There are only two men in this world who are paid to steal money: the politician and the banker. One of them claims to be a thief without knowing it, while the other claims to be a thief without wanting to be — that is to say, the one is corrupt within the lawful and the other within the unlawful, with no more difference between them than there is between being dissolute in front and being dissolute behind.
Each one usually has under them a powerful one, and this, in turn, another, and they all get rich on the spoils of the poor, ragged one, they feed on their blood and laugh at their needy pocket.
They all detest decentralization — as parasites enriched at the expense of the public, they fear transparency and as tyrants, they fear the word “freedom.” They hate to accept decentralization and freedom to rule for fear that having to perform their duties to the fullest, they will diminish the privileges derived from their authority, and because their longings as powerful people only seem to be satisfied when they are bought with the life, wealth or reputation of others. Hence, nothing is so useful to us as for politicians and banks not to look too much after their common interests. For, not only is it a very uncommon thing for politics, banking, and disinterested work to go hand in hand, but in both trades one succeeds only by dint of deceit, and kills with a lie in one’s mouth and a knife in one’s hand.
The truth is that the universal history of governments is about nothing but money-addicted criminals, who with their care have sent whole peoples out of this world without leaving them with anything to pay even the ferryman from hell. Natural law taught them to live by crime, so that if, one day, they were allowed to do nothing but honest things, there would surely be a lack of people willing to rule over the earth.
Money is the only one of the gods whom they worship and take orders from, and it is usually by means of it that they guide their fanatics, as they put the dagger in their hands. It is because of this that they announce, in strict right, that only their keys can open the locks of other pockets or, rather, of the pockets of the people, who always had and always will have a natural tendency to let themselves be robbed, and to believe that whoever does so is in every right to call it legal.
There is nothing so easy for a government, of course, as to make the will of the people docile by means of the chains of money. And this has been perhaps our greatest calamity throughout the ages: that the thieves always led the blind, that the politician became a pimp, respectable only because of their office and their wealth, and the people a shameless woman who by dint of surrendering herself ended up becoming incapable of denying anything.
For one can condemn politicians when they plunder, but one must never forget that it is thanks to us that they govern, nor forget that as soon as the particular interests of a handful of men legally dispossess thousands of our brothers, the part of the State devoted to sustaining and legalizing it will be the most appalling thing in the human race.
Often, the people are glassy-eyed, and look on injustices with a blind eye, as if they were political wretches, without realizing that in doing so they are only harming themselves, and that by their inhuman indifference they are not only signing the ruin of the State, but also are taking away the clothes of an honest woman, putting on a bra and panties, and prostituting her in a tavern.
You, wretch, do you know how much courage you instill by your silence to those who have ruined you? Do you know that someday the corruption of your government will no longer suffice even to bribe the will of the people? Do you know that it is proper to men themselves to cause great damages and to increase them by trying to justify them? Do you know that the product of the extremes is equal to the product of the means, but that a stolen $10 million is
not the same to those who have stolen it as is the loss of opportunity for those who have been robbed? And do you know, rather, that it is only the product of the honest work of the worker and the peasant, hardened by calluses and bathed in tears, that pays tribute to your legislative and executive power?
I know many a neighborhood thief who would have enriched their State if they had had the positions of those who have robbed it; who, if they had had money troubles, would never
have stoked the fires of war, the most effective and accurate resource that governments have to convince the people that their misery is a passing evil; who, unlike politicians, would have the decency to take the resources for their vices out of his own pockets. And they would govern on the principle that the State must be respected, and therefore, those who steal from it should be hanged.
But, alas, politics is an activity forbidden to poor devils, and reserved only for multimillionaire criminals, for Caligulas who drink pearls and eat ten of millions of sesterces in a single day, for malefactors who have nothing but accomplices, sensualists who have nothing but companions for amusements, traffickers who have nothing but partners, religious men who have no other office than to congregate the factious, and lazy men who have nothing but idle friends. A bad servant of public affairs would be one with too many scruples, who would begin their service by cutting off the excessive riches of politicians, which produce arrogance and engender noxious power, and under whose impulse they always take flight to take everything with
them.
The very great and powerful have hitherto been nothing but great cheats, who first built the castles of kings and much later thought of building the huts of the plebs, and who
were never satisfied either with the riches of the East or the poverty of the West, because they always coveted with equal eagerness all evils to appropriate the greater part of the goods.
