April 20th, 2020 may be the day in American history marked as the beginning of the end for our democratic republic if action is not taken swiftly. It is strange to retrospectively examine the past 20 years and reflect on the actions that landed us in the dangerous spot we occupy now. We have allowed corporate greed and an abandonment of our god-given rights of liberty and independence to pathologize our society through the same mechanism the constitution warned us of in Article 1 Section 8, unchecked government power.
The evidence of this is not in the intent put forward for our laws but rather the outcomes that have transpired as a result along with the sentiment and resentment that has seeped into our society at large. The fronts on which we are under duress are 3.
Socially
Technological advancement has been the greatest driver of American innovation since the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s however technology today looks nothing like technology then. Social media has changed the way people interact since its conception in 1997 but not in the way it was originally intended even in its most notable iteration "Facebook" for which the original intent was "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." though the outcome has been exactly the opposite. The simulation of presence will never be equal to the occurrence of presence and the insidious manner in which these apps are now constructed as made evident by works such as "The Social Dilemma" is reprehensible at best but closer to coercion at worst.
The founders feared this type of coercion but had placed that fear in the wrong entity, they had only known governments or banks to possess the type of reach necessary for these campaigns, not conglomerates. Today we have a fusion of the two in our society as Cronies direct the interactions of people nationwide showing and hiding what you are "most interested in" or more accurately what weakness can be targeted to capitalize on your attention. This does not bring people together this drives a wedge between groups with various propaganda spawning tribalistic behavior demonstrated by the January 6th, 2021 event at the Capitol in Washington DC, the multitude of attacks on police outposts across America over the last 2 years, Antifa enacted militant zones, and finally the attempted kidnapping of government officials such as the governor of Michigan.
Someone’s posts are at least equivalent to their speech and should be treated as such if an individual shares their true identity online. We need a regulation requiring all social media platforms offer a “free speech” account. A free speech account will:1. Give ownership of user data to the user meaning they are the only ones allowed to delete/edit/create their posts.
2 . Prohibit any social media company from analyzing “free speech” account data or free speech interaction data (timing of ad/post viewership, reactions to posts, reading of comments/sentiment, etc.) with anything approximating artificial intelligence or manual data mining otherwise they will face a per user fine.
3. Users with a free speech account have the highest priority in searches and any content feeds of which the deciding factor for order will be chronology.
4. All implicit censorship is prohibited for these accounts (Shadow Ban Posts, Profile Search Omissions, Content Based Post Priority)
When a user opts in to a free speech account they must be verified using photo ID/blue check verification confirming the user is who they present themselves as and all profile pictures are identity confirmed. The default wall configuration will be chronology/subscription based posts and the explore page should be tag based on the user’s selections not the social media’s psychological model assumptions. That data and those opinions belong to the people not to an ad machine and someone’s speech should be addressed by their peers rather than any corporation or government.Economically
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." - Alexis De Tocqueville
Words of old that ring true to our current situation. We have hit an economic inflection point that leaves us as a free society beyond vulnerable because of decisions made by those who are not wise enough to fear or will not live long enough to face the repercussions of their "empathetic" spending and distribution/defacement of our currency.
At a basic level, a currency is a promise, a promise of value to all who hold the notes. in earlier days that promise was to exchange your dollars for their value in gold. The bill of rights explicitly denounces taxation without representation however was formed under the presumption that money would be tied to the value of gold indefinitely restricting the supply of dollars that can be printed by the gold in reserves. That is not the case anymore, value is now tied to the supply of the dollar which can be printed on-demand of those running the press.
This produces 3 main problems:1. When you increase the supply of dollars without increasing the supply of goods/services the dollars you own represent a smaller portion of value in the system. Effectively raising the prices of all products in the system since there is more money chasing the same amount of products.
ex. You have saved $1,000. The government prints money at an inflation rate of 5.5% in 1 year. That same $1,000 now has the buying power of $954.84 but compounded over 5 years that rate jumps to 27.5% on the same $1,000 diminishing your buying power to $725 because of the overall increase in prices market-wide.
2. The newly printed money is dispersed to special interests many of which entice dependence on the government who supplies for them, Or in plainer terms a bribe so that they will continue to vote for those who claim to be helping them but are really hurting them economically.ex. Peter works 50 hours a week to pay bills and provide a life for his family, Paul is down on his luck and needs welfare assistance while figuring out his next move. The Fed prints money to pay out obligations and buy assets (usually bonds) resulting in both Peter and Paul being worse off in the medium to long term as prices begin to rise. The fixed income that is given to Paul and the money Peter saved is diminished along with compounding this invisible tax year over year for everyone in our society without ever being sufficiently explained as a raising of the poverty line or subjecting more people to poverty/state sufficiency with a growing cost of living.
3. High Inflation discourages delayed gratification/saving behavior for banks and corporations domestically and encourages them to make investments in assets that appreciate like real estate/housing jacking up prices for the consumer raising the cost of entry for homeownership relegating the previous generations ability to build generational wealth to only the ones with high earnings or assets to liquidate.
