What emerges from this collapse depends on what we build before it’s complete. If we spend our time fighting each other, a new strongman will step in to “restore order.” If we spend our time trying to reform the system, we simply delay its failure while it extracts more wealth and freedom. But if we spend our time building alternatives—real alternatives based on voluntary cooperation and private property—we create the possibility of something genuinely different. This isn’t a call to passivity. It’s a call to redirect your energy away from defending the indefensible and toward building the possible. Stop trying to win arguments with people trained to see you as an enemy. Build something they can join instead. Stop waiting for the right leader or perfect policy. Build the world you want to live in, one transaction, one conversation, one community at a time. That is the only revolution worth having. That is the only one that actually works. View quoted note →

None of this requires political change or violence. It only requires you to cooperate directly with others rather than through the bureaucratic middleman. Every transaction you conduct outside the system—every bitcoin payment, every handshake deal, every favor traded in a network of trust—is a vote for a different world. It also means refusing the tribes the state creates for you. You don’t have to choose between corrupt political factions. You don’t have to participate in culture wars that keep you distracted. You don’t have to treat your neighbor as an enemy because you disagree about which emergency to panic about. View quoted note →

As the old systems crumble under their own contradictions, the state grows more desperate—more authoritarian—cloaking its decay in patriotic slogans and moral crusades. Yet no volume of coercion can conjure what has been systematically undermined: a society grounded in self‑ownership, reciprocal respect, and the willingness to deal with one another as equals rather than enemies. View quoted note →

"A system built on coercion needs division like oxygen. It must invent internal enemies to justify its dominance, to keep people dependent on its “protection.” When citizens are busy fighting one another—over politics, culture, race, or faith—they are not asking the fundamental question: why should anyone rule them at all?" View quoted note →

Stop Fighting Your Neighbor: The Mechanics of State Power and How to Opt Out My latest with Mises https://mises.org/mises-wire/stop-fighting-your-neighbor-mechanics-state-power-and-how-opt-out

Why do we need to give money to taxes and social security? That money needs to go to fun stuff, like chicken nuggies and milkshakes.

“The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” — Frédéric Bastiat

A fractured society cannot effectively resist centralized authority because resistance requires coordination, and coordination requires trust.

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

I love being a dad View quoted note →

"Rothbard considered the classical-liberal solution to the fundamental human problem of protection—of a minimal or night-watchman state, or an otherwise “constitutionally limited” government—as a hopelessly confused and naive idea. Every minimal state has the inherent tendency to become a maximal state, for once an agency is permitted to collect any taxes, however small and for whatever purpose, it will naturally tend to employ its current tax revenue for the collection of ever more future taxes for the same and/or other purposes. Similarly, once an agency possesses any judiciary monopoly, it will naturally tend to employ this privileged position for the further expansion of its range of jurisdiction. Constitutions, after all, are state-constitutions, and whatever limitations they may contain—what is or is not constitutional—is determined by state courts and judges. Hence, there is no other possible way of limiting state power except by eliminating the state altogether and, in accordance with justice and economics, establishing a free market in protection and security services." —Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. View quoted note →