In a series of tweets on November 9, “serial technology entrepreneur” Dave Troy outlines his view of cryptocurrency as  “an ideologically-driven attack on the legitimacy of fiat currency, the
@federalreserve, and the incumbent financial system,” and “the sequel to the January 6th” Capitol riot.

Let’s dispense with the latter charge first: There’s no merit to it whatsoever.

Cryptocurrency came into existence years before Trumpism was so much as a gleam in the Republican Party’s eye, and was conceived in large part as a method of separating money and state.

The Capitol riot, on the other hand, was no more than a tawdry tantrum of preference over which tyrant was entitled to crack the whip of government over the “incumbent financial system.”

In short, the Capitol rioters have far more in common with Dave Troy than with Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator.

Troy is partly right, though, in claiming that cryptocurrency constitutes “an ideologically-driven attack on the legitimacy of fiat currency” in general and on the Federal Reserve itself.

That doesn’t mean that the many people involved in cryptocurrency, from miners to exchange operators to individual holders, are all wild-eyed anarchist revolutionaries like me. Far from it. For the most part, they’re no different than any other class of investor, entrepreneur, or consumer. They see something of value and they want to profit from it, or at least make good use of it. For most of them, it’s no more ideological than buying a share of Apple or a loaf of bread.

But for us ideologues, yes, the purpose of cryptocurrency is to seize control of money  from the political class and distribute that control widely among free markets and individual people. That would be a good thing, not a bad thing, and to understand why we need look no further than the current worries over inflation.

America’s central bankers claim that recent inflation — supposedly annualizing to more than 6% at the moment, but probably much higher — is “transitory,” while politicians either claim confusion as to its cause or attribute it to convenient distractions.

Inflation happens when the money supply increases faster than the production of goods and services for purchase with that money. Period. Rising prices aren’t inflation, they’re just a symptom of inflation.

The Fed has spent the last two years magically creating new dollars out of thin air far faster than the economy can absorb those dollars with production of goods and services to sell.

Why? So that Congress can borrow those magical dollars and spend them on whatever the political class happens to want … in the process, reducing the value of the dollars you earned with actual productive work.

While it’s a stretch to claim that cryptocurrency is immune to government manipulation, it’s at least immune to arbitrary creation by government. Cryptocurrency makes it harder for the politicians to steal from you. That’s why the political class hates and fears it.

Giving government control of money was one of our worst mistakes. Cryptocurrency is how we’re correcting that mistake.

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.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

• “Cryptocurrency: Dave Troy is Partly Right, But on the Wrong Side,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 11/12/21
• “Cryptocurrency gives power to the people,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Palos Heights, Illinois Reporter, 11/13/21
• “Cryptocurrency: Dave Troy Is Partly Right, But On The Wrong Side,” Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 11/15/21
• “The Politics of Crypto,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 11/15/21
• “Cryptocurrency: Dave Troy is Partly Right, But on the Wrong Side,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 11/16/21
• “Cryptocurrency: Dave Troy is Partly Right, But on the Wrong Side,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sidney, Montana Herald, 11/16/21
• “The politics of crypto,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Creston, Iowa News Advertiser, 11/17/21

On November 9, DC District Court judge Tanya Chutkan refused former US president Donald Trump’s request, based on “executive privilege,” for a preliminary injunction forbidding the National Archives and Records Administration to release documents to the US House committee grandstanding on … er, “investigating” … the January 6 Capitol riot.

If  Trump’s name goes down in history for anything of substance rather than mere flash, it  should probably be for his bizarre claim that  people who aren’t executives anymore retain  “executive privilege” over information pertaining to their time in office.

The concept of “executive privilege” appears nowhere in the US Constitution, but instead developed over history in court decisions, culminating in 1974’s US v. Nixon.

Nixon lost that case and had to turn over audiotapes of Oval Office conversations as part of the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation, but the Supreme Court did assert a “valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them,” so as to encourage “candor” rather than “a concern for appearances and for their own interests.” Appeals to “national security,” justified or not,  also remain a perennial “executive privilege” favorite.

What we haven’t faced before is a legal test of the notion that “executive privilege” inheres in the person rather than the office, remaining a former president’s prerogative after he’s lost his bid for re-election and returned to private life. It’s a silly notion without basis in law, jurisprudence, tradition, or common sense.

The US government’s executive branch records logically fall under the stewardship of that branch and of its current chief executive, not of every Bill, George, Barack, and Donald who may have held the post in the past.  And the purpose of that stewardship supposedly answers to claims of “the common good” rather than the comfort of former executives. The current chief executive, President Joe Biden, has directed the National Archives to release the documents requested by Congress, leading to Trump’s challenge.

