In the above video Andreas describes the history of money all the way back to the beginning. How long ago was money invented? Nobody knows; it's probably older than the wheel itself.

Taxation is theft.

My favorite libertarian saying by far.

What is the history of income tax?

United States. The US federal government imposed the first personal income tax on August 5, 1861, to help pay for its war effort in the American Civil War (3% of all incomes over US$800) (equivalent to $18,300 in 2019). This tax was repealed and replaced by another income tax in 1862.

Wow, 3% sounds pretty steep!

Yeah, and people were pissed about getting taxed by 3%!

How do I know?

Because people are pissed every time they get taxed, without exception.

Now we live in a world were getting taxed 50% after sales tax, federal tax, state tax, and property tax is just the standard. That doesn't even count "cost of living" tax like healthcare and food/water/shelter and energy.

16 minutes into the video.

Andreas hits the nail on the head by pointing out that the transition from using gold/silver coins to paper money that represented the Precious Metals was the first form of debt; something I talked a lot about in my latest series.

Currency Tidal Wave Part 1: Debt and Inflation

Currency Tidal Wave Part 2: The Water Analogy

Currency Tidal Wave Part 3: The Age of Exponents

"Master/Slave architecture" (Server/Client)

Another thing that Andreas explains: if you are not the master in this system, then you are the slave. There is no other way around this in centralized permissioned systems. Perhaps this is the reason why talking about money is such a taboo subject.

In any case.

Why is taxation theft? As someone who comes from a now-fleeting radical left-wing political background, don't we need taxes to pay for the shared infrastructure that we all use? The answer is a resounding 'yes' within certain contexts.

Okay, what is the context?

While income tax was introduced in the USA in 1861, other taxes have been around since Egypt in 3000 BC (even confirmed by the Bible itself!). If we want to build common spaces for the commons, we need to get money from the commons to build the commons.

But that's only true when money ISN'T DEBT.

On June 5, 1933, the United States went off the gold standard, a monetary system in which currency is backed by gold, when Congress enacted a joint resolution nullifying the right of creditors to demand payment in gold.

Save the date!

June 5, 1933

This is the day that taxation became theft.
This is the day that taxation became a unnecessary burden to society. This is the day that taxation became completely irrelevant.

Gold Standard

Make no mistake, moving away from the gold standard was a spectacular upgrade for the economy. The Great Depression started in 1929 and didn't start recovering until 1933. Coincidence? The Gold Standard created the hyper-deflationary spiral required for the Great Depression to not only occur, but also to feed itself until we removed it and straight up fought in a world war. By removing the Gold Standard, the government removed the incentive for rich people to horde their money and promoted exponentially more economic velocity.

The ability to simply print money out of thin air is a fantastic and powerful tool. The only downside are the people chosen to wield this power. The tool isn't evil. It is the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. Crypto is providing the tools required in order to decentralize that power and cut out all the corruption created by it.

Listen to the last question posed 36 minutes into the video.

Central banks don't need any help from Bitcoin to be undermined. The inherent nature of centralization undermines itself. Antonopoulos doesn't want central banking to fail; that would hurt a lot of people just like it destroyed his home country of Greece and essentially bankrupted his parents (twice). Rather, Andreas knows central banking will fail because it is simply doomed to given the mechanics of the system. We both hope that crypto will be the safety net humanity requires during its darkest hour.

What am I trying to get at?

As soon as the economy was able to simply print money out of thin air by leveraging all types of collateral (property, gold, people, etc) was when taxes became fully irrelevant. Kings and queens in the Dark Ages couldn't print money. Again, we were on the PM standard for thousands of years. The ONLY way to rule in a centralized manner was to tax the citizens in one way or another. It was the citizens themselves who owned the money, and they had to be taxed directly or else there was no way to pay for common infrastructure or "defense".

But now that we can just print money out of thin air, everything changes.

And take this with a grain of salt... because central banks are private institutions. Should we really expect a private institution to pay for common infrastructure? The debt-based system we live in today depends on collateral. It would only make sense for the fed to build the roads if the fed then owned the roads. Then if the fed owns the roads, wouldn't we expect them to tax us to use them?

This all boils down to a private institution owning the money supply. It's quite obvious that the government itself should control the money supply (as terrifying as that sounds). But again, we see with crypto that the government itself controls the money supply. Except with crypto, the communities are the government. It is in this way that all cryptocurrency is obviously communist in nature, but don't tell anyone that because communism probably has the worst connotation of all time due to China and friends.

Communism is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, namely a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state.

If you think communism is anything other than this: you are wrong. Let it be known that the vast majority of the population is brainwashed in this regard. I am not wrong, you are wrong; and you are brainwashed. I am also brainwashed in several respects. Literally everyone is. Get over yourself and try to undo the training. Ego is not helpful in this regard.

The thing about communism is...

That it doesn't scale (yet). Crypto can scale communism to unimaginable sizes, but until then I'd say that the biggest communism can scale is like 1000 people max (if that). Anything commune bigger than 1000 people that calls themselves communists are lying. China has a billion people. It's a totalitarian regime, but people are brainwashed into thinking communism bad, China bad.

Centralized control bad.

Remove the centralized control of communism, and it becomes real communism. The more centralized control is removed the more communism becomes anarchy. The problem with anarchy and decentralized systems is that it lacks direction and organization, so on a certain level we should always sacrifice as much decentralization as we can in order to achieve the maximum amount of efficiency. Obviously this is a dangerous game, but it is a game we are being forced to play, and our livelihoods are at stake. I don't know about you, but I plan on trying to win this game. DPOS is looking pretty sexy in this regard.

