Someone asked, “what about dolphins?”

My friend replied that they’re very intelligent, and may be capable of savings and investment. He related a story in which a dolphin was trained to retrieve a piece of paper in order to receive a reward. On a later iteration the dolphin was observed to take the paper, tear it into scraps and hide them under a rock, and later present the multiple scraps in hopes of more rewards.

My friend asked, “now, you couldn’t possibly want to eat an animal that can do that, right?”

And I said, “heck no! I think that dolphin should be given a job at Goldman Sachs!”

For American families, the list of insurance types they subscribe to includes most of the following at various times, with some variances:

• Homeowner’s or renter’s insurance
• Mortgage insurance
• Title insurance
• Life insurance
• Health insurance (multiple policies)
• Auto insurance (multiple policies)
• Social “insurance”, in the form of Social Security
• Credit insurance, via credit card fees
• Unemployment insurance
• Disability insurance
• Bank deposit insurance (FDIC, and does FSLIC even exist any more?)

All that adds up to a whole bunch of money over a lifetime. With the exception of Social Security — more accurately described as a fraudulent investment scheme based upon extortion — insurance premiums are almost always paid to (generally large) corporations with insurance and/or banking licenses.

Lots of folks will tell you that insurance is one of the best businesses to get into. Why? Because operating as a privileged corporation with an insurance license makes you a member of an elite cartel uniquely positioned to extract massive rents from the market. If an entrepeneur wants to start an insurance business, the barriers to entry are very high: university educations, certifications, licenses, capital reserve requirements, specific corporate and capital structures, legal fees, accounting and audit compliance, government reporting and so on.

There is no free market for insurance today. The economic distortions introduced by artificial barriers to entry, extensive government regulation and all the privileges which attach to holding an insurance license make it impossible to say that anything like free competition in insurance exists. Indeed, because of this, we can’t look at today’s insurance markets for a whole lot of guidance as to what free market insurance might look like.

It’s quite possible that today’s policyholders are being ripped off relative to a free market, in that premiums would be lower absent the distortions. It’s also possible that premiums for some types of coverage would tend to be higher, since many of the distortions can be interpreted as subsidies which allow insurance companies to offer lower rates than possible otherwise. Additionally, providers of mandated forms of insurance might enjoy fewer policyholders.

Much of the insurance market in the United States today is decidedly un-free, though you can spot signs of freer times in some insurers’ names, where they include words like “mutual”. Time was when a lot of the insurance functions being provided today by the state and by large, privileged and even global corporations were handled by local mutual aid societies, industrial sickness funds, benefit societies, rural co-ops, fraternal associations, churches and just plain old good neighborliness within local communities.

The modern insurance system seems to me a great game, a trick increasingly used to enslave people. And with America now heading full-steam toward some sort of either mandated or state-provided health insurance scheme, well… the profits for politicians and their buddies in the insurance and banking industries will be enormous, while the average American is shackled with ever more mandatory premiums and compulsory coverage while service quality falls.

For the agorist, this is a business opportunity.

Canada’s Investment Executive makes a blitheringly stupid set of assumptions in “New rules make renouncing citizenship too expensive for U.S. expats“:

New U.S. expatriation rules, introduced one year ago, governing U.S. citizens or long-time green card holders who wish to renounce their American citizenship are serving as a disincentive for many to make the decision to give up their citizenship.

[...]

Under the rules introduced June 17, 2008, there is a deemed disposition of worldwide assets based on their fair market value on the day before expatriation. A 45% tax is levied on any capital gains above a 2009 capital gains exemption of US$626,000.

[...]

U.S. citizens and green card holders often choose to renounce U.S. citizenship in order to remove themselves from the U.S. tax regime, which, for one thing, obligates them to file a U.S. tax return every year even if they don’t live or earn income in the U.S. They may also make the decision to renounce in order to avoid U.S. estate tax.

Only “covered” expatriates fall under the expatriation rules. Covered expatriates either have a net worth equal to or greater than US$2 million, or have an average tax liability of greater than US$145,000 for the previous five years. Those who have failed to certify compliance with U.S. tax obligations for the last five years — including filing a U.S. tax return — would also be considered a covered expatriate.

