Liberty.me Liberty.me Freedom Is a Do-It-Yourself Project Jeffrey A. Tucker Published in 2014 by Liberty.me Published under the Creative Commons Attribution License ⒊0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ 10987654321 ISBN: 978-1-63069-032-8 (print) ISBN: 978-1-63069-000-7 (ebook) OL25435969M Contents Introduction to Liberty.me xi Part I: Revolutionary Entrepreneurship 1 The Delightful Merchantcra of the Shaved-Ice Truck 3 2 Ground Zero in Crypto-Commerce 7 3 Does Innovation Require the Patent Office? 11 4 Smart People Share 15 5 Entrepreneurs Are the Good Guys 19 6 A Seemingly Impossible Business 23 7 How Business “Recesses” Itself 27 8 The Market, Not Government, Gave Us Super Glue 31 9 Headphones: Paradigm of Market Progress 35 10 Government Targets the Breeders 39 11 A Total Dedication to Sponges 43 12 To Build a Better Can Opener 47 13 Gadget Mania: May It Never End 51 14 The Market and Good Character Turn Tragedy to Triumph 55 15 The “Domestic Terrorist” You Can Call a Hero 61 16 Do You Know the Way to San Jose? 65 Part II: Technology in the Service Upheaval 17 Top Alternatives to Paper Money 71 18 Is Bitcoin Real or Not? 75 19 Bitcoin for Beginners 79 20 How the Internet Saved Civilization 85 21 Money Can and Should Be Private Property 89 v vi Contents 22 Should Bitcoin Be Regulated Like Dollars? 93 23 Bumps on the Bitcoin Road 97 24 Sailor Tales om the Bitcoin Seas 101 25 What Bitcoin Is Teaching Us 105 26 Bitcoin’s Moment 109 27 Gun Control: It Backfires 115 28 Be Your Own Manufacturer 119 29 Printed Protection and the Future of Defense 123 Part III: The Stagnating State 30 Quick, Drive More and Crank up the AC 129 31 The Triumph of Scrooge McDuck 133 32 Government Creates a New Criminal Class 137 33 IRS on the Hot Seat 141 34 If It Moves, Tax It 145 35 The Company That Owns Your Genes 149 36 Taxed for Life 153 37 None Dare Call It The 157 38 The Sequestration Boondoggle 161 39 The Basement beneath the Wage Floor 165 40 The Four Signs of a Collapsing State 169 41 How Markets Fixed the Travel Problem 173 42 The Gas-Price Story of Hurricane Sandy 177 43 The Coxeyites, the Bankers, and the Political Class 181 44 The Great Robbery of Wage Earners 185 45 The Man the Keynesians Fear 189 46 The New Year’s First Heist 195 Part IV: A Culture of Liberty 47 Javert’s Religion of Statism 201 48 Contemporary Pop-Culture Themes Point to a Conscious Awakening 205 49 Fi Shades of Government 211 Contents vii 50 How Regulation Stifles Spontaneous Order and Play 215 51 The Skill Set of the Young and Smart 219 52 Dumb Ways (for an Economy) to Die 223 53 Advice to Young, Unemployed Workers 229 54 Is There a Viable Alternative to College? 235 55 Meet the Targets or Die the Death 239 56 Can You Learn with a Gun to Your Head? 243 57 Building a Freer Life 247 58 Drop the Freon and Come Out with Your Hands Up 251 59 The Holy Hangman Still Kills 255 60 The Homogenization of the Car 259 61 Protectionism Is a Rip-Off 263 62 This Way to the Slaughterhouse 267 63 Storm Economics in One Lesson 271 64 Prohibition Lite Is Making RYO Cigarettes All the Rage 277 65 The State of Economic Freedom 281 66 Rachel Carson and the Bed Bugs 285 67 The Fast-Food Path to Skinny? 289 68 Smartphone, Dumb Government 293 69 Kill Private Capital, Kill Civilization 297 70 You Will Be Betrayed 303 Part V: State of Fear 71 Aaron Swartz, Hero and Martyr 309 72 “If They Want to Get You, They Will Get You in Time” 315 73 The Character of Edward Snowden 319 74 Snowden’s Flight to Freedom 323 75 Thank You, Russia? 327 76 We’re All Edward Snowden Now 331 77 Surveillance Has Changed Us 335 78 An Empire in Panic 339 79 One Hundred Years of Intrusions 343 viii Contents Part VI: The Way to Break Free 80 To Free One’s Mind 349 81 How the State Will Die 355 82 Getting Serious about Freedom 359 83 The Patent Bubble and Its End 363 84 Government Will Lose the War on Piracy 367 85 The Exploitation of Labor by Government 371 86 Give the Gi of Capitalist Understanding 375 87 Why Can’t Schools Secure Themselves? 379 88 Why the Rich Immolate Themselves 383 89 Will Your Office Pool Get You Arrested? 387 90 Clothing for All: The Slow, but Relentless Revolution 391 91 Are These the End Times? 