Dylan Lawrence Moore

Welcome. Like I said in the video, there's nothing wrong with a mortgage as long as you use it correctly and understand what you're getting yourself into. It's a great tool for getting into a house. As far as I can tell, there are two big issues to deal with: first is the 30 year mortgage. If you play with a mortgage calculator, you'll find that the interest totals aren't that bad until you start getting into the 20+ year range. 30 years REALLY stretches that interest out. The impact of my video would have been minuscule if we most of us still used 15 or 10 year mortgages. Second, as was one of the main points of the video, people have a tendency to keep refinancing themselves into the "expensive principal zone". One thing I've heard, and I agree with this, is that a huge problem with the way banks make mortgages is that they take your GROSS income instead of your NET. Additionally, because most people will "get the most they can afford" (at least the people in my life lived that way), they crank up the debt level just to where they can barely handle it. What happens then is any negative change in their income destroys their standards of living. All this can be largely avoided by a little self-awareness of what you know you can handle financially, and not just let the bank tell you "what you're able to get". I would start studying RIGHT NOW. Remember, just because people set themselves up to be slaves to their mortgage payments doesn't mean you have to. Working your ass off and saving for 30 years isn't the best way to get into a house. Even if you don't plan on living in the city you live in now, what if you bought a house, then threw in a renter when you moved? Then the renter makes the mortgage payment and you have someone else building up your equity. Hell, you could even just buy the house and never move into it to begin with. Let the renter make the mortgage payment from the beginning. Like eschielder mentioned at the beginning, if you're just looking at your cash stream, you don't really care what the interest payment is as long as you're positively cashflowing every month. Just try to get out of the "expensive principal zone" as fast as you can.

Seattle is the hottest market in the US right now. East Asian influx, Amazon and Google keep growing, Microsoft and Boeing are here, too. Drive across the mountains into eastern WA and the housing prices are like 1/5 that they are on this side. Just start making them. Fuck up and call it practice.

Yea I live about an hour out of Seattle. Go inside Seattle and the prices start to look more like what you said about Sydney. Thanks! For this video, the beginning was scripted and I followed a fairly strict outline. Generally I have to do an outline because I have a hard time getting to a conclusion without one. I never, however, stick to the script or the outline. I'm always adjusting it as I go.

For fun? Oops. I always screw that one up. And you do? Completely agree. Nothing here contradicts what I said in the video. They are increasing cashflow, yes. But if they just keep reverting their payments to consist of 80% interest and 20% principal, over the long-term, they are not. The important thing is the consumer being aware of what they prefer. This is why I specifically say in the video: do the math and ask yourself, "Am I really saving money?" And vast majority I meet don't. Thus I made a video. Completely agree. Nothing here contradicts what I said in the video. I literally said "a mortgage is just a tool" in my video. That's... kind of the whole point of the video. Guess I'll have to tell that to all the people who have thanked me for helping them understand mortgages better.

Have you ever met someone who never realized how much the interest adds up to in a loan? I have met many. This video is aimed at them, not savvy investors. I don't understand your logic. If I'm liable, per the terms of the written agreement, for $778k, why can I not consider it a $778k debt instrument? I find the $400k to be misleading, especially as people rarely read the Truth in Lending papers that show the payment breakdowns.

Definitely to all that. It doesn't contradict anything I said in the video. Notice I never said a person shouldn't get a mortgage, or should never refinance. Cashflow is indeed the name of the game, but most middle class don't think that way. They think they're saving money refinancing every 5-7 years to get a lower interest rate/lower monthly payment/wrap up the credit card debt into the loan--which was the main thing I intended to address in the video. (Title of video is purposefully inflammatory.)

That definitely works, but there are better ways to do it. The video wasn't about how to pay mortgages off faster, it was simply showing how much people pay 80% interest their whole lives because they don't understand how mortgages work.

If I told you that you paid 80% interest on your mortgage, would you believe me? Practical defense tactics against the dark banking arts. You will probably lose some sleep over this one. (Information applies the same to student loans.)

FOLLOW UP. Welcome to Tweakerville Part 2 In the wake of my recent article Welcome to Tweakerville, I had an ex-junkie reach out to me to do an interview on the subject of drug addicts. Not only did she tell me everything I wrote in the article was true, she gave first hand experience why it was WORSE than what I wrote about. The 12 Step recovery program is nothing but moral relativist nonsense. I would have to get conspiratorial to comment on the intentions of the designers, but it is very clear even from a cursory philosophic glance that the method is designed to keep drug addicts addicted. Treatment centers are so easy to cheat that it's difficult to not say they're designed that way. It's no wonder the drug problem is so bad: tweakers are getting fed the drugs and provided counter-effective solutions as treatment. Listen to the full interview here.

Resurrecting the topic!

Bringing this back to life.

