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Showing posts from February, 2019

Glimmer of (Gray) Hope

Three club owners have a meeting with the local press in the Norwegian town of Fredrikstad, airing their brewing troubles to an eager journalist. The year is 2009 and two things have collided with each other that changed the behavior of their clientele: The aftershock of the 2008 economic crisis and a change in local alcohol serving hours.



When nightclub-goers still have the need to keep the party going but have less money in their pockets and the clubs can’t stay open as long as they used to, there’s a unique pocket in the market for someone that can offer alternatives. Someone who doesn’t care about state-mandated opening hours and deal in smuggled booze: The illegal nightclubs.

That was the topic of discussion the three club-owners had with the press,[1] those pesky competitors not playing by the rules. It’s almost impossible to compete when you are handcuffed to regulations and everything you sell has an automatic 25% extra costs attached to it straight out of the gate (and that …
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Tokenization: A Blueprint for Stopping the SEC

So now what?

Thanks to the disintermediation spurred on by Satoshi, Ross, and Cody, - agorists have the ATF, IRS, DEA, FDA, & Federal Reserve cornered. Uber, Lyft, & Airbnb have more or less gutted the taxi and hotel cartels, liberating the hospitality industry.

So who’s next? Counter-economists need a target.

The consensus which seems to be arising in agorist circles is that a death blow to the SEC will do a great deal to liberate individuals from state financial controls and thus lift living standards and the quality of life for the entire global population.

While I admit it sounds like a lofty goal, I assure you we will do it and we will do it using the same peaceful, non-violent tactics and strategies that Cody, Ross, and Satoshi exemplified. With the assistance of blockchain technology, it’s possible for individuals today to tokenize anything and everything they can get their hands on. And we will. Indeed, the process is already underway.
“100% of stocks and bonds trad…
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Ludwig von Mises: The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science | BOOK REVIEW

This article was republished from the MisesRevived blog with permission from the author, Stefan Klovning. 


In this essay, published in 1962, Mises elaborates in depth what praxeology means, what implications it has for the study of human action, and criticizes doctrines contradictory to the praxeological method (especially logical positivism).

Mises takes complete distance from the classical characterization of man as “Homo oeconomicus” (that is, a purely self-interested and rational person), and rather says that it’s more of a “Homo agens, the acting animal,” because, according to Mises, “The characteristic feature of man is precisely that he consciously acts (p. 4),” by which he means “to strive after ends, that is, to choose a goal and to resort to means in order to attain the goals sought (p. 5).”



I’m sure many would dispute the claim that only humans behave in this way (see, for instance: “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are” by Frans de Waal), but he later elaborat…
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Lewis Dartnell: The Knowledge | Book Review

With a catchphrase like "How to Rebuild our world after an apocalypse", this book didn't need much more to sell itself to me. The idea of the book is to act as a guiding hand after a reset of the world. Laying down the principles needed to know and understand to rebuild the technologies of today, pretty much from scratch. There are several interesting things going on in this book that is of interest to Agorists - Let me explain with a review of the book.

 The author recognizes that there will be a grace period after a worldwide devastating event where there will be plenty of spare parts and canned food around, that act as a breather for any survivors of the apocalypse (Lewis Dartnell leaves it open what really can happen). After this honeymoon period, this window of well-stocked store shelves, we need to redo all the hard work that represents thousands of years worth of human development in technology and knowledge.

The first few chapters cover some rough basics of chemis…
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The Gated Community: A Welcome Trend in Urban Development

I recently finished reading Tim Marshall’s Politics of Place series. It’s a three book trilogy focusing on contemporary international relations. The first two books were both excellent reads - Prisoners of Geography (which loyal fans of The Agora will remember from the source list for our podcast series, Geopolitics) and A Flag Worth Dying For. But the impetus for this article comes from book three: The Age of Walls.

Marshall’s focus here is on political and socio-economic barriers dividing societies. He discusses physical walls such as those separating Israel & Palestine, China & Mongolia and Trump’s proposed border wall. However, he also covers in detail, the internal divisions amongst societies. One of these internal divisions he mentions are those of the gated community. Although Marshall only spends 4 or 5 pages on the topic, he makes points of sufficient interest that I felt it warranted further investigation. After looking into it a bit, I confirmed my initial suspici…
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