The best part about all of this is that these are all opt-in systems. Humans have never had this option before. I might be a citizen of Hive, but I am also a citizen of Bitcoin and a citizen of the United States. I get to harness the benefits of all these citizenships at once. When in doubt, buy more Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the anchor that has such a basic bitch governance structure it is impossible to corrupt.

Exponential change is on the horizon.

We are being ushered back into a system where citizens control money directly just like they did with gold and silver coins. Except this time, the "gold" and "silver" are much harder to steal and much much harder to counterfeit. This is going to change the entire world in ways that we couldn't even imagine, just like it would be impossible to imagine the invention of skateboards before cars were invented.

• First you need a car.
• Then you need a car to get stuck in the mud.
• Haha, stupid car getting stuck in the mud, horses are obviously superior.
• Then roads get built (infrastructure, gas stations, etc.)
• Then pedestrians get killed over and over again by cars.
• More infrastructure: sidewalks.
• Only then does someone realize: hey what about dem skateboards?

The first commercial skateboards appeared in 1959, but crude homemade versions of skateboards, often consisting of nothing more than old roller-skate wheels attached to a board, were first built after the turn of the 20th century.

Literally over 70 years after the first car was invented.

Luckily we live in an exponential era so we won't have to wait 70 years for the infrastructure to get built. The Internet already exists. We've already been developing the infrastructure of crypto for over 40 years. People need work; they need good jobs. Once crypto starts providing those jobs we are going to see some absolutely insane developments.

Taxation is theft.

Back to the point, people are going to refuse to pay taxes when they become their own central bank. That much is obvious. At some point in the not-so-distant future (soon™) the majority of the population is going to be like: "Wait, why would anyone pay taxes when literally anyone can print money?" To which the governments will say: "Well if anyone can print money then why wouldn't you pay your taxes?" And that's the beginning of the fun little war that's bound to be waged sooner or later. Hopefully mostly non-violent, but I doubt it, and as we all know, government has the monopoly on violence. Not gonna be pretty. Never dull.

Conclusion

The entire false premise of taxes is that we all need to chip in to do our part for society. We all must share the burden of building common infrastructure that everyone benefits from. You might not need government assistance today, but chances are you'll need it eventually, and even if you never need it it's better for society as a whole to provide the service regardless of individual circumstances. This is a lie that has been propagated for about a hundred years now. It hasn't been valid for quite some time; the second money itself became debt rather than pure value.

• Who's going to build the roads?
• Who's going to take care of old people?
• Who's going to provide legal representation to the poor?
• Who's going to build the parks?
• Who's going to lay the water pipes?
• Who's going to feed the starving?
• Who's going to pay for healthcare?
• Who's going to set up that powerplant?
  • I hope it's a volcano that mines Bitcoin!

The answer to all these questions and more is simple: we are just going to print the money. Duh! Crypto isn't debt, meaning no collateral is required. The collateral for crypto are its own liquidity pools. The collateral for crypto is the community itself, and this community is not only self-governing, but also opt-in. The opt-in mechanics of crypto force all communities to compete in the attention economy and give their citizens the best deal possible or risk bleeding out to another superior option. This is the ultimate expression of not only free-market capitalism, but also communism, socialism, and anarchy all at once. Crypto is opening every door at the same time and pursuing every path imaginable. It's quite a sight to behold.

These liquidity pools don't get smaller when money is printed (even if the value of a single coin might go down). In fact, as I have explained a dozen times already, if the inflation that we print creates more value than it leeches from the liquidity pools, printing money actually makes individual coins worth more, on top of "diluting" the money supply. It's a win/win in all aspects. It is no secret that inflation creates growth: that is the literal definition of "inflate"; to grow.

Deflation is bad. Every economist knows it's bad. At some point the deflation of Bitcoin is going to catch up to it (probably when all the banks and corporations fully buy it out). Hodl to make them pay for it. The only way to prove that hyperinflationary crypto is the superior option is to flip Bitcoin with one. It's going to happen. Oh, the sweet sweet tears of the maximalists as their fucking brains implode. I will feast upon their souls. Too far?

So why do taxes actually exist?

They are simply one prong in the system of Triforce Slavery. Taxes exist so that the most powerful people among us can loophole out of them. It is in this way that taxes are a tool to make USD and other fiat currencies more valuable without actually doing any work, competing, or further developing the technology.

Legacy finance has been frozen in time for decades without having to compete. Rather they control the governments and captured the regulators to make sure no one else can undermine them with better service. Any and all competition is either bought out (preferable) or stomped out by the law itself under the guise of "protecting investors". Finally, crypto has come to stomp out this false narrative, and not a moment too soon.

Does the Federal Reserve actually need collateral to print USD? No, they do not. When the FED prints money, there is nothing preventing from simply giving that money away for nothing in return. This would not collapse the system. In fact we've already seen other central banks do just that in the form of negative interest rates. This house of cards still stands triumphant! For now.

How do I know that money can be printed without collateral?

Because crypto has been doing it for over a decade while generating exponential returns. Does anyone need more proof than seeing it done with their own eyes over and over again within the most hostile environment possible? This isn't rocket science, but then again economics is actually a lot more complicated than rocket science. Gravity is a predictable variable. People are not.

At the end of the day this entire situation is 100% about the narrative. It is about a story that people believe. The vast majority of the population thinks that taxes are necessary, even if they are extremely annoying and obtuse.

Perception is reality: therefore taxes are necessary. However, humanity is preparing for a paradigm shift the likes of which history has never seen; not by a long shot. No matter what happens, it's going to go down in history-books.

Or should I say "history-blockchain"?

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