Thanks! I really appreciate that. It's been something on my mind for awhile now, especially since I've been getting up close and personal with hypodermic needs. There's a follow-up in the pipeline. It's probably more eye-opening than my article. As for protective gear: for the really bad ones, we do full coveralls, respirators, and lab gloves under our work gloves. That way we can snap off the lab gloves every time we need to take gloves off and now be worried about touching ourselves or anything we don't want to have tweaker-cooties. And we bring a 55 gallon barrel of ethanol sanitizer and jump in it every time we take a break.

This... doesn't sound very difficult.

1. I don't think it's clear which country is more free than another, either. In fact, one would probably have to be specific when talking about it. More free with what? Getting a job? Traveling? Starting a family? Being taxed? etc. My point is that the US has some pretty big things going for it in the realm of freedom that the rest of the world doesn't: A.) It's English-speaking, which as I've mentioned is the language that has proselytized freedom. B.) Despite the Homer Simpson-esque qualities of much of the population, it has a tradition of freedom. Getting people to think about freedom is more about getting them to analyze the words they're already using and traditions they're already following, unlike other cultures and languages where the vocabulary still needs to be developed and the traditions are non-existent. C.) The US is a super power. What happens here makes a big effect on the rest of the world. D.) The US still largely has 1st Amendment protections. E.) Its nationalist "re-awakening" has been successful enough to elect Trump. Every western European attempt at this has failed so far. (Austria was SO CLOSE!!!!) 2. I don't think so. Obviously there is no way to prove this, but I have the feeling Thomas Paine had no idea what was possible until he came to the US. Remember, when he arrived, he got sick and was bedridden for a year. By the time he was up and able, the American Rebellion had already started. I think the evidence is strong enough to point out that his Common Sense turned the American Rebellion into the American Revolution, which though a massive feat, he was taking advantage of the tsunami of history that started prior to him being there. He was probably high on his own successes when he went back to England and France to try again, and to find out that same tsunami hadn't occurred, which almost cost him his head. Thomas Paine's time was different because no one knew what was possible. Because of Thomas Paine, we now know what is possible. Paine himself didn't have enough information to know where he should move, and he was lucky enough to wake up from being sick in the middle of a rebellion led by the most literate society in human history. 3. I don't think libertarianism or anarchy gets "implemented". They're directions, not locations. You use the core principles of the philosophy to guide your actions. It's a question of how to continue to guide those actions into the future. 4. Refer to point #1. By the way, I'm not criticizing attempts at making those countries more free. I just think you're dealing with a harder problem. 5. YUUUUUUP.

The flaw is I never claimed b.). I'm not arguing absence of a law, I'm arguing less law. The free banking era and the Bank of Scotland had less law, but it still had a positive amount of law, and so therefore was legal. In the case of Scotland, if I understood it correctly, the Sovereign of the Realm granted the bank permission to issue the sovereign's currency. The BIIIIG question I would ask: can you pay your taxes in Bank of Scotland-issued notes? I don't see why it's necessary to call that Talmudic reasoning. It's just a fallacy. (Unless you want to call it a Talmudic-flavored fallacy) I get that he claims that cattle is probably the oldest form of money, I just don't see the explanation why. And I thought I had given relative evidence. What I quoted mentioned that, prior to the Manhatten Project, there had been less than a single ounce of uranium produced in the US because of the engineering problems of producing it. The Manhattan Project, using the entire power of the US government, was able to engineer enough uranium to not only make bombs, but to make plutonium to make bombs. Obviously they took things out of the private sector to do this, and I'm not saying the private sector couldn't have done it eventually; I'm also not saying that this is an pro-argument for the existence of government--all I'm saying is this is an example of where the government achieved significant something before the private sector did. This was an engineering feat beyond anything the world had ever seen, private or public sector. As Quigley points out, historically it's on par with humanity's development of agriculture.

A philosophical analysis of negative and positive rights tells us that any time the government gets involved in PROVIDING something, it must be inherently oppressive because someone need merely demand it to create an obligation on the government to provide it, and the government must provide it by taking it from someone else. The Bill of Rights enshrined the concept of negative rights in the US Constitution. However... there's a weird one. The 6th Amendment. The government guarantees a right to a speedy trial. That sounds kind of like a positive right, doesn't it? (NOTE: I totally say 4th Amendment in the video. Doh.) Libertarian philosophy argues: if the government causes the problem, then the government has to provide the solution. If the government arrests you (problem), it has to give you a means to deal with that arrest (speedy trial). Thus it doesn't fit the category of a positive right. ...but what happens if government causes the problem of requiring citizens to pay taxes with money? Discussion ensues.

Nope. The demand for money is essentially limited by: What's needed to keep everyone employed, plus What's needed to keep full productive capacity, plus What's needed for everyone to pay their taxes, plus What's needed for everyone to save (and be able to invest) the amount that they want to. Once those four things are met, the tickets have been sold out. Posting another video made today that relates very directly to this subject. Will be up after moderator approval.

Not until the demand for money is met. If I own a movie theater with 500 seats and I sell 50 tickets, it doesn't devalue my tickets to sell 51. The only way my tickets could be devalued is if I sold more than 500.

