The Microstates Of Europe, P. Christiaan Klieger describes them broadly as "designer nations" marked by "tenaciousness of national aspirations and ethnic solidarity."

Liberland, a "new libertarian country," seems like more of the former.

"We aim to develop a critical business hub and a free port on the Danube River," Michal Ptacnik, who was recently named Liberland's "minister of justice," told an audience at a libertarian-minded conference in Prague last year.

He said the governing principle should be "a mix of Swiss democracy and corporate governance." The focus is "to be a free-trade zone where individual liberty governs supreme," he said, adding, "We seek to build the freest country on Earth, and the most prosperous one."

Slow Progress

Liberland describes U.S.-based lobbyist Steven Melnik as its "ambassador at-large." An immigrant to the United States, Melnik appears to be trying to nudge U.S. and other influentials toward recognition of an eighth European microstate.

In the Justice Department document, Melnik said he continues to represent the Free Republic of Liberland under an agreement that "does not contemplate remuneration for services."

Melnik, who has represented Jedlicka's group since 2019, said that in the previous six-month reporting period he was "not required to perform any services" and that "all my actions have been voluntary and not for payment."

For Jedlicka, the end goal still seems a distant dream. But he remains an optimist.

He said Croatia now "recognizes us as a serious national movement and suggested that Zagreb was comfortable with not claiming the 7-kilometer patch he's staked out.

"We believe that in the near future they will recognize the great economic benefit that will be realized by [the] creation of Liberland," Jedlicka said.

The benefits of eventual sovereignty, for a founding father and Euroskeptic like him, and for all five members of Liberland's "government," might seem obvious. He said their current goals include creating "more benefits" of Liberlander "citizenship."

"We aim to be a shining example of how a country's government can be organized in the new millennia using strong ideological principles, as well as the latest decentralized blockchain technologies for governance," Jedlicka said.

And he doesn't seem to be in any particular rush to force his model on anyone.

"It is nice to have formal recognition by other countries," Jedlicka told RFE/RL, "but we are also happy if we are informal friends and if they recognize our motto: Live and let live."

Originally posted here:

Wedged Away In The Balkans, Would-Be Microstate 'Liberland' Keeps Up Its Fight For Recognition - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Politicians and media pundits often use the term anarchists to conjure images of lawless hooligans causing mindless destruction, warning of a dystopian world that might exist without the rule of law.

In reality, anarchists have been involved in some of the most significant political projects of the last two centuries, whether its striking workers winning the eight-hour work day or communities coming together to participate in mutual aid projects. But HBOs new six-part docuseries, The Anarchists, features self-described anarchists of a whole different variety: self-interested capitalists and crypto bros.

Anarchists carrying the torch of the long-standing political tradition are cringing at the series portrayal of anarchism as being compatible with capitalism. The series is ultimately a character-driven drama about murder and interpersonal conflicts, not a political documentary focused on ideology. But uncritically using the term anarchist to describe capitalists mystifies actual anarchist politics for the average viewer, they say.

Their conception of anarchism is just completely and totally divorced from the 175-plus year political history of the anarchist movement, Cam Pdraig, an anarchist who organizes with the Black Rose Anarchist Federation in the Bay Area, an anarchist socialist organization, told Motherboard. Anarchism is a cooperative political doctrine critical of both the state and capitalism, and the filmmaker Todd Schramke makes no attempt at addressing that at all.

The series follows the growth of, and conflict within, the annual Anarchapulco conference in Acapulco, Mexico. Founded by entrepreneur and long-winded YouTuber Jeff Berwick in 2015, Anarchapulco caters to middle-to-upper class mostly white American expats who promote free market libertarian capitalism, as theorized by far-right thinkers like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. In their view, governments should be abolished and everything should be privatized. Police officers would be replaced by private security forces, and public schools would become for-profit charter schools.

The Anarchists filmmaker Todd Schramke is friendly with Berwick, and has said in the past that he is influenced by public figures like Stefan Molyneux, a white supremacist infamous for amplifying disproven theories of eugenics and scientific racism. In addition to more traditional libertarian capitalists, Berwicks Anarchapulco has more recently become a home for cryptocurrency and web3 enthusiasts, who are hawking digital assets like NFTs and even trying to, uh, monetize colors.

It's completely uncritical in a way that I haven't ever seen, Jen Rogue, another anarchist who organizes with Black Rose in Texas, told Motherboard of the series. Usually when you see people do documentaries on things that a filmmaker is sympathetic towards, there's usually some vague attempted balance or kind of deeper thinking. Its just so shallow and propagandistic.

Of course, the feud has moved online too.

