You don’t get wealthy by paying interest.  You get wealthy by earning interest.

This is one of my favorite lines when it comes to personal finance.  While I am not adverse to all debt, I do think that a good path to wealth entails minimizing debt and not holding any bad debt.

While being a proponent of minimizing debt and being somewhat risk averse in terms of investing, I have great concerns regarding inflation now and in the future.

Many people who fear inflation are not adverse to debt.  They may promote various assets to hedge against inflation, or to even make money from inflation.  These assets could include stocks, real estate, gold, and other commodities. In many cases, they even find it useful to use debt in order to finance these purchases.  This is especially true when it comes to real estate.

Some have an even more flippant view of debt because they believe inflation will take care of the debt.  In other words, if the currency is depreciating by 10% per year, then you shouldn’t care about having debt at 5% interest.  After all, you are paying back the loan in a depreciating currency.  This can even be an excuse to take on more debt because it means paying it back later on when the money isn’t worth as much.

There are several problems with advocating more debt because of an expectation of inflation.

First, if you have a loan with a 4% interest rate, you are paying that 4% interest for as long as you have the loan.  It is extra money going to the lender out of your pocket.  Whether or not the money is rapidly depreciating, the money is exiting your account and going to the account of the lender.

Now, there is a counter to this that it would be better to borrow money at 4% interest and to get a return of anything higher than this (less taxes owed on the gains).  If you can borrow at 4% and get a return of 8% on this money, then it makes sense.

But that leads to problem number two with advocating more debt.  You don’t know that you will be right.  Maybe inflation (monetary or price) will stop. Maybe the currency won’t depreciate as much as you think.  Maybe the assets you buy won’t go up in value, even nominally.

There were people predicting runaway price inflation in 2009 with the Fed’s reaction to the financial crisis.  There are people still predicting runaway price inflation in Japan due to the massive government debt-to-GDP and the easy money policies from the Bank of Japan.  So far, they have been wrong.

Sure, if I knew that gold was going to go to $20,000 per ounce in the next 10 years, then I would borrow money at a low interest rate and buy as much gold as I could. But I have no idea that this will happen.

While I suspect that we will see higher price inflation in the future and that certain assets will go up in price, I really don’t know for sure.  This is why we diversify.  Diversification isn’t just about the investments that you buy. It also means diversifying your situation, which includes not overloading yourself with debt.

The best financial diversification is to have absolutely no debt and to have money left over to invest in assets that perform well in an inflationary environment.  You are protected either way with inflation or deflation.

Gold is an inflation hedge.  Paying off debt is a deflation hedge.  Paying off debt also just makes good sense.  The worst-case scenario with paying off debt is that you could have used the money for something else to get a higher return.

Mortgage Debt

I am currently refinancing my mortgage.  My current rate is just below 4%, and I have a little over 19 years left on it.

I was looking to refinance to a 20-year mortgage.  I could pay it off in about the same time while lowering my monthly payments.

However, when I was looking at rates in late 2020, the rates for a 15-year fixed mortgage were much better.  I have locked in a rate table that includes a rate as low as 2% on a 15-year loan.  This would include paying points (additional closing costs).

As of right now, I am going to refinance to a 15-year mortgage even though my payment will go up slightly (less than $100 per month, even with rolling in closing costs). I will pay off my mortgage in 15 years instead of in 19 and a half years.

I don’t know if this will turn out to be the mathematically optimal decision.  What I do know is that I think it is the right decision given what I know right now.

If I knew with absolute certainty that gold would go up 10% per year every year for the next two decades, then I would be better off doing a refinance into a 30-year loan.  I would also be better off taking out a large loan as a cash-out refinance.  The same goes if I knew that stocks or bonds would give this return in the future.

But I have no idea. I suspect that we will hit higher price inflation ahead and that gold will do well, but I am not certain.

What I am certain of is that I will pay my mortgage off in 15 years or less.  Even if we do hit much higher inflation, I will have locked in payments that I can afford.

I know there are people who are taking advantage of the low rates and refinancing into a 30-year mortgage.  There are people doing this even when they have owned their house for 5 or 10 years, or even longer. They’ll go from having, say, 20 years left on the loan, to restarting back at 30 years with a much lower payment.

While cash flow is important, I think it is shortsighted to do this in many cases.  You could keep refinancing back to a 30-year loan every 10 years and lowering your payment, but you will never actually get rid of the payment.  It is especially problematic when people do this and take cash out, thus pushing the loan balance higher again.  It is understandable for people who are really desperate and need the money, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do this if the money is being used for a new pool or new granite countertops in the kitchen.

There is no right answer to all of this.  Personal finance really is personal.  However, it is important to give proper thought to taking out more debt or even refinancing existing debt.

While I think everyone should prepare for higher price inflation ahead, you shouldn’t bet the farm on it.  This means not going into more debt on a possible false assumption that the currency you use will rapidly depreciate in the coming years.

If you want to become wealthy, you aren’t going to do this by continually taking on more debt. Debt can be useful in growing a business or buying real estate, but it should be used with careful thought.

We are in an information war right now.  The powers-that-be are trying to shut down all dissident voices.  These power players include the government, the corporate media, the social media giants, and big business in general.

There is a certain extent that media and corporations are complicit in shutting down anti establishment voices because they themselves feel threatened.  If you are a big company and you dare to go against the grain in the current climate, you could feel major repercussions just from the government.  This especially becomes the case when you receive any government money or any kind of favoritism.

It is tempting for libertarians and conservatives to want to quash censorship by relying on the government.  It is the only way that many of them see a solution.  But it is important to resist this temptation, as it is antithetical to liberty.  Also, why would you rely on the very people in government to make this right when they are the ones trying to silence you?

The establishment is getting its revenge on the people who dared to elect Donald Trump in 2016. They have been fighting an ongoing war against Trump since 2015.  Even though Trump surrounded himself by a bunch of swamp people, he has dared to tell the truth at times.  He has provided a much-needed voice to the underclass, or as Hillary Clinton would call them, the deplorables.

The war against Trump has mostly been against Trump for the last 5 years.  They ridicule him.  They lie about him.  They make a caricature of him.  They paint him in a bad light at every possible turn.  It’s not that Donald Trump doesn’t have his flaws. He has many.  But the establishment and its media will try to make Trump look as bad as possible virtually all of the time.

Before Trump took office, there were fake allegations that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.  Some of his closest advisors were prosecuted for things that most people couldn’t even tell you about.  The truth is that they were prosecuted because they were a threat to the establishment.  They were a threat to reveal truths about the swamp, and they were a threat because some of them wanted to reduce the U.S. empire.

There were continuous allegations against Trump for four years in office.  He was impeached in December 2019 for a phone call with the president of Ukraine where Trump asked him to look into the Biden family (and for good reason).  When I wrote a summary of 2020, I actually forgot to include the impeachment saga, as the Senate did not acquit him until February 2020.  Isn’t it odd that it never came up once as a question in one of the main presidential debates?

Trump seemed to slide by everything.  Sure, the establishment media convinced half the population that Trump is a horrible person and that most of our problems are a result of him.  But close to the other half of the country remained in line with Trump, or at least sympathized with him.  They understood that Trump was a little different from the ruling class, and Trump himself had helped to show that the ruling elite were in it for themselves.

After the November 2020 election, Trump continued to claim that he won.  He continued to claim that there was massive election fraud, and a great percentage of his followers believed it then and still believe it now.

On January 6, 2021, it came to a climax when hundreds of thousands of people showed up in Washington DC to protest the certification of Joe Biden as the next president. The bizarre twist came when people went past the barriers and were on the grounds of the Capitol building. It is hard to say if there were outside agitators who initially led the way, but I have no doubt that there were some Trump supporters who actually entered the Capitol building.

In the grand scheme of things, there may have been a few hundred protesters to enter the building out of possibly a million people.

It was a bad idea for several reasons.  Unfortunately, this is what got all of the attention.  Because a few hundred people got goaded into entering the Capitol building, it sparked a full movement of censorship against anti establishment forces.

