The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

by Robert A. Heinlein

“That’s okay,” she answered, her voice warm again. “Everybody does business with the Authority, we can’t avoid it—and that’s the trouble. That’s what we’re going to change.” We are, eh? How? I thought. Everybody does business with Authority for same reason everybody does business with Law of Gravitation. Going to change that, too? But kept thoughts to myself, not wishing to argue with a lady.

Although seemingly impossible, it is in fact possible to "opt out" of any gubernamental system. (esp. today, when the separation of money and state has been made possible by Bitcoin). Just because it's hard to imagine, doesn't mean it can't be done.

Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?”

Morality is independent groupthink. AKA "the tyranny of the majority" as per the Founding Fathers.

“I can get along with a Randite. A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals.

Rational Anarchists: Thomas Jefferson? Possibly Michael Saylor? (definitely Michael Malice).

“My point is that one person is responsible. Always. If H-bombs exist—and they do—some man controls them. In terms of morals there is no such thing as ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.”

"The People" is a mental construct that has no place in reality. There are only individuals. The role of a Democratic Republic should always focus on individual freedoms, as minorities must be protected from the "tyranny of the majority". The ultimate manifestation of a "minority" is the individual.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

Freedom can be a state of mind. Esp. moral freedom. Legal has no relation to "good" illegal has no relation to "evil". What's legal is arbitrary. Snowden and Assange are "criminals" (but the opposite of evil).

That Mike could raise hell with Warden’s residence and nobody could figure out what to do shows silliness of piling everything into one computer.

Centralization leads to single points of failure/attack. Not a good defensive strategy.

Was a pyramided swindle based on fact, unknown to me but known to Prof and latent in Mike’s immense knowledge, that most money is simply bookkeeping.

Money is nothing but a ledger. Who owes how much to whom. That's what money is -- simple. But the problem lays in WHO controls the ledger. With fiat, the ledger is owned by the government/central bank and is easily corrupted. The only incorruptible money known to man is Bitcoin. No one owns the ledger, being entirely decentralized. There is little incentive to try and break the ledger, and high cost if attempted and failed. It takes far more energy to attempt to control it (at this point, impossible amounts) but even if such a vast amount of energy could be harnessed to attain 51% of the hash rate, it would still be in the attacker's best interest to follow the protocol and benefit from the money you could gain by mining at an advantage (stealing) rather than entirely corrupting the ledger and gaining nothing at immense cost. If the ledger was compromised, the value of the asset would collapse.

But scheme troubled me; I was brought up to be honest, except with Authority. Prof claimed that what was taking place was a mild inflation offset by fact that we plowed money back in—but I should remember that Mike had records and all could be restored after Revolution, with ease since we would no longer be bled in much larger amounts by Authority.

Whoever is in charge of the money printer (monetary inflation, AKA "counterfeiting" when done by an individual, but "quantitative easing" when done by a central bank) has immense power. This power can only be used for evil, as you cannot morally justify something as "good" simply because you claim it's "for the good of The People". Someone always gets fk-ed while the other gets richer. Non-consensual wealth redistribution is stealing. Period. But an argument could be made that stealing is a moral imperative if the entire nations' literal survival depends on it.

I told conscience to go to sleep. Was pipsqueak compared to swindles by every government throughout history in financing every war—and is not revolution a war?

Monetary inflation is always used to fund wars (even imaginary wars, like "The War on Covid/Opiates/Drugs" etc...). REF: how The Bank of England funded WWI through "war bonds" allegedly purchased by "The People". Keynes described that incident as "masterful manipulation". This only came to light recently, in 2017 (~100 years later). WWI was not a "morally necessary" war. And lead to WWII, which was. Both could have been avoided had it not been for central banking.

One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die . . . and accepts his sentence undismayed.”

On what adulthood is (accepting death without fearing it). Interesting take.

suppose Hong Kong dollars weren’t “money” in some legal sense. Authority would not accept them; times I went Earthside had to buy Authority scrip to pay for ticket. But what I carried was Hong Kong dollars as could be traded Earthside at a small discount whereas scrip was nearly worthless there. Money or not, Hong Kong Bank notes were backed by honest Chinee bankers instead of being fiat of bureaucracy. One hundred Hong Kong dollars was 31.1 grams of gold (old troy ounce) payable on demand at home office—and they did keep gold there, fetched up from Australia.

