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Bitcoin: The Fearmongers’ Dirty Little Secret

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The bitcoin logo
The bitcoin logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

European bureaucrats barely allowed the blood to dry on Paris’s cafe floors before calling a “crisis meeting” on November 19 to plot new ways of seizing power over the emerging digital economy. Their targets: Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as well as gift cards loaded with cash. Basically, any method of spending or receiving money without the state’s knowledge and permission.

Now, mind you, no evidence has emerged linking any of these things to the Paris attacks. The attacks weren’t the REASON for this new initiative; they were a PRETEXT for it. Bitcoin in particular and cryptocurrencies in general keep the political class lying awake at night. Terrorism is just an easy hook to publicly hang their fear on without revealing that fear’s real roots. When there’s no convenient blood on the floor to point to, they purse their lips and lecture us on fraud, identity theft and other nastiness they pretend to protect us from.

Why do our masters really fear unregulated, unsupervised, unlicensed transaction systems? Because they fear anything they can’t control. And so they should.

A brief digression: Reuters, like many other mainstream media outlets, characterizes Bitcoin as “a vehicle for moving money around the world quickly and anonymously via the web without the need for third-party verification.” Two of the four elements in that description are just flat false. Bitcoin is not naturally anonymous, and each Bitcoin transaction is verified by multiple third parties and permanently recorded on a publicly readable ledger called the block chain. Bitcoin is less anonymous than, say, cash — which the political class also seems determined to eliminate in favor of debit cards issued by government-supervised banks.

That said, Bitcoin transactions can be anonymized with a little work, and there are other payment systems with more anonymity-friendly features.That’s a feature, not a bug. Terrorists will always find ways to keep what they’re doing hidden; they have good reason to work at it. For the rest of us, if it’s not easy we get lazy.

Why do the politicians and bureaucrats fear and loathe personal privacy (that’s all “anonymity” is) so much, especially where money is concerned? Put simply, consider the old anti-war saying: “What if the Air Force had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?”

That’s what’s at stake: If the politicians and bureaucrats don’t know who has money or where that money is or how to get at it, they can’t steal it from us at will to buy things “for us” that we’d never  buy ourselves if given the choice.

Yes, that really is all it’s about. That’s what keeps them up at night. Don’t let them scare you away from Bitcoin with their scary fairy terrorist tales.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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End the Education Fights: Time for a Divorce

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School -- girl reading (RGBStock)

Students at Mount Horeb Primary Center in Wisconsin were scheduled to read the book I Am Jazz, by teen transgender celebrity Jazz Jennings, in late November, the idea being to acquaint the student body — which includes a trans girl — with the basics of gender identity.

The reading was canceled when school administrators received a nastygram from a group calling itself “Liberty Counsel.” Since the book’s content doesn’t conform to the views of some evangelical Christian parents, exposing their children to it would, Liberty Counsel claims, violate those parents’ civil rights.

Any three people reading this column will probably come up with three different opinions on the specific issue at hand: When should kids learn about gender, where should they learn it, and what should they learn about it? In that area, I can’t say I’m a big fan of Liberty Counsel’s positions (their letter is a poisonous piece of trash that treats gender identities diverging from from their tendentious misreadings of scripture as “confusion” and “mental disorder”).

On the other hand, the incident does bring up a more fundamental point. This past year, brawls over the content of “public education” seem to have centered around gender identity issues — who uses what bathroom, locker room, etc. But the brawls themselves are nothing new. They’ve occurred with regularity ever since government’s hostile takeover of American education began in the mid-19th century. Sex education in general has been a recurring topic, as has evolution vs. creationism in science curricula. Even the state’s cultish loyalty oath, the “pledge of allegiance,” has occasioned multiple 12-round heavyweight extravaganzas.

The solution to all this constant conflict is simple: If we want to end the political struggles over education, we need to end the involvement of politics itself in education. And the only way to do that is to separate school and state entirely.

I said it would be simple. Simple isn’t the same thing as easy. “Public education” in the US, up through the high school level, is an industry with more than $600 billion in annual tax-extorted revenues and millions of employees. They’re one of the most powerful ready-made political lobbies imaginable. They will not go gently into that good night.

But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Why not start by separating YOUR kids from the government education con game? Private schools may be more expensive and homeschooling may require more effort, but both alternatives produce better results than the combination prisons/daycare centers the state falsely advertises as “schools” these days.

Or I suppose you could just let Liberty Counsel and the local NEA chapter continue to duke it out every other week over what your kids should learn.

Thomas L. Knapp 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

  • “End the Education Fights: Time for a Divorce,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 11/29/15
  • “End the Education Fights: Time for a Divorce,” by Thomas L. Knapp, FPP News [New Hampshire, print edition], December 2015
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NATO: This Deal is a Turkey

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Source: Published by the American red cross, i...
Armenian civilians are marched to prison by armed Ottoman soldiers. Kharpert, Ottoman Empire, April 1915. (Photo credit: Wikipedia — Public Domain Photo from Red Cross)

Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty states that an “armed attack” on a NATO member “shall be considered an attack against them all” and that all parties to the treaty must join in to “restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” Left unspecified is what happens when a NATO member itself launches an “armed attack” on a non-member, as happened Tuesday when Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian Sukhoi-24 bomber near the Syrian border.

Naturally, there are conflicting claims about whether or not the Russian craft was in Turkish airspace. Even if it was, no one seems to be buying the idea that it was “attacking” Turkey. But Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan edges toward such a position on the basis that the Russians are fighting Syrian rebels, some of who happen to be ethnic Turkmen — “our brothers and sisters” — and who may not necessarily be affiliated with the Islamic State.

If Russia responds tit-for-tat, and if Turkey successfully invokes Article 5, NATO members could suddenly find themselves in a shooting war born entirely of their own hubris. Turkey should never have been admitted to NATO in the first place, and both its membership and the existence of NATO itself have long outlived any possible value they might once have had.

First of all, Turkey is not situated on the North Atlantic. Nor on any other part of the Atlantic. Nor anywhere NEAR any part of the Atlantic. Picture the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce recruiting businesses in Denver. Yeah, sort of like that.

Secondly, Turkey has little in common with other NATO members or with “the west” in general. Erdogan is a tinhorn Islamist authoritarian whose regime persecutes political dissenters, treats it as a crime to even mention that a hundred years ago his predecessors systematically murdered 1.5 million Armenians, and only materially supports NATO actions when doing so provides cover for suppressing the nationalist aspirations of Turkey’s (and Iraq’s, and Syria’s) Kurds.

Thirdly, while the 45-year Cold War needn’t imply future enmity between Russia and the US or western Europe’s NATO nations, the Russians and the Turks have been at each others’ throats for nearly 500 years now with few breaks and no end in sight. Sooner or later, they’re going to go to war again. The benefits of having Turkey in NATO are mostly illusory. To the extent they aren’t, they’re not worth the risk of getting “Article Fived” into that war.

If America’s political leaders are truly interested in peace, they’ll withdraw the US from NATO or, at the very least, move to expel Turkey from NATO. But America’s political leaders AREN’T truly interested in peace, are they? Happy Thanksgiving.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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