The Sovereign Individual (Part 1)
Here’s to peace, prosperity and your good health
Happy New Year!
I am currently reading The Sovereign Individual, a book written in 1997 that has some pretty wild implications for financial independence, personal freedom as well as personal finance.
I wish I’d read it 20 years ago. It would have been a gift for my inner peace and equanimity.
Why? Because it would have saved me much pain and frustration watching all the strange things in culture, politics and economics unfold over the last ~10 years.
It would have helped me understand what appeared to be madness.
Here is a quote from Chapter 1:
The clash between the new and the old will shape the early years of the new millennium. We expect it to be a time of great danger and great reward, and a time of much diminished civility in some realms and unprecedented scope in others.
Increasingly autonomous individuals and bankrupt, desperate governments will confront one another across a new divide.
All nation states face bankruptcy and the rapid erosion of their authority. Mighty as they are, the power they retain is to obliterate, not to command. Their intercontinental missiles and aircraft carriers are already artifacts, as imposing and useless as the last warhorse of feudalism.
When the state finds itself unable to meet its committed expenditure by raising tax revenues, it will resort to other, more desperate measures.
Amoung them is printing money. Governments have grown used to enjoying a monopoly over currency that they could depreciate at will. This arbitrary inflation has been a prominent feature of the monetary policy of all twentieth century states.
The US dollar lost 84% of its value between 1949 and 1995. This inflation had the same effect as a tax on all who hold the currency. As we explore later, inflation as a revenue option will be largely foreclosed by the emergence of cybermoney.
In the Information Age, individuals will be able to use cybercurrencies and thus declare their monetary independence.
How wild is that?!?
To repeat, The Sovereign Individual was written in 1997.
Waaay before the Culture Wars and more than a decade before Bitcoin (the first crypto-currency) was launched in the aftermath of the bailout of the banks in 2008.
I do not ask you to believe me.
I do NOT ask that you drink the crypto Kool Aid and start to day-trade shitcoins and monkey J-pegs.
I do NOT ask that change your profile picture and put red laser eyes in your profile picture (one of the strange side-effects of Bitcoin Maximalist retardation).
I simply suggest that in 2025 we need to understand both systems of money: the old and the new.
The old system is property, the S&P 500, FTSE 100, bonds, gilts, treasuries, REITs, commodities, property and fiat currencies.
The new system is NASDAQ, crypto and earning wifi money.
Here’s to keeping an open mind in 2025!
Here’s to peace, prosperity and your good health.
Love to everyone
Barney
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