Fiat is trash money. Unless forced upon the world as the global reserve currency (the least trashy of currencies) no one would accept it. They are IOUs that can only be redeemed for more IOUs, perpetually debasing in value by design. Currency pegged to hard assets like gold mitigate the "trashiness" significantly by ostensibly limiting the supply of IOUs that can be created at the rate of the % of more gold that is mined per year (~2-3%, which should in theory be canceled out by GDP which increases at about the same rate, leading to stable prices). Unpegged to hard assets, the supply of IOUs is limitless, invariably leading to hyperinflation as the temptation to print fiat money to fund gov. spending cannot be quelled. The alternative is to overtly tax citizens, which doesn't get politicians into office as no one wants to be taxed more.

Could buy these with scrip, too, but Authority’s prices kept changing, upward.

Fiat currencies always decrease in purchasing power over time. Consumers only see this in higher prices for goods and services and are told that it's inflation caused by an imbalance between supply and demand, but nowadays that is almost never a significant factor in comparison monetary inflation. Citizens know prices go up ad infinitum intuitively. Every decade someone can say "remember when you could buy X with just $Y?" (This is extremely obvious when speaking to older generations, when they could buy things with pocket change as those coins used to have significant purchasing power). Think "chelines" in Nicaragua, or pennies globally. Pennies are not even accepted as currency outside the US, and within they are often thrown into the trash or on the street. Give pennies to a homeless person and be prepared to get a good tongue lashing.

“Oh, ‘tanstaafl.’ Means ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ And isn’t,” I added, pointing to a FREE LUNCH sign across room, “or these drinks would cost half as much. Was reminding her that anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless.”

"tanstaafl" is widely accepted to be an economic fact. If people knew how central banks ignored this reality, they would riot. Yet they also ignore this reality when it comes in the form of "stimulus checks" without thinking about it twice.

Expected that; having been Earthside I know how their minds work, some. An earthworm expects to find a law, a printed law, for every circumstance. Even have laws for private matters such as contracts. Really. If a man’s word isn’t any good, who would contract with him? Doesn’t he have reputation?

Normies expect and want laws for everything (99% unnecessarily so) even for private matters. Up until 2008, it was illegal to have men to have anal intercourse with each other in Nicaragua. Then it was made legal. Did anyone care whether it was legal or not? How much time and money was allocated to politicians debating this law of 0 consequence? And this is not even close to the most absurd examples -- just first one that came to mind.

“We don’t have laws,” I said. “Never been allowed to. Have customs, but aren’t written and aren’t enforced—or could say they are self-enforcing because are simply way things have to be, conditions being what they are. Could say our customs are natural laws because are way people have to behave to stay alive.

Natural Law in a state of anarchy works fairly well. Darwinian-ly so. Sure, not perfect, but the point being that anarchy does not necessitate chaos.

Where treasure is, heart will be.

Money goes to who/what you love. Biblical wisdom. Perhaps fact.

However, user has a problem, too; if GLOPS comes through as GLOPT, he’s in trouble. Any method of communication needs redundancy, or information can be lost. Was at redundancy that Mike nibbled, with perfect patience of machine.

The importance of redundancy in code and cryptography. Using "code words" digitally fail by a simple typo. Code words are not a good way to communicate privately in a digital world. Cryptographically scrambled comms. is what works, but requires redundancy in double, triple, quadruple checking to make sure the comms have not been decrypted and changed. The Bitcoin blockchain is the most redundant system ever devised by man. Every single historical transaction is re-verified to be true every 10-minutes since the genesis block by thousands of independent decentralized full nodes. The redundancy is literally infinite, ensuring a level of "source of truth" in the ledger that makes it the most secure and ONLY 100% objectively accurate timeline of events known to man.

A pulse is a pulse is a pulse. Electrons chasing each other. To Mike, whole world was variable series of electrical pulses, sent or received or chasing around his innards.

