The Self-Referential Awakening – Heeding the Warrior’s Call

submitted by jwithrow.
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Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
The Self-Referential Awakening – Heeding the Warrior’s Call

January 4, 2016
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P closed out Friday at $2,044. Gold closed at $1,060 per ounce. Crude Oil closed at $37.07 per barrel, and the 10-year Treasury rate closed at 2.27%. Bitcoin is trading around $431 per BTC today.

Dear Journal,

Happy New Year! As I touched on in my last journal entry, I expect 2016 to be a very interesting year in the financial markets. Credit has been expanding and interest rates have been falling for more than three decades now, but 2016 may be the year those trends reverse.

The “authorities” will fight such a trend reversal with everything they have, but Mr. Market will eventually assert himself. Trees don’t grow to the sky, as they say. For a more detailed look at the prominent macroeconomic trends of our time, as well as how to position your finances accordingly, please see our online course Finance for Freedom: Master Your Finances in 30 Days.

Moving from finance to philosophy…

Socrates: Everyone wants to tell you what to do and what’s good for you. They don’t want you to find your own answers, they want you to believe theirs.

Dan: Let me guess, and you want me to believe yours.

Socrates: No, I want you to stop gathering information from the outside and start gathering it from the inside.

Continue reading “The Self-Referential Awakening – Heeding the Warrior’s Call”

Decentralization and Spontaneous Order

submitted by jwithrow.decentralization

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
Decentralization and Spontaneous Order

November 25, 2015
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P closed out Tuesday at $2,084. Gold closed at $1,074 per ounce. Oil closed at $42.87 per barrel, and the 10-year Treasury rate closed at 2.25%. Bitcoin is trading around $324 per BTC today.

Not much action in the markets this week as Wall Street humanoids are gearing up for the big holiday on Thursday. Only the high-frequency trading machines remain to trade back-and-forth with one another for a few days. Despite this calm, I get the sense that a big move is brewing…

Also worth mentioning, I appeared on the SovereignBTC podcast with host John Bush last week. We had a blast talking about many of the topics I often muse on here in the Journal. If you would like to listen to the interview, you can find it at the LTB Network here.

Dear Journal,

“That was really sweet what you wrote about Madison…” wife Rachel said after reading my previous journal entry. “But the only thing you said about me was that I wouldn’t read past a certain point!”

“Well did you read past that paragraph?”, I asked with a wry grin on my face.

“No, that’s as far as I got…”

My last entry discussed the potential for the family unit to act as a sovereign institution in light of the burgeoning Great Reset, much to the benefit of both the sovereign family and the local community. The underlying theme of that entry, and of many recent journal entries, has been decentralization.

I seek to offer my unfiltered perspective when I sit down to write these journal entries, and I only write them when motivated to do so for that reason. That’s why the Journal follows no set schedule whatsoever, though I try my best to post a weekly entry. Sometimes when I re-read my unfiltered entries, however, I get the feeling that readers may come away with a more negative sentiment then I intend to convey. Continue reading “Decentralization and Spontaneous Order”

The Wizards of Ozymandias

submitted by jwithrow.Central Planners

“The Wizards of Ozymandias” by Butler Shaffer is a must-read for anyone who appreciates Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. The book is also a must read for anyone with an interest in the history of western civilization, social philosophy, free-market economics, or critical thinking in general.

A paperback copy of the book costs $16.85 and the kindle version costs $3.99. We will provide a link to the book at the end of this post.

In a nutshell, Shaffer spends 310 powerful pages exposing the fallacy of central planning and he does so in a common sensical way. There are no ideological theories or assumptions, just critical thinking and common sense – imagine that!

Coincidentally, critical thinking and common sense are two of the most important victims of central planning.

By the way, when we talk about central planning we are talking about the systems of societal control that have been gradually implemented over the past one hundred years or so. We are talking about socialism in general and all manner of destructive socialist policies. We are talking about organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, the military-industrial complex (please, look this one up), the FDA, the EPA, all other alphabet soup governmental organizations, all other organizations whose name starts with “The Department of”, and countless other massive, unaccountable monsters of bureaucracy.

And yes dear friend, the Federal Reserve and the IRS are instruments of socialism (and fascism and perpetual war – nothing is ever cut and dry). They are the opposite of free market capitalism. In fact, the implementation of a central bank is one of the planks of the Communist Manifesto. We think it is the fifth plank but we are not sure exactly and we haven’t looked it up because we don’t want to send mixed signals to our friends at the NSA.

Anyway, the point is that human beings are not robots. Human interaction does not need to be scripted according to some jerk’s sociopathic ideals.

Governments are not people. Nations are not people. Corporations are not people. People are people. People are best when they are free from coercion to voluntarily interact with others for their own benefit as they see fit. The free market serves people in this fashion as long as they abide by two rules:

Do not infringe upon another person or his property (natural law). Do all that you have agreed to do and nothing that you have agreed not to do (contract law).

Mr. Shaffer is a little better written than we are so we highly recommend his book.