This happens over, and over, and over. There is no bottom to the Tweaker Abyss that the bar of standards can settle upon. It’s like a acid trip calculus problem where you experience “the most disgusting thing you have ever seen in your life” an infinite number of times within the span of a half hour. Posted from original Steemit Article here: https://steemit.com/news/@volsci/welcome-to-tweakerville My knack for cleaning things up has led to an interesting profession. Welcome to Tweakerville Introduction I don’t know if it’s an obsession with keeping a place organized, or the challenge of solving the problem of how to decide what to keep and what to throw away, but even when I was a kid I would go through periodic phases of throwing everything out of my room that I didn’t need. I had to purge the dead weight. Even when I was traveling in Europe, I would end up at odd jobs that involved clearing out junk from houses and properties. The most massive clusterfuck of a hoarder I have ever worked on was on a property in Klosterneuburg outside of Vienna, Austria. I was on a team that literally took months to just get the junk and garbage out. I got so good at cleaning places up I decided to start a business doing it early 2017. I never would have guessed, but garbage is like gold. The amount of money people are willing to pay to get rid of garbage and junk is incredible. But what is even more incredible is the type of junk you will find. As our property cleanup business picked up, we started to notice a pattern in a certain type of cleanup: the debris left behind by drug addicts. For the sake of this article, when I refer to drugs, I talking the hard stuff: heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, methadone, and the like. I don’t know how ubiquitous the term is, but up in Washington State, we use the term tweaker to refer to people who have ruined their lives on these drugs. It’s not politically correct. It offends a lot of people. Good. I want you to be offended by what you see in this article. It will help you see some of the real effects of drug problem this country is facing. You Begin Your Adventure in Tweakerville This story starts with Everett, Washington, known as Tweakerville by locals: Prior to the 2017 general Snohomish County elections, a business owner in Everett by the name of Gary Watts used his electronic business sign to read Welcome to TweakerVille – Everett, WA. The message on the sign erupted into controversy—which is exactly what Watts wanted. Everett has been a tweaker epicenter for several years, largely due to the methadone clinic in downtown Everett which hands out free methadone to any addict who asks for it. The problem has gotten so bad that cleanup efforts of tweaker camps produce mountains of used needles. I’m not joking. Check out this pile of needles from a cleanup effort: Need a closer look at that? Article source. Everett is so infested with tweakers (often referred to as “Everett’s finest” by the locals), that Watts finally had enough. In addition to his Tweakerville readerboard, he installed a TweakerCam pointed at where the tweakers like to congregate outside of the methadone clinic. In fact, it’s still running in real time. You can watch what the tweakers in Everett are doing this second here. (TweakerCam stillshot: image outside of Everett methadone clinic.) It will get boring quick. They don’t do much. The general frustration with the tweakers has gotten so immense, that Watts used the controversy as an opportunity to run for Mayor of Everett. Watts pointed out (rightly so, I think) that several city council members had been incumbent for many years and weren’t coming up with any useful solutions, that somebody new had to get in there and do something. Watts was late to the election, so he had to settle for being a write-in. You can watch his campaign video here: With no political experience, no real plan, coming in late as a write-in, and running almost exclusively on an anti-tweaker platform, Watts was able to acquire 11.82% of the votes for mayor. Shit, if I lived in Everett, I would have voted for him. The only thing “no political experience” says to me is “no previous experience with corruption”. Good enough for me. Apparently it was good enough for many others, too. 2017 Everett Mayor Election Results Despite Everett carrying the iconic torch as being one big, gaping tweaker hole, the problem goes much beyond Everett. Moving south towards the more populated areas of Washington, the city of Seattle itself is rapidly becoming known as a giant homeless camp. Tent villages are appearing in almost any place they can fit, the favorite being under freeways and bridges. Under the freeway in Seattle. Bicyclist reportedly attacked here. Source. Look how great tweakers are for the environment. Might as well be in Haiti. Source. Friends I have in Seattle have complained that they will get a fine from the city if they have an unclean yard, but public property is openly allowed to get infested with tweakers and their tent cities. In fact, it’s rewarded. The City of Seattle provides housing, food, and free drugs to these people, and has an official website for information about their “sanctioned encampments”. Check it out: https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness/sanctioned-encampments My Story with Tweakers As for me, I avoid Seattle like the plague. Not just because of the tweaker activity and homeless camps. The traffic alone is enough to make you contemplate suicide and everyone there seems to be a passive-aggressive dick. Everything is all tolerance and love until it isn’t. For me, I stick to the northern end of the I-5 corridor when I can. Gorgeous mountains, lush green trees, incredible valleys, views of the sound and islands, and so many rivers and streams you can’t throw a rock without hitting one. Also less passive-aggressive bullshit from the populace compared with Seattle. However, the tweaker problem is still real, just more hidden. Because we’re mainly out in rural areas, and because evergreen trees like cedars are excellent at keeping properties private, I never had any idea as I drove down backroads through the woods how many properties have been turned into landfills. Landfills? I thought we were talking about tweakers. Allow me to explain. Fine tweaker livin’ up past Marblemount, Washington: I don’t know what the statistics would be on this, but my personal experience has taught me that if a tweaker has the space to do it, he will become a hoarder. And never a hoarder of anything valuable. A tweaker will collect anything: cars, trailers, clothes, VHS tapes, kitchen accessories, tires, bricks, rocks, pool tables, bicycles, propane tanks and heaters, ducting, Christmas trees, clothes, mattresses and box springs, TVs, actual garbage, car parts, toilets, pipes, coolers, combs, barbeques, porn, clothes, refrigerators, mostly-empty paint cans, full paint cans, sewing machines, porcelain figurines, plastic totes, dryers and washing machines, space heaters, lawn chairs, couch cushions, garbage bags full of clothes, tools boxes filled with things other than tools, clothes, arrest warrants and public fines, bath tubs, shower stalls, water heaters, stripped electrical cords, stuffed animals, empty chemical bottles, full chemical bottles, air conditioners, car seats, lawn mowers and weed whackers, metal roofing, and clothes. Did I mention that tweakers like to hoard clothes? They definitely like to hoard clothes. The worst part about this is you have to assume there are needles sticking out of all of it. Unfortunately, that’s often the case. Camano Island Tweaker Pad Sedro-Woolley Tweaker Resort Sedro-Woolley Tweaker Antique Car Collection None of the stuff is ever good. Ever. No vehicles run, all the electronics are broken, and anything that has multiple parts is always missing the vital ones. Even if an item was good at one point, it has been so permeated with mold and rat urine that instinctively you know you would be cursed for taking it home. Tweaker-cursed. They won’t pay the bills so the water and power will have been turned off for months, sometimes even years. Mold will have completely saturated the structure and the tweakers will be living side-by-side with the rats. Because they can’t flush the toilet they will find somewhere outside to use as the bathroom. They will invite their tweaker friends over who will eventually get kicked out of where they’re living and move in, so the hoarding acceleration will intensify. Eventually the roof will leak so the contents of the house won’t just mold, they will rot. Often the kitchen will be burned out. Slowly the house will get so full and so disgusting that the inhabitants will have to move into a trailer on the property. Eventually, the house will be foreclosed on, or the inhabitants evicted (or simply arrested), and it falls upon the new owner or the bank to clean it up, often under threat of suit by the county. (People were still living in this property when we found it.) Want a closer look? Here is a video I took of a property before we cleaned it up in Skagit County: (Note: You obviously can’t pick up the smell from the video. The inside of the house smelled so badly of rats you could hardly breathe. The only reason I wasn’t wearing a respirator was because I wasn’t disturbing anything.) When I was young, I remember seeing those commercials where a woman would hold an egg saying, “This is your brain.” She would smash the egg with a frying pan and say, “This is your brain on drugs.” I’m thinking of taking before and after pics of the next house we do so I can make a meme saying, “This is your house. This is your house on drugs.” Drugs will take a property and turn it into a toxic garbage heap. It’s unreal. There really isn’t a way to properly describe in words how awful it is to go through one of these cesspits. However, I’m going to try. Your instinct upon first sight is to say, “How can anybody live like this?!” I said it, my business partners have said it, every person we’ve ever met on the jobsite has said it. As you get closer and begin to notice the expanse of the awfulness, you will turn that phrase into a mantra. “How can anyone live like this? How can anyone live like this?! Seriously! How do you not die living like this?” As the smell of rats and mold hit you, you say, “Oh my god, this is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life.” It’s not hyperbole. You mean it. As your continue your quest through Tweakerdom, you uncover something more horrible. You find the actual rat nest, the remaining remains of the latrine, the liquified meat in the fridge; you say, “Oh my god, THIS is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life!” Again, it’s not hyperbole. You mean it. This happens over, and over, and over. There is no bottom to the Tweaker Abyss that the bar of standards can settle upon. It’s like a acid trip calculus problem where you experience “the most disgusting thing you have ever seen in your life” an infinite number of times within the span of a half hour. My brother-in-law came to see the extent of one of our jobs. