Jordan Peterson’s latest video about Bitcoin made me want to go out and get a wallet, the electronic wallet needed to accumulate Bitcoin. But, any form of money needs government to protect it. More precisely, what needs the protection of government is the capacity to exchange without coercion or deceit in the market place. As long as the market is not free, in other words, safe from coercion and deceit, nothing can remain uncorrupted.
I don’t have a bank account here where I live. I had to close it because the bank nibbled away, at over $3 a bite, what little I had in it, leaving me with the choice of closing it or owing them money when what was mine was totally gone. Having an account that could conserve its value, even if it was just a little money, has been attractive to me for a long time. But, my knowledge of the principles that make a free market possible has prevented me from allocating any of my very scarce resources there.
If government is corrupt, Bitcoin and all the resources invested in it are not safe, neither do they remain uncorrupted. Oh, it can operate underground, without a doubt, but that is of very little utility when it comes to a means for exchanging and measuring the goods and services produced by Society. It is corrupted even now that Bitcoin has not come under direct fire by the government. People who have had inflated fiat money funneled to them because of their special connection to government have already corrupted it.
Those who understand the corruption of it all, but have benefited from it, big or small, nevertheless, use Bitcoin to hedge their bets. They want to preserve their corrupt gains and, therefore, dump it into Bitcoin, distorting the demand and making it hard to get in at a reasonable price for those who don’t have money funneled to them through government. But, it isn’t safe.
At some point, soon, government will want to impose their own form of electronic money. They won’t want the competition and will drive Bitcoin underground in the same way they have destroyed so many businesses during the Covid debacle.
Congress will make using Bitcoin practically impossible; Bitcoin will become illegal or, the way they are using pressure to vaccinate people, they will impose unpalatable choices on most people. Stay unvaccinated, but you will not have a job, keep your business open, or be able to do what you would “normally” have the freedom to do. That without going into the not more far-fetched control by government of the internet through compliant tech giants to suppress its use.
The market is not free; it is subject to arbitrary government coercion and the competition for power that plagues it. Without freedom, Bitcoin cannot prevail. It is not Bitcoin that will save the world from the corrupting influence of coercion and deceit, from politics. It is the clear and general understanding of how respect for freedom and property make Society, the total network of those relationships, possible.
The Civic Dictionary is now available on Amazon as an e-book and paperback.
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