But perhaps there will come a time, fixed by humanity itself, when the politician — the proprietor of injustice, corruption and inequality — will necessarily be annihilated by them and will disappear, and then there will be only one kind of life on the face of the earth, only one freedom, only one currency, and only one form of government of beings speaking the same language.
Then, knowledge will at last reign, and we shall be too intelligent for a government to deceive us again; and though it may take something from us, much more it will have to leave us. We shall not care what our rulers say, still less what their superiors keep silent.
Our best inventions will be garrisoned and defended with walls of men and without any mediation of political parties. We will be excessively careful with the little they will have left us, out of longing for the much they will have taken from us. We will prohibit the use of Bitcoin by bankers and politicians, and in this way we will invite worthy men to make use of that from which we keep the unworthy; or, at least, in this way we will put the government in the hands of people to whom we can entrust our money for the first time.
“Let us save ourselves, brother, from these cruel souls, /
and let leave them finalize without us their miseries”
–Corneille, “Rodogune”
Civilization always wants a different thing from what governments want: a contrary thing, most of the time. But for some strange reason we are more sensitive to acts against governments than to those committed against civilization and progress, so that we embrace a cloud with ever-increasing ardor, and make mediocrity and incapacity the most natural thing, to such an extent that as we shrink back, we think we are pursuing an ideal, and going after that ideal we think we are always ahead of others.
Since we do not deem it necessary to aspire to much, we make a merit of aspiring to little, and only in this way do we feel part of a serious, rigorous and just State, even if at times it seems to want to play the executioner with us, and to be a little upset if we call it ridiculous, mediocre and unjust. Although, to tell the truth, some of us find it impossible to accept that the State can resemble a foolish boss who gives a wage to one employee while treating the other like a slave; who puts a one-armed man to knead bread, a mute to read to him and a blind man to
manage a bank for him.
On the contrary, there are those of us who believe that the more innovative a government is, the
more it is to gain over foreigners; that very few of the men who now command us do so to render any service to the masses; that it is better to save oneself by distrusting governments
than to regret afterwards having been ruined by them; and that, while it is true that having a government is always necessary, it is much more true that what is best must always speak louder than what is simply necessary. We may not be so wise as those who see nothing wrong in what is happening to us, but at least we are braver than those who see it, but do
nothing to remedy it, for, besides not thinking of ourselves as a herd of colts grazing in a pasture, we do not think of ourselves as a herd of asses that are beaten on their feet while they are made to dance on a roof.
“How society goes in this world will be known by anyone who is worthy of a better without my telling him.”
–Schopenhauer, “Parerga And Paralipomena”
Is it not a thing worthy of weeping that, infinites as the worlds are, we have not learned to govern ourselves even in one? We want to rule men as one rules a beast that is led by the ears, as if we wished to experience in them how much hardship can endure the human race. Who can save us?
We give them the strength of our best years, and with it they forge chains of slaves. We seem to be reduced to serve them as an anvil or hammer, to respond to the chant of every politician as if we were their altar boys. In their economic order, the principle “what is right for one must be right for all”; never applies, but power, size and weight of pockets decide.
We obey a lame man, who implements justice out of simple legal necessity, and from whom we have learned nothing but to limp. We live under the yoke of governments that want to prevent, at any price, that new forms of wealth be forms of wealth, that what is useful be useful and what is beautiful be beautiful, and that believe that changing the name of things immediately modifies their nature. Making part of a society that makes of its most foolish laws something immutable, and of the most important ones something totally vile and bribable. Together, with a hypocritical people who are governed as they reason, and who believe that their right is to talk nonsense, just as their government’s right is to do nonsense every day.
Within a democracy that never provides everyone, for whatever it is worth, with the highest economic equality, and in which the poor generally get the worst slaps in the face. Under a judicial system that with the same arguments that punish the legal justifies the illegal: under
a legislative branch that is incapable of organizing its laws in the proper way, and yet wonders why they are so often disobeyed. And where every regulating power, in short, has always sufficient force to reduce us to a worse state, and much more than is necessary to prevent us from the better.
“Most legislators have a narrow and despotic mentality, by which they look only to the country in which they live and in which they are to rule; each looks upon his people as if they were the only people on earth or as if they were the enemy of the earth.”