This form of taxation is not only dishonest but regressive forcing more people below the poverty line and into state dependence programs that utilize Congressional budget resources ($2,800,000,000,000 annually) to fund/inflate the prices of private companies the public may not have picked to serve them but none the less they live on thanks to government subsidies.
Luckily for us, the answer also lies in the constitution, a more limited and constrained government. The government does not add to the productivity of the economy but rather lives off of or subtracts from its potential and disperses those riches as they please at the expense of us all. This is why congressional wages and the congressional budget should be negatively indexed to a 2% inflation target meaning if they miss that target their budget and wages are reduced by the percentage they missed for that fiscal year.
That being said the role of our government should be fair and minimal necessary lawmaking to protect citizen's rights, consistent application of that law, and maintenance of the military as explicitly outlined in our constitution. Currently, our federal government spends 31% of all wealth produced in this country as a baseline every year. Meaning from January to April on average individuals work for free and are supplied services of low quality and high cost due to bureaucracy and the absence of market forces. My proposition is to amend the constitution to limit the Federal Government spending to a flat rate of 20% of GDP in peacetime and a wartime maximum of 30% of which the extra 10% will solely be allocated to military equipment/maintenance and you must secure a 2/3 vote in both the house and senate to initiate the increase while needing presidential approval as the final step to confirmation.
Also in place of a welfare system that treats its subjects as if they are children who are incapable of receiving and managing money. I propose Milton Friedman's idea of a negative income tax/guaranteed income in which progressively assists people while not disincentivizing their participation in our economy allowing economic actors in to make the decisions with printed money themselves and dramatically cutting down the bureaucracy of the wasteful welfare state.
Finally, my last proposal is the abolition of the federal minimum wage law under the basis that it discriminates profoundly and excludes the non-skilled worker population of our citizenry from ever being able to participate in our economy. This is outlined beautifully in a quote by renowned economist Thomas Sowell. "The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer." The cold hard truth is an employer can only pay you less than your productivity can supply to the company. If a worker's productivity is less than that of minimum wage then employers can't afford to take on that worker. This leaves only large companies with copious amounts of infrastructure to raise the persons productivity above minimum wage can give these people jobs and often end up abusing them as a result since the pickings for the worker are thin. Absent the minimum wage law competition and untapped labor resources will drive prices downwards creating more affordable goods and services for all and allow us to compete worldwide with greater effectiveness. Though the road will be painful in the short term as we await price deflation and the real value of our debts will increase we must resist the drug of stimulus/easy money inflation we have become so accustomed to in order to save our nation's soul.Liberty
September 11, 2001, our country lived through the most horrific attack on western society ever witnessed. However the days following, America has never been more united under a cause as we were devoted to hunting the barbarians responsible ultimately ending in their execution. Though they are gone their mission lives on with the effects of that fateful day and one could argue the reaction that followed was many times more harmful than the atrocity perpetrated. This was their true mission, not only to strike fear into our people but to coerce us to turn over what made us strong in the first place. Our liberty, our courage, and our self-reliance to the institution that throughout history, without failure has devoured every empire that has ascended to the phase of its necessity. This event opened the wounds necessary for those whose goal is usurping power to target our human nature and need for safety to take advantage of us all.
Today we are witnessing before our eyes the results of overreaching power, especially in the hands of those unfit for its responsibility. demonstrated by the fact that this day marks day 591 of the 15-day restrictions implemented to "flatten the curve" and that temporary power is only seeking expansion rather than reduction. In our capitalist society, the Federal Reserve/Federal Government have taken it upon themselves to become the biggest business declaring corporate kings by simply making the choice for you who is allowed to be sovereign and industrious and those who must rely on governmental judgment to guide their lives. This is a mistake, capitalism aims to disperse computational power among the many whose judgments are more complete and better suited to the maintenance of the system rather than to the few who do not have the information, experience, nor ability to make those judgments without catastrophic end and we are seeing that play out painfully in front of our eyes nationwide.
The solution is to fight back uniformly as a populace and deny any further destruction to our liberty from those who attempt to strip us of it. We must not allow those in DC whose rights are protected by their position and ignore the rules they themselves set, to take what we hold as sacred.Make no mistake this is domestic tyranny of the sorts predicted by our founders and it is our duty to fight for what is our birthright as Americans, our lives, our livelihood, and our liberty.
This is by far the most over reaching generalization and by far the dumbest thing I’ve ever read
1. LAUGHABLE that you believe attacks on police outposts were spurred by social media and somehow was a bad thing for society.
2. Removing the federal min wage. It will do absolutely nothing except hurt those that are already poor. Your “income to production” analogy is not only ignorant of the fact no job produces less than $7.25/hr for a company but also removing this would allow greedy employers (fed. contractors) to underpay valuable labor. I thought your whole theme was about defeating corporate greed?
3. Day 571 of 15-day stop the spread. You can literally do anything you want, there’s no lockdown in your state bro. You have to where a mask? That’s what society has always done during large scale pandemics
You’re article is a pathetic attempt to pioneer right wing propaganda. Stick to your day job