The International Monetary Fund refers to cryptocurrency only once in its 215-page World Economic Outlook for October 2018, but that reference is telling: “Continued rapid growth of crypto assets could create new vulnerabilities in the international financial system.”

Ironically and counter-intuitively — but in my opinion not accidentally — that sentence is grouped in a paragraph  with worries about the potential of cyber warfare to “undermine cross-border payment systems and disrupt the flow of goods and services.”

Cryptocurrency, of course, is the perfect solution to “cross-border payment systems.” In terms of both movement and accounting, it simply ignores borders.  A Bitcoin is a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin — in Minneapolis, in Mumbai, in Moscow. And it can be moved between those three cities in a tiny fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort  it takes to set up wire transfers between bank accounts and to exchange dollars for rupees, or for rubles. All without government permission, too.

The “vulnerabilities” the IMF worries about are its own. Cryptocurrencies are, to varying degrees, resistant to supervision, surveillance, and regulation by entities like the IMF and its 189 member governments (the so-called “international financial system”).

Those governments (and their intermediary institutions like the IMF) fear money they can’t control. Who can blame them? The long history of central government banking is a history of money and markets easily subjected to taxation and political manipulation. Its purpose is to shear the sheep — that is, to clothe the ruling class at the expense of those who produce goods and services of actual value.

The brief history of cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is a history of emerging financial (and, ultimately, political) freedom for the productive class. That’s its philosophical genesis and its technical goal: Putting wealth beyond the reach of the thieves and extortionists who call themselves “governments.” Crypto is, as the anarcho-syndicalists like to put it, “building the new world in the shell of the old.”

Some players in the crypto sector seek co-option by the existing “international financial system” — for example, seeking regulation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and its global equivalents.  They’re backing the wrong horse. The old “international financial system” will be replaced, not reformed.

The IMF’s purpose is not to facilitate “cross-border payment systems and … the flow of goods and services,” but to control them.  Fortunately, the time when that was even remotely possible is coming to an end.

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/CITATION HISTORY

Amazon.com’s plans to establish  a pay minimum of $15 an hour for all its domestic workers (Day One: The Amazon Blog, October 2) come across as the real-life version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons turning his nuclear power plant into a community garden. The Internet sales Goliath is by far the largest company to have taken up a wage floor that is among the main demands of critics of its labor practices, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos inspiring Senator Bernie Sanders’s Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act. Sanders has pivoted to commending the same Bezos his “Stop BEZOS” proposal demonized.

Has the avowed socialist simply accumulated enough political power to beat up on business with a long-shot bill symbolizing the force of piecemeal lesser measures? Or has a well-meaning but impractical gesture lucked into sparking a real concession?

Critics point out that the specific mechanic of the Act — taxing larger companies the full amount their employees get from welfare programs — suffers from the perverse incentive of making it less worth employers’ while to hire the most impoverished applicants. Yet it is not simply the case, as Jonathan Chait protests, that “social welfare benefits workers, not their bosses.” In observing that measures seemingly championing the underdog can in fact become corporate welfare, Sanders is more perceptive than Chait. Sanders grasps the outlines of “corporate liberalism” as exposed by a half-century of research by historians like Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, and Joel Spring.

Amazon’s promise that “our public policy team will work with policymakers in Washington, D.C., to advocate for a higher federal minimum wage” is merely the latest example of dominant firms collaborating with government to design regulation they welcome because its costs fall most heavily on others. From safety measures (Kolko’s “The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916”), to transportation infrastructure (Kolko’s “Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916”), to workforce training (Spring’s “Education and the Rise of the Corporate State”), legislative mandates and standardized requirements stop competitors from doing things better for less, and often from even entering the market in the first place.

In attempting to take back such ill-gotten gains, the Stop BEZOS Act doesn’t go far enough. Money would be left in the pockets of the neediest by measures like the Mobilization for Incremental Tax Exemption — an across-the-board removal of the lowest income earners from the tax rolls endorsed by both William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism director Thomas Knapp and “Bernie: A Lifelong Crusade Against Wall Street & Wealth” author Darcy Richardson.

Opportunities to earn more would expand as structures of corporate liberalism recede. The book industry, for instance, would no longer be artificially routed through an Amazonian mega-river — on Beltway-built ships — but would tend to eddy around the communities it serves. It would look less like a centralized Amazon warehouse than like the local touch and personal service of year-old Kew & Willow Books of Queens, New York — founded by employees of a nearby closed Barnes & Noble with knowledge of the trade and the neighborhood.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Amazon’s $15 minimum pay is a hollow gesture,” by Joel Schlosberg, University of New Mexico Daily Lobo, 10/08/18
• “Can’t Stop the Bookstore,” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 10/11/18
• “Can’t Stop the Bookstore,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 10/14/18
• “Can’t stop the bookstore,” by Joel Schlosberg, Pahrump Valley [Nevada] Times, 11/07/18

On September 30, a US Navy destroyer, the USS Decatur, sailed within 12 miles of the Gaven and Johnson reefs in the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands.  Twelve miles being the “territorial waters” limit set by the UN’s 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Decatur was met and warned off by a Chinese destroyer.

The US government complains that the Chinese ship maneuvered “in an unsafe and unprofessional” manner, approaching within 45 yards of the Decatur before veering to avoid a collision. Now, CNN reports, “[t]he US Navy’s Pacific Fleet has drawn up a classified proposal to carry out a global show of force as a warning to China.”

The Decatur had no legitimate business in those waters. It was there for one and only one purpose: To rattle the US saber in a continuing domestic propaganda campaign for “containment” of Chinese “expansionism,” (read: “Keep spending lots of money on the US Navy”).

No fewer than six states — China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Phillipines, Malaysia, and Brunei — assert territorial claims over all or part of the (largely uninhabited) Spratly archipelago.  To which, if any, of those states do the Spratlys “belong?” That’s for them to work out between themselves, through arbitration and mediation or maybe even war. The US government, neither numbering itself among those claimants nor having any plausible basis upon which to do so if it wished to, needs to butt out.

In 1821, then US Secretary of State (and later president) John Quincy Adams wrote that the United States “has abstained from interference in the concerns of others …. she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

Adams’s words echo the sentiments of his former rival, Thomas Jefferson, who in his first inaugural address called for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

While those principles of peace and non-interventionism more often found expression in breach than observance — the Mexican War comes to mind —  they fell completely apart with the Spanish-American War, which marked the beginning of the US as a global empire.

We’ve been paying the price ever since: Two world wars, 33,000 American dead in Korea, 58,000 in Vietnam, more than a quarter century of war in the Middle East and Central Asia, and no end in sight.

The rest of the world has paid an even higher price in blood, treasure, and servitude for the imperial games of self-styled “superpowers” — a class the US often holds itself out as the sole remaining example of since the Soviet Union’s 1991 dissolution.

It’s time to retire the “superpower” nonsense entirely, stop gaming other countries’ conflicts to justify our own military-industrial complex’s corporate welfare checks, and let the parties to the Spratly spat work it out among themselves.

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/CITATION HISTORY