Well, I’m a covered expatriate, since the last time I filed a US tax return was 2005. I also happen to be rather broke.

What is so glaringly wrong here are the assumptions made about prospective renunciants of US citizenship which seem to underlie the article:

• That someone with US$2m in net worth couldn’t be bothered to move their assets into structured offshore vehicles in advance of expatriation, and
• That renunciants wouldn’t just say “screw the IRS anyway!” and ignore the law — which is their right under any moral framework which does not permit theft, which is what taxation is.

Of course, the ruling class tools at the OECD and its hated Financial Action Task Force have made the first option increasingly difficult by putting the screws to those few remaining countries which continue to legally permit banking, corporate stock ownership, trust and other asset-holding relationships that allow for privacy, anonymity and tax avoidance. That said, there remain plenty of holes in the global taxation control grid which can be exploited — some legally, and some illegally.

PT combinatorics interlude:

• There are 203 states today. n=203
• For safety and security, you might like to hold an asset in situated in country A with its nominal (corporate, trust) ownership domiciled in country B, all while legally residing in country C. r=3
• Take P(n,r) = n!/(n-r)!, where n=203, r=3
• P(203,3) ~= 8,200,000
• That’s a whole bunch of chances to slide ’round the control grid!

Mind you, n doesn’t really equal 203, since there are some states where you’d definitely not want to hold assets or an ownership vehicle or reside, or combinations thereof. We’re still talking about big numbers here, though.

One last thing, from the article:

Every quarter, the U.S. government publishes the names of those who’ve renounced U.S. citizenship in a federal register.

Well, that’s the Federal Register, actually, but whatever. I’m still looking forward to seeing my name turn up, but it wasn’t there as of a month ago when I did a bit of searching online. Oh well. I don’t really care about the American state’s paper tiger actions with respect to me anyway.

From Network, 1976:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale… and I won’t have it!
Is that clear?
You think you merely stopped a business deal.
That is not the case.
The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country… and now they must put it back!
It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance!
You are an old man… who thinks in terms of nations and peoples.
There are no nations. There are no peoples.
There are no Russians. There are no Arabs.
There are no Third Worlds. There is no West.
There is only one holistic system of systems!
One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variant, multinational dominion of dollars!
Petrol dollars, electro dollars, multi-dollars.
Reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels!
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet.
That is the natural order of things today.
That is the atomic, and subatomic, and galactic structure of things today.
And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature!
And you will atone!
Am I getting through to you?
You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy.
There is no America.
There is no democracy.
There is only IBM and ITT, and AT&T, and Du Pont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon.
Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx?
They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.
The world is a college of corporations… inexorably determined by the… immutable bylaws of business.
The world is a business, Mr. Beale.

In that posting I didn’t really give any reasons for doing it. Some looked at it as an act of pure anarchy, others looked at it as sheer insanity, and I was even accused of “aiding and abetting” “illegal” “aliens” who might use the number in the United States.

Now I’ll tell y’all why I done did it.

First of all, I’m going to burn the card later this year. That event is postponed until I, card and fire are in front of a camera suitable for making YouTube videos. So you can consider the posting just a teaser for the main event.

A token of fake solidarity -- yours for the taking

Second, and more importantly, I have resolved that I will never accept payments from Social Security, or any other state pension scheme.

Now, maybe you’re saying, “Eh, you’re not even a citizen any more anyway, so you lost that!” Not true. Citizenship has no bearing on “benefits” eligibility.

Or, you might be saying, “But you could at least take back what was stolen from you in taxes!” Not true either.

Given how Social Security is structured, what was stolen from me in taxes will always be stolen. It cannot reasonably be reclaimed, since it’s already been redistributed to millions of other people. Despite the fact that many Americans receive regular Social Security “statements” which twist language to make it appear that contributors have “invested” something, there is no investment. There are only ledger entries made, accruing future privileges to be delivered via robbing future workers.

The money that was taken from me in Social Security taxes between 1987 and 2003 is effectively gone. I cannot justify taking a Social Security pension twenty years from now in order to reclaim those funds, because to do so would be to support a system that will steal anew from other people in order to pay me. The notion of rightly getting back what you put into such a program is fallacious.