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll find a dead body in this?” he asked. Actually… yes. Yes we are. The Opiate Crisis You may be surprised to hear this, but I support legalizing all drugs. I’ve done enough homework on the subject to know that prohibition always makes things worse. It opens the doors for corruption and gang violence, addiction and usage rates always go up (the numbers back this up), and there is no way to regulate the black market product. A common issue, even among pot smokers, is that you never actually know what you’re buying or how potent it is. Furthermore, because transportation is such a huge issue with illegal substances, there are MASSIVE incentives to make the drugs as potent as possible. The stronger the drugs are, the less space they take up, which means they’re easier to conceal during transport. The history of the drug trade, particularly with opiates from the golden crescent of the middle east and the golden triangle, is wrought with conspiracies and government involvement in drug trades. Human society has simply been unable to come to grips with the fact that drugs are just worth so much damn money during prohibition. I remember listening to a documentary, I believe it was from BBC, that the opium trade made up ONE FIFTH of the entire British economy sometime during the 19th century. Gives a little context to the Opium Wars, doesn’t it? The Golden Crescent and Triangle. Source. Thus whenever I hear the government yakking away about how the “War on Drugs” or some other problem-exacerbating government program, I generally roll my eyes and take it as propaganda intended to keep the illicit trade going. But after I’ve seeing first-hand, I’m not taking it as a joke when President Trump announces a state of emergency for the opiate crisis. He. Ain’t. Fuckin’. Joking. What’s worse is drugs like heroin, methamphetamines, and cocaine are becoming the drugs for wimps. When I was young I loved reading the sci-fi books by Alan Dean Foster. He wrote the book Bloodhype, which was a story that involved a drug called bloodhype which was so addictive and toxic it would kill you within 72 hours of first use. It was produced by the hyperion tree on some planet, and the drug became such a problem that the galactic government solved it by eradicating all hyperion trees off the planet. I remember thinking as a kid, “Wow. That’s a wild imagination right there! Good thing this is just science fiction.” Not anymore. Fentanyl and carfentanil are the two new big opiates on the block. Fentanyl (Wikipedia Article) Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid discovered in the 1960s, considered a safe and effective pain medication and anesthetic. It’s 50 times as strong as heroin. Sounds great right? Like all medicine, everything is about dosage. Turn it into a street drug and you have a substance capable of causing overdose on contact with the skin. Police across the country are being informed not to touch any white substances because they might come in contact with fentantyl. Read about an example here:Police officer accidental overdose from touching white powder on his shirt without realizing it.. Sound bad? Just wait. Carfentanil weighs in at 5,000 the strength of heroin and has toxic effects so powerful that governments are starting to worry about its use in chemical warfare and terrorist attacks. Readily commercially available from Chinese pharmaceutical companies. Carfentanil Wikipedia Article I may have to contradict myself here. Can we please ban these chemicals and eradicate the hyperion trees that produce them from the face of the earth? Oh, that’s right. They’re synthesized. Shit. Compassion vs. Enablement I know I’ve taken a very strong tone throughout this article against tweakers, and I’m sure many will find it distasteful. Tweakers are people, too, they’ll tell me. Tweaker Lives Matter. I agree. Kinda. Tweaker Lives Matter! Whatever has happened to these people that has led them to choose lives of drug addicts is awful. I’m grateful never to have to have thought my life was so horrible that I would need to fix the problem with meth or heroin. However, when it comes down to it, drugs are a choice. Calling drug addiction a disease is putting a drug user in a position where he is never responsible for his own actions. While it may feel like compassion to not be stern with these people and encourage them to go through the pain of withdrawal, it isn’t. Building methadone clinics for drug addicts to get free hits whenever they want not only is destructive to the community and the land, it is destructive to the drug addicts themselves. I'm wary about “treatment facilities”. I’ve been criticized for by others claiming that because I don’t support methadone clinics, I don’t want treatment for drug addicts. Giving a heroin addict methadone to deal with his addiction whenever he asks for it is like giving a smoker a pack of cigarettes whenever he asks for it. It may alleviate the immediate discomfort for his withdrawals and your immediate discomfort for having to tell him no, but it’s a long-term course for destruction. It’s enabling. The actual compassionate thing to do is to not give the addict the drugs. Think about it. If your best friend came over to your house one day and announced that he started taking heroin, what would you do about it? Drive him to the clinic to get clean needles? Help heat up his spoon? Give him a safe place to trip and crash? No! You would lambaste him up and down like the idiot he is, and knock his ass out if you needed to, and even tie him up in order to take the drugs away and destroy them. Why? Because he’s your best friend and your compassion for him compels you to. If you didn't, you would be enabling him. Why is this problem getting worse? Honestly, I don't know. I remember after the crash of 2008 reading more and more articles about homeless cities popping up all over the country. Hard times can be hard. There were a lot of people losing their homes and jobs at that time. However, economic conditions have improved and the real estate market has had time to shake out and recover, banks are lending again, and yet the tweaker problem stays on the rise. I can, however, connect dots. While the tweaker problem seems to be bad everywhere, they appear to openly bad in democrat controlled areas. Seattle is a cesspool of tweakerdom, and I'm reading more and more reports coming out of California that there are some places with miles of homeless camps. One number I read is that the total number of “unsheltered” in California is around 114,000. Homeless camp in California (Source.) My opinion is that tweakers are simply another "oppressed group" that power-hungry neoliberal politicians can exploit to stick more laws and regulations up your ass, and steal your money in the process. You might not like my politics when I say this, but I can't overlook the prevalence of homeless cities out in the open and the free handing-out of methadone in democrat controlled areas. It's like they're privileged citizens you're not allowed to cast your shadow on. If a politician or a bureaucrat can claim you're oppressing some defenseless someone, they can pass laws against you to protect them. That's essentially what we're seeing. Solutions? First is recognition of the problem. Until I started cleaning up after these people, I really didn't understand how bad it was and how these drugs destroy a person. Even after I saw it once, I didn't realize how bad it was until I started seeing it over and over. Second is understanding that, even if times are hard for them, drug addiction is a choice. They chose to put themselves in the lives that they're in. They need to choose to get out of it. Third is to understand it is not compassionate to just hand out methadone to these people. It is keeping them in the hell that they've gotten stuck in. Fourth is understanding the nature of addictions. I'm not talking about the difference between chemical and psychological addiction, either. Something like 80% of people who try chemically addicting drugs don't become addicts. The problem is that people who are unable to maintain proper neurotransmitters like serotonin to feel good, happy, or even normal, will feel normal for the first time upon trying drugs. What's worse, is when they crash after the drug wears off, they crash hard. A person who can regulate his neurotransmitters more or less properly will have a hangover, get over it, and get back to work. The other person will need to take the drug again just to feel normal. The nail in the coffin is the diminishing effects of the drug—because a person will develop a resistance to the drug they're taking, he will need heavier and heavier doses of drugs to feel the same high. Before long you have an addict. What causes this inability to regulate neurotransmitters? Adverse childhood experiences and single motherhood. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs - website) are stressful or traumatic events, including abuse and neglect. They may also include household dysfunction such as witnessing domestic violence or growing up with family members who have substance use disorders. ACEs are strongly related to the development and prevalence of a wide range of health problems throughout a person’s lifespan, including those associated with substance misuse. ACEs include: Physical abuse Sexual abuse Emotional abuse Physical neglect Emotional neglect Intimate partner violence Mother treated violently Substance misuse within household Household mental illness Parental separation or divorce Incarcerated household member Excellent resources for getting more information about ACEs and how they relate to addiction is here: Free Domain Radio: The Truth About Addiction Free Domain Radio: The Bomb in the Brain Single motherhood. Statistically speaking, a child growing up without a father has a much greater chance of substance abuse and of homelessness. Saying this out loud will garner you all sorts of shit from single mothers who are unwilling to admit they chose to have children with low quality men, but the statistics are there and I’m going to say it anyway. One of the most destructive things you can do to a child’s development is to raise him or her without a father. Drug addiction is one of the many, many negative behavioral correlations associated with growing up without a father. More information: https://thefatherlessgeneration.wordpress.com/statistics/ This is a long-term problem that ultimately lies on rebuilding the healthy family unit. I won’t go into arguments and evidence of why the family unit is doing so badly today in the West (that would be enough for a whole other article), but I will suffice to say it here and hope the reader goes forth to his his own research. Conclusion: A line from The Godfather comes to mind when I write about this subject. When all the dons are meeting and discussing whether or not they should allow the trade of drugs in their cities, Don Zaluchi stands up and says, “I also don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, "I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment -- we can make fifty thousand distributing." So they can't resist. I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable. I don't want it near schools -- I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people -- the colored. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls...” Zaluchi hits the nail right on the head in the end. These substances take your souls—they abscond with your ability to choose. A human’s ability to choose, and thus his ability to access moral behavior, is tied inextricably with our ability think and to reason with the more advanced circuitry of our brains. Heavy drug use shuts down these abilities. It turns humans back into animals obsessed only with their base nature’s need for another drug dose. Thanks for reading and become more aware of the problem in our backyard. This is a serious issue and it needs serious attention.

