Milton Friedman's greatest regret.
The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.
Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.
Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.
This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.
Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.
"Bitcoin isn't backed by anything."
Let me stop you right there.
Bitcoin is backed by energy. Real energy. Kilowatts. Heat. Physics.
The kind of backing you can't print, fake, or vote into existence at an emergency Fed meeting.
Every block mined is a thermodynamic proof of work. Not a promise. Not a policy. Proof.
The issuance schedule has never been amended by a committee. Not once. Not ever. Because there is no committee.
There's just math. Cold, indifferent, and immune to political theater.
The network is secured by more raw computing power than anything humanity has ever built. Hundreds of exahashes per second standing guard. Every single day.
Now let's talk about what is backed by nothing.
The dollar.
It's is backed by confidence. Specifically, confidence in the institution that printed $6 trillion in two years while telling you 3% inflation was healthy and you should be grateful for the soft landing.
In the same people who can't pass an audit.
Who fund wars with a credit card.
Who promise solvency while sitting on $39 trillion in debt and accelerating.
"Backed by nothing" isn't an attack on Bitcoin.
It's a confession about the dollar.
Follow if you're serious about building wealth they can't print away.
Levitical law only appears centuries later (as God’s protective mercy, once sin had introduced cumulative mutations & emotional brokenness). There was never a timeless cosmic ban…only a safeguard for a fallen people who could no longer handle the original design without harm. Your taboo is only born of His lawful restriction…protecting you from yourself.
@MurderBleach@taco_talks Pristine DNA, closer to creation…Lifespan dropped enormously, post fall (from 900+ to 100- over a relatively short period of time).
Gilles, je vais démonter ta prémisse de départ, parce que tout le reste de ton argument s'effondre avec elle.
Tu pars du principe qu'il faut une « sensibilité de gauche » pour ne pas laisser créver les gens de faim. C'est l'inverse total de ce que dit l'histoire économique des 50 dernières années.
Les chiffres bruts.
1990 : 2,3 milliards de personnes en pauvreté extrême. 38% de l'humanité.
2025 : 831 millions. Environ 10%.
1,5 milliard d'êtres humains sortis de la misère absolue en 35 ans. La plus grande réduction de souffrance humaine de toute l'histoire de l'espèce.
Qui a fait ça ?
Pas l'aide internationale. Pas les ONG. Pas les programmes de redistribution. Pas la « sensibilité de gauche ».
Le marché. L'ouverture commerciale. La Chine de Deng en 1978 qui abandonne le maoisme. L'Inde en 1991 qui libéralise. Le Vietnam, l'Indonésie, le Bangladesh qui s'ouvrent au capitalisme.
Les seuls endroits où l'extrême pauvreté a EXPLOSÉ sur la même période ? Le Vénézuela socialiste : de 27% de pauvres en 2008 à plus de 80% en 2018, avec une inflation de 130 000% et un Vénézuélien moyen qui a perdu 11 kilos par dénutrition. La Corée du Nord. Cuba. Le Zimbabwe de Mugabe.
La gauche ne nourrit pas les pauvres. Elle les fabrique.
Le capitalisme produit tellement de richesse que même ses « perdants » américains vivent mieux que la classe moyenne soviétique. Un pauvre US a un frigo, une voiture, un téléphone, l'air conditionné, internet. Un pauvre cubain attend du riz.
Ton argument selon lequel « le social aux USA est un désastre » repète une légende française. La réalité : le PIB par habitant américain est de 80 000$. Français : 45 000$. Un Mississippien — l'État US le plus pauvre — a un revenu médian supérieur au Français moyen.
La vérité que la gauche française refuse de regarder : dans un système libéral, il y a plus de richesse créée, plus largement distribuée, et beaucoup moins de pauvres. Partout. Sans exception. Sur toutes les périodes mesurées.
ÊTRE de gauche en 2026 face à ces données, ce n'est pas avoir de la « sensibilité ». C'est ignorer 35 ans de preuves accablantes. C'est préférer la posture morale au résultat.
La compassion sans résultats, ça s'appelle de la vanité.
Tu confonds deux choses, et c'est exactement le piège que la French Theory a tendu.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité — égalité *de droits*, égalité *devant la loi*, égalité *de dignité*. C'est la promesse républicaine, et personne ici ne l'attaque.
Le wokisme, ce n'est pas ça. C'est l'égalitarisme des résultats. Et l'égalitarisme des résultats, contrairement à l'égalité des droits, n'est pas un élargissement de la liberté — c'est sa négation.
