Bastiat & Bitcoin
In times of adversity, thank Life for this welcome challenge. For in challenge, we gain an opportunity to prove that we are deserving.
Over the course of recent passing weeks I have been leisurely chipping away at The Law by Frederic Bastiat, and let me tell you… what a timely collection of thoughts for today. Bastiat’s words are 169 years old, and they are just as relevant now as they were in 1853 France (if that doesn’t show you what very little humanity has done as far as growing).
“Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two.”
Bitcoin upholds this divine creed. By defending the individual’s right to property via the most secure and powerful computing network that man has ever constructed, and in a manner with which is agreed upon by social contract to be free from manipulation or alteration, Satoshi Nakamoto has given the world a foundation for truly Just lawfulness.
“If every person has the right to defend — even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly.”
By this mechanism, we engage a process that allows for individuals to unite under a common cause — the support and defense of individual rights — to be capable of producing a true Country of Freedom. Whether this be by dissolution of current borders, or by making healthy and necessary changes in society after realization upon reflections that our modern valuations of Freedom have gone awry.
“Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?”
It was by these philosophies, these laws of life, that a coterie of colonists challenging an incumbent that was far disconnected from reality, landed a blow that carried waves of Freedom across the world. And now, today, we have descendants of those very men and women — that risked everything for Freedom — daring to deny these freedoms from their peers, that they wrongly view as lesser to themselves. Descendants that ‘matured’ during an age of relative ease, and complacency.
“If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.”