The politicians and their media lie constantly.  Sometimes they don’t outright lie, but they propagandize constantly to distort the truth.  It is the same thing as they do to get support for a war.  George W. Bush never actually said that Iraq was responsible for the attacks on 9/11, but he often conflated the two things to give the impression that Saddam Hussein was partially responsible.

In this case, they say that Trump incited violence and insurrection.  The media is trying to paint anyone who is a Trump supporter as some kind of domestic terrorist.  This is especially laughable given the media’s support for the massive violence that occurred in the summer of 2020 in major cities across America.

So anyone who attended the Trump rally/ protest is being painted as a bad person, even if they did not step foot on the Capitol building.  There is a full attack to shun people from society who in any way supports Trump or even questions the establishment and its motives.

From 2015 to January 6, 2021, most of the effort was to get Trump and bring him down.  He was the face of the anti establishment movement.  On January 6, 2021, the war shifted from Trump to his 75 million supporters.  Maybe the war was always really against his supporters, but up until this time, it was mostly personalized against Trump and those close to Trump.  Now it is against a whole segment of society.

An Echo Chamber

While I don’t want the government to control social media, I am highly critical of what is going on. We should demand that these companies get no government funding for anything.

I see some people cheering on the censorship.  These are people that don’t like Trump.  They don’t understand what they are cheering for.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have banned Trump.  They would rather do this and lose money from people who will no longer use their platform.  Perhaps the scariest thing is the actions taken against Parler, which is a competitor.  Apple, Google, and Amazon have all taken steps to close down Parler.  As of right now, Parler’s website is not functional.

It’s not that Parler allows threats of violence on its platform.  It’s that it is a place where people are free to post what they want as long as they aren’t inciting any kind of violence.  But because it is becoming a place for conservatives and libertarians to go, it had to be shut down.  The powers-that-be can’t have dissident voices out there.

To be clear, it’s not even that Parler is a platform for conservatives.  It’s just that it is attracting people who are being shut out of Facebook and Twitter.

The people who are cheering on this censorship apparently want to live in an echo chamber. They don’t want to hear any opposing views.  It might confuse them.

If you ban contrarian views from Facebook and Twitter, then people are going to find some other outlet.  The establishment can keep trying to attack the competition, but people are going to find a way to be heard, even if they are just being heard by others who agree with them.

Conservatives and libertarians understand opposing views for the most part, even if they don’t agree with them.  It can be hard to understand why people may hold these views, but the views are understood.

The same can’t be said for much of the left and for the establishment in general.  The ruling elite may understand, but the average person on the street doesn’t understand these anti establishment views.  They just listen to the caricatures that are drawn up by the establishment media.

There are tens of millions of people out there who get 99% of their information from the establishment media.  They watch the news on television.  They read establishment sources on the internet.  A few may still read the newspaper.  They are bombarded with the same views over and over again. So when they hear it repeated a hundred times that Trump incited violence, then it must be true to them.

There is a total lack of curiosity.  They may see the occasional dissident voice on Facebook.  They can’t even entertain the possibility of another opinion being on to something.

This is why someone who isn’t in hysterics over the coronavirus must be evil or stupid. They have heard hundreds of times from their trusted media that the virus is very deadly and dangerous and we must obey the mask mandates and social distancing as directed.

To be sure, we are better off today than in previous decades.  30 or 40 years ago, you watched television and read the newspaper.  It was a complete echo.  Now there are alternative news sources, but you have to be a little curious and open-minded to look at them.

The reason there is such disunity is because a lot of people don’t believe the lies of the ruling class.  There is seeming unity in North Korea.  There was unity in the Soviet Union.  Nobody questioned the official narrative or else they risked being erased from society, whether it be by death or a concentration camp.

Now, the ruling elite are trying to erase those who don’t accept the official narrative. They can’t get away with concentration camps or death in most cases, so they turn to censorship.  They want to shut people up.  They want to ban information.  They want to scare people into silence.

In the long run, it isn’t going to work.  It’s not to say that we don’t have a tough road ahead of us.

As I’ve been repeating for several months, the tens of millions of Trump supporters aren’t going away.  You can pretend that they don’t exist, but it doesn’t make it so.  While many of them may be misguided in some aspects and not fully able to articulate a position of liberty, they do understand that the ruling elite is their enemy.  This is an important realization that the other half of the country does not understand.  Instead, the people who preach unity and dutifully obey their rulers are the serfs.  They are enslaving themselves.  They are helping to enslave all of us to a certain degree.  They are being duped, and they have no idea.  They can’t see through the echo chamber.  When they are lied to enough on a constant basis, they can’t comprehend that they may be being lied to.  It would rattle their entire worldview.

The empire (the establishment) has struck back.  They have gotten their revenge in 2020 and the beginning of 2021.  They got the hysteria they wanted with a virus.  They got unprecedented government controls.  Now they are painting Trump supporters as violent people.  They are trying to block the free flow of information.

In the long run, it isn’t going to work.  There are too many people who have woken up to the reality that the ruling class is not working for them.  The people in the echo chamber will occasionally hear alternative viewpoints. A few of them will be rattled and will have to rethink their view of the world.

While part of human nature wants to trust people and seek safety, I believe the thirst for liberty will overwhelm this.  Liberty is part of human nature.  That is an idea that cannot be permanently silenced.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” ~John F. Kennedy

As a libertarian, I have a lot of mixed feelings about what happened in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.  It is mostly libertarians who wonder when the American people are going to pick up their theoretical pitchforks and head to DC, but I have never been one to preach this.

Violence begets violence.  There are times to use violence when it is in self-defense.  Otherwise, it should be avoided by anyone who seeks peace.

As a libertarian, I understand that the state (i.e., the government) is a violent institution. The very definition of the state is that it has a legal monopoly on the use of violence.  We often don’t see violence employed, but the threat is there.  What the state tells you to do is not typically a suggestion.  It is a requirement backed up by the use of force.

Still, I don’t think the storming of the Capitol Building can be justified as self-defense. I understand it was to intimidate politicians, most of whom I dislike.  I understand that it was a government building (taxpayer funded) that was briefly occupied and a little bit damaged.

The problem is that these rulers are ruling by the implicit consent of the people.  I would even go so far as to say that most of the people at that rally, including the few who entered the Capitol Building, consent to the system to a certain degree.  They may want to remake the system, but they wanted their guy in as president.  I wonder how many people at that rally favor ending government schools.  I wonder how many don’t believe in the government’s Social Security system.  I wonder how many want to remove all troops from overseas.

Don’t get me wrong. I am sympathetic to the cause for which many of the protesters went to DC.  It is not surprising that there was finally a little bit of violence employed by the Trump side after enduring so much.  With that said, I think it was a very bad idea to storm the Capitol Building.  I’m not sure what it accomplished other than losing at least one life and losing a lot of sympathy from others.

I want to be clear that this is the fault of those who stormed the building.  Even though I think it was a stupid decision, I don’t think most of these people are bad people.  They got caught up in a mob mentality.  Revolution sounds like a fun thing, especially when you are angry at the situation.

It would not surprise me if there were provocateurs in the crowd.  It also seemed much too easy for the crowd to just walk by the police and get into the building.  I have seen speculation that at least one of the first people to go in is actually from Antifa.  You can find anything on the internet, but I also wouldn’t doubt that this is possibly true.  I do believe that most of the followers were probably actual Trump supporters.

The woman who was shot and killed was killed execution style.  She was going through a broken window.   She was not going in to hurt anyone.  There was no reason to shoot her except to send a message.  I believe in proportionality, and this was not proportional.  I believe the person (police officer or secret service agent) who fired that gun should be charged in her murder.

The woman took a risk doing what she did, and she paid for it with her life.  It is the saddest part of what happened that day, at least to me.

Glaring Hypocrisy

When watching the corporate media report on this, I couldn’t help constantly drawing comparisons to what happened across the country in major cities throughout the summer. The protests and riots that destroyed several blocks of several cities were put in a rather different light than what happened at the Capitol.

