Poor
Man Survival
Self
Reliance tools for independent minded people…
ISSN
2161-5543
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are
simple."
-- Dr. Seuss
-- Dr. Seuss
25
ways to Delete or Beat the Beast…
While the idea of an American
republic has been kept alive to assuage the masses, the reality is it was taken
from us years ago while we slept. Living a free & private life in an increasingly unfree America is
becoming quite a challenge…
In recent weeks, there has been a lot of concern that an
upcoming eight week military exercise on U.S. soil known as “Jade
Helm” is actually a dress rehearsal for the imposition of martial law in
this country. One of the reasons for the high level of concern is that we
have seen a dramatic increase in the number of “urban warfare exercises”
conducted by the U.S. military in major U.S. cities over the past decade –
including exercises where “dissidents” are hunted down, arrested and hauled
away. As our world becomes increasingly unstable, and as our society
rapidly decays from within, many believe that it is only a matter of time
before the executive branch will have sufficient excuse to use the extensive
martial law powers that it has been accumulating since 9/11.
Frankly, I no longer trust the federal government to do
the right thing…they have proved dishonest time and time again, especially
since the dawn of the –unPatriot Act.
A couple months ago the DHS
(Department of Homeland Security) and FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
stated that the number
one threat to the United States is none other than its own citizenry. This
isn’t some small group of spun out nuts or even groups of people that the
government feels are too religious such as Waco Texas and The Branch Davidians.
As far as Islam, they were not even mentioned in the report. Instead, huge
swaths of American culture and people were listed as
the most likely threat to our country. These were some
of the groups listed; Christians,
Home
Schoolers, Members of the Tea Party, Constitutionalists, Preppers
(people who can food), Militia and the terrorist group they are most concerned
about is returning
combat veterans of the United States of America.
Cops are taught to regard the slightest failure to
immediately comply with whatever they demand as a "threat" to their
"safety" - and savage, disproportionate violence is often the
immediate reaction.
Here are 25 ways to minimize government in your life, courtesy of Jeffrey Tucker and Max Borders (FEE.org)…
ONE. Private schooling/homeschooling: If you don’t like the government schools, take your kids out. Millions of families are doing it. Some are even forming virtual coops and getting content from online sources.
TWO. Online education: Are you after a real education or a signaling mechanism? MOOCs and other online sources (like Khan Academy) are reducing the costs of education—away from the inflated guild of higher ed and publicly funded indoctrination camps.
THREE. Alternative nicotine delivery: From a revival of roll-your-own cigarettes to snus (smokeless tobacco) to e-cigarettes, people are responding to health concerns and ever-higher cigarette taxes -- just not the way anti-tobacco zealots think they should. Cue increasingly shrill backlash.
FOUR. Farmers market cooperatives/urban homesteading: Farmers market coops have people trading goods in kind. People barter and contribute their labor outside the auspices of government skimmers. Plus, people in big cities are growing their own food—USDA free. (Here’s a tip!)
FIVE. Private neighborhood security: Check out new apps like Peacekeeper. It’s just one example of the ways local communities can reduce the cost of security and emergency services—and keep it local. (Here’s another in Detroit.)
SIX. Barter markets: If you are in business, you know the score. If you can trade services or goods directly, it’s best to forego the paper trail. You donate programming time, I’ll give you web space. You promote my product, I’ll promote yours. If money doesn’t change hands, you can avoid all kinds of problems with the government. Barter has become a natural response to the tax collector.
SEVEN. Email/social media swarming: With social media, it is possible to ignite popular outrage against the machinations of legislators. The outcry against SOPA/PIPA is a good example. The floods of protest against invading Syria had an effect on the pullback from that near disaster, too. Political activism will never be the same. It’s desktop democracy. Aaron Swartz lives forever.
EIGHT. Camera phones: One powerful weapon against the State is probably in your pocket right now. Consider Copblock and the Peaceful Streets Project. They keep cops accountable through tech-enabled “eternal vigilance.” The more people who stand up in the face of intimidation (or simply film from their windows with a zoom lens), the better.
NINE. Private venture capital markets: There’s a problem with Fed-set interest rates. No one really wins. Since the policy of zero-percent interest rates began, a gigantic non-bank lending and borrowing sector has picked up where the banks left off. And its rates are set by the market.
TEN. P2P file sharing: The survival and persistence of file sharing through “torrents” shows that civil disobedience in the face of intellectual monopolies is alive and well, despite a 20-year war on the practice. The more the monopolists fight, the more file sharers win.
ELEVEN. Speed: At a certain point, no one bothered driving 55 any more (not just Sammy Hagar). People sped en masse until Congress decided to let the states set speed limits -- higher. It’s a paradigmatic case: People disobeyed until the law was changed.
TWELVE. Crowdfunding: If you need startup money, you can pass around the virtual begging bowl. But it can’t be just any old thing. You have to convince the crowd to let go of their resources. But that might be a much lower barrier to get over than snagging the attention of venture capitalists or prying a loan out of your bailed-out bank.