The bigger question is whether “executive privilege” has any defensible place at all in a government that claims to be a democratic republic made legitimate the consent of the governed. The answer is no.

The purpose of the executive branch is to execute the will of Congress and, by supposed extension, the people. The president isn’t a king and the US government isn’t a company he owns. He’s an employee, a functionary, a gofer.  He operates at the direction and behest of Congress. His actions should therefore be subject to its constant examination and evaluation.

Donald Trump isn’t even any of those things anymore. He’s just a disgruntled former employee who enjoys no plausible “privilege” whatsoever regarding the historical records of his administration and its actions.

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.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

• “‘Executive Privilege’ Should Be Ended, Not Extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 11/09/21
• “‘Executive Privilege’ Should Be Ended, Not Extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Dillon, Montana Tribune, 11/10/21
• “‘Executive Privilege’ Should Be Ended, Not Extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 11/10/21
• “‘Executive Privilege, Should Be Ended, Not Extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Williston, North Dakota Herald, 11/10/21
• “‘Executive privilege’ should be ended, not extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp,  Havasu City, Arizona News-Herald, 11/12/21
• “‘Executive Privilege, Should Be Ended, Not Extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 11/12/21
• “‘Executive Privilege, should be ended, not extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Miles City, Montana Star, 11/12/21
• “End, not extend, ‘executive privilege,'” by Thomas L. Knapp, Marin County, California Local News, 11/16/21
• “‘Executive Privilege’ Should Be Ended, Not Extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Glasgow, Montana Courier, 11/17/21
• “‘Executive Privilege’ Should End,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Salt Lake City, Utah City Weekly [web and print], 11/18/21
• “‘Executive privilege” should end,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Orangeburg, South Carolina Times and Democrat, 11/18/21
• “‘Executive Privilege’ Should Be Ended, Not Extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Kingstree, South Carolina News, 11/18/21
• “‘Executive privilege’ should be ended, not extended,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sterling Heights, Michigan News-Herald, 11/21/21

A year after the man dubbed the “Insane Clown President” by Matt Taibbi was voted out, Trump-era dread still haunts the USA.

As the end of October approached, numerous news outlets debunked online rumors that “clowns are allegedly planning their own purge the night before Halloween.” Yet while madcap maniacs’ mayhem was conspicuous in its absence, so was skeptical scrutiny of the similarly apocalyptic anxieties over the off-year elections of November 2.

When the forerunners of 2021’s clown warnings circulated in 2016, Mad magazine noted that common features with the concurrent presidential campaign included “men wearing makeup and disturbing grins” and being “like something out of a horror story.” If anything, such comparisons are too flattering to the political circus.

The campaign trail’s rivalries are more obnoxious than the one between Crazy magazine mascot Obnoxio the Clown and Mad‘s Alfred E. Neuman, who himself became a clown rather than merely clownish on the cover of Mad Clowns Around. Insane Clown Posse is not the threat to civil society that the FBI’s classification of the fanbase of the horrorcore hip hop duo as a gang itself became.

Election results confirming the Pew Research Center’s report that “support for reducing spending on police has fallen significantly” likewise reflect the premise of the Purge films (the second was subtitled Anarchy) that the absence of law and order would lead to chaos. Yet as Howard Zinn observed half a century ago, a society where “order based on law and on the force of law” preempts “harmonious relationships” and nonviolent settling of disputes “is the closest to what is called anarchy in the popular mind — confusion, chaos, international banditry.”

In an interview for their July 1976 issue, Karl Hess told Playboy magazine that “the Presidency could be overthrown tomorrow if the American people suddenly began laughing at it, or ignoring it” and that there was no need to “reach for the musket if all you need is a custard pie.” Looking back on that same bicentennial year’s presidential race for Vanity Fair, Wavy Gravy recalled that he was considered “too weird to arrest” when a bulge in his pocket turned out to be from gag teeth rather than a firearm, with the jester-protester choosing to follow its chattering rather than that of the candidates since “nobody should have that much power.”

Voting with one’s feet without passing through a polling site can be an effective path to change, even if those feet are wearing clown shoes.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Was it a Clown Car or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, November 5, 2021
2. “Was it a clown car or a cop car I saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles City, Montana Star, November 5, 2021
3. “Was it a Clown Car or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, November 10, 2021
4. “Was it a Clown Car, or a Cop Car I Saw?” by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup Record-Tribune & Winnett Times [Montana], November 10, 2021