I believe this is for two reasons.  One is obvious, which is that the BLM/ Antifa riots were a leftwing cause, so they were treated favorably.  What happened in DC on January 6 came from mostly pro Trump people.

The second reason, I believe, is that the attacks throughout the summer of 2020 were mostly against private property.  There were some police stations attacked and city halls, but private businesses and private housing sustained the vast majority of the damage. The temporary siege of the Capitol was government property.  It is a sacred symbol of our democracy, or so say the powers-that-be.  It showed a vulnerability of the state. It showed that the state relies on the consent of the governed, and it was briefly rattled.

As previously discussed, the woman shot dead was only entering a window.  She was not pointing any weapons.  She didn’t have a flamethrower in her hand. Yet, with all of the riots across America, I’m not sure that one person was ever killed by the police for vandalizing, looting, arson, or attacking others.  It took a 17-year old kid to kill a couple of people who were attacking him, with the police seemingly nowhere to be found.

The establishment media is completely contradicting themselves from what happened half a year ago.  They called this domestic terrorism, but they couldn’t seem to find those words for the rioters in downtowns across the country.

Some have suggested that the people entering the Capitol all should have been shot dead.  Were these same people calling for all people to be shot dead who were breaking store windows, lighting cars and buildings on fire, and looting private property?  The question answers itself.

Meanwhile, the entire establishment is condemning Trump for what happened, even though Trump wasn’t telling anyone to do this.  Sure, he was constantly complaining about election fraud, but it doesn’t mean he should take the blame for the result of what happened.

Trump reiterated that there was election fraud and told the people to go home in peace.  This wasn’t enough for his critics of course, but nothing would have been enough.  But back in late May and June when cities were burning, did Obama or Biden or Harris make a call for non-violence?  Again, the question answers itself.  Harris was too busy helping to post bail for the few rioters who were arrested.

Mike Pence and Election Fraud

I am not sure if the storming of the Capitol would have happened if Pence hadn’t made the announcement that he did prior to the Congressional certification process.

You can read Pence’s letter.  While I believe there was significant fraud, I actually tend to believe that Pence got it right. The vice president cannot overturn an election.  Perhaps he could have delayed the certification more and held more hearings.  But you don’t want to set a precedent where the vice president, as president of the Senate, can overturn the electoral votes sent by the states.

If the vice president had this kind of power, don’t you think that Joe Biden, as vice president at the time, would have just declared Hillary Clinton to be the victor in the 2016 presidential election?

I try to put myself in the position of others to see if I am being fair.  What if Ron Paul had been cheated out of an election because of the vote counting in certain swing states?  On the contrary, what if Ron Paul had won and had the majority of electors and the vice president tried to overturn it?

I think we need to stick with decentralization.  I’m sure there was fraud in Georgia and Michigan.  I’m sure that Pennsylvania broke its own laws. But it really does need to be handled at the state level.  There is some responsibility that goes to Trump for not being prepared and having more players on the ground to prevent this type of thing.  If the Trump people are mad and want revenge, then start taking over state legislatures to prevent this type of thing in the future.

Republican Hypocrites

While I generally think Pence did the right thing in this situation, I understand why Trump and his supporters feel betrayed by Pence.  But again, Trump has to take some responsibility for this. Trump could have picked anyone as his running mate in 2016.  He chose Mike Pence, an establishment guy.  He also chose a bunch of people who opposed his agenda for his cabinet.

Elaine Chao just resigned as Transportation Secretary.  She is the wife of Mitch McConnell.  I haven’t liked the woman since she was in the Bush administration.  Again, it’s Trump’s fault for picking a person who probably despises Trump.

Why did Chao resign right after the events of January 6?  She already knew that Trump heavily disputed the election results. Trump didn’t tell people to take the Capitol.  He was doing the same thing on January 6 as he had been doing all along.  So it was really the result of what happened that caused her to resign.  She saw her political opportunity, and she took it.  The Republicans should forever keep her locked out of politics, and they should do the same to her husband.

Also, there were several Republicans in Congress who were going to raise objections to the electoral votes.  But after the brief takeover of the Capitol, they said it seemed inappropriate.

Wait a minute. If you think the election was stolen, how does that change based on the events that took place that day? Or do these politicians still think it was stolen but no longer want to cause any disruptions?  It doesn’t make much sense except that they are lying hypocrites.

As I’ve been saying all along, the 70 million plus who voted for Donald Trump are not going away. Most of them are peaceful people, but they aren’t going to “unite”.  When Biden and company say they want unity, they mean that they want everyone to fall in line and follow the edicts of their rulers.  Not everyone likes this plan.

Everyone has their breaking point, but apparently many people have yet to hit theirs, even with the lockdowns of 2020 and beyond.  In less than a year, many people, perhaps a majority, have basically accepted totalitarianism in the United States.

There isn’t a breaking point for some, especially those well off and those who work for the government and get a guaranteed paycheck.  The breaking point for many government workers is the funding of their agency and their job.

If some of these governors keep on destroying their states, they will find an increasingly shrinking tax base.  You can’t keep sucking money out of people when they either move out of state or are not working. If the federal government stops bailing out state and local governments, then maybe the politicians in the lockdown states will finally open things up when they are looking at steep budget cuts.

I feel more insecure going forward, knowing that the American people will just submit to authoritarianism because they are told lies by the authoritarians.

I was accustomed to this when it comes to war.  The politicians, the media, and the “intelligence” agencies can just make up any story to justify a war.  Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.  Assad gassed his own people.  Libya is supporting terrorism.  The excuse hasn’t mattered much.  The people willingly go along and give the military a green light.

When it comes to war though, it happens overseas.  The American people suffer no direct consequences for being wrong and for submitting to authoritarianism.  They don’t even have their taxes hiked.  They pay for it through monetary inflation (dollar depreciation), but most people don’t understand this or think it through.  So the politicians get away with lying about war.

I didn’t think they could get away with implementing authoritarianism at home.  It isn’t on the same scale as a war, as governments are generally not directly killing people.  But the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders have been devastating nonetheless, and they have shattered many millions of lives.

It is easy for a Hollywood celebrity to take a video telling everyone that “we’re all in this together”.  They say this in their giant house with the big pool in the background.

Where are the advocates for the hundreds of thousands of small business owners who were forced to shut their businesses?  Many of these are permanent.  Where is the political left?  These are the people who decry inequality and big corporations. The lockdowns that most of the left have supported have created greater inequality, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  They have also destroyed small businesses to the benefit of large corporations.

Dying With a Vaccine, Dying of COVID

Now that vaccines are being pushed, it is inevitable that there will be side effects.  These will include reactions and likely even death.  But it isn’t always easy to identify cause and effect.  This is something that the COVID hysterics won’t admit to when it comes to the virus.

There are establishment outlets warning that just because someone dies after taking a vaccine, it doesn’t mean that they died of the vaccine.  When you have thousands of people getting vaccinated every single day, including many elderly people, you are going to have a few people who would have died anyway.

Yes.  This is what they are actually saying.  In other words, they’re saying the exact same thing that others of us have been trying to point out since March 2020 about COVID-19.  It’s mostly old people and really unhealthy people dying “of” COVID-19, according to the CDC. The people who are supposedly dying of COVID are people who generally die.

So this is the logic of the COVID hysterics.  If you get a COVID vaccine and die, it is a coincidence.  The person would have died anyway.  If you test positive for COVID and die, then you died because of COVID.  There is no way you would have died without it.

When people buy this kind of logic, perhaps they deserve to be enslaved.

We’re still waiting on the final mortality numbers for 2020, but they look to be somewhat in line with what would have been expected without any “pandemic”.  If anything, it looks like it was younger people who saw an increase of mortality due to things like depression, suicide, and drug overdoses.

