Skip to main content

When "Liberty" is Terrifying

The NYT profiled Dread Pirate Roberts, the alleged founder of the infamous "Silk Road" website:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/business/eagle-scout-idealist-drug-trafficker.html

The most interesting part about people like Dread Pirate Roberts (aka Robert Ulbricht) is their bizarre view of liberty. Aside from his alleged willingness to murder people (one would think murdering someone would be an attack on their liberty on a much grander scale than forcing them to pay income tax), he seems genuinely disgusted by the idea of some level of democratic oversight of basic societal functions:
For centuries, consumers have been taxed by governments or overlords of one type or another, rendering unto Caesar for as long as there have been Caesars. But if Silk Road were scalable, that era was over. Or at least imperiled. Anyone would have the option to sell goods undisturbed by regulations and without sharing a percentage of revenue with the state. And why stop at drugs? The system would work for legal products, too. The tools are there for a kind of subterranean Amazon.com.
That sounds great, right? But if we look at how the website actually operated, we see that Ulbricht didn't have any problem with an "overlord" taxing transactions, so long as it was someone clever and liberty minded- someone like, umm, himself:
The site acted as an intermediary, hosting the online market and holding money in escrow until buyers confirmed that products had arrived. D.P.R. would then release the payment to the seller, keeping 8 to 15 percent of the transaction.
While the ruling class of old recognized they could make a ton of cash through a societal structure maintained and perpetuated by governments long in control of people like themselves, this new breed of would-be titans are purists. They would have society run by Platonic philosopher kings in the mold of John Galt and completely abolish even the pretense of any democracy. To me, that's the direct opposite of liberty. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

  I voted for Joe Biden and hope he wins. I’m also alarmed at the increasingly transparent alliance between the Democratic Party and influential sectors of corporate America, namely media conglomerates and the technology industry. (Their relationship reminds me of the Republican Party and the energy industry.) It’s true there are conservative media outlets that are not friendly to Democrats, but it’s far less certain how objective the “paper of record” and other “serious” media would be to a post-Trump and post-COVID Biden administration that is politically and ascetically their peer. (I would say we are at a point of competing Pravdas, but that would be a slander against the Soviet newspaper’s pre-Stalinist period when it was a battleground of ideas.) Perhaps even more damning is the Democratic Party’s relationship to the technology industry, particularly when companies like Twitter and Facebook have shown they are prepared to unilaterally decide what’s true and what’s false. Not ...
I’m somewhat familiar with the story, but haven’t seen the tv series “the plot against America.” Is it any good? I’ll admit I have doubts that will be difficult to overcome. My guess is it’s a well stylized but historically simplified attempt to frame international liberalism, particularly the US dominated post war order, as something deeper than what it has become- a value championed almost exclusively by the cosmopolitan elite and global corporations. I also predict that the entire post WW1 context (three months involvement and almost 120,000 Americans dead, split evenly between fighting and the flu pandemic) is lost to Lindbergh and his anti-Semitism. Is this accurate? “The man in the high castle,” another alternative history book made into a tv series that I actually did watch, missed an opportunity to dig into American militarism by not really explaining why so many high level American military members joined the Nazis. (We were supposed to believe it’s just because the Germans wo...

Why not vote for Cornel West?

 In January of 1967, Marxist activist Hal Draper wrote : The lib-labs would then swoon, crying 'The fascists are coming!' and vote for the Lesser Evil. In these last two decades, the Democrats have learned well that they have the lib-lab vote in their back pocket, and that therefore the forces to be appeased are those forces to the right. The lib-labs were kept happy enough if Hubert Humphrey showed up at a banquet to make his liberal speeches; or, before that, by the Kennedy myth which bemused them even while the first leader on this planet poised his finger over the nuclear-war button and said 'Or else!' With the lib-lab votes in a pocket, politics in this country had to move steadily right-right-right-until even a Lyndon Johnson could look like a Lesser Evil. This is essentially why – even when there really is a Lesser Evil – making the Lesser Evil choice undercuts any possibility of really fighting the Right. Draper was already speculating on that tumultuous, and se...