Why are English-speaking countries (until recently) the most free countries in the world? I'm not saying the concepts weren't imported from other languages (English is really just a hodge podge of other languages, anyway), I'm saying the discussion fully flourished in English, and continues to do so now. Please provide me any sources if you have them, but when I spent my time in Austria learning German, I for the damn life of me couldn't find any philosophic content in German that I actually wanted to read. It was all rationalistic/romantic bullshit. It's like the native German speakers have an obey-the-rules circuit built into them, and it really comes out in the bureaucratic vocabulary of their language. I found myself in a lot of frustrating conversations because of it, as well. After much discussion, an Austrian girlfriend I had woke up to it one day and realized "alles in Österreich ist verboten!" (everything in Austria isn't allowed). Where are the French and Spanish sources and ideas that have really pushed the concepts of freedom? The Scandinavian? Obviously some exist, but why aren't they as prolific as the ones in English? Japanese, for example, isn't even built with the capability of independent thought. I've heard from many Japanese people that they need to speak in English in order to express their opinions. Japanese is more concerned about whose ass to kiss. I'm aware of the biography of Thomas Paine. I'm guessing his life was more complicated than what you've described. He was from pretty low birth (son of a corset maker) and probably didn't realize what was possible until he came to America and saw what was going on. In his book Common Sense, he spent a large amount of the text describing why the timing was perfect for the American Revolution, due to economics, militaristic, and geographic advantages that the colonies held at that moment. Indeed, he started his project where there was the most possibility of success. I'm saying that's still the US. We live in a age of superpowers now. Before superpowers, countries existed when they could a.) control their borders and b.) police inside their borders. After superpowers (i.e. US and USSR post-WWII), a country was simply whatever the superpower said it was. The US and USSR could simply support whichever side they wanted to be in control. I think the situation is a little more complicated now, as China probably can be considered to have "superpower" status and the EU kinda-sorta-maybe does. Whatever the case, making a libertarian paradise in Panama, it could just be rolled over by a bigger country. The revolution will have to occur IN a superpower, and the US is the only near that. Sadly, this is an argument hard to defend against. I'm adding my part, and I think others are as well, to turn this around and be deserving of them again. I upvoted you to undo them. Your points are valid and worth discussing.