Admittedly, it gets tricky because there are a lot of variables with people staying at home more.  There are probably fewer traffic fatalities, but more depression-related deaths.  There were probably some people who survived because they didn’t go to a hospital or doctor’s office (medical mistakes are frequent), while others died prematurely because they didn’t go.

But when you look at the more open states within the United States, and you look at relatively open countries, the overall mortality isn’t significantly higher than usual, and they are not higher than the lockdown places.  We’ll hopefully get better data for the year 2020 in the coming weeks, but the point is that this isn’t much of a pandemic at all.  It is only a pandemic in fear and hysteria.

The Breaking Point of Small Business Owners

The hardest hit people are those who have lost work and those who own businesses that were shut down.  For people who already worked at a low wage, they can probably find a replacement job in most cases.  Plus, the generous (generous by politicians using other people’s money) unemployment benefits are oftentimes paying a higher wage anyway.

I can imagine someone who was making $100,000 per year and supporting a family.  If that person loses their job, it would be quite difficult, as the unemployment payments won’t nearly cover the previous salary.

I believe the hardest hit are the small business owners.  Imagine owning a small clothing store.  You get shut down, while people go to Walmart or Target down the road, which are deemed “essential”.  But when you got to Walmart or Target, it is not as if the clothing departments were closed down and you could only buy groceries and household products.  Customers could still walk out of the big stores with clothing.

Restaurants have to be the hardest hit businesses.  This is especially true for restaurants that made most of their money from dine-in customers.  It’s easier for a fast food place to still make decent revenues from drive through services.

I have a lot of empathy for these business owners.  Thug politicians are putting them out of business.  But the people are enabling this.  They are consenting to the power acquired by these governors and mayors.  They aren’t all consenting, but there are enough of them that are.

These business owners are having their livelihood taken away from them.  It is very difficult to start and sustain a successful business. This is especially true for brick and mortar businesses.  They require a lot of startup capital too.

For many of these restaurant owners, they are seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars that they have saved and spent over the years vanishing with one unlawful executive order.

While I have a lot of empathy, they still have decisions to make.  For those in places like New York City or California, they probably should have seen the writing on the wall years earlier.  There is no way they could have predicted what would happen in 2020, but the creeping totalitarianism was evident.  The incredibly confiscatory taxation levels have long been a sign of trouble.

At what point do these people fold and move and never return?  If I lived in California, I would be doing everything in my power to get any money I can for what I have left.  I would move out of the state and never return.  It is hard to close down your business, especially if you have devoted years or decades of your life to it.  But at some point, you cannot deny reality.

I am not typically one who says we should just give up our fight for liberty and let everything go to hell.  At the same time though, you can’t keep fighting an uphill battle where you know you won’t win. The business owners in these non-business friendly states and cities are in a no-win situation other than just leaving.

If you lived in the Soviet Union in 1970, or if you lived in Nazi Germany in 1940, it probably wouldn’t have been wise to stay and fight for liberty.  At some point, the only option is to leave.

These business owners are Atlas.  They feel the weight of the world on their shoulders.  They just need to shrug.

I never could have predicted what happened in the year 2020, so perhaps making predictions is futile. However, predictions aren’t only for fun.  They also don’t necessarily have to be accurate to be useful.

One thing that Harry Browne wrote about in his book Fail-Safe Investingwas to take predictions and test them against your portfolio.  In other words, if you read a good article that seems plausible, predicting a stock market crash in the near future, you don’t have to base your decisions on whether it will be true.  You need to base your decisions on whether you are prepared if it does come true.

The same would be the case for a lot of scenarios.  If someone is predicting a new great depression, or a monetary crisis, or massive inflation, or a spike in interest rates, or all of the above, you should look at your portfolio to see if it will hold up if the person’s predictions come true.

The same goes for life.  While your investment portfolio is important (if you have one), your overall quality of life is even more so.

So when we talk about predictions for the coming year or the different possibilities, you can derive benefit whether they come true or not.  It is best to ask yourself if you are prepared if one or more things does come true.  This preparedness applies mentally, physically, emotionally, and financially.

Politics

My first prediction is that Joe Biden will take office on January 20, 2021.  I know that Trump and many Trump supporters are still contesting the outcome.  I have little doubt that there was significant election fraud in the big cities in swing states.  This is especially true for Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. There were also a lot of unlawful changes made in states prior to the election regarding mail-in ballots.

I know there will be objections in the Senate coming up.  I know some Trump supporters have laid out a path to victory. But the entire establishment is against Trump, and I don’t think he has the structure in place to overturn the currently reported votes in the swing states.

If I am wrong and Trump ends up staying in office, then all bets are off the table.  This would change everything.  There would be mass rioting.  There would be a doubling-down on the virus hysteria, if that’s even possible.  So if something happens over the next few weeks where Trump is actually victorious, then prepare for total chaos.  I give it less than a 5% chance though.

Assuming Biden takes office, I don’t think he’ll last long.  How many people are cringing every time he is live on camera? He can’t get through more than a couple of minutes without sounding stupid or lost in space.  I don’t see how he will give a coherent State of the Union address, but maybe they’ll drug him up and he can surprise me.

They’ll let Biden take a spin on Air Force One and take some nice family pictures at the White House. Maybe they’ll let him meet briefly, in a controlled environment, with a few foreign leaders.  Overall, they’ll try to limit Biden’s time speaking in front of a camera to as little as possible.

It’s hard to say if he’ll last a year or a couple of years.  I highly doubt he will last for the full four years.  I give it a better than 50% chance that we will see a president named Kamala Harris.

When the time comes, Biden will graciously go before the cameras and state that he is stepping down due to health reasons or family reasons.  I’m just not sure whether it will happen in 2021.

COVID-19 Hysteria

When I listen to other libertarians or conservatives who believe the coronavirus story is largely propaganda (hyped up by the media), I hear two main possible outcomes, assuming Trump leaves office.

The first outcome is that the lockdowns and restrictions continue, or even get worse, as long as enough people permit them to happen.  The governors and mayors have newfound dictatorial powers, so why would they let them go?  Politicians love power, and they gained tremendous power in 2020.  They will continue to make the virus sound as bad as possible and keep people living in a state of fear.  When people are fearful, they are easier to control.

The second outcome is that Biden gets into office and makes a few token moves.  He’ll “ask” everyone to wear a mask for 100 days. If anything, this might lead to less mask wearing out of rebellion, but he’ll attribute any improvements to his policies and the vaccines.  They can easily change the sensitivity of the PCR tests, thus driving the positive cases way down.  After a few months in office, with the end of winter (which is typically the end of flu season), Biden can declare victory over the virus and we can start going back to a normal (pre March 2020) life.

Both arguments are plausible.  They are both reasonable for a libertarian to make.  I originally thought the second outcome would happen, but it has surprised me just how extensive the lockdowns have been.  It is true that these politicians love their newly acquired power.  At the same time, there are going to be fiscal budgetary problems with state and local governments.  They will get some bailout money from the federal government, but at some point they will want to start collecting tax money again where it previously was.  It would also look bad for Biden if everything just gets worse for the next several years.

My best prediction here is that it will be a combination of the two scenarios outlined above. I think Biden will issue a few orders to make it look like he’s doing something more than Trump.  He will continue to tout the vaccines. Over time, the restrictions will be loosened.  Some states will loosen quicker than others.  But we aren’t going back to pre March 2020 any time soon.  The mayors and governors will keep a hold of their power.  They will generously allow 50% capacity at some establishments, or something like that.  They will ease the burdens on small business owners, but they will not completely go away in many places.

I expect the mask hysteria to continue for a long time.  It is a form of obedience.  When someone wears a mask, it demonstrates that the person is an obedient citizen.  They are listening to “the science” (i.e., the establishment media).

I wish I had better news here.  I feel fortunate to live in Florida.  If you live in California or New York, you should have already made your exit. People’s lives are being ruined. Many people are depressed. Kids are having their childhood robbed of them.

