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Showing posts from August, 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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The Economics of BTC Maximalism

BTC maximalism is a flawed doctrine, fallacious in numerous respects. 

First, if you'd prefer to hear these arguments in audio, check out this recent episode of ABNP, where @mrpseu & I discused these same topics. 

Also, a qualifier: I'm not capable of making, defending or refuting technical arguments. I'll leave that aspect of the debate to others. My concerns with BTC maximalism are entirely economic and can be divided into four areas. 


Based on the criteria for saleability as laid out by the austrian school, BTC is not the most marketable digital commodity.A lack of portability relative to other cryptocurrencies implies BTC isn't as sound of a commodity. Value storage is a secondary function of money and cannot satisfy the use-value requirement of regression theorem. BTC maximalism lays waste to the Hayekian notion of competition as a discovery procedure. This final point was addressed in detail on episode 50 of The Agora, Crypto-Economics and thus, isn't elabor…
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Don't Vote for Alex

It is 2019 and in Norway, that means county and city-election year. You can vote for me, but this article is all about why you really shouldn't. [1] There are several ways to say 'No'. This is a story about the time I said 'Yes', what I will stay positive to and what I will be negative toward. 

"But it is immoral to support politicians to oppress us because they might relieve us one oppression" - Samuel Edward Konkin III


First of all, there is some explaining to do: In my last article on the New Libertarian I argued that party politics is a waste of time and that you could use that time more productive so this entire piece seems like its contradicting that one. It might, that is up to you to judge for yourself (and if you want a chat I'm very approachable on Twitter), but in my defense, I will highlight two things:

One: I'm not against solution-finding, culture-building or exchange of ideas. I can give no brighter example of this happening than the…
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Is Anarchy a Faustian Bargain?

The common perception of Anarchy today appears to be one of chaos and destruction. Without the State, it is proclaimed, violence would immediately ensue; without law, there'd be no deterrent disincentivizing this, and we'd return, in the words of Thomas Hobbes (1660), to an age where "every man is Enemy to every man", and "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But is this really what by necessity would result from abolishing the State? I've previously forcefully argued against the theoretical foundations of the State (Kløvning, 2019a), and although my premises were not disputed, the conclusion of dismantling the State provoked many consequentialist concerns of what could happen if actualized. The central question that must be answered to address such concerns is whether the substitution of Anarchy for a State would possibly be undesirable despite the former having more of a rigorous and defensible logical foundation than the latt…
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The Role of Government: A Critique

There is a wide range of arguments for the necessity of government, an entity literally defined by the initiation and attempted monopolization of violence. Some can be plainly dismissed: the government has divine rights or that it is an inherent moral authority. In his book, "Capitalism and Freedom," Milton Friedman rejects these arguments and instead develops one based on economic reasoning. This is not to say it is flawless, though. Friedman and others argue that government is necessary to define rights, enforce those rights, provide a monetary system, solve technical monopolies and externalities, and protect children and mentally handicapped. However, upon examination, these justifications fail to achieve their goal. The government as an inevitability, but distinctly not as a necessity, may be a fine conclusion; however, moral or economic justification of the monopoly on violence falls far short.
I wish to note here that I have the highest of respect for Friedman and his…
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Why Socialism Leads to Totalitarianism and Vice Versa

Despite the horrific experience with Socialism across the world throughout the 20th century, the doctrine still maintains plenty of followers and has been growing especially since the Great Depression. "It wasn't real Socialism," they proclaim. While the Statist Socialists, most of whom call themselves "Democratic Socialists", contend that their system could work as long as they had the "right people" in power, the Anarchist variety tend to point to the historical instances as "State Capitalism", i.e. having nothing to do with their ideal system of societal organization. Only a small minority of acolytes tries to defend and justify the regimes that reigned terror over the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Cambodia, North Korea, etc., but the self-proclaimed Socialists who denounce these don't seem to have much curiosity as to why all these experiments tend to end up with the same results.

It's important to remember that, in cont…
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Book Review: Everything You Need to Know But Have Never Been Told | David Icke

The higher the wisdom the more incomprehensible does it become by ignorance. It is a manifest fact that the popular man or writer, is always one who is but little in advance of the mass, and consequently understandable by them: never the man who is far in advance of them and out of their sight.  - Herbert Spencer Hardly ever throughout history does there arise figures who truly approach the latter description by Spencer. Renegades, contrarians, free-thinkers, or whatever other labels they may go by, tend by definition to venture beyond the norm, and often end up with significantly different convictions from what the mainstream culture as an aggregate tends to hold on to. I consider David Icke to be among those matching Spencer's criteria, and possibly even the closest contemporary figure in this regard. This is not said because I agree with every single claim and argument Icke presents throughout this almost 700-page-long book - because I certainly do not - but rather in admirati…
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