GoFundMe Thievery
Capital Thinking · Issue #1032 · View online
By now, everybody is probably aware of the Canadian #FreedomConvoy and how GoFundMe, at the behest of the Mayor of Ottawa and Justin Trudeau, summarily closed their fundraiser, which had exceeded $10 million.
They also announced that they would literally redistribute funds to other “approved charities”.
Those approved charities would presumably be those mentioned by name by the likes of Trudeau (like the avowedly Marxist BLM, who have fundraising issues of their own owing to lack of financial transparency).
GoFundMe just proved Bitcoin’s use case
In case you were wondering what life under a CBDC will look like
This kind of incident is a microcosm of exactly why the world needs Bitcoin, decentralized crypto-currencies and communications protocols.
Because we now live in a world run by collectivist technocrats. They sincerely think that what they believe should be rules and what you or I believe should be thought crimes.
On its own this would be merely annoying, having to perpetually deal with shrill, sanctimonious hysterics, perpetually shrieking in your face about things they want you to think and how they want you to live.
But it’s a problem when these people congregate around the choke-points of a centralized, bureaucratic technocracy and impose their personal neuroses onto the rest of society.
Not only as policy, but as official canon on what is truth itself.
The final straw is when dissent is criminalized and plunder legitimized. When all actions against those dissenters are fair game, while any civil (and constitutionally protected) resistance is by definition reprobate, then we have arrived in dystopia. At the very least: authoritarianism.
Reality will always intrude…
The Fourth Turning people observe that the generational cycles oscillate between individuality and collectivism. By extension, right now we’re in a phase of peak collectivism.
They’re not wrong, but I think that misses the overall progress of humanity. On a scale of individual autonomy and empowerment, the long term trajectory is always “up and to the right”.
Anybody reading Rothbard or Hayek knows that the construct of The State is more accurately a racket whereby small cadres of self-anointed elites appoint themselves the overlords of the masses.
Rigging society so that the vast bulk of wealth accrues to themselves and any attempts by the rabble to defend their own interests increasingly fall outside the scope of what is permissible.
Photo credit: Brian Stalter on Unsplash
Meanwhile back at the ranch...
If confirmed, Sarah Bloom Raskin would lead the central bank away from its core mandate.
No Mission Creep at the Fed
Americans do not need the federal government telling banks who can and cannot receive credit based on politics.
However, if on February 3, the Senate Banking Comitttee approves President Biden’s recent nominee to the Federal Reserve, Sarah Bloom Raskin, our country will be taking a giant step in that direction.
Ms. Raskin, who wishes to become vice chairwoman for supervision of the Board of Governors and a member of the Federal Reserve System, believes that the Fed should discourage bank’s lending to companies that she deems insufficiently green.
If she prevails, oil and gas companies risk being squeezed out of bank loans — a plight that may eventually befall any company that fails to meet her environmental standards.
Not only is that a potential threat to the livelihood of many Americans; it’s a threat that should never emanate from the Fed.
President Biden should withdraw her nomination immediately.