395 92 Kids: Smarter than Adults 399 93 The Fundamental Right of Secession 403 94 The Center of the Conspiracy 407 95 Our World through Thomas Paine’s Eyes 411 96 The Marshmallow Test 415 97 Fi Ways to Leave Leviathan 421 Part VII: The World Can Be Made Anew 98 The New Libertarianism 433 99 How Medical Innovation Redefines Our World 437 100 The Joys of Living 441 101 Cryptography and the Money We Use 445 102 Real Markets and Real Economics 449 103 A Meeting at Thirty Thousand Feet 453 104 How Digits Are Reinventing the World Order 457 105 How We Found Ourselves 461 106 I, Twinkie 465 107 A Day in the Beast’s Belly 469 108 How to Protect against the Evil Eye 473 Contents ix 109 Sexism and Market: There Is an App for That 477 110 How the State Works: Learning om OrangeIs theNewBlack 481 111 Plotting Freedom in Free Spaces 485 112 The Tinkers Save the World: Review of Oz the Great and Powerful 489 113 Economic Lessons of Black Friday 493 114 The Media Revolution of Our Times 497 115 Touring Real Life through Real Markets 499 Part VIII: Postscript: Interviews 116 Interview with the Daily Bell 503 117 Interview with Tejarat-e-Farda 519 Index 523 Introduction to Liberty.me History is shiing in radical ways. Government programs are failing to meet modern needs, but material progress around the world is proceeding without them. The twentieth century of central planning and leviathan control is being le behind, and a new age is dawning. It is a time of individual empow- erment, astonishing entrepreneurial achievement, global communications and engagement, and a breathtaking pursuit of new possibilities. These, and not decrepit bureaucracies that ruled the old world, are the driving forces of modern life. Consider that most of the technologies that define our lives today— smartphones, email, Internet banking, infinite television and radio, instant knowability of nearly everything, global real-time video communication— didn’t even exist twenty years ago. They weren’t even imagined. They are blessings bestowed upon us through the combined forces of entrepreneur- ship, risk-taking enterprising initiative, crowd-sourced cooperation, and the disruptive impulse that seeks to make the world anew. And yet they are far more integral to life than any institution created by politics. We’ve learned that no institutional structures on this earth are perma- nent, not even those cobbled together through a century of state imposition and control. We can look back at the writing of the 1930s and see it. They— and this was a global movement—believed that the right form of central planning could improve on what people could create themselves. There were all sorts of theories about what is wrong with the ee market, and an equal number of theories about how to fix it. The smartest people in the world would gather and assemble the right resources and accumulate all the neces- sary power to pound the world into shape. And yet observe what a mess they made of it. War, debt, political corruption, waste, bureaucracy, wrecked currencies and financial systems, control by unelected elites—every ustration of modern life was born of this ideology of power. And yet there was a fatal flaw. Men and women will not live in cages. They will not be robbed of their volition. They cannot live a life of conformity and regimentation. People are capable of rational xi xii Jeffrey A. Tucker | Liberty.me – Freedom Is a Do-It-Yourself Project engagement with the world around them and also prepared to outsmart the systems that are designed to control them. The signals that human beings use to make sense of the world—prices, interest rates, cultural cues, rituals of our own making—therefore reemerged and displaced the central plan. In the end, the state cannot administer a jail and maintain total control, much less a full society that advertises itself as ee. And therefore what is called the market—which is really just the composite of choices we make in the material world—has reemerged like grass through the concrete. The Fed controls interest? Not really. There is a second market for making and receiving loans that is insuppressible. The government defines what is and is not money? The market has made a new money out of cryptography that lives in the digital cloud. The government controls healthcare? The market is making new services available. The government controls communications? Forgetit: the market has forged a new way that transcends borders of nationality, race, sex, and class. This is humanity speaking and acting, one person at a time. The results are all around us, and we depend on them om morning to night every day. In the great race between reactionary power and progressive markets, markets have the edge.