In a March 24 Yahoo! Finance interview, as the price of Bitcoin hovered above $55,000, Bridgewater Associates chief investment officer Ray Dalio weighed in on  the future of cryptocurrency.  The two main takeaways from the interview are a little scary, each in a different way.

Takeaway Number One: What’s up with a  billionaire hedge fund manager who doesn’t understand the concept of “value?”

“Bubbles,” says Dalio, “are financial assets that have imputed value. It’s an asset that doesn’t have intrinsic value. It has imputed value. It’s whatever we think it is.”

With that sentence, Dalio is describing every financial asset — in fact, every thing of any kind — in the universe. There’s no such thing as “intrinsic value.” All value is “imputed.” Or, rather, all value is subjective.  What’s a thing worth? Whatever someone thinks it’s worth, period.

In the context of buying and selling things, a “price” is the meeting point between how little the owner is willing to give up a thing for and how much the buyer is willing to give up to get that thing. If there’s no such meeting point, the exchange doesn’t happen.

There’s no magic formula that says the Furby you found in an old box in the attic is worth $5, $50, or $500. If you won’t give it up for less than $501, it’s worth at least $500 … to you. If you won’t give it up for any price, it’s “priceless” … to you. If a potential buyer won’t pay more than $4.99 for it, it’s worth less than $5 … to him.

Ditto baseball cards, cabbage, tickets to see the Stones, gold, and Bitcoin. All of those things are valuable to different degrees, and for different reasons, depending on who has them and who wants them. So are US dollars, but the government would rather you didn’t understand that.

I’m not an investor, but if I was I’d think twice before handing my money over to a fund manager who doesn’t understand value.

Takeaway Number Two: Dalio thinks “it would be very likely that you will have [cryptocurrency] under a certain set of circumstances outlawed the way gold was outlawed.” Acquaintances in the know tell him the surveillance state has become sufficiently powerful and invasive to make such an edict stick.

That’s scary, too. Not because the government CAN successfully suppress cryptocurrency (it can’t), but because to the extent that it believes it can, it’s going to ruin lives trying to suppress competition against its monopoly on money.

On March 16, federal agents raided (among other places) the studio of radio show Free Talk Live. They abducted six people, including several friends of mine, on charges of  conspiracy to “operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.” Their “crime” was openly and publicly buying and selling cryptocurrency — which, by the way, the government says isn’t money.

“The Crypto Six” face many years in prison if convicted. They’re not the first victims of governments’ developing war on cryptocurrency and they almost certainly won’t be the last. You can (and should) help fund their legal defense at thecrypto6.com.

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

• “Value, Cryptocurrency, and the State’s War on Both,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Miles City, Montana Star, 03/26/21
• “Value, cryptocurrency, and the state’s war on both,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Havasu City, Arizona News-Herald, 03/27/21
• “Value, Cryptocurrency, and the State’s War on Both,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 03/27/21
• “Value, cryptocurrency and the government’s war on both,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 03/30/21
• “Value, Cryptocurrency, and the State’s War on Both,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 04/06/21

In its current form, the US Senate delaying tactic called the “filibuster” hangs on a rule requiring 60 votes for “cloture.” Simply put, it takes 51 Senators to pass a bill, but before that it takes the consent of 60 Senators to end debate and actually get to a final majority vote.

Each time control of the US Senate changes hands, the new majority party publicly mulls doing away with the filibuster in the name of democracy, while the new minority party staunchly defends the filibuster in the name of minority rights to force due deliberation.

This year is no exception. The Democrats enjoy a 51-vote majority in the Senate (48 Democrats, two “independents” who caucus with them, and Vice President Kamala Harris as a tie-breaker). If they’re unanimous, they can pass anything they want … but only if they can find ten Republicans to vote for cloture. No wonder they’re tempted to use  a parliamentary tactic (called, by both sides, “the nuclear option”) to do away with the 60-vote requirement.

But there’s a fly in the ointment: President Joe Biden.

Until recently, Biden opposed ending the filibuster, and as not only president but also former 36-year Senator, his opinion carries  weight on the matter with his party.

In a March 16 interview, Biden shifted gears and supported resurrecting the “talking filibuster” as a compromise. “You have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate …. You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking.”

The “talking filibuster” is both more interesting and more demanding than just sitting on 41 votes to gum up the works. It takes effort, and it’s entertaining (I still remember the late West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd rambling on about his “little dog named Billy” while filibustering something or other).

But whether it’s 60 votes for cloture or Senators yammering about recipes for green bean casseroles, I like the filibuster and want to see it continue regardless of which party is in power. And my reason for that isn’t complicated:

Political power, especially on the sheer size and scale wielded by the US federal government, is a very dangerous thing. Even if it really is the only lesser evil versus Hobbes’s “nature red of tooth and claw” (and I consider that a false dilemma), we should make it as difficult to wield as possible.