The Economy

I have been predicting a crash in stocks for too long now.  The bubble has expanded bigger than I thought would happen. I already thought it was a bubble in late 2019.  After massive lockdowns for much of 2020, with hundreds of thousands of small businesses closed and millions of newly unemployed people, stocks are booming.

Well, the big stocks are booming.  This has caused the indexes to go wild.  The heavily weighted stocks (think Amazon and Apple) have a major impact on the broad market.  There’s no question that tech stocks have benefitted from the lockdowns, at least in the short run.

But the rise in stock prices is beyond ridiculous at this point.  I expect a massive crash at some point, but we don’t know if it will happen in 2021.  I expect it will, but you never know with the Federal Reserve right now. The Fed’s balance sheet grew by over $3 trillion in 2020.  If the new money keeps flowing, then it could keep the stock bubble going for a while longer.

Going back to Harry Browne, it isn’t a question of whether stocks are about to crash any day now. It is a question of whether your portfolio is prepared in the event that they do crash.  I know some people are going to get burned badly.  I cringe when I hear people talking about putting a big chunk of money in Tesla, or even in an index fund.  I also cringe when I hear people getting into Bitcoin for the first time.  This is another major bubble.

It is best not to get swept up in the mania.  If you want to gamble, you should set aside a small amount for speculation and use only that.  I still recommend a permanent portfolio, or something similar in nature.

I think interest rates will stay low as long as price inflation expectations remain relatively low.  I do believe we will see price inflation pick up at some point, but it is hard to say how much of it will be reflected in the CPI statistics.  Right now, much of the new money created by the Fed is being used to bid up stock prices and housing prices in the suburbs.

Assuming Trump leaves office on January 20, 2021, he may look back later on and be thankful. I think the economy will be a mess over the next four years.  I don’t expect a complete collapse, but there will be rough times ahead for tens of millions of Americans.  There are already rough times now, and it will get worse for many.

The government continues to spend recklessly.  It doesn’t matter who is president.  It doesn’t matter which party controls Congress.  The deficits keep going higher.   The debt keeps going to new ridiculous levels.  The consequences of this and the lockdowns have only begun.  The next four years will be tough, and it won’t be fun for the president. We will likely see some kind of financial crisis and/ or massive price inflation scenario.

Control Your Own Destiny

Regardless of what happens this year, you can only control what you can control.  You can predict everything right, but it won’t matter if you don’t prepare for it.

I do believe that one’s mentality plays a major role in dealing with crisis.  While the events of 2020 were surprising to me, they didn’t catch me completely unprepared.  Sure, I could have owned a bit more toilet paper back in March, but I was relatively calm in the face of it all.  I saw through the propaganda from the beginning, which helped my state of mind.  I saw so many people panicking and living in major fear.  My main fear was the reaction of society.  I wasn’t afraid of a virus though, so I didn’t have that hanging over me as so many others did.  This was a great benefit.

While there are tough roads ahead, and we should fight for our liberty, it is especially important just to take care of yourself and your family.  And the more freely that you can live your life, the more impact it will have for others.  You can be an example for others on not being afraid and being mentally prepared for tough times.

Here’s to a better 2021 than 2020.  I will remain optimistic and realistic at the same time.

At the beginning of 2020, I was expecting a recession this year and an interesting presidential election.  We technically got those things, but it sure played out a lot differently than I expected. We got more than was bargained for.

In March, we saw the establishment eliminate Bernie Sanders from contention of the presidency. The Democratic Party establishment gave the typical accusation that the Russians were helping Sanders, and Sanders weakly responded saying that there would be no Russian interference on his watch.  Sanders showed himself, once again, to be a tool of the establishment.

The other establishment candidates dropped out right before Super Tuesday and rallied behind Biden. They followed their orders dutifully.  Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race because too many of her supporters may have gone towards Sanders.

Sanders got played again.  This time, the Democratic Party put its hopes in Joe Biden, a now 78-year old lifetime politician who can barely string two coherent sentences together.  But the powers-that-be only needed a figure that would represent the anti Trumpers.  Nobody actually voted for Biden.  They voted against Trump.

The Democratic primaries got almost no attention after Super Tuesday.  In early March, the coronavirus hysteria began.  It is still amazing how fast life changed for everyone.  Even more surprising is that we have to wonder if some of it is permanent.  I live in open Florida where you still feel like you’re in a hospital when you go to the grocery store.

The Hysteria Begins

The coronavirus hysteria (not the coronavirus) is the biggest story of the year.  The biggest consequences now and down the road are the loss of liberty and the economic devastation.

There are tens of millions of people in poverty who have been pushed back even closer to the brink of starvation because of arbitrary government rules in response to the coronavirus hysteria.  This is especially the case in third-world countries.  But even in a relatively wealthy place like the United States, there are millions of newly unemployed people and hundreds of thousands of small businesses that have closed down.  With all of the new debt and monetary inflation piled up in response, the economic devastation will be felt for years to come.

We were told originally that there was a 3 to 4 percent mortality rate, or some close variation of that.  I knew it was a lie right away.  It was coming from the same lying media that lies about wars and lies about almost anything political of significance.  It was also easy to spot the lie because they were using bad statistics. They were simply counting the people who died divided by the number of people who tested positive.  But early on in China, the people testing positive were the people who were already really sick.

But the establishment had its handpicked experts of epidemiologists and scientists to say what they wanted them to say.  These were the only opinions that mattered according to the corporate media, and they wanted to make our lives as miserable as possible, especially given that Trump was still president.

Things have only gotten more insane since that time with nearly everyone walking around with a mask on.  I see toddlers with a mask on.  I see people driving alone with a mask on.  I see people walking outside with a mask on.  It’s pure stupidity or virtue signaling or both.

Protests and Riots

Then came the end of May and the death of George Floyd.  For a brief period of time, the coronavirus didn’t matter any more.  I thought that would be the end of the coronavirus hysteria, but I underestimated the stupidity and gullibility of people.

If you left your house for anything deemed “non-essential” from mid March to mid May, then you wanted to kill someone’s grandmother.  But when thousands of people were protesting and/or rioting in the streets, there was no longer a threat to grandma.  It was ok because it was for social justice.  It was for something really important.  In other words, according to the corporate media, it wasn’t important for a business owner losing their business, or a worker losing their job.

The rioting, burning of buildings, looting, and other destructions of property went on for many weeks or more in the big cities.  In many cases, the police were told to stand down.  The people trying to defend their property were often labeled as the bad guys.

After a while, the rioting started to look somewhat bad for the left.  So it stopped in enough time before the election while Biden and his establishment media tried to flip the script.  It was really the Trump people who wanted rioting and chaos.  The left wanted peace and harmony.  It’s hard to make this stuff up.

The Establishment Media

In the lead up to the election in November, the establishment media did everything it could to cover for Joe Biden and make Trump look as bad as possible.  It wasn’t anything new that the media was trashing Trump for anything it could find.  The amazing thing was that the media was just flat out ignoring major stories.

The biggest story was that of Hunter Biden and his infamous laptop.  It would be understandable if it just exposed Hunter Biden as a creep and nothing else.  Of course, the media wouldn’t ignore such a story about one of Donald Trump’s children, but at least it would be somewhat understandable.  But the information basically showed that Joe Biden knew everything that was going on and was receiving kickbacks from foreign countries for doing favors while vice president.  Now that the election is over, it’s no surprise that Hunter Biden was already under investigation and the media will make mention of some of his troubles.

The biggest story here though is not Hunter Biden or even Joe Biden.  The biggest story is the establishment media’s total cover up of anything that could possibly hurt Biden’s chances of winning.

Election Chaos

The election itself was no surprise.  The establishment took control over the swing states to the degree it was possible.  Many rules were changed in the name of coronavirus safety (that seems to be a theme now). Mail-in ballots allowed for more voting and more fraud.

On the night of the election, the swing states just stopped counting their votes.  Then, in the early morning, the vote “counting” resumed.  This was particularly the case in the major cities in swing states (Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Atlanta).  When people woke up Wednesday morning, it all of a sudden looked like Joe Biden would win. He pulled off a miracle.

