Freedom needs

free markets

We should probably define our terms. Free means unrestrained, which means that you as a buyer are not compelled to only buy from certain vendors. It also means that vendors are not obligated to sell to you, especially if they don’t like the price you offer for their goods and services. Free means without permission, without let or permit, without the parasites of gooferment charging a fee, collecting “sales tax,” or otherwise invading the economic transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller.

We are used to sales taxes in many places. Oregon is not one of them. Oregon doesn’t have a sales tax, which means that the gooferment isn’t going to ask your small business to collect those parasitic fees on every transaction, account for them in reports, and send those funds to the evil people who work in state government offices whose machinations for totalitarian control are widely reported. Oregon has other taxes, so please don’t suppose that I’m pimping for the place. Nor is it the only state in the USA that has chosen to forego the irritating and idiotic collection of the most regressive form of taxation ever conceived.

But, I am willing to allow that you can have what is otherwise a free market where everyone is charging sales tax and it is being collected on every sale. You will find, though, that such a “level playing field” market, which would be a better description, is not actually completely level. If I talk to a vendor I know well, or if I approach with cash in my hands, I can generally negotiate a cash transaction without sales tax being collected. This fact falls under the good news from Howard Hughes negotiator Chester Karrass: you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate for.

PJ O’Rourke died in 2022 in New Hampshire. He was 74 years old. I’ve no information on whether he was murdered by the vaxxajab. But he makes a pretty good point. A free market is not a great mystery. It is simply a place where people cooperate to find market clearing prices.

Market Seeking

I have said before in these pages that mankind is market seeking. In the absence of markets, people will find a way. If you make it illegal for people to sell bread above a certain price, people will stop selling bread in an open setting. However, bread will still change hands, and at a higher price if that’s practical. If you make it illegal for people to bake bread, they will find ways to hide the scents that arise from the process, or do so out of town where there is less chance of being detected. But people find a way to do what they want, as well as what is needed to survive.

These are not facts that are well-liked by the demon worshippers. The demons they worship hate God and therefore hate all of God’s creation. That’s why the demon worshippers are dumping chemicals out of the back of aeroplanes which you can see in the sky as chemtrails. Sky didn’t used to look that way. The demon worshippers especially hate God’s greatest creation, humanity. So they funded a really nasty troll named Jean-Jacques Rousseau to write about an imaginary social contract. That led to the “French Revolution” and a great deal of bloodshed, as fiat currency was used to destroy economic prosperity. Anyone using anything but assignats and mandats faced the guillotine. Even mentioning prices in silver could get you thrown in prison and facing execution in Bordeaux under the Terror.

But the freemasons were not satisfied with the outcome of the Napoleonic wars. After all, Napoleon was one of their boyz. Just look at his hand hidden in all his official portraits. So they worked on a more hard core set of revolutions for various parts of Europe for 1848. All the while freemasons were pretending to be members of the aristocracy and middle classes they were funding violent insurrection. And they paid their guy Karl Marx to make up a new word “capitalism” though in German it is “das kapital” and tell a lot of lies about it. I’ve read his major works, they were required reading in college. I can tell you he describes a society that might work for some alien species of being, but it has no chance of working with human beings.

These are simply facts. If you want to have a disputation about history in the comments, I feel an eagerness to go at it. Communism has been a failure for the people who have endured it. It has caused enormous suffering. I’ve previously posted this graphic, but I think it needs to be seen again:

This time I’ve linked the pic to my late friend RJ Rummel’s web site at the University of Hawai’i. He once wrote about how much it affected him, personally, to go through every single account of a mass grave being uncovered, or a group of people being tortured to death in some gulag, over the course of an entire century. It was heart wrenching work. And he reviewed several centuries prior to the 20th as well. When he and I talked about it, he asked me what would stop governments from killing their people. I said the only way to stop them from genocides and wars was to stop having them. He didn’t like that answer. But I think it’s true.

Free markets do not require governments to exist. Governments are parasites and make free markets more expensive and more difficult to operate. But governments actually do require people have some sort of activities that produce wealth. Where there are no places to buy and sell things internally, such as North Korea, people suffer great privation. But the government of North Korea apparently sells a lot of armaments, including to Russia, including a few that have been deployed against targets in Ukraine. So there are market aspects of even the most ruthless and democidal governments on Earth.

