The Future Belongs To Freedom & Canada’s Embrace Of Authoritarianism Is A Huge Mistake

Those who embrace freedom will have a long-term advantage.
Those who give in to fear and demand expanded government power will be left behind.

It has never been more possible for people to enjoy near-total freedom.

The advance of technology, particularly the internet and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin means that centralized institutions like governments, banks, and central banks no longer have the total monopoly on information or money generation that gave them their immense power.

In effect, we have advanced beyond the need for many of the institutions that run our society, but we haven’t woken up to it yet – at least not in large numbers.

Backlash to freedom

Even before covid-19, we saw governments and centralized institutions desperately trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube when it came to the expansion of freedom that the internet has enabled.

In the past, it was easy for the government to influence the media, since the cost of getting your opinion out to the masses was immense. You needed a printing press, you needed a massive staff of writers and editors, and you needed a distribution network.

So, only a few could afford to own a newspaper, meaning the government knew the key players it needed to influence and control.

The advent of radio & tv didn’t change the situation that much, considering that once again the costs of setting up a large-scale media institution remained out of reach for nearly everyone.

The internet has changed all of that.

First of all, Independent Media has become a powerful opponent of government propaganda, and is becoming the true media because we are reliant on individual Canadians choosing to support us, rather than forcible taxpayer funding.

Additionally, nearly every Canadian is able to become the media at any moment, by livestreaming an event, or sharing their opinion widely on social media.

This means the media has gone from being just a few key players at the top of an organizational hierarchy, to millions of people.

And of course, it’s far tougher to control millions of people than it is to control a few.

And this scares the government and scares the establishment media.

Hence, the backlash.

When those in power fear losing control, they react by trying to expand their control at all costs.

Hence we see constant attacks on free expression and massive bailouts of the establishment press (at our expense of course).

In effect, rather than embracing how the internet has made expanded freedom possible (something we are supposed to support considering we are a ‘free’ country), governments like the Trudeau government have decided to move closer towards a place like China where freedom is seen as something to be feared.

This is the battle we see:

• Those who embrace freedom, and those who fear it.
• And this applies beyond just the establishment media.

It also applies to our monetary system, in what could be the true battleground of freedom in the next 100 years.

Should the government control our money?

At first, that question seems absurd. Of course the government controls our money, right?

The government creates it, prints it (digitally most of the time now), and it has value because the government decides it does. But does it have to be this way? Should it be this way?

Absolutely not. When we really think about it, it is a severe conflict of interest for a government institution to have control over our currency.

We see the consequences at this very moment, as unaffordable government spending is enabled by the creation of massive amounts of money, which creates a hidden Inflation Tax that devalues our currency, punishes those who save, and punishes everyone by making our reward for our hard work get smaller and smaller as our hard-earned money is robbed of value.

It’s a massive trick being played on all of us:

• We get told our economy is ‘growing,’ because the amount of money in the system increases, even as each of us actually has less real value at our disposal since that value is being inflated away.
• We are told to fear deflation, even though deflation should be the goal of any productive society, since everything should be getting less expensive as we become more and more skilled and efficient at producing.

Why are we supposed to accept this state of affairs?

Why should we submit to the idea that our lives are controlled by a concept of money that is manipulated by governments and used to keep us under the thumb of the state?

We shouldn’t. And this is where cryptocurrencies come in.
As with the internet, the advance of technology has once again rendered centralized government control unnecessary, and even counterproductive.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin offer the possibility of a return to something like the Gold Standard, where there was true value and true scarcity.

And if you think that isn’t necessary, consider this chart below, which shows the relationship between productivity and compensation before and after the US (and other countries like Canada), fully severed the relationship between fiat currency and Gold.

On August 15, 1971, the US abandoned the Gold Standard. In May of 1970, Canada abandoned fixed exchanged rates. Given our deep economic connection with the US, their abandonment of the gold standard, and the unlinking of the Canadian dollar to anything tangible resulted in a complete ‘fiat’ currency, a currency that has ‘value’ solely because the government deems it so.

Since then (as you can see in the chart above) we have seen a profound divergence between productivity (which keeps going up as would be expected due to technological advancement), and wages, which have remained largely stagnant (on an inflation adjusted basis of course).

You can notice this when you consider that it was once the norm for one spouse to work and be able to afford a decent house, multiple children, two cars, and regular vacations, thing that are increasingly out of reach for younger generations despite our country supposedly being ‘richer.’

The fact is, while there is certainly ‘more money’ floating around, that money has been so severely robbed of value that we are poorer in real terms.

Technology now exists to counter this, as we see with Bitcoin.

It is scarce (only 21 million Bitcoins can ever be mined), and it is decentralized. No government official can create more or manipulate it.

To get a sense of how important that is for freedom, consider how China has reacted to Bitcoin. They issue ban after ban after ban, stricter each time, with the latest being a full ban on Bitcoin transactions in the entire Communist State.

If China is reacting to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in that way, it tells you they fear how it can make freedom and prosperity flourish, just as China fears a free and open internet.

Thus, the path for Canada is clear, if we want to be a truly ‘free nation.’

We must embrace freedom, embrace free expression, embrace cryptocurrencies and decentralization, and recognize that the future belongs to freedom.
If instead we continue going down the authoritarian path, we will be left behind as other nations advance into a brighter future.