Trump is still not conceding and is looking at any possible avenue to overturn the media’s anointment of Biden as president-elect.  The drama will continue into 2021, as will the lockdowns and the mask hysteria.

The country is even more divided at the end of 2020 as it was at the beginning of the year. It is more divided politically, and there is also a divide with the assessment of the coronavirus and the lockdowns.

Lockdowns Have Consequences

Again, I believe the biggest story is the loss of liberty and the economic consequences that are still to follow.

Governors and mayors have been given the power to shut down businesses on a whim.  They can pretty much make anything up that they want to now.  They can do it all in the name of public safety.

It could be the continuation of COVID-19.  It could be a mutated form of it.  It could be a new virus.  It could be climate change that is going to put us all under water in 5 years according to the “experts”.  You better follow the orders of your rulers if you want to be safe.

Then we have the fiscal disaster.  State and local governments are in trouble with their budgets, even more so than they were a year ago.  They are being bailed out to a certain degree by the federal government, but there are limits here.

The federal government is running deficits at an unprecedented pace.  The Federal Reserve has expanded its balance sheet by over $3 trillion this year, and we are nowhere near done.  The stock market has resumed its massive bubble after a brief down period in March and April.

There is going to be a massive depression or massive price inflation, or maybe both.  There are going to be massive defaults. The federal government’s defaults will mostly come in the form of depreciating money.  Sure, you’ll get your Social Security checks and your pension, but it won’t be worth much.

Some Optimism

From a libertarian standpoint, there is a little bit of good news out of all this.  Some people don’t buy all of the hype, or they at least don’t accept the lockdowns.  There are many people who should be more sympathetic to a libertarian message than before.  This should be especially true for small business owners.

Homeschooling has only increased in popularity, and the schools are seen more as daycare centers than learning centers.  While I was hoping for even more parents abandoning the government schools, at least we are headed in the right direction.

The same goes for college, where many people are realizing that they are paying tens of thousands of dollars per year for a mediocre education.  In many cases, it is more propaganda and brainwashing than it is education.

Even in the corporate world, many companies have realized that their productive employees can work just fine remotely.  Many will keep it this way.  They will save money not having to lease as much expensive office space.

I think the world needs to hear a principled libertarian message.  It is ripe for it.  This doesn’t mean defending restaurants by saying that outdoor dining doesn’t really spread the virus.  It means defending small businesses by defending the concept of private property rights and freedom of association.

The world needs to hear the message of liberty.  The rulers rely on the consent of the people.  If the general population no longer accepts the fear and hysteria, or at least accepts that the government can’t do anything good about it, then the support for the rulers will collapse.

The lockdowns and other restrictions are completely unnecessary and anti liberty.  They can only exist because enough people allow them to exist.  This is the message that needs to be told in 2021 and beyond.

In typical Trump fashion, he caused quite the ruckus on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning when he suddenly came out with somewhat opposition to the spending bill coming out of Congress.

It looked like it was a sure thing the day before.  Now that the election is over, Congress was able to agree on what they call a COVID-19 relief bill.  Others refer to it as a stimulus bill.

In typical Congress fashion, the $900 billion monstrosity was paired with an annual spending bill of $1.4 trillion.  This is a good way to sneak in a lot of extras for the lobbyists, especially when it is well over 5,000 pages.

Trump himself detailed some of the expenditures.

When money is going for gender programs in Pakistan, it might be a sign that there’s a problem.

I already wrote about the $900 billion portion.  It is largely a bailout of state and local governments.  Even the unemployment benefits and small business handouts are a bailout for the lockdown states, as these states are suffering disproportionately due to their own stupid policies.  I guess you could say that elections have consequences.

When I first discussed the bailout bill, there was no direct stimulus provision.  That has been added to this latest bill in the form of $600 payments for adults and $600 per dependent.  There are income limits that apply.

Trump is opposing this bill largely because he says that the stimulus is too small.  (Did you really think he would oppose it on moral grounds?  Did you think he would oppose it because it isn’t pro liberty?  Still, I’ll take what I can get.)

It is telling though that Trump is also pointing out the massive pork in the bill.  Some of the things are obviously very bad and should be evident to the average guy on the street.  All of the money going out in the form of foreign aid is ridiculous.  I think most people from any political party would agree here.  Now that Trump is less than a month away from leaving office, is he finally attempting a slight draining of the swamp in terms of spending?

Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue on Tuesday night was about the “relief” bill.  He listed many of the atrocities and even called out Lindsey Graham.  I have a feeling that Trump saw this or had wind of it beforehand.  If Trump is getting his information from Tucker Carlson, he could do a lot worse.  Sure, I wish Carlson were more libertarian on economic issues, but he is far superior to most other pundits in the corporate media.

I don’t know where it will go from here, but I’m glad Trump is giving us some more entertainment before leaving office, which I expect he will in less than a month.

Do the Math, UBI Makes More Sense

We’ll forget for a moment about the annual $1.4 trillion portion of the spending bill. Let’s just focus on the $900 billion.  A small part of that includes the $600 direct payments.

What if you just took all of the money and gave everyone living in the United States an equal amount?  There are about 330 million people in the United States.  That means it would be close to $3,000 per person.

If we use the round numbers above, it would be $2,727 per person.  This includes all children too.

That means, for a family of four, they would receive $10,908.

Imagine if they had sent direct payments with the original $2 trillion stimulus.  A family of four would have received over $24,000 the first time, and then another $10, 908 with the $900 billion.

So if all of the “stimulus” or “COVID-19 relief” spending had been divided up equally and sent out directly, a family of four would have received over $35,000 in 2020 alone.

Sure, there would be no business bailouts.  There would be no additional unemployment benefits from the federal government (there would still be state unemployment).  But if every person received at least $8,500, wouldn’t that have gone pretty far for most people?

It wouldn’t have discouraged working as much as the additional unemployment benefits did. And it wouldn’t have encouraged state and local governments to continue with brutal lockdown policies knowing that many businesses would get bailed out.

Don’t get me wrong here.  I am not an advocate of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).  It is anti liberty.  It is a violation of property rights.  It is a redistribution of wealth.  It is inflationary.  And to some degree, it is a misallocation of resources.

But here is what I am saying.  A UBI would be preferred to a typical spending bill coming out of Congress if it is an “either/ or” thing.  If the government is going to pass $3 trillion in spending legislation this year, most people would be far better off if the money were just divided up evenly and handed out directly to everyone.  It wouldn’t be fair, but it would be fairer.  It wouldn’t be a good use of resources, but it would be a better use of resources than sending money to Pakistan for gender studies.  It would even be better than using the money to bail out businesses.

Whenever you hear about the government spending another trillion dollars, just think of it as $3,000 for every individual.  If you have a family of four, just think that a one trillion dollar spending bill could have just meant $12,000 sent directly to your family.  If people would do some simple math, they might realize how bad they are getting ripped off.

I consider myself to be a radical libertarian.  Sometimes the word “radical” is seen as bad, but that depends on what you are being radical about.

If your child were kidnapped, would you “radically” demand a return of your child?  Or would you take a more “moderate” approach and request that you be able to see your child part of the time with certain restrictions applied?

The same goes with radical libertarianism.  I won’t apologize for being a radical.  I am radical in my philosophy of non-aggression.  I am radical in that I want peace and prosperity.  I am not demanding just somepeace and someprosperity.  While I may cheer some moves in the right direction, it doesn’t mean I accept that as the final result.  I will continue to promote all peace all the time, even if I know that won’t happen today and maybe never.

If you accept a certain level of authoritarianism, then don’t be surprised if you get it. This has been made especially clear in 2020.

The only way to beat back the lockdowns, restrictions, and other tyrannical measures that have come in 2020 is through radicalism.  I don’t mean radicalism necessarily in terms of taking action.  I mean radicalism with regard to what we are willing to accept.

We don’t need a large portion of the population to turn into radical libertarians in order to reverse all of the lockdown measures of 2020.  But we do need a large portion of the population to become radically libertarian on this one issue.

