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wealth comes from the ownership of assets that increase in value over time.
Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2022 estimated global wealth at around $463.6 trillion, with 31 percent of that, or around $145.8 trillion, in the hands of Americans.1
power and massive debt loads are at odds with each other.
The government is desperate and in debt, and you and your fellow citizens represent a massive amount of wealth to be “legally” conquered.
The intention is to hollow out the middle and working class and leave them with nothing. It’s
When a social moral code replaces a legal code and gains acceptance, it is only a matter of time before those in power want to leverage that dynamic to secure more power for themselves.
But how does a true state social credit system come to be? It requires two steps. The first is information-gathering on individuals. The second is those in power using the information without being challenged. When both of those become easy to do at scale, tyranny quickly follows.
SCS is primarily about gathering and analyzing behavioral data of individuals, then rewarding or punishing certain actions to force individuals into compliance with the types of behaviors the CCP wants and eliminating or suppressing behaviors they don’t.
Social credit takes the concept of trust in society and puts it in the hands of central planners to dictate their morals and other priorities. This is fascism masquerading as trust. It is a tyrannical and complete centralization of powers and control over the population, with no regard for individual rights.
social credit systems throughout history have often been associated with communist regimes.
Limiting and controlling wealth creation opportunities is a key method for controlling a society, and so it makes sense that China would focus on that first in terms of social credit, getting those with any sense of entrepreneurialism or capitalistic instincts “in line.”
bad outcomes often start as innocuous ideas.
it is always fear and crisis that are used for the subjugation of rights and the theft of liberties.
there’s one small problem with empowering “truth experts”: Experts are people. People respond to incentives. Therefore experts respond to incentives.49
those with a financial incentive or who see the financial opportunity will find useful idiots to help entrench this in society.
Empires, despite their privileges, fall victim to human nature, and their leaders do very stupid things.
“History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else. —John Locke
if you own nothing, they own you. “They” being any combination of government, elite power-grabbers and bad actors, and Big Tech.
Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own.
Ayn Rand said, “Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.”4
The National Association of Home Builders reported in 2021 that government regulations at all levels have added around $94,000 to the average cost of a new home.8
Mark J. Perry, from the American Enterprise Institute, details a list of “50 Years of Failed Doomsday, Eco-pocalyptic Predictions”
we have wars on just about everything except homelessness because corporations and politicians don’t stand to make any money off solving homelessness.11
War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, which was published in book form for the first time in 1898 and has never been out of print.
Stable money is critical to a stable society.
97 percent of the money in circulation is via digitized transactions (including checking transactions), versus using physical money.10
The dollar is amazingly still considered a store of value, even though it has lost almost 97 percent of its purchasing power since 1913, the year the Federal Reserve Act was passed, and 86 percent since 1971, when we came off the gold standard.
Had Wall Street had to suffer the same pain that everyone else was suffering, the overly strict Covid policies would probably have lasted fewer than the target fifteen days to slow the spread, and we would have moved directly to a mitigation stance.
As we know, inflation is an erosion in the dollar’s purchasing power—debasement or erosion of the dollar’s role as sound and stable money.
every dollar you work so hard for is worth less and less over time.
By the end of Q2 2022, household debt surpassed $16 trillion, an increase of about $2 trillion over 2019,
If a government wanted to control how you acted and interacted, push an agenda for “the good of society,” or exert some other control, the easiest way to do that is through money.
we have an “industrial age government” and an “information age world.”15
If It’s Free, You Are the Product
The training of generations to accept a lack of ownership and privacy does not bode well for rights or creating wealth and prosperity for individuals—just for the technology companies.
Your time has value, as does your liberty.
If being “green” were truly the most important thing, ESG advocates would not only be all-in on nuclear energy, but also they wouldn’t act as if handing off production to these rogue countries is an appropriate or “green” action.
It’s like believing that having an open smoking section in a restaurant works.
What exactly does ESG have to do with maintaining orderly and fair capital markets? Nothing.
He is not a full man who does not own a piece of land. —Hebrew proverb
(attaining homeownership leads to higher wealth).”6
college and university degrees have become the biggest legal financial scam in the country,
the US government has morphed into the largest predatory lender in support of it.
While you will hear many on the left call education a “right,” it is not—it is an investment.
the accreditation for that work should cost less than work that has a higher associated pay structure (and in a free market, it would).
college costs are increasing faster than wage gains.
roughly 16 percent of high school grads earn more than many workers with a college degree.9
more than one in three workers with a bachelor’s degree earns more money than half of workers with a master’s degree.10