From the Wikipedia article: "Scottish free banking lasted between 1716 and 1845, and is arguably the most researched and developed instance of free banking.[12] The system was organized around three chartered banks, the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the British Linen Company, and numerous unchartered banks. It resulted in a highly stable and competitive banking system.[13][14]" From the Bank of Scotland wiki: "The Bank of Scotland plc (Scottish Gaelic: Banca na h-Alba)[2] is a commercial and clearing bank based in Edinburgh, Scotland. With a history dating to the 17th century, it is the fifth-oldest surviving bank in the United Kingdom (the Bank of England having been established one year before), and is the only commercial institution created by the Parliament of Scotland to remain in existence. It was one of the first banks in Europe to print its own banknotes and it continues to print its own sterling banknotes under legal arrangements which allow Scottish banks to issue currency." It was still a legal arrangement. Thus state-issued. Banks issue credit in a similar fashion today: it's a legal arrangement. I'm getting ready to read the book, but in my talks with Nima, according to David Graeber in the book Debt: The First 5000 Years, there is no archaeological evidence supporting the existence of the barter system. Money has been state-created from the start. The source you provided doesn't actually give any evidence of money from 9000 BC. Just mentions something about cows. From Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope, p. 848: "The greatest achievement of science during the war, and, indeed, in all human history, was the atom bomb. [...] The only human discovery which can compare with it was man's invention of the techniques of farming almost nine thousand years earlier, but this earlier advance was slow and empirical. The advance to the atom bomb was swift and theoretical, in which men, by mathematical calculations, were able to anticipate, measure, judge, and control events which had never happened previously in human experience. It is not possible to understand the history of the twentieth century without some comprehension of how this almost unbelievable\goal was achieved and especially why the Western Powers were able to achieve it, and the Fascist Powers were not. ... In a similar way the remaining German scientists, although seeking the bomb, decided in February 1942 that large-scale separation of isotopes was too expensive to be practical, and spent the rest of the war years on the hopeless task of trying to devise an atomic pile which could be used as a bomb. The great German error was their failure to reach the conception of "critical mass," the point which had been published in Russia in 1940. ... When the curtain of secrecy fell in June 1940, all the theory needed for the task was known by all capable physicists; what was not known was (1) that their theories would work, and (2) how the immense resources needed for the task could be mobilized. As late as 1939, less than an ounce of uranium metal had ever been made in the United States. ... Until May 1, 1943, these complex projects were operated by committees and subcommittees of scientists of which the chief chairmen were James B. Conant, Vannevar Bush, E. O. Lawrence, Harold Urey, and A. O. Compton. The actual construction work was delegated to the United States Army Corps of Engineers in charge of Leslie R. Groves, an expert on constructing buildings, whose chief achievement was the Pentagon Building in Washington. ... This obsession was based on [Grove's] belief that the project involved fundamental scientific secrets (there were no such secrets). His efforts were quite in vain, as the only real secrets, the technological ones regarding isotope separation, critical mass, and trigger mechanisms of the bombs, were revealed to the Soviet Union, almost as soon as they were achieved, by British scientists." What the government did that the free market did not wasn't physics, it was engineering. The entire facilities of the country were required in order to facilitate the refining of enough uranium and plutonium to make the bombs, and it was done by government order. Maybe the free market could have done it eventually, but it didn't. Government made it first.