A Social Security pension — or any other state-funded pension program of the type — is a product of legal privilege. If I were to go out and rob a few million peaceful people in order to fund my retirement, civil society would rightly call me a criminal. The machinery of the state — or, even, a free people — would descend upon me to stop my crime, punish me, and perhaps attempt to make restitution to the victims.

When the state goes out and robs millions in order to fund people’s retirement pensions, the robbery is sanctified. It’s called “solidarity” or “the social contract” or other similar nonsense.

Marxists sometimes criticize what they call “capitalism” for “atomizing” society, for driving divisions between people and breaking the bonds of true solidarity which hold communities and societies together. But what could be more atomizing than a state pension system that says, “submit to robbery while you are young, so that you can enjoy the privilege of benefiting from robbery when you are old”?

No thanks. I’d prefer real solidarity. And given the choice between fake solidarity which supports the state’s privileged robbery and the real solidarity which must be expressed by each individual volunteering to support those worse off, I’ll choose the latter. Even if doing so means living in poverty at the end of my days.

Anyone who wants to fund my retirement — or, during this crisis, my living expenses — is warmly invited to do so by clicking “Support nostate.com” above. Real solidarity is welcome. I won’t have any of the fake.

Or would you choose not to eat there at all?

For the benefit of which privileged classes would you like to bully strangers today?

Cute, isn’t it, the way propaganda works?

A lot of well-meaning, gentle folks will look at a poster like this and think they’re being presented with a choice among competing priorities: education, agriculture, or technology?

Precious few will look and see the robbery that is taxation. Perhaps fewer still will see the false choice in being able to select from a limited menu of privileged classes: parents of school-aged children, textbook publishers, teachers and others involved in the “education” industry; farmers, agribusiness, pesticide producers and the giant industrial manufacturers of agricultural machinery; or technophiles, those wealthy enough to enjoy the benefits of modern telecommunications and the corporate interests behind the telecoms wallowing already in a century of robbery-subsidized privilege? Maybe only a handful will recognize that government monies are never “invested”, but rather are stolen from taxpayers and bestowed upon politically-connected, privileged classes. Perhaps almost none at all will notice the false choice, the presumption and attempted transference of moral corruption involved in the use of “we” and “our” (the linguistic situation is even worse in the Slovak version, which asks, “Na čo by sa mali použiť naše peniaze?“, placing the question into the passive voice: “For what should our money be used?”).

Few, indeed, will startle, perceiving that freedom is not on the menu.

I call bullshit, horseshit, and dogshit.

We can’t afford these tax exiles

Monday March 30 2009

It is called ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’, ‘the ultimate escape plan’, and reinforces the notion that ‘only little people pay tax’. That is, moving offshore to escape the clutches of the Irish tax authorities. This needs to be stopped now.

Ireland needs to adopt the American tax system whereby an Irish citizen would have to renounce his citizenship before he could move abroad to with his cash.

We need a law that will tax the assets of those who leave for good on their way ‘out the door’, as if they were selling their assets, and a provision needs to be put in place that would tax Irish heirs on amounts given or left to them by ex-Irish citizens. Taxing the recipient instead of the donor would make it harder to get around any new tax laws.

Ireland Inc could never afford these tax exile prima donnas. In the current economic climate they need to be told that if they are not prepared to be part of the solution, they will no longer be allowed to be part of the problem.

To remove their citizenship and require them to apply for a ‘tourist visa’ to visit Ireland might concentrate their minds.

We can no longer afford freeloaders in our society.

Mick Murphy

Model Farm Road, Cork

Of course, one of the immediate and appropriate responses to a screed like this is, “‘We’, who?”

Would that be the “we” which excludes all Irish tax slaves who recognize, rightly, that taxation is theft?

Would that be the “we” which excludes all the remaining Irish tax slaves who make every effort to “cheat” the taxman by underreporting, claiming legally impermissible deductions, etc.?

Would that be the “we” which excludes all the remaining Irish tax slaves who structure their investments, businesses and other economic activities such as to legally reduce the amount of tax they pay?

Would that be the “we” which excludes all the remaining Irish tax slaves who, knowing that they could do more for the State, consistently fail to send in extra “donations” to the government alongside their tax extortion payments?