Let me give an example of how being a moderate can really hurt the cause.  A week or two ago, I was watching a California restaurant owner being interviewed on Fox News.  At that time, it had recently been announced that outdoor dining would no longer be allowed in many parts of California.

The restaurant owner stated that he understood why indoor dining had not been allowed.  But, he said, he had made accommodations for outdoor dining and he was following the protocols put in place by the governor. He said it wasn’t fair to ban outdoor dining and that his business was at risk of failing with the new shutdown.

I have heard similar stories from other restaurant owners.  I hear statistics about how very few coronavirus cases have been traced to restaurant dining.  I hear about how other businesses are not treated the same, or how an outdoor dining tent was allowed for another group of people.

I’m sorry, but this misses the point.  While I feel empathy towards these business owners, I also get really irritated with some of them.  I was particularly irritated when this one restaurant owner said he understood and accepted why indoor dining should be closed (by the state).

This business owner was signing his own death certificate.  He was making an argument in favor of the state’s lockdown powers, and I don’t even think he understood what he was doing.

This is the problem with too many people.  They try to compromise.  They try to be a “moderate”.  They try to sound “reasonable”.  That is what this guy was doing.  He was trying to sound reasonable.  But in the process, he was conceding the worst aspects of the whole thing. He was saying it is ok for the governor to control his business, as long as the measures put in place are reasonable.  But I’m sure the governor always can come up with a reason that is logical in his own mind.

The guy should have said that he owns the restaurant and that it is his property.  As the property owner, he should have the right to do as he pleases with it, whether that includes outdoor dining, indoor dining, or anything else.

I have talked about the issues of discrimination and voluntary association before.  I was a big critic of the state telling a baker that he had to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding.  It had nothing to do with being for or against gay people.  It had everything to do with property rights.

I have also said that a property owner should be able to discriminate on any basis.  This includes race, sex, religion, age, or anything else.  There should be no interference from the state.  It’s not to say that there might not be consequences from customers, but the law itself should not prohibit discrimination.

The reason is because of property rights.  It is the property owner’s right to use his property as he pleases, so long as he is not using aggression against others.

This is really the only defense against the lockdowns.  It is a violation of property rights and voluntary association.  If someone is fearful of the virus, they don’t have to go to a restaurant.  If a restaurant owner wants to close all dining, that is his business. If he wants to be completely open, that is his business.  It is up to customers on whether they want to go there.

I think statistics can be useful.  They can be useful in persuading others that the virus is not nearly as serious as they have been led to believe.  They can be used to show that lockdown countries or lockdown states are not necessarily any better off in terms of lower coronavirus cases or deaths.

But even here, they should be secondary arguments.  The primary argument should be one of liberty, which includes property rights.

When a restaurant owner argues that the coronavirus hasn’t been traced much to outdoor dining, then he is conceding his own property rights.  Because the implication is that if tracing did show outdoor dining to be a problem, then it would be ok for the governor or other state officials to shut down outdoor dining.

This is why many libertarians have been frustrating to listen to in 2020.  It is why the Libertarian Party presidential campaign was so ineffective.  They should have been making a clear case for property rights in the face of lockdowns, even if it is more of a state issue than a federal one.  It was the federal government recommending the lockdowns in the first place.  While there may have been some mild criticisms here and there of the lockdowns, they were weak and seemed almost secondary.

There are hundreds of thousands of businesses in the United States alone that have been shut down this year.  They need a voice. They need an example.  These business owners should all be libertarians by now.  They should be against government licensing now more than ever.  They should be against any state interference in business in any way so long as there is no aggression.

This is the moment libertarians have been waiting for.  People need a voice.  We have the right message that will resonate with people.  It does not lie in “moderation”.  We need radicalism more than ever.  We need a radical defense of liberty.  We need a radical defense of private property rights.  No business should be locked down for any reason ever so long as that business is not aggressing against anyone else.  This message needs to be repeated over and over again.  Even the business owners themselves need to hear it.

I saw reference to “Party Like It’s 1999” on CNBC on the morning of December 18, 2020.  They weren’t talking about a Prince song. They were talking about the boom in stocks.

I don’t know, seeing this caption, if there is irony there or not.  Was the implication just that stocks were booming?  Or was there an implication of a massive bubble ready to collapse?

I remember the tech boom of 1999 quite well.  All you had to do during that time was put a dot com after your company name and try to get it to go public.  Many of these companies boomed, even without having ever made a profit. Some of them barely had any revenue.

The tech boom in stocks came to an end in 2000.  Stocks in the Nasdaq plummeted.

It should be noted that the boom in technology never came to an end.  The ridiculous stock prices came to an end at that time. The profitable companies (or future profitable companies) survived.

Amazon

Amazon was part of the tech boom of the late 1990s.  It had started out as an online bookstore and quickly grew into the everything store.  While the stock price had its time of falling, the company moved ahead and the stock price went forward with it.

By the way, I had owned Amazon stock back then.  I believe it was actually my worst investment decision ever, looking back. The bad decision was in selling. I don’t remember exactly when I sold, but it was sometime in the 2000s.  I saw an old statement and I figured out that if I hadn’t sold, it would now be worth somewhere in the low six figures.  This was off an investment of maybe one to two thousand dollars.

Even though the profit margins are extremely low for Amazon, the massive volume makes it a profitable company.  There is some justification to its sky-high stock price.  It is important to note though that Amazon has benefitted consumers more than anyone.  We can talk about the billions Jeff Bezos has made.  We can talk about the many people who have become millionaires selling products on Amazon.  But there are hundreds of millions, maybe billions, who have massively benefitted from Amazon.

Consumers don’t always get cheaper prices, although that is one benefit.  It is a measuring stick for comparing prices and delivering competition.  Most of all, it has become a place of convenience, especially with the fast delivery.

Anyway, Amazon is the outlier.  I have no idea where its stock price goes from here.  But it has been a big beneficiary from the events of 2020, especially with many small businesses having been forced to close.

Nasdaq Up 42%

The other headline on CNBC that morning was that the Nasdaq is up 42% this year.  This would be ridiculous in any year.  It is especially ridiculous given what has happened in 2020.

The main thing that seems to matter in 2020 is the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet (which has skyrocketed).  The Nasdaq stocks have boomed more than other stocks because the lockdowns don’t impact tech stocks as much.  If anything, like the Amazon example, it has seemed to benefit some companies.

But we are at a point where nothing makes sense.  We have seen massive unemployment in 2020.  We have seen record deficits.  We have seen hundreds of thousands of small businesses shut down. And we were already at near record highs in stocks at the beginning of this in early March.

What the market is telling me is that the events of 2020 are good for stocks.  I don’t see how this can be true in the long term. Stocks investors are saying that the Fed’s massive monetary inflation has no ill effects.  It is all positive for corporate profitability.

Some people are spending more on Netflix and Amazon.  They are at home more and want entertainment.  Some people have more disposable income because they aren’t commuting to work and they aren’t going to the nail salon.  But on the other hand, you have millions of people who are now unemployed who previously weren’t.  You have many millions of more who have seen a reduction in pay or a reduction in hours.

I find it hard to believe that the events of 2020 are good for corporate profitability overall. Of course, this is assuming that profitability even matters, which it doesn’t seem to matter much these days.

However, there tends to be a reversion to the mean.  Profitability doesn’t seem to matter now, but if companies ultimately become unprofitable, this eventually gets reflected in the stock price. There is a reason we call them bubbles.  They aren’t supposed to make sense.

I wrote a post in January 2020 wondering when the Dow would hit 30,000.  I wondered the same about the Nasdaq hitting 10,000.  Once stocks started to fall in March, I didn’t think it would happen this year.  I was completely wrong.  It is incredible that the Dow has broken the 30,000 mark.

With the Nasdaq, not only did it break the 10,000 barrier, but it is now about 27% above that barrier.  I thought it was a bubble before it hit 10,000.  What we have now is a mega bubble.  There is a lot more to the Nasdaq than just Amazon.