They definitely are. They never claimed to be libertarians or anarchists, either. America is the place with the greatest liberty mindset. The language of liberty was written in English, and put into practice in America. Even if we're going through a major liberty crisis right now, the language is built into the culture. All we have to do is turn around and look at what we're already built on. The rest of the West is close enough in their cultures that it wouldn't take too much adjustment. The rest of the world, ehh.... After the American Revolution, Thomas Paine went to Britain to attempt another one. He narrowly escaped with his life to go to France, where he joined the French Revolution. He was welcomed with open arms by the French revolutionaries, as they all knew who he was. However, he nearly met the guillotine for sticking to his principles. The French weren't ready to get it... That's why I'm saying libertarians and anarchists who want to get out of the US to find the "most-libertarian" place available is escapism. They're taking their talents and knowledge and removing it from where it's needed: the US. Just like the first time around, once we figure it out here, it can start being exported. Hopefully it works this time.

Irrelevant. Even during the free banking era, bank notes were supposed to be redeemable in US dollars. Today, bank notes (money orders and cashiers checks) are supposed to be redeemable in US dollars. In either case, government money is and was the actual money. The "free" banking era wasn't an era of private currency, just private institutions making promises with government currency with no government oversight. Your source doesn't mention anything about government or the role money played in those times. I don't know why you're talking about rocket technology, bombs, and physics. I said nuclear weapons, satellites, and money. If you think most of the work of making nuclear bombs and satellites was done before government got involved, then I see you don't know much history of the subjects.

