How The West Is Run
We are not fighting the communists anymore. We are fighting the banking committees.
Modern governance no longer depends on laws passed by parliaments. It no longer needs constitutions, elections, or democratic mandate.
The Western world refers to the ensemble of societies and cultures encompassing Europe itself along with settler societies in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Latin America, unified by a historical continuum of Greco-Roman classical heritage, Judeo-Christian ethical foundations, and modern developments in rationalism, science, and liberal institutions.
Key characteristics include a commitment to reason over dogma, individualism prioritizing personal agency and consent-based governance, and institutional arrangements such as the rule of law, separation of powers, and free-market capitalism that have empirically driven innovation and prosperity.
-- Grokipedia
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of generating profit.
Its defining features include secure private property rights, the profit motive driving innovation and efficiency, competition fostering improvement, and limited government intervention to enforce contracts and prevent coercion.
The primary characteristics of free market capitalism are:
individual freedom to choose,
willing buyer - willing seller principle,
limited government intervention,
accumulation of capital,
robust competition,
profit motive,
secure private property rights,
division of labour,
no force or fraud.
What if there is a fatal flaw in our understanding of how this free market economic system really works? What could be wrong? The system appears to work spectacularly well, as the many free market successes attest. But there are caveats, lurking like evil spirits at the fringes of this brilliant system.
Does capitalism improve the life of all its followers, or just some? Does this philosophy come at the expense of non-economic considerations such as nature, contentment, beauty, peace? Is it moral, and does it care? Does it promote widespread peace and human flourishing?
Free market warriors tend to brush these concerns aside as the pathetic bleating of the unsuccessful, the woke concerns of the loony fringe. Look at this GDP, look at all that construction, look at the shrinking poverty rates, look at the increasing life expectancies. What’s not to like?
But has capitalism made the common people in the West happier, more fulfilled, less depressed, healthier? Housing has become unaffordable, health costs an arm and a leg and a kidney, depression is endemic, education is a catastrophe (a word most can no longer spell), the will to reproduce is plummeting, many are bored and lonely in a world filled with Facebook friends and endless online entertainment. Why?
We could blame it on the rise of woke, of socialist tendencies, of Islam. We might blame it on the decline of religion, nationalism, civic pride. On our obsession with the material at the expense of the spiritual. But these are just symptoms. What is the root cause of the increasing unhappiness of Western citizens?
The freedom to choose does not guarantee the wherewithal to choose. Is the seller always willing, or constrained by circumstances? How does the willing buyer afford the purchase price? Who controls the playing field on which these supposedly willing participants meet? Whose long-term interests are being served by every transaction? Freedom to choose is not free.
Money is the lifeblood of the free market system. It is the casino chip that identifies who’s winning and who’s losing. It carries the critical price information essential to every transaction. In its absence the system quickly bleeds to death. Money is the central enforcement tool of the new elite.
So how does money arise? What keeps it flowing? Who controls the money supply? It is not governments, who believe they are in control but who are always desperately short of money. It is not individuals who are mere spectators on the banks of the money river.
Money is made and managed by the banks, mainly the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, but also by the myriad of smaller players. The banks set the quantity of money, they set the price, they set the conditions for its use, and they hold almost all the money available.
Virtually every middle-class family in the West will be heavily indebted to a bank for a mortgage. Most home-owners fear their bank manager more than their boss or their government. They will be bound to the whims of the bank for most of their adult lives and will ultimately pay many times the value of what they borrowed.
Your freedom to choose is limited by what the banks will allow, except in the most trivial cases. You are free to choose what cool drink to buy, if you have cash on hand. Payment for anything more than a few dozen dollars will be decided by the bank. Do you have sufficient funds to use your card? Are all your details up to date (FICA)? Does the transaction amount exceed the allowable limit? Is your account flagged? Soon more insidious questions will be asked - are you wealthy, are you carbon compliant, have you been vaxxed? This is already happening in countries like Canada where Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) have been introduced.
Even nation-states must go cap in hand to our banking overlords, and their proxies like the IMF or World Bank. Why do you want this large loan? Do we approve of the purpose for the loan? Are you green-compliant? What will you give up if you default? The banks don’t threaten your individual rights, or your sovereignty, or your democracy. They don’t have to. If they don’t like you, they just won’t give you any money. Ask Liz Truss.