THIRTEEN. Social entrepreneurship: The welfare State tends to make people dependent supplicants. Foreign aid does, too. But entrepreneurs with causes are creating better ways of helping the poor, from microfinance to the return of mutual aid societies like the Christian healthcare coops cited above. The social entrepreneurship sector is enjoying a tech-enabled renaissance despite the State. (See also young social entrepreneurs.)
FOURTEEN. Medical tourism/opt-out: For a while now, people have been taking their medical problems to other countries that offer comparable care more cheaply and without all the red tape. In fact, people used to come from Canada to get care they couldn’t get in the land of “free” healthcare. Medical inflation is so bad in the United States now that a lot more people are leaving to get treatments abroad, or opting out of the third-party payer healthcare cartel. Meanwhile, some people are leaving to get treatments the FDA hasn’t approved.
FIFTEEN. Self-managing organizations: Firms like Valve and Morning Star show that you don’t need formal hierarchies -- “bosses” -- for an organization to run well. These firms might teach us that the world doesn’t need bosses, either.
SIXTEEN. Tax sheltering: Value creators are tired of having their rewards raided by the people with the guns and the jails. Apple, for example, uses a multinational tax-sheltering scheme so complicated that mere mortals can’t possibly follow it. The result: extra capital to make the iPhone ever cooler. Politicians whine but consumers cheer. (Just when you thought Swiss privacy laws were finished, there’s no doubt that clever people will find new ways to hide their capital from the State.)
SEVENTEEN. Supper clubs: Underground foodies are paying visits to chefs and great cooks outside the auspices of the public health nannies. Every home is a restaurant, every kitchen an income earner. Similar supper clubs sprouted up in Chicago when aldermen in that city banned foie gras (a ban that was eventually overturned thanks to popular outcry, civil disobedience and counter-special interests).
EIGHTEEN. Offshoring and inshoring: Sometimes corporate taxes, union controls, and regulatory control are all just too much. U.S. corporations take their production elsewhere (currently the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, when state taxes are taken into account), even as foreign corporations venue-shop for the best production facilities in the United States (away from high taxes and cartelized unions).
NINETEEN. Food trucks: Bricks-and-mortar restaurants love regulations because they can keep a boot on the necks of competitors. That’s why cities that tolerate food truck culture are giving these restaurants a run for their money. If you can stand to eat your tacos on a park bench, it might be worth hitting a food trailer—the ultimate in microentrepreneurship. They are often at the forefront of experimentation and variety.
TWENTY. Social networks and Skype: Millions of people from all over the world are interacting as if they were next-door neighbors. Subtly this blurs the lines created by nation-states and creates a far more cosmopolitan world—one that exposes the arbitrariness of jurisdictions that you may or may not happen to have been born in.
TWENTY-ONE. Driverless cars: The technology is here. It certainly changes the calculation for distracted or intoxicated drivers, and it fixes the problems with public roads the State won’t fix. Driverless cards will give us safe, automated travel and deny the State funds it gleans from hassling people for both major and minor offenses that result from bad infrastructure, human error, and poor judgment. It’ll just take one or two areas of the world to deploy them successfully to unleash the change.
TWENTY-TWO. Crowdsourcing private equity: Kickstarter and other online fundraisers were required by law to restrict their services to donations and not sell stock. But what about premiums for donations? How big can they be? The limits are being tested. In a few years, you will be able to buy startup equity with Bitcoin and the whole world will benefit. In any case, the loophole has been already been created.
TWENTY-THREE. Private conservation: You can be an environmentalist without agitating to have pristine lands given to the State for taxpayer management. Groups like the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited do great things when they don’t turn land over to the State. And private individuals are opting to conserve land rather than sell it.
TWENTY-FOUR. Immersive environments: We’re in the process of creating the Matrix around us. From Second Life to immersive games, we may soon see linkages between the virtual world and the crypto economy that result in interesting new forms of order.
TWENTY-FIVE. Twitter revolutions: Having troubles with a tinpot dictator or religious zealots? Organize, demonstrate and overthrow with Twitter—#overthrow. (But be careful you don’t end up installing a regime that’s worse than the one you helped overthrow.)
[These originally appeared on FEE.org, right here.]
Face it:
liberty is gone. Freedom exists now only in the ideology of
the Constitution, not in the practice of “democracy” and a U.S. government that
rules us with tens of thousands of “laws” that yoke us to an indentured
servitude of paying for its spending spree. Those in government have completely
usurped the power of the people, all under the guise of protecting the people
from, well, themselves…
The Gestapo is alive and well in Obama's America »
Barack Obama's most Gestapo-like initiative is "Operation Chokepoint." This is your government's attempt to put morality controls (just like those in Iran) on the American public by shutting down certain businesses. More »
Barack Obama's most Gestapo-like initiative is "Operation Chokepoint." This is your government's attempt to put morality controls (just like those in Iran) on the American public by shutting down certain businesses. More »
Yours for a life fulfilled
Bruce ‘the Poor Man’
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