I wrote up an article about this over on Steemit: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@volsci/taxes-explain-the-value-of-bitcoin-what Including the text here: Taxes Explain the Value of Bitcoin! WHAT?! What gives bitcoin its value? Its backed by nothing. Well, can't you say the same thing about the US dollar? Bitcoin Creates its Own Demand Analogous to Taxation (Image from Bitcoin Taxes on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitcointax) In this video, Dylan Moore of the Volitional Science Network and Nima Mahjour of www.economicsjunkie.com continue our series on Modern Monetary Theory around the subject of bitcoin. We've all been hearing from every FUD-corner of the earth that bitcoin is in a bubble that's about to pop. In some sense this may be true--bitcoin has gone through several popped bubbles, but always comes back to rally even stronger. But is there a greater bubble that will pop and send bitcoin down to zero to stay there forever? After all, there is nothing backing up the value of it. Modern Monetary Theory and the Value of Money Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is an economic theory developed in previous decades by economist, entrepreneur, and banker Warren Mosler, previously called soft currency economics. MMT asserts that the value of money is derived from the demand of the state. That is to say, money is valuable because the state taxes it. This sounded absolutely bizarre the first time I heard it. Why would the state want something if it wasn't valuable to begin with? The economic story I remember hearing, is that the state taxed the valuable labor and goods of people that they already had in order to fund its spending. How else could it happen? Just like I need to earn money first before I can spend it, the state must need to tax money first in order to spend. Turns out this equation is backwards. In his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber describes that there is no archaeological evidence that the state taxes before it spends. It actually spends before it taxes. ...what? The Story of Taxation and Money This is how the story plays out: a tribal leader, whether its a chief, king, emperor, khan, or president, demands a tax in a specific token. This token can be anything: gold, silver, paper notes, tools, tally sticks*, iron dipped in vinegar, digital bank ledgers, cryptocurrency--anything. Typically, it must be either something scarce or something that only the tribal chief can create. Once this occurs, immediately everyone within the tribal chief's jurisdiction become unemployed. Unemployment is an effect of taxation. People want employment because it pays in the currency that they are able to pay their taxes with. If no one is demanding that currency for tax, there is no reason to work for it. For the sake of this article, let's say that the tax demanded is a dylannor, a currency only I can create. Counterfeiting carries the penalty of death. Tally Sticks *Tally sticks are an example of a tax system used in medieval Europe (image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick ) The people, now unemployed and not willing to counterfeit, ask, "What the heck is a dylannor and how do I get them?" To which my chieftain response is: "If you work for me, I will pay you in dylannors." Voila. I have just created public spending. The only thing that limits my ability to spend is my ability to create dylannors. If I make them out of gold, spending requires gold mining and gold taxation. If I make them out of paper or digital ledgers in central banks, my imagination is the only limit. Especially in the latter case, I don't need the money in order to spend, I simply need to demand the money in order to make it valuable to begin with. The violence of the state is what gives money its value. Pay your taxes, or else. In effect, a nation's currency can simply be viewed as tax tokens that can be exchanged for safety from harassment of the state. The state gives value to an otherwise worthless item (paper notes, digital ledgers, etc.) through the demand of this value in taxes. What does this have to do with bitcoin? Nima Mahjour has been the first to argue this (article below): bitcoin's value is derived from the demand of bitcoin miners. In the same way that the state demands taxes in order to give value to its money, bitcoin miners demand bitcoin in order to access the bitcoin blockchain. They create their own demand. The blockchain is a valuable tool as a ledger that cannot be destroyed, as any bitcoin-fan knows, and the only way to get access to that ledger is by exchanging an otherwise worthless digital token called bitcoin. *Nima Mahjour of economicsjunkie.com The implications of this are staggering. Many MMTers argue that the state is necessary to create a currency, because the violence of taxation is what has given money value throughout its history. However, is violence the only thing that can give value to a currency? I argue no. Bitcoin is showing us this right before our eyes. I think we're still a ways before cryptocurrency replaces fiat, but the omens are becoming more and more clear: fiat better watch out. So is bitcoin in a bubble that's going to pop when the fad is up? I seriously, seriously doubt it. Nima's Article on the Value of Bitcoin: https://beinglibertarian.com/fiat-money-system-can-explain-bitcoins-value/ Warren Mosler's website: http://moslereconomics.com/ Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1516823472&sr=8-1&keywords=david+graeber

You missed my point. It should not be the goal of anarchists and libertarians to seek out places that already have liberty. It should be the goal to create it where they can. That's why I bring up Thomas Paine, because that's what he did in America, and he attempted to do in Britain and France afterward. People calling themselves anarchists and libertarians who try to find the "place with the most liberty" so they can live out their lives mostly undisturbed are just escapists.