“The goal of our declaration of economic independence is simple,” according to Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign website: “We win. They lose.”

By “we,” DeSantis presumably means everyday Americans. But he never really explains who “they” are, other than to reference shadowy “elites” no fewer than five times, and China a whopping 14 times, in his “declaration.”

He claims he will “protect entrepreneurship from central planners” … with vigorous central planning.

He’ll “demand that American companies act in accordance with American interests.” By doing what Boss Ron tells them to do.

He “will not tolerate woke corporations using ESG as an end-run around our constitutional system to impose heavy-handed, left-wing edicts through concentrated private power.”  But at the same time, “there will be no ideological litmus test for getting a loan, establishing a bank account, or running a business. ”

Which is it going to be, Ron? Can those “woke corporations” run their businesses the way they want to, or do they have to pass your ideological litmus tests?

He “will create a fair labor market” — with draconian immigration policies to exclude the vast majority of humanity from that labor market. If that means that American workers can’t get — or afford — many things for lack of willing hands to make them (and because he’ll prevent Chinese companies from selling them), too bad for us.

He reminds me a lot of US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

Like Warren, most of his career has been spent in so-called “public service.” Other than a couple of years in private practice while preparing his first congressional campaign, he’s spent his entire adult life drawing a government paycheck. Public school teacher. Navy attorney. US Attorney. Congressman. Governor.

And, like Warren, when he sees a problem — real, imagined, or manufactured — his automatic response is to propose “solving” that problem by putting him in charge, with sweeping powers to “fix” it by ordering people around.

If there’s a difference between the two, it’s that elitist political careerist Elizabeth Warren doesn’t run around pretending to hate elitist political careerists, while that’s part and parcel of elitist political careerist Ron DeSantis’s schtick.

Fortunately, there’ another similarity between the two. Like Elizabeth Warren, Ron DeSantis looks set to fail in his bid for a major party’s presidential nomination.

That’s a small favor for which I’m duly grateful to the Almighty. Even if it means putting up with his misrule in Florida for another two years.

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

On August 23, the Southern District Court of New York unsealed an indictment accusing two Romans of money laundering.

“Romans” doesn’t refer here to people from Rome. It refers to two guys named “Roman” — Roman Storm of the United States and Roman Semenov of Russia.

And “money laundering” doesn’t refer here to actual money laundering in either the real or metaphorical sense. It refers to developing software that protects people’s privacy, namely a “cryptocurrency tumbler” which allows people to move money around without permission from or — hopefully — the knowledge of government spies.

The software in question is called Tornado Cash.

Unlike some “tumblers,” Tornado Cash is open source (anyone can see the code it runs on) and decentralized (it has no single “owners” or decision-makers and is governed by “smart contracts” and the votes of anyone who holds its “tokens”).

Storm and Semenov face the “money laundering” charges because, the government alleges, people it doesn’t like have used Tornado Cash to avoid US government sanctions, US government taxes, etc.

Programs like Tornado Cash scare the hell out of politicians. The ability to earn and spend money without their permission is an existential threat to their power over you. That kind of thing must be nipped in the bud at all cost. Therefore, selected victims must be made examples of, and Storm and Semenov drew the short straws this time around.

Tornado Cash takes the form of a “Decentralized Autonomous Organization.”

Governments don’t mind organizations, as long as those organization can be carefully monitored, tightly controlled, and harshly punished should they happen to get on any politician’s wrong side in any way at any time.

The “decentralized” and “autonomous” parts make it harder to monitor, control, and punish an organization.

Whether the Tornado Cash DAO is decentralized and autonomous enough to survive the attempts on its life (so to speak) is questionable. Because it’s a for-profit proposition, with token holders still maintaining some control over, and benefiting from, its operations, there may be further weak points.

But for now, the weak point is “who wrote the code?” The government is going after Storm and Semenov because they’re known to have been involved in doing so.

In the future, we’re going to need Decentralized Autonomous Programs, not organizations — anonymously authored, open source software that, once released into the wild, fulfills its functions without further human supervision.

With governments increasingly looking to get into the “Centralized Bank Digital Currency” game, your future options boil down to two:

Government can control every cent you earn, hold, or spend, in every respect, all the time, 24/7/365.

Or government can lose its control over money entirely.

This is an all-or-nothing scenario, folks. It’s one or the other. Choose wisely.

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

I keep hearing that COVID-19 is back — but of course, it never really left and likely never will. Case numbers and hospitalizations are ticking upward, something we’re likely to see as a seasonal phenomenon from here on out.

I finally experienced the virus firsthand last week. I rate it zero stars, not recommended.  As flu-type illnesses go, it was far from the worst I’ve lived through, but it wasn’t pleasant.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I’ve been getting off easy. It killed my mother in 2020, and last year, the other four people in my household all experienced it with varying degrees of severity, but I never tested positive or felt any symptoms (I credit the Novavax vaccine, for which I was a clinical trial volunteer). This time, we ALL got it. I can’t say it wasn’t my turn.

Another thing that  never fully left and seems to be raising its ugly head again: COVID-19 authoritarianism.

For two years, politicians and “public health” bureaucrats at all levels of government got their jollies pushing us around.

They threw centuries of actual, hard-earned epidemiological knowledge and experience — for example, the absence of evidence that masking prevents the spread of viral disease — in the trash can and replaced it with a state-established religion they called THE SCIENCE.

At points, they attempted to shut life as we knew it completely down across large parts of the country. They insisted on visible displays of faith in their new religion, in the form of those ineffectual masks. They limited our travel, threatened our jobs if we declined their heavily promoted, but also largely ineffective, mRNA vaccines, and admonished us to just get used to a “new normal,” the distinguishing feature of which was to be them remaining in charge of everything we did, indefinitely.

Yes, the madness subsided over time. But the sense of entitlement to rule obviously remains.

NewsNation’s Elizabeth Prann reports that, per a group called No College Mandates, more than 100 universities and colleges across the US still maintain vaccine mandates, and that a few (including Rutgers and Georgetown) still require religious face gear indoors.

Every spike in cases brings our technocrat masters around to muse about the possibility of returning to mask mask mandates, “encouraging” (because they’ve so far mostly failed to mandate) vaccine and booster “uptake,” etc.

Their “new normal” never really achieved “normal” status, but it lives on, largely due to the complete absence of real penalties for getting so power-hungry while getting nearly everything completely wrong.

How many of them went to jail, or  coughed up fines, for their various violations of your rights to live, travel, and work?

How many  lost their jobs for abandoning basic standards of science and getting nearly everything completely wrong?

How many have even admitted and apologized for their  totalitarian antics?

We do indeed need a “new normal” — and the distinguishing feature of that normality must be that in the future the technocrats show their work and ask, rather than order, us to trust them.

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