–Voltaire, “The Princess Of Babylon”
All of our evil, our greatest handicap, comes from not being able to do anything new without the approval of some government.
It is sad that, often, to be a good man one must begin by being an avowed enemy of the government, or, more than of the government, of the powerful who live robbing us and lying to us at all times, saying the opposite both of what they know and of what they have not the slightest knowledge, hypocritically feigning the virtues of the eternally deprived of the people, who are often more surly to their benefactors than to those who profit by them, and laughing to see that the degree of intelligence necessary to subdue us is a fairly accurate measure of the degree of intelligence we have.
And what else are we wanted to do? If knowledge speaks to us louder and more firmly than governments and their chief dignitaries; if it keeps reminding us that we have no need of such a kind of State, without whose coercion we have not only procured a better education, but has saved us the strength we have been wasting in trying uselessly to fix it; if every day it cries out to us that whatever comes from political sects we must take as unwarranted, and that obedience to institutions is a ridiculous thing when it is they who engender the worst injustices; if year after year, month after month, and week after week it gives us reason to affirm that the words of governments are written in water, and that what a single ruler defrauds in half a day is far greater than what the rest of the people earn in a lifetime.
“Arrogant, installed in their offices by the city they think themselves more important than the people, when they are nobody.”
–Euripides, “Andromache”
The word economy, to the common man, means almost the same as a line drawn around him for a chicken. The people know nothing of economics or monetary policies, because they are made to work six days a week so that on the seventh they can go to church and to the tavern to spend their money. They prefer their economy to be dealt with by economists, whose prestige is based on the ignorance of people who do not understand monetary matters, and this ignorance is based in turn on the prestige of economists, who have appropriated the word economy to express weakly and obscurely the value springs of our life. The economist, who in fact speaks only of cases that never occur in reality, has accustomed us to the foolish idea that human wealth is a natural consequence of a state policy, that without the intermediation of the state what they call “legal economy” cannot exist.
They would be astonished if someone were to hint to them that it is precisely out of illicit activities, unregulated by any government or political institution, that any idea of economics was formally born, and that it was only after it was subjected to the authority of a handful of economists that whole nations began to be condemned to live under the orders of a single gang. The history of economics, or at least of economics under the command of economists, is a secret rage against all the presuppositions of freedom and justice, against the sentiments of value of freedom and justice, against taking sides in favor of freedom and justice, for it rests on a relationship of domination of a bunch of bureaucrats over a stratum of workers between one and two million times more numerous, of blind obedience to a medical regime that makes them an exposition of everything that is bad for their body without pointing them to a single
remedy.
Their monetary policies, created out of nothing, and therefore turned into nothing, have done nothing but increase the needs and the thirst for wealth, without at the same time increasing the means to satisfy them, and it is thanks to them that the central banks today print banknotes like those rats that give birth while they are still suckling a litter, and conceive again although they are already pregnant.
They are responsible for the fact that our financial system is a balloon inflated with wind, from which storms come out when it bursts; that our currency lacks real consistency, and is a brittle tile at the slightest blow or jolt; that the banks have everything and the people have nothing, and that this is the masterpiece of the raison d’être of our existence; that economic policies are the most ridiculous farce and the most dreadful plague on the face of this earth, immediately after war, religion, famine, and ignorance of arts and letters; and that governments, idiotic and cruel, make the wretched peasant spend three times as much as he earns, and work all
his life to pay bank debts.
By preventing them from being seriously contradicted, under the pretext that they are very good economists, and by forcing everybody to believe it, they have made of our money what they have made of it: an eternal marriage between the State and financial speculators, who in turn are like the last servants of a great estate, who calculate the value of the land, the animals, the jewels and the crockery, pick up the filth and, if they find any old shirt that might be of use to them, they put it away and take it out of there, hidden among their private parts.
I have always heard it said that the present economic system would be lost if men would only read and think, or, still more, that they would eat their central government with their own teeth if they knew even half the evils they have brought upon society. But, unfortunately, this society was always reduced to this alternative: either despair made it detest its misfortunes, or stupidity made them bearable, to the point of resigning itself to leave its fate in the hands of economists, who always had plenty of figures to explain the injustices of life, and who invented a monetary system made to suit the ambitions of the banks, the great enslavers of the human race, and whose rogues we are finally beginning to know much better than they do our wise men.
This is a guest post by Anderson Benavides Prado. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.