In Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest, he presents a list of institutional arrangements that turned a bunch of ignorant, “malodorous” Europeans into the world’s dominant culture in the space of a couple of centuries. One of those institutional arrangements was property rights. That is, when something is yours it’s yours, not the king’s or […]
Creeping Fascism, Part 2: Great Fraudulent Beast
In Charles Mann’s 1491, about the (surprisingly big and diverse) cultures that existed in the Americas before the arrival of smallpox, he offers this: “The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; […]
Fiat Currency and the Emerging Police State
Our transition from more-or-less free country to police state is accelerating. The NSA’s Utah data mining facility, ever-tighter restrictions on offshore accounts, the Internet “kill switch”, the Patriot Act’s many assaults on the Bill of Rights, the militarization of local police, the spread of drones for domestic surveillance; each has a role in the high-tech […]
“Turnkey Totalitarian State”
New tech is always a double-edged sword, with benefits balanced to an extent by the risk of misuse by idiots or criminals. Airplanes make possible fast travel but also saturation bombing; biotech gives us stem cell treatments and frankenfoods; antidepressants and painkillers help some people and addict countless others. TV, nuclear power, cars; pretty much […]
Creeping Fascism, Part 1: Return of the Company Town
The US government’s obliteration of the Bill of Rights via the Patriot Act, the recent defense bill that allows the military to detain citizens indefinitely without trial, the health care law that forces citizens to buy insurance, and the attempted takeover of the Internet through SOPA and PIPA has gotten a lot of attention lately, […]
I’ll Give Up My Chicken When They Pry It From My Cold Dead Hands
Last week I had dinner with two friends, one of whom is what the mainstream would call a conspiracy nut. Over the course of a couple of hours and a bunch of margaritas he walked us through everything from the government’s role in 9/11 to the FEMA internment camps to the surge in gun regulations, […]