I should like to point out that we don’t have good figures for the 21st Century. RJ Rummel died in 2014, and I think he stopped working on the project in 2010 because it was better for his health to stop. It was right around that time that the word began to get around that Xi had been murdering the 78 million Falun Gong in custody, a few at a time, and carving them up for body parts. There are a lot of reasons to believe that the 2005 exhibition of human bodies, still featured in the marketing for Bally’s Las Vegas, consists entirely of the bodies of people murdered by the government of China and sold to the exhibitors who use them for profit. I’m sure there is a communist somewhere who is going to declare that exhibit’s very existence evidence that “free market capitalism” is oppressive and dangerous.

In addition to tens of millions of Falun Gong, the Xi government has deliberately murdered tens of millions of people with the bioweapon release in 2019, with the murders in 2019-2020 of dissidents in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and with the murders of Uighurs in far West China. I believe it is possible to prove in court that the Disney corporation has profited from the use of forced labour in China for production of its films there, and I believe it is also possible that forced labour figures in the production of Tesla vehicles, Nike shoes, and Apple iPhones in China. I believe that by saying I believe these things, I am actually engaged in protected speech, but I’m eager and enthusiastic to receive the cease and desist letters propagated by the lawyers of those companies that use slave labour on a daily basis. So, come at me boyz, I’m in a mood.

My very existence

You might pause to think about it for a bit. I say that the demon worshippers rape children, murder tens of millions, and get away with it because they are protected by the parasites in gooferment. And I’m still here. I say things about major corporations using slave labour in producing their products (which is, by the way, not evidence of a free market since slavery is not a free market price for labour) and I’m still here. I’m not afraid. You shouldn’t be afraid, either. I wrote about it a while back, maybe you remember.

For 250 years we have fought the demon worshippers and their minions. And we are still here. This is America. And we are not afraid. We have free markets because they are needed for freedom, because humans are market seeking, and because we will defy the bureau rats and politicians to defend our families, our property, and our faith.

Recent Readings

I began this essay in part because of some things I’ve been reading. So let’s dive into two of those essays. One that caught my attention briefly on Substack was pushed further into my awareness by the amazing and always free market enthusiastic Lew Rockwell on his eponymous web site. It is by my favourite plague chronicler

eugyppius

and bears the intriguing title of Authoritarian Politics in Post-war Europe. I found it rather harder going than usual, because I kept bumping into little outrages such as, “This is because World War II destroyed right-nationalism as a meaningful political force. Western Communism survived until the collapse of the wall in 1989, and in attenuated form socialist ideology lives on within our respective liberal democracies.”

It has come to my attention that I am old enough to forget that Peter Wiggin was also a character in Orson Scott Card’s book Ender’s Game and that Ender’s sister was older than Ender, the “third” of their family. But being old enough to remember the Internet in the 1970s I am also old enough to remember that Francisco Franco was a post-war right nationalist, and he was not destroyed in World War II. I think somewhere George Orwell, a veteran of the fight in Spain against Franco, is chuckling about how World War II is perceived by eugyppius. I’m also old enough to remember that Augusto Pinochet was a right nationalist in Chile, running the country from 1974 to 1990. I think he died at home age 91. Not sure what all this “destroyed” right nationalism is doing in Africa, either. But perhaps the point is that Germans in power in the red-red-red traffic light “coalition” government of Germany are as red as the blood they seek to shed to keep power. To be fair, I think the watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) are content to simply freeze Germans to death rather than have their blood running in the gutters.

Our plague chronicler continues, “Thus libertarians, free marketeers, the traditionally religious, gun enthusiasts, free speech advocates and even certain strains of environmentalists who are not worried about carbon dioxide all find themselves ‘on the right.’ While this is pretty stupid, it does not mean that the political spectrum is an illusion or mere propaganda.” Well, yes, it is a rather idiotic result, since it tries to force fit a lot of disparate views into one term, “on the right.” And, no, the political spectrum, being a one-dimensional “mapping” of an n-dimensional political space, is not an illusion, but it is also not very useful.

I’ve previously written about the Nolan chart. I knew and corresponded with David Nolan for many years as a result of his activism in the Libertarian party which he founded in 1971. Up to this point I have avoided posting a graphic about it, but here goes:

I’ve taken the opportunity to link to Jim Eyer’s site which includes details about the quiz that can help you locate yourself on the chart. There is a bit of software, courtesy of friends from Advocates for Self Government, so you can answer ten questions and find out how much of a communist or fascist you might be. By the way, no, I don’t believe that God has ever asked people to form a government to enforce personal morality. You can feel free to cite Bible verses if you disagree. Jesus is a free market anarchist, who is against the kind of compulsory behaviour exhibited by the money changers who had cornered the market on Temple shekels before his birth and until the sack of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Returning to our favourite plague chronicler, eugyppius writes, “Even in the absence of popular uprisings, liberal regimes have been elaborating ever more authoritarian political programmes for generations now, because exercising control is simply something that states do.” Well, now, that may be what states do, but they make it far too byzantine to call it simple. States are parasitic aggregates that seek to impose costs on otherwise free markets through taxes, inspections, and regulations. If you’ve ever run a small business, you may have found yourself at the mercy of the fire inspector, the health inspector, or the paperwork inspector. If you lost your “occupancy certificate” then, so sorry, no one can be in the building you run your business from. Bureau rats are an infestation, and they add immensely to the cost of living. Some writers have estimated that Americans pay more than 65% of their income in taxes, fees, or the costs of regulations imposed on businesses.