Mike, being a super intelligent AI can see the world as it really is. Is there really any fundamental difference between his ‘pulse’ and ours which just pump blood through our veins. Is there really any reason to believe that organic and nonorganic sentient life forms should be treated differently? Is there really a strong argument to distinguish the organic and nonorganic considering they are both made up of atoms? Isn’t matter just a form of energy?

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws—always for other fellow.

Control of other humans freedom is evil side of human nature

Because not one of those people said: “Please pass this so that I won’t be able to do something I know I should stop.”

People never vote to make their own vices illegal

I almost needn’t have bothered; more than six people cannot agree on anything; three is better—and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest. Never fear, son, this Ad-Hoc Congress will do nothing . . . or if they pass something through sheer fatigue, it will be so loaded with contradictions that it will have to be thrown out.

Democracy In a nutshell

“No, no! Mike is far more alive than those yammerheads. The dead man is Thomas Jefferson—first of the rational anarchists, my boy, and one who once almost managed to slip over his non-system through the most beautiful rhetoric ever written. But they caught him at it, which I hope to avoid.

Thomas Jefferson was a rational anarchist. He believed the Republic would be no different than the Kingdom they sought to replace. His efforts to keep government weak were thwarted by Hamilton. The US constitution’s amendments were created in order of importance. The 2nd exists to preserve the 1st. Jefferson knew the government would have to be periodically and violently overthrown. Let’s keep it that way.

A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers . . . and its greatest strength is a ‘free press’ when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible.’

The fallacy of Democratic Republics providing and protecting individual freedom

At one time kings were anointed by Deity, so the problem was to see to it that Deity anointed the right candidate. In this age the myth is ‘the will of the people’ . . . but the problem changes only superficially. Comrade Adam and I have had long discussions about how to determine the will of the people. I venture to suggest that this solution is one we can work with.”

Democracy is about manufacturing consent. By devising a democratic system whereby a superior body over congress (like the Senate) has only the ability to repeal or veto by a 1/3 minority, bills that are passed 2/3 by the majority in the lower legislative branch, you could theoretically design a system of governance that cancels itself out unless nearly 3/3 reach consensus (supermajority, nearly unanimously) which would rarely ever happen.

“Nationals,” as they were called, were inflation money, war money, flat money, and were discounted a fraction of a percent on day of first issue, concealed as “exchange service charge.” They were spendable money and never did drop to zero but were inflationary and exchange reflected it increasingly; new government was spending money it did not have.

Fiat currency = inflationary war currency in order to fund unpopular policies that no one would pay for. Workaround is printing more money to fund without consent. The USD has lost 99% of it’s purchasing power in the last 100 years (started when the dollar became increasingly unpegged to gold, and esp. once it was entirely “temporary” irredeemable for gold during the Nixon administration, going full fiat, and debasing at exponential rates ever since. Like all purely fiat currency it’s trajectory is invariably a downward path to 0 or near 0 value.

“Comrade Members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom—if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant. Move slowly, be hesitant, puzzle out the consequences of every word.

Your own elected government will become tyrannical (essentially paraphrasing Jefferson)

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”

Forced taxation is immoral, regardless of what “the majority” decide is an ethical amount.

“‘How,’ Manuel? You know how we are doing it. We’re stealing it. I’m neither proud of it nor ashamed; it’s the means we have. If they ever catch on, they may eliminate us—and that I am prepared to face. At least, in stealing, we have not created the villainous precedent of taxation.”

Monetary Inflation and taxation are both nothing more than theft, but overt theft via transparent taxation normalizes it, while money printing as a stealth tax goes largely unnoticed, and thus is better if the intention is to stop printing after necessary defensive measures of existential wars.

Mike didn’t miss a word; his most human quality was his conceit.

Power of AI is ability to deceive

“It’s not as sudden as it sounds; Prof and Mike worked it out months ago. Decentralization, dear, the same thing that McIntyre has been working on for the warrens. If there is a disaster at L-City, Luna Free State still has a government.

Decentralization to avoid single points of failure during attacks. (Bitcoin does this best).