by Claudio Grass, Claudio Grass:

Please forgive me that I don’t talk about the flue called “Corona”. I truly believe it is a deception and will be remembered as the attempt to destroy the private economy as well as the capitalistic system. What we are witnessing during this “corona-crisis” is simply unprecedented. It is nothing short of a blatant attempt to destroy the private sector, the capitalist system and the financial sovereignty of every citizen. The state denies the right of every individual to work, to put food on the table, to provide for their families and to take personal responsibility for their own choices. On a societal level, is nothing less than the transformation into a technocratic, big data “new normal” that already exists in China and this Orwellian nightmare is already our new and sad reality.

Ron Paul wrote the following the other day: “Governments have no right or authority to tell us what business or other activity is “essential”. Only in totalitarian states does the government claim this authority. We should encourage all those who are standing up peacefully and demanding an accounting from their elected leaders. They should not be able to get away with this.”

This is what it is all about. Full control of the ones living off taxes over the ones who have to pay them. Maybe you remember my latest article in the previous edition of this magazine when I summarized the definition of capitalism from a Marxist perspective: “the workers spend what they earn and the capitalists earn what they spend”. This is how the original Marxist thinkers defined capitalism. You might have understood that in their eyes the individual is the worker and when everything is under government control, the politicians and bureaucrats become the real capitalist. It is important to understand that the term “capitalism” has been purposefully misdefined and hijacked from the beginning by Marxist thinkers. Six weeks ago, this was just a theory, but now it already turned into reality. The corona scare shows just how fearful certain cultures and civilizations have become.

Welcome to the “new normal”

Anyone who believes that the world will look the same in a few months’ time and that we will go back to normal, has not understood what this is all about. They have also not understood the importance of all the rights and the liberties that we are “temporarily” giving away to governments and institutions and the likelihood of ever getting them back. History clearly shows that “emergency” restrictions and concessions have a way of sticking around long after the crisis is over and becoming a permanent fact of life. We already see this process take shape today: The World Economic Forum, among others, has already introduced a proposal about an “Immunity Passport” and a “Digital ID”, including health monitoring to trace every interaction with other people to assure “social distancing” will be part of the new normal. If concepts like that are implemented, you can be sure that you will end up in a scenario where governments and bureaucrats can at any time shut down your business again, and order you, your colleagues or employees to self-quarantine until your health rating will switch from red, yellow to green again. Man becomes nothing more than an algorithm, while data-driven rating systems dominate his life and can at any time lock him away for several days.

How could you possibly run a small business under these circumstances? How can you plan anything if you and your employees might be pulled out of work at any moment? Another aspect of these measures of course is that people will mistrust each other, as all kinds of interactions are deemed dangerous and physical proximity is perceived as a health risk. This is the end of interpersonal relationships, but also the end of a free society as we know it.  Under such circumstances, only large “too big to fail-corporations” and crony-capitalists might survive, but for a small shop owner, it will be the end. This paves the way for the chronic normalization and mass implementation of “Universal Basic Income”, based on the fraudulent and totalitarian principles of “Modern Monetary Theory”. 

The ones who have not realized yet that the world has already changed, only need to think about the idea of boarding a plane in the coming months. Is normalcy really just around the corner and do you really expect people to be allowed and to be willing to get on a plane as we did a few weeks ago? The idiotic worldwide lockdown and the forced restriction of the free movement of people, goods and services have already destroyed huge parts of the global economy and the international division of labor. On a practical level, all that these catastrophic measures, based on the “pretense of knowledge”, will achieve is to drastically limit our living standards, along with our liberties and social cohesion.

How will the coming weeks look like? 

First of all, the global deflation that has been triggered over the past few months will have a devasting impact on an already extremely fragile and hugely indebted financial system. This global economic freeze is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before and therefore its precise effects cannot yet be estimated. However, I believe that the majority of the individuals in the current system are going to suffer serious losses over the coming months and many of them will lose everything. When private business can be shut down on a whim and without any kind of due process, the concept of private property simply does not exist anymore. Of course, it still has to be seen which countries will be implementing this “new normal” as quickly and as harshly as the Chinese model, however, if we the people don’t oppose this, we will end up in an economic system which will be steered and planned from the top. This is what awaits at the end of this road, if citizens are incapable of thinking for themselves and instead delegate their decisions and personal responsibility to the state.

Is there an alternative?

Here is where my outlook turns a little more optimistic: digital technology is highly asymmetrical, and skewed in favor of the individual. A centralized, hierarchical structure is very fragile when compared to a decentralized, versatile alternative.

Let me give you a list of very simple examples:

Are you concerned about censorship? Rest assured, restrictions on free speech and other crimes of conscience have become unenforceable. Their unenforceability is becoming increasingly obvious. For every platform that decides to collaborate with authorities and stifle free speech, a dozen alternatives pop up that respect and foster it.

Are you concerned about privacy and surveillance? Rest assured, unless you voluntarily disclose your personal information on Facebook or Twitter, you can protect your personal privacy as well as a head of state, if you want to. You can choose not to carry a mobile phone, or to modify it. You can encrypt your private data so well that no government goon will be able to access it. You can transact with your peers in near 100% privacy.

Are you concerned about financial repression? Rest assured, there is always physical gold, the ultimate store of wealth, and cryptocurrencies represent a superior medium of exchange. Those are the two functions of money. How can capital controls still be a thing, in a world where there are bitcoin and dozens of alternatives that are well beyond the reach of these measures?

You see, we don’t need to decapitate the king if we can simply ignore him. The true revolution of this age will not be a collective movement, but a sum of individual revolutions. People opting out. If there’s suddenly no reason to listen to the tyrant, if his proclamations suddenly become unenforceable, why continue living by them?

In certain professions, one can already produce value from any location, and avoid all parasitic third-party interventions, whether governmental or otherwise. A producer of intangible goods (like a software developer, a composer, an author, etc.) can theatrically be in a quiet valley, transact only in cryptocurrency, have no private data, file, picture or document accessible to anyone but himself, and pay whatever taxes he deems appropriate. His reality and his physical body are de facto disconnected, so he may keep his physical body in the place he prefers.

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