I don’t disagree with eugyppius about the meaning and intention behind left liberal governments. They are not nationalist socialists but internationalist socialists. Their economics are not fascism brand but communism brand. However, I am with George Orwell on the view that I don’t really care whether it was a left boot that kicked me in the ribs while I lay handcuffed on the ground that winter’s day in 2004, breaking ten of my ribs and damaging my left lung, or a right boot that also kicked my face and sent my eyeglasses frame into my eyebrow, gashing it open and breaking my nose.

Based on the liberal socialist progressive ideology emitted by LBJ and other Demon rat politicians in Houston, I suspect that it was more of a left boot thing. You see, in the 1990s I had been active in the Houston Property Rights Association. We kept publicly criticising the taxpayer funding for stadia and sports arenas and we kept being persuasive to the voters. They had to hold repeated elections and kept losing on their referenda, until they hit upon the idea of having an election on a Thursday and not telling anyone. Then they won their total sportsball tax subsidy ballot item, and I stopped hearing from them. Until they had me arrested because they were afraid I might be organising a protest during their Superbowl in 2004 (I wasn’t) and charged me with “HOUSTON SUPERBOWL DRAGNET” which is what the ticket said after three days in jail sleeping on a concrete bench in a holding cell in the place where I was to be told what crime I had been charged with. Fun times.

Yes, before WW2, Lyndon Johnson, who would later help Allan Dulles murder JFK and become president, worked in Houston for the real estate developers who met in downtown hotels, speakeasies, and illicit casinos and decided city policies. Johnson was a procurer, a pimp, for the men with money. It is widely understood among the cognoscenti in Houston that LBJ would not only provide teenage or younger male or female prostitutes/slaves but would also arrange for them to be murdered and their bodies disposed of afterwards.

Anyway, that’s the first essay that seemed like I should make a few comments on. Here it is in its full unexpurgated form on Substack in case you’d like to join the conversation. You cannot pay for L5 News for reasons I’ve elaborated elsewhere, but you can contribute to the plague chronicle, and I would encourage you if you wish.

Authoritarian politics in postwar Europe, or: Why fascism is a bad way to describe what is happening in Germany

Which brings us to happy reading activity number two, from James Howard Kuntsler. Again, I adverted on the essay because of Lew Rockwell’s very fine aggregation work.

Reacting to Tyranny

You might enjoy the full essay from Mr. Kuntsler. I certainly did. But I’m not sure whether there is any value in any sort of poll taken in Houston or anywhere else regarding what people think might be good or bad in government. Certainly the idea that half the country supports the current incumbent in the White House seems like a considerable reach, to me. I definitely don’t think there’s any point in looking closely at the methodology of the quoted study. But if you do, feel free to comment here.

What does impress me is the possibility of a trucker boycott of the city of New York in response to the corrupt Engoron tribunal making its ruling against Trump doing business in New York. Here’s what Mr. Kuntsler says about it:

Every reaction provokes an equal and opposite reaction, Newton’s Third Law states. It manifested shortly after Judge Engoron’s end zone dance when a call went out over the Internet for America’s truckers to refuse loads inbound to New York City. We’ll have to stand by to see how that develops. No more bok choy, Texas beef, or Meyer Lemons for you, “progressive” denizens of the Five Boroughs! Embrace the suck! The genius part is that, unlike the 2022 Canadian truckers’ action in Ottawa, the American truckers will not be cluttering up New York’s streets with their rigs, license plates on view, leaving them vulnerable to such pranks as the shutdown of their bank accounts. All they’ll do is sit innocently at home back in Kentucky and Missouri, enjoying a break from the rigors of the highway. Is that a crime?

James seems to feel that there will be a further boycott in keeping goods from going to Washington, DC. Sounds good. I am on a number of trucker Telegram discussion groups, and will spend a bit of time in the next day or so encouraging them. Refusing loads is a good tool. It could produce results. And tyranny never sleeps, so we shouldn’t expect much rest until we free the slaves, stop the wars, and end tyranny. God’s will be done. Amen.

---

That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.