A silent revolution is re-engineering the architecture of human society. This transformation bypasses traditional political battles, advancing instead through financial regulations, technical standards, and algorithmic systems.
The objective is not the dramatic seizure of institutions, but their steady obsolescence, overlaying democratic processes with a global framework where innate rights become conditional permissions – granted or revoked based on compliance with programmed parameters.
This is the quiet war prophesied in the 1979 document Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, which outlined warfare conducted through economic and social systems. The battlefields are now our digital wallets and energy bills. The weapons are the standards and algorithms being fused into an automated governance system.
Quoted from ‘The Quiet War’ on the escapekey substack
The West is now run by unelected bureaucratic cabals infesting the banks, the many NGO’s, the international agencies. They grow by hijacking repeated “global” emergencies and then using self-appointed panels of experts to advance their agenda and take ever more control.
We are not fighting the communists anymore. We are fighting the banking committees.
Trevor Watkins is the founder of the Individualist Movement, the author of two books, and an Associate of the Free Market Foundation. He publishes on a blog at libertarian.org.za. The views expressed in the article are those of the author and not necessarily shared by the members of the Foundation.
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Yes, even in substantially democratic nations wherein the "will of the people" manifests via the four critical pillars namely of: free and fair elections, electoral integrity, freedom of speech, without the violation of a prevailing constitution, the outcomes seem to deny the voters!
The Banking Industrial Complex (BIC), for want of another name to identify this amorphous leviathan, prevails and suffocates the uplifting disruptive competition of the free market.
(To think that a recent Nobel prize for economics was awarded to three or so economists, or whatever they are, who have studied the otherwise obvious phenomenon of disruptive competition of the free market, if one exists, is an indictment of faculties of economics world wide ... a child in kindergarten would expect a genuine free market to be in a perpetual state of disruptive competition, a market state that the elite generally detest as their cheese gets continuously moved ... and then they have to keep applying their minds to keep up or face loss of social capital and their invitations to the caviar and champagne events).
In a genuine free society, the ultimate natural democracy by the way, the essential imperative for a free market to exist requires your innovative Harm Consent Rule, the HCR, Trevor, coupled to the Nature of Us, the NoU, to prevail over anti-free market forces like the BIC.
(For the NoU see: https://thetaooffreedom.substack.com/p/the-nature-of-us-nou?utm_source=publication-search).
HCR + NoU is the otherwise nebulous Non Aggression Principle, the NAP, realised concretely.
No harm without consent and only harm with consent!
This would deal not only with mafias extorting their "protection" taxes alla the Sicilians, the Calabresi, the Neopolitans, and the taxi mafias in South Africa, or the formal versions like those of the BICs reigning supreme in the West, but also with what economists erroneously call "market failures" like being subjected to passive smoking or inhalation of asbestos fibres at levels far higher than they would otherwise naturally occur.
These so called "market failures" would actually be the failure of a night watchman government if one existed not enforcing laws of tort.
But certainly the failure of faculties of economics world wide to understand this.
Both Hayek and Milton Friedman missed this, but Ayn Rand did not albeit her "Nature of Man" is limited and skewed in one direction only ... egoism.
If you go to a pub that allows smoking you consent to harm.
However, if your neighbour sets up an asbestos manufacturing plant next door, unless you consented to him spewing asbestos fibres over your property at levels higher than they would otherwise be naturally occurring and natural selection enabled you to handle it, then that is a violation of the HCR, you did not consent to harm ... unless of course you signed the ToS for their products and services.
Ayn Rand's solution in the laws of tort apply even if she had not quite fully figured it out, despite her unquestionable brilliance.
The BICs use the cover of the myth of "market failures" to justify their incremental enslavement of individuals.
They use the cover of feigned "utilitarianism" to justify their existence.
If they cannot invoke a government to act violently against disruptive competitors via legislation and regulations enforced by the police and the courts, then their cheese will in time be moved and their status as the best of God's Gifts to human kind eroded ...
A useful analytic tool is to place individualism as an opposite force to institutionalism. Institutionalism consists of NGOS, Quangos, lobbyists, religions and any other form of communal power grouping.
Race, gender, culture, economic and political power groups have all become pawns for power. Government is where they derive their pornographic satisfaction.
As an individual, I shun any form of collective membership.