When this thing blows, it is going to be devastating to a lot of people.  It could happen quickly too.  It takes a lot more time to inflate a balloon than it does to watch it pop.

The Fed will likely respond to such a crash with even more money created out of thin air. Believe it or not, there are limits here too.  We may get to see those limits.

Many of the lockdowns have not ended in the United States.  Some places are locking down harder.  This can’t be good for business overall.  We have barely begun to see the economic devastation.  It is hard to imagine that major corporations will not be caught up in this devastation. Stock prices can’t go up forever. At some point, we are going to see the correction of a lifetime.

With the approval and coming release of vaccines for COVID-19, there are questions on what the proper libertarian stance should be on this vaccine and vaccines in general. There is also a question of whether libertarians (or anyone else) should get the vaccine.

From a libertarian standpoint, it should obviously be voluntary on whether to get the vaccine or any other vaccine.  It is a personal decision.  Whether or not it is a good idea is a different matter.

There are a few self-identified libertarians out there who will argue that the state can compel vaccination because walking around unvaccinated can be seen as aggression. This is a major stretch at the very least, but I believe it is flat out wrong.

If you are walking around without a vaccine, then this is not aggressive behavior.  If you are sick and contagious and walking around trying to infect others, then this would be considered aggressive behavior. It is a little more questionable if you are sick but not purposely trying to infect anyone.

Even here though, a good libertarian stance would argue for strong property rights.  If most property is owned privately (i.e., not by the government), then it really becomes a question of the property owners’ policies and voluntary associations.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that every storeowner has to have an explicit policy for everything. We do rely on social norms. When you walk into a store, you don’t need a specific invitation.  The “open” sign is understood.  You also, hopefully, don’t cut in front of someone in line at the register.

If you walk into a store and sneeze on people on purpose, there may not be a specific policy against this.  But you will be infringing on others, and the store manager will likely throw you out.

The hard thing we are facing now with vaccines is that there is a threat of having your life made difficult if you are unvaccinated.  For instance, Ticketmaster has already suggested requiring vaccination to attend a concert or other event, or to get a negative COVID test right before the event.

It is not hard to imagine that the airlines might require something similar.  It is not hard to imagine many major corporations following suit, especially when corporate executives are quick these days to do the politically correct thing and to stay on the good side of the establishment.

As a libertarian, I don’t legally object to a company requiring vaccination in order to do business there.  I will personally object and complain, but I don’t want the government to force a company to not require vaccination.  Of course, if the government got involved, we know which side it would come down on.

The big problem is that the government is influencing these businesses to take these types of actions.  It is not all that different from mask policies.

Even worse, the government is heavily involved in many of these industries.  Again, we need to return to private property rights. If the government didn’t own and control so many things, then this would not be as much of a problem.

The government is heavily involved in medical care in almost every way.  So it is no surprise that hospitals and other medical facilities are likely to require or highly encourage vaccination.  The same goes with airlines.  In the realm of schooling, most schools are government-run and government-funded.

Even in industries where the government has less control, the threat still looms.  Every legal business is licensed by the state. If you are a hardware store owner, are you going to announce that vaccinations are unnecessary?  Are you going to say to your employees that you don’t recommend getting a vaccine?  You will be lucky if you can just ignore the vaccination issue. Again, threats loom.  This is more true now than ever after we have seen that governors and mayors can just deem your business as “non-essential” and shut it down without even going to the legislature.

So the root of the problem isn’t vaccination.  The root of the problem is a lack of respect for property rights.  It is a problem of government at all levels being able to interfere with businesses.

Vaccine Safety and Efficacy

Now there is the question of whether it is wise to get vaccinated.  There is certainly a lot of skepticism, which is good. I only wish there had been that much skepticism about the hyping of the dangers of the virus from the beginning.  I wish there had been more skepticism about the wisdom of locking down society.

It’s interesting that there are no clean political lines when it comes to getting a vaccine.  The vaccines are coming out on Trump’s watch, but they were announced after the election.  So some Trump supporters favor the vaccine because Trump is touting it and because they are coming out while he is still president.  But much of the left also favors the vaccine because they are being approved after the election, which seemingly takes a lot of the political element out of it.

Libertarians tend to be the most consistent in not wanting to get the vaccine, but I have definitely seen exceptions here as well.

With regard to Trump, I think he has just been bad on this issue.  With the overall issue of the coronavirus, Trump has been better than Biden just because Biden has been so horrible.  At least Trump admits that there are tradeoffs and that we can’t lock down society for a long period of time.  As he has said a few times, we can’t let the cure be worse than the disease.  Of course, from my perspective, the cure became worse than the disease on the first day of lockdowns back in March.

When Trump was elected in 2016, there was talk of him setting up some kind of vaccine safety committee to be headed by Robert Kennedy Jr.  This would have been a hand grenade thrown right at the FDA, the CDC, and the entire pharmaceutical industry.  This is why it never happened.

I suspect the hysteria over COVID-19 was greater than it would have been had Trump not been president.  He got suckered. He went along with Fauci and all of the establishment medical hacks.  He originally bought into the idea of lockdowns.  In this sense, he deserved to lose the 2020 election, even if fraudulently.

At this point, I’m not sure how much worse things could get under Biden in terms of the COVID hysteria.  He can implement a 100-day mask mandate (or request), but maybe that will just make the Trump people a little more defiant.  Right now, almost everyone wears a mask because they are obedient citizens. At the very least, they feel societal pressure to conform.

Trump continues to push hard for the vaccines.  It certainly makes no sense based on what he was saying in 2016. Unfortunately, many Trump loyalists are going to listen to him on this one and take the vaccine.

My personal recommendation is to skip it.  It may be hard for some people, especially if their job depends on it. If this is the case, then my best recommendation is to stall for as long as possible.  At least give it a little time to see if there are major side effects being experienced by a significant percentage of people. But don’t rely on the corporate media for this reporting.

Just the fact that the establishment and its media are promoting these vaccines so hard gives me reason to stay away from the vaccines.  They lie about weapons of mass destruction.  They lie about climate change.  They lie about Russian interference in the election.  If they’ll lie about all of this, why wouldn’t they lie about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine?

Also, I just don’t believe the narrative about COVID-19.  Even if you believe the death count, which you shouldn’t, it means that really old people and really unhealthy people mostly die from (or with) it.

If you are relatively young and healthy, then there is no reason to be vaccinated.  Your risk of bad side effects from the vaccine is likely much higher than your risk from the actual virus.

If you are elderly or if you are in poor health, then you probably shouldn’t be injecting vaccines into you that will likely just serve to further weaken your immune system.

These are just my opinions.  If you disagree, you are free to take the shots.  Of course, I wish that others had respected my rights and the rights of others to live our lives as we saw fit this year.  If you thought you were at high risk for the virus, then nobody was telling you that you had to leave your house.  But for those of us willing to take the risk (supposedly), we should have been allowed to voluntarily associate with others.

The other major problem with these vaccines is that they all come about with government funding. The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars already, which means that the taxpayers have paid for them. Again, we get back to a lack of property rights, although a few billion dollars is nothing these days.

However, the government funding and approval create even more moral hazard.  It takes away market competition.  It gives a false sense of security when the FDA approves a vaccine and declares it to be within its safety guidelines.  And these vaccines coming out now were obviously rushed, and there was far less stringent testing than normal.

It would not surprise me if the coming vaccines just cause a new wave of illness.  Maybe the illnesses will be blamed on the coronavirus.  Maybe they will be ignored.

One thing I do know is that it would have to get pretty bad for any establishment news sources to report on it.  You will have to rely on alternative media, which you should probably do anyway.

My best hope is that the vaccines don’t really do much of anything but they are used as an excuse to say that the coronavirus “pandemic” is now under control and we can start opening up the economy.

Actually, my best hope is that everyone wakes up and realizes they have been swindled since March 2020.  But I’m trying to be realistic here.