Quelques exemples concrets :
— San Francisco supprime les classes de maths avancées au collège pour "réduire les inégalités". Résultat : les écarts entre élèves explosent, les familles aisées prennent des cours privés, les pauvres se font enterrer. L'égalitarisme a creusé l'inégalité.
— Les politiques de discrimination positive à Harvard : étudiants admis avec des scores très en dessous de leurs camarades, taux d'échec dispropportionné, sentiment d'imposture, ressentiment généralisé. On a saboté ceux qu'on voulait aider.
— L'aide humanitaire qui distribue du riz gratuit pendant 30 ans en Afrique : effondrement des filières agricoles locales, dépendance institutionnalisée. Donner un poisson, c'est empêcher d'apprendre à pêcher.
Le wokisme ne détruit pas l'humanité dans le sens dramatique. Il fait pire : il dessert systématiquement ceux qu'il prétend protéger, et il génère du ressentiment des deux côtés — ceux qu'on infantilise et ceux qu'on culpabilise.
La fraternité républicaine dit : tu es mon égal, donc je te traite en adulte capable.
Le wokisme dit : tu es ma victime, donc je dois te protéger de toi-même.
L'un élève. L'autre infantilise. Ce n'est pas la même chose, et confondre les deux est exactement le tour de passe-passe qu'on dénonce.
⚡️This “professor “ asking “where are the servers” in 2026 is like a medieval cartographer asking where the edge of the earth is in 1520.
The question reveals that the person asking it hasn’t updated their model of reality despite overwhelming evidence that the old model is wrong.
Bitcoin has been running for seventeen years. It has survived the shutdown of Silk Road, the collapse of Mt. Gox, a Chinese mining ban, multiple 80% drawdowns, regulatory assault from every major government, and active hostility from the entire traditional financial system. If the CIA built it they built the most resilient piece of infrastructure in human history and then let it be attacked repeatedly by other arms of the same government.
That doesn’t hold up for five seconds under basic scrutiny.
But the CIA theory isn’t really about the CIA. It’s about the desperate need to locate an authority behind the thing. Because if there’s no authority then every assumption about how power works, how money works, how systems work, comes into question. And for someone whose entire career and status and identity is built on understanding how systems work, that’s not an intellectual problem.
That’s an existential one.
The real thing happening in that clip is a man protecting his worldview in real time. The question “where are the servers” isn’t curiosity. It’s defense. If the servers can be located then the system can be understood within his framework. If they can’t be located then his framework is incomplete. And admitting your framework is incomplete when your framework is your career is something almost nobody will do voluntarily.
This is why Bitcoin adoption follows generational lines more than intelligence lines. It’s not that older people are dumber. It’s that they have more invested in the existing model. Decades of career. Status built on expertise within the current system. Reputation staked on understanding how things work. Bitcoin doesn’t ask them to learn something new. It asks them to accept that something they spent their life mastering is being replaced. That’s a fundamentally different ask. Learning is easy. Unlearning is almost impossible when your identity is built on what you know.
The “where are the servers” question will be studied in the future the way we study people who rejected the heliocentric model. Not as stupidity but as a perfect example of how paradigm resistance works in practice. The evidence was available. The system was running. The proof was on the blockchain for anyone to verify. And he looked at all of it and said “but where is the building.”
There is no building. There was never going to be a building. The entire point is that there is no building. And the people who need a building to believe something is real are going to be the last people on earth to understand what happened.
By the time they get it, it will have already restructured the global financial system around them.
They’ll be standing in the rubble of the old model still asking where the servers are while the new one runs on sixty thousand nodes they never bothered to look at.
@DLoesch@ian_mckelvey@eastbaycitizen No need, he was faithfully serving their purpose at that point in time…Once the utility is gone, they can pretend to have principles again.
Did you know C.S. Lewis predicted the modern obsession with “being nice” would destroy the soul?
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis argues that when a society stops believing in objective virtue, it doesn’t become tolerant… it becomes manipulable.
He calls the result “men without chests.”
People with appetites and intellects, but no courage, no honor, no trained moral instincts. They can calculate everything and defend nothing.
Lewis saw that once we reject inherited moral law, we don’t become free. We become raw material… easily shaped by propaganda, pleasure, and fear.
Modern man prides himself on compassion while quietly surrendering every standard that once gave compassion meaning.
Lewis’s insight is brutal: a civilization that educates clever cowards will eventually be ruled by tyrants or technicians.
Because when nothing is worth dying for, everything becomes negotiable… including human dignity.
@skumWgmi ***Rest in Him who is before all things!… “Before Abraham was, I am.”
***There has ALWAYS been (& forever will be) relationship!...“Let US make man in OUR image, after OUR likeness.
You are loved & NOT alone!