Letting 51 politicians do whatever they want, over the opposition of 50 other politicians, is far too loose a standard for application of such power.

At a bare minimum, I’d prefer a 7/8ths vote requirement to pass legislation, with a far lower threshold to repeal it. And, perhaps, a rule mandating the public execution of one randomly selected Senator who votes for each bill that passes.

But in an imperfect world where compromise is valued, I’ll settle for either a 60-vote cloture requirement or a “talking filibuster” scenario in which the minority can, with some application of effort, slow the pace of Leviathan from a sprint to a plod.

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

• “The Filibuster: Imperfect, But Better Than Nothing,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 03/22/21
• “The Filibuster: Imperfect, But Better Than Nothing,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 03/23/21
• “The Filibuster: Imperfect, but better than nothing,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hopkinsville, Kentucky New Era, 03/24/21
• “The filibuster is imperfect, but better than nothing,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Kingsport, Tennessee Times News, 03/29/21
• “The Filibuster: Imperfect, But Better Than Nothing,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 03/29/21
• “The filibuster is imperfect, but better than nothing,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sterling Heights, Michigan News-Herald, 04/02/21
• “The filibuster is imperfect, but better than nothing,” Dearborn, Michigan Press & Guide, 04/02/21

“Dozens of young White House staffers have been suspended, asked to resign or placed in a remote work program,” The Daily Beast reports,  “due to past marijuana use.”

Or, rather, due to having truthfully disclosed that marijuana use when applying for their jobs. It’s a felony to lie on forms like the Office of Personnel Management’s “Questionnaire for National Security Positions,” which asks “In the last seven (7) years, have you illegally used any drugs or controlled substances?” Presumably some applicants decided to risk the felony rap rather than out themselves. They’re apparently the smart ones.

I’m not prone to pity for government employees who find themselves kicked out of Uncle Sugar’s paycheck mill and into the productive sector, but the sheer idiocy of this move doesn’t augur well for drug policy in general.

If you believed that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were really going to take a different approach to the “war on drugs,” and voted for them on that basis, you got conned. And you should have known better.

When it comes to marijuana in particular, every winning presidential candidate since Bill Clinton has pulled the old “Lucy tells Charlie Brown to kick the football then pulls it away” routine.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump might have fooled you, but they were elected president as, more or less, political novices, without records of actual governance to compare their campaign rhetoric to.

Biden and Harris, on the other hand, have both spent their decades in political office gleefully doing their damnedest to put users of substances they disapprove of behind bars — Biden in the Senate and Harris as both a prosecutor and US Senator. Their supposed slight changes of heart on the presidential campaign trail were simple opportunism, and transparently so to anyone knew their records.

If America in general ran on the White House policy we’re seeing here, US unemployment would stand at (at least) 52%. That’s the percentage of adults who admitted to having used marijuana at some point (and 44% of those claimed to still use it) in a 2017 Marist/Yahoo News poll.

Fortunately, America in general is way ahead of the federal government, and the Biden/Harris administration in particular, on marijuana. Medical marijuana is legal in 39 states and DC (five more have legal CBD), while 15 states and DC have legalized recreational use (although South Dakota’s governor is pushing malicious litigation to overturn the will of the voters on the subject).

The war on marijuana may not be over, but marijuana is clearly going to win it. The only question is how many more victims Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will have abducted and put in cages (or killed) before America recovers from its chronic case of reefer madness.

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

• “Reefer madness: Biden White House director’s cut,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hopkinsville, Kentucky New Era, 03/19/21
• “Reefer Madness: Biden White House Director’s Cut,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 03/19/21
• “Reefer Madness: Biden White House director’s cut,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Claremont, New Hampshire Eagle Times, 03/20/21
• “Reefer Madness: Biden White House Director’s Cut,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 03/21/21
• “Reefer Madness: Biden White House Director’s Cut,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 03/22/21
• “‘Reefer Madness’: Biden White House Director’s Cut,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 03/23/21
• “Reefer madness, director’s cut,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Madill, Oklahoma Record, 03/24/21
• “Biden, Harris showing their true colors with their long-standing war on ‘drugs,'” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sterling Heights, Michigan News-Herald, 03/26/21
• “Biden, Harris showing their true colors with their long-standing war on ‘drugs,'” by Thomas L. Knapp, Dearborn, Michigan Press & Guide, 03/26/21
• “‘Reefer Madness’: White House director’s cut,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Spring Hope, North Carolina Enterprise, 03/27/21
• “Reefer Madness: Biden White House Director’s Cut,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 03/27/21