595-12-5275: Former Social Security card of Michael J Gogulski

A Wikipedia moderator contacted me recently, saying that a concerned reader had written in distress that my Social Security card image might have been posted there by an identity thief… or something.

The issue’s now cleared up, and the image of my former card is now tagged as having been authenticated with me. Groovy!

Meanwhile, a bit from what I sent back to the moderator, after the concernant was satisfied and the image tagged:

My bigger worry, philosophically, is that we don’t really have any “identity” to be stolen in today’s world. Whatever we might have had, has been crushed out of us from birth. And yet we walk, the pale shadows of what we might have been…

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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.

This particular bit has been taking up two slots in my inbox for a while, and it’s time to purge:

From “Sioux Warrior” at 2:54am:

why did you renounce US citizenship? are you fucking insane?

Um, yes… yes, yes I am?

And from “Sioux Warrior” at 3:02am:

ok you burned your ssa card. wow. You could have simply cut it up. You are still on file at SSA. it does not matter that you burned it. I get SSI income, I agree that the SSA really sucks ass. I want them out of my life. If an illegal alien uses your SSN, they won’t do anything.

I hereby disclaim all liability in connection with your use, storage, processing or retransmission of this information.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wt1ZjXv8Lg

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.

So, what the heck, I joined the discussion. All that follows is copied from the forum thread, me quoting others indented:

Done that…

Whose is it, then?

A crime? Who are the victims?

“The American worker” is an abstraction. Take “the American worker” into any court as plaintiff and be laughed out for lack of standing.

Which American worker(s)? And what ever happened to the homey American notion that economic competition is good?

Well now that’s exactly not the principle involved in taxation.

To my narrow perspective this suggests either a limited knowledge of history (Nagasaki? Tuskeegee? Guatemala? Abu Ghraib?) or a rather inhuman set of values.

Well that does save your masters the bother of sending heavily-armed enforcers after you. Did you kick in a bit extra, too, with the thought that something good might be done with it?

Of late? What, since, like, Shays’ Rebellion in 1786? The Whiskey Rebellion in 1791?

You are hereby invited to do so, which will save me the bother. If you’d care to provide copies of the correspondence with the SSA, I’d be grateful.

Actually I am sure that it did not happen. Citizenship has no bearing on SS numbering, contribution obligation or benefit entitlement.

Hiya.

My own ancestors “invaded” America just over a hundred years ago, coming from central Europe. Some of them came for economic opportunity, some came to escape religious persecution, some came in order to avoid having their children thrown into the bloody maw of war via conscription into one imperial army or another. Prior to that, other Europeans invaded, killing and robbing millions of the original inhabitants, and relegating the survivors to a second-class existence.

A lot of the frustrations I see vented on this forum are of the form:

“Illegal immigrants/immigration cause problem X”, therefore
“The government should do Y”

However, the vast bulk of these problems could in fact be mitigated by having the government STOP doing certain things, e.g.:

Immigrants are taking American jobs — abolish the minimum wage, abolish ridiculous licensing requirements for low-skilled jobs, stop rewarding idleness through compulsory unemployment “insurance” financed by the robbery that is taxation

Immigrants are filling the public schools — abolish public schooling

Immigrants are bringing in illegal drugs — abolish the drug laws

Immigrants are getting free health care while Americans who can’t afford insurance but don’t qualify for government entitlements suffer — abolish “must treat” legislation, abolish medicare, medicaid and all other socialized medicine, abolish the AMA licensing cartel that makes US medicine so bloody expensive through its guild protectionism, and on and on

Immigrants might be terrorists — abolish the American empire abroad, but expect change in world attitudes toward America to be slow

New World Order globalists are intent on using divide-and-conquer strategies to reduce national sovereignty and institute one-world government — abolish all the taxes and privileges that fund, protect and support those monsters

Pointing to problems demonstrably caused by the American state, and then asking the American state to do more in order to fix them is somehow not consonant with ALIPAC’s support for the “tax day tea parties”.

The list of immigrant “problems” which could be eliminated completely by having government quit doing things it shouldn’t be doing anyway goes on and on and on.

Then there are two remaining issues I see a lot:

Immigrants are poisoning/diluting/changing “our” culture — in the final analysis, tough luck. Adapt. Change. Deal with it. This position amounts to racism, cultural bigotry and American exceptionalism anyway. Evolve, or show the courage of your convictions by going out and threatening peaceful, migrating people with kidnapping, imprisonment and even death yourself, instead of trying to delegate the task to government, and see how that goes for you.

Immigrants ought to get in line and go through the “legal” process — there are many, many moral objections to this idea, but I’ll leave you with this thought: If immigration is morally legitimated today via legal process, how, then, could any of the original settlers and colonists who went to the Americas from Europe achieve any moral claim to their presence on the territory?

As far as my personal history… well, I guess I took the red pill.

At the tender age of nine, I had handwriting. Woe, woe be unto ye who would use this as evidence of my onging consent to anything other than pride at my youthful penmanship.

In the course of the intervening years, numerous people asked to see this silly little piece of paper, and I showed it to them. Perhaps I did so out of pride, simply for having a little piece of paper of my own. Perhaps I did so out of fetishistic glee at feeling “a part of something”. Perhaps I did so because, otherwise, I couldn’t obtain a lawful salary.

Hell, I don’t even remember.

It had a number on it: 595-12-5274.

595-12-5274

595-12-5274

Why isn't "social security" capitalized? Is it because it's not A CORPORATION IN CAPITAL LETTERS? OMIGOSH!

Here, and now, I provide this number for the simple joy of numbers themselves… so that you, too, may feel silly… so that you, too, may enjoy the pride of being 595-12-5274, and so that you, too, might enjoy my former, fetishistic glee at being a “part”.

A part “of”.

A part of, “something”.

A part of “something”… numerical.

Something… numerological.

Something… magical.

A part of a something that will chew out your decayed, barren, poisoned soul, and then ask you if you’re satisfied — for customer assurance purposes, of course.

Of course.

Steal this number. Please — steal this fucking number.

Inspired, in part, by Billy Beck, by a liter of Smädný Mních (Vybrobené z prírodných slovenských surovín!), and by Robert Anton Wilson (may he rest without consciousness).

If you’re the victim of identity theft, does that mean you lose your identity, as in “an identity is not something you have any more”? If not, what about agency? Status as a human being who ought to be subject to the same law as everyone else? Do you cease to be a person? An entity? Do your friends hold a funeral, or maybe put up posters around town, hoping that someone has been able to identify you and knows why you lost your identity?

Hopefully you answered all of these questions “no”. If you haven’t lost anything and if your situation in all those ways hasn’t changed, it can’t rightly be said that your identity was “stolen”. The identity referenced by “identity theft” is not identity of any intrinsic value (except, I believe, in certain exceptional trade situations), such that it can’t be easily replaced. It is Ihre papieren, bitte. True, someone can steal all you own and encumber you with debt for the rest of your life, but it’s not like you cease being who you are. Your circumstances change, you do not.

At some point during the dissolution of the institution of the state, new methods of authenticating people shall arise which are created by the market according to its needs and tolerances. Will that happen due to market initiative or in response to states ceasing to provide the identification function? What forces and acts will lead to the bulk of humanity ceasing to rely on states’ methods of identification? What would a non-state identification system look like? How much would it be used, in comparison to how much intrusive provision of identity documentation we suffer today?