After the anarchist news organization Its Going Down critiqued HBOs misuse of the term anarchist and called Berwick an anti-semitic grifter in a barrage of tweets, Berwick responded with a 30-minute YouTube rant in which he claimed his detractors were just unhappy, poor, and jealous of wealthy people and told them to work on themselves.

So-called Anarchist capitalists, or ancaps as they are sometimes called, have long battled with anti-capitalist anarchists over the use of the term libertarian which was historically associated with anti-capitalist anarchist politics as far back as 1858. That is until the 1970s, when laissez faire capitalists in the United States co-opted the term by forming the hyper-individualist Libertarian Party.

Berwicks conception of libertarianism is clearly of the individualist bent. He chose Acapulco, Mexico as a landing pad for what some attendees call their tribe because it seemed anarchist to him. The buses were all private, they race to get you. They got the music, he says to the camera with a grin in the first episode. Everyone is drinkin. All the girls are sayin hi.

Anarchapulco guests stay in a luxury hotel, worship bitcoin and mingle with others who lament the statist American sheeple and their bloodsucking central banks. They seem to be suburbanites who are understandably bored by, and wish to flee, the mind-numbing grind of American life. Some who decide to stay for the long haul live out their fantasies in mansions together, a power dynamic anti-capitalist anarchists consider colonialist.

One major thing that immediately stuck out to me, especially in episode one, as they were getting into people's backstories as to how they ended up in Anarchapulco, was this dynamic of expats moving to Mexico, making a village and not really interacting with locals, just straight up being colonizers in every humanly possible way, Robin Young, an anarchist with Black Rose who lives in Miami, told Motherboard.

They have little to no interest in or regard for the local population at all, which, in any case, are to be but material resources to further develop settlers' communities, she continued. They consider themselves an entitled vanguard tasked with developing the land of uncharted financial freedom as a way to gain social liberties. Acapulco, as part of Mexican territory, is the new land where this can be donenot for the sake of this territory, which is regarded as a pure source for resources.

Berwick claims hes an anarchist because he doesnt believe in rulers, and doesnt think anyone should be a slave. But for anti-capitalist anarchists, capitalism cant be anarchistic because the economic system relies on rulersbosses and ownersto coercively extract profits from a laboring class. Anarchists therefore consider anarchist capitalism to be oxymoronic.

One Anarchapulco attendee Larken Rose framed taxes as giving your master the fruits of your labor, when they're expressly capitalists, Pdraig pointed out. They ignore the fundamental organization of production that is capitalism which is predicated on your boss extracting the complete value of your work from you. The fruits of your labor are being stolen from you.

Anarchists of the socialist variety argue for workplaces that are democratically controlled by workers themselves, not bosses or state bureaucrats. Food, water, essential goods and art would be produced and freely shared and distributed in accordance to the needs and desires of people in a community, not the desires and needs of capitalists.

That obviously, makes us very different from what the so-called libertarians believe, Pdraig explains, but it also makes us very different from what the State Socialists believe, because the State Socialists believe that you need to have an economy that is controlled on behalf of the working class through the managers of the state.

Outside of a workplace context, some anarchists propose building neighborhood assemblies, where issues are debated and discussed face-to-face. Rotating delegates from assemblies could then meet at regional and even global assemblies to relay what was discussed at their local assemblies to the larger group. In such a system, they propose, people would cultivate a free society collectively.

The ancaps idea of freedom is freedom from anybody interfering or talking to or being around them that isn't like, in their cult, or whatever, said Rogue, the anarchist from Austin. And to me, my idea of liberty is for everyone in my community to have everything they need to be the best version of themselves.

Many anarchists are inspired by the Rojava Revolution in North and East Syria, and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. Both are large-scale, stateless anti-capitalist movements building decision-making structures from the bottom up.

If the documentarian, or if HBO itself, wanted to produce a documentary about anarchists in Mexico, they have a long history they can pull from, said Pdraig. He pointed to the anarchist-influenced Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) that helped spark the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Young, the anarchist from Miami, emphasized the pro-choice Green Wave, which successfully fought for decriminalizing abortion in Mexico.

You have these histories that exist, you have contemporary anarchists in Mexico, but instead of doing that, instead of focusing a documentary which is ostensibly supposed to be about those groups of people, you are focusing on a niche of expat Americans who are using the power and influence they've accrued to individually change their lives by moving to this place, said Pdraig. Its just totally absurd.

Anarchists interviewed by Motherboard for this story withheld their real last names, citing concerns for their safety.

See the original post:

Real Anarchists React to The Anarchists, A New Series About Crypto Bros - VICE UK