Would that be the “we” which excludes all the remaining Irish tax slaves who — Catholic, Protestant or neither — consistently engage in the democracy’s sacrament, voting, with an eye toward electing candidates who promise to reduce their taxes?

That’s right, Mick Murphy, you go. You watch a few of your fellow slaves attempt to shed the yoke, and instead of rallying for freedom, call out to your masters to make the yokes heavier. You’re a goddamned hero.

That doesn’t mean that “most people are stupid,” a proposition to which 95% of citizens surveyed will agree.

But when I see dozens commentators on talk shows discussing bailouts, tax increases (and, properly, taxes at all), inflation, the hot/cold/muddled trade wars between east and west, war, torture and any number of other subjects, well, gosh… there’s a whole lot of stupid out there.

Add Guy Fawkes mask for more powerful effect

When there is talk of, oh, another trillion dollars being shoveled out to first-to-the-trough interests owned and controlled by the global elite, well, the talk isn’t about where the money comes from. The talk isn’t about how inflation of that sort is exactly equivalent to grand larceny. The discussion doesn’t center around any sort of moral consideration, or recognize the fact that lending out a trillion of these “dollars” into existence has the net effect of devaluing the holdings of all dollar holders, or that these compelling accounting fictions created by the elder warlocks of Wall Street and Washington will be as yokes upon the necks of generations. The questions come to revolve instead around such subsidiary matters as whether or not enough tribute is being extracted from the proletariat via inflation to benefit the komitet, or whether or not the right factions of the ruling class will receive the newly-stolen booty first — certainly not around such other (equally subsidiary) matters as whether or not the robbers should be executed by firing squad or by being bound to a tree naked in the jungle, smeared with honey, and left for the ants.

This in and of itself isn’t stupid. The people here are focusing attention in directions which benefit them. They flirt with the jungle, honey and ants every day by speaking their “minds” to the masses. They get paid very well for doing it. The stupid, here, is that people watch and listen to and read this drivel, they absorb it, they internalize it, they believe it, and they will cast out as devils those who would challenge the dominant tribal paradigm.

One day, the masses are going to wake up, en masse, as it were. Paradigms will shift, as it were. The future will, perhaps, shock again.

Meanwhile, the stupid is man-in-the-street reactions filmed on the east coast of the US by Iran’s PressTV along the lines of “Gee, I don’t know much of anything about anything, but I got faith in Obama,” or “Change gonna win, baby!” or “Well, I guess if that’s what they figured out is necessary…”

Me? I’m investing in honey.

The original question regards approaching wealthy potential donors who may be interested in funding voluntaryist/anarchist causes.

In my own rather limited experience with activist fundraising, I do know that the key questions these folks are going to ask you is: How much do you need? How are you going to spend it? and How can I measure the value of my investment?

Inasmuch as we are a movement, we are a polycentric one. Each of us may have very different answers to those questions, and each of us would frame the discussion with such prospective donors differently.

The “How are you going to spend it?” question, though, is one which can be reframed a bit, as, “What sorts of activities and organizations do or could donors fund, which could be beneficial vehicles for us?”

I offer here a list of possibilities, in no particular order:

• think tanks
• publications (journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters)
• academic endowments (dubious)
• political parties, candidates and campaigns (distasteful, at best, to many of us)
• grant-making foundations
• public advocacy groups
• conventions and other mass public events
• political action committees
• media awareness projects
• charity organizations with compatible ideological orientation
• businesses to compete with government service provision (agora!)
• seminar series
• roundtable groups

If you can bite down on one of those — or anything else — and create a project or business plan for it, then you will have answered the questions you are likely to get from any serious donor prospect, and will be ready to go out and make the pitch.

Interviewed was Nick Rosen, founder of Off-Grid.Net, talking about, of all things, how to more or less disappear officially while not having to become a Mountain Man (“…or Woman!” “Quiet, Stan!”).

I only caught the last couple minutes of the segment, which seemed to have been a good deal longer.

Captions on the screen at one point, with no apparent connection to what was being discussed, said something to the effect of, “Hushmail can be used to send encrypted email.”

So, how is Hushmail not a honeypot again? It was mentioned on-screen, for free on CNN, it’s gotta be a honeypot, right?

Did anyone DVR this? Giev youtubes, please!