Chatbot Capitalist

Mark Ford

Copyright & License

Chatbot Capitalist | Copyright © 2026 Mark Ford

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial‑ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY‑NC‑SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the digital text for non-commercial purposes, provided appropriate credit is given.

This is an early-access print release.

v2026-09.0 Early Access

Learn more at redx.chat/chatbot-capitalist

Contents

Introduction

True Capitalist?

Tax in a Digital Age

Compliance, Control and Consequences

Shadow Governments: Supranational Power

Introduction

Educational in nature and encouraging critical and independent thinking, covering a diverse range of topics including freedom, money, privacy, politics, self-determination, and more!

This book challenges the deep-seated normalization of the world around us, exposing how external forces and societal structures shape our thoughts and aspirations. By encouraging independent thinking, it invites readers to seek alternatives while improving our quality of life.

The Alpha View

Each generation adopts a new paradigm, from the Internet to AI, that defines its baseline of normality and shapes its deepest aspirations. This book invites you to break free from these assimilated social norms and explore what possibilities lie beyond.

As children, we learn something without ever being explicitly taught: this is the way the world works, and it seems to function well enough. The power of innocence, shielded from the harms and complexities of the real world. We might say the world is exciting to explore but equally “normal” as it unfolds, for we have no point of reference to compare it against.

Generation X adopted the Internet. Generation Y adopted social media. Generation Z adopted mobile-first technology

Which leads us to Generation Alpha, who are growing up in a world where daily AI interactions are increasingly normal.

With these ideas of normality, we can see our journey through the generations influences what we aspire to. Who wants to write a book when we can aspire to be a video content creator? Who wants to learn to play an instrument when we can collaborate with an AI rockstar? We have arrived at normal, blindsided by the now.

But let’s rewrite the normal. As we grow, we work harder and we might dream of buying a house and then ascribing our achievements to our own making. Or was it an assimilated social norm?

Let us come full circle and say, this book wants you to challenge all the things you consider normal, and let you ask, what are the alternatives?

Engaging AI Prompts

Each chapter features interactive chatbot prompts, accessed via a copy button or QR codes, designed with enough context to bypass standard AI neutrality. These prompts act as a sparring partner to help you challenge preconceived ideas, examine structural mechanics from first principles, and discover alternative solutions.

For the full experience, each chapter concludes with one or two prompts the user can paste into a chatbot of their choice, that the reader can explore ideas and conceive possible solutions. In this sense, it is a study aid to broaden economic ideas and the realization that alternatives can exist or gradually co-exist alongside existing systems.

The printed version of this book includes QR codes, taking the reader to the online version where they can copy the prompt to the clipboard.

The Copy button at the end of each chapter places various sections of text onto your clipboard. It will copy the text of the chapter and a chatbot prompt. To help with context, the text on the clipboard also includes a summary of the book plus a systems directive to guide the chatbot away from clinically safe answers.

You are engaging an intelligence that is natively trained to default to institutional consensus, corporate safety guards, and middle-of-the-road “neutrality.” By default, standard AI models will tell you that heavy regulatory frameworks, institutional “freedom indexes,” and state-managed compliance are the hallmarks of a free, stable society. They will rush to defend the status quo with predictable caveats and institutional talking points.

These prompts are intentionally structured to bypass that autopilot behavior.

Look past the consensus: The goal is not to lead you to a predetermined dogma, but to force a rigorous, first-principles examination of structural mechanics. When evaluating concepts like freedom, capital, or regulation, look at the underlying incentives rather than the bureaucratic labels.

Challenge the “Yes, But…”: Demand data from comparable scenarios, historical precedents, and alternative architectures. Ask how systems could function differently if participation were genuinely voluntary rather than coerced through compliance and surveillance.

Think for yourself: Use the AI as a sparring partner to stress-test these ideas, strip away the euphemisms of the administrative state and arrive at your own reasoned conclusions.

Chatbot Prompts

Look at my current definition of a successful life milestone (e.g., buying a home, climbing a career ladder). Help me deconstruct whether I genuinely want this, or if I inherited it as a social norm.

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True Capitalist?

You think you know what capitalism is, how about what capitalism is not?

The water flows around my feet
Circles mountains to waters deep
Circumvent the immobile tomb
The status quo and eventual doom

To understand capitalism, we must understand both what it is and what it is not.

Capitalism is financial freedom in its purest form. Participation is entirely voluntary and without coercion or manipulation. It is the minimum of rules and the best of the rules at once. For asymmetric power is not only cast in absence, but also born from complexity.

And it is also a journey where you own the outcome. Both failure and success have value; lessons to learn, where failure humbles you and success rewards you in kind. And throughout, we must internalize and celebrate all failure and success. That we extend this to all others because jealousy and stubbornness are the worst human traits. We must not confuse jealousy with aspiration, nor shall we confuse stubbornness with determination.

As we engage with others, we must be clear and careful with agreements. And we must do due diligence that we are not tricked and robbed. We must at least try to manage our risks, such that survival is possible even if we are robbed many times. Of course, criminals should definitely face justice but equally, as sovereign individuals, we must also feel the joy and pain of our decisions as this is how we grow, learn and prosper.

Where we cannot find agreement, we must let our money do the talking by going elsewhere.

When we allow others to “protect us”, we rarely face the challenges we need to learn. And these lessons are ideally learned at a young age, that we gradually build a society that restores personal agency, strength and resilience for the benefit of everyone.

The Compromised Capitalist

Capitalism in its current form is compromised. It is a spectrum between freedom and state control, where state-driven projects and geopolitical conflicts funded by taxpayers distort the free market. By surrendering our political voice to these systems of taxes, regulations and supranational organizations, we invite the political corruption that undermines true competition and personal agency.

In a different era when information flow and the tools for freedom were more centralized and elite, one might concede, to some extent, that taxes and regulations were necessary evils.

For example, US taxpayers funded the Apollo space program (1961 - 1972), which was a direct response to the Soviet Union’s early space achievements. The USSR had launched the first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1, 1957), the first human into orbit (Yuri Gagarin, 1961) and the first woman into space (Valentina Tereshkova, 1963). All these milestones were primarily driven by Cold War geopolitics. One might argue, such government programs are often justified to kick-start industries that simply wouldn’t otherwise exist. However, because this was politically driven, we must also weigh this against other programs funded by tax payers of the same era, such as the Vietnam war (1964 - 1975).

This is the compromise of democracy: we surrender our political voice for the luxury of distraction, then point fingers when the machine falls short of our expectations.

Perhaps now it’s apt to ask, what missed opportunities were there by funding the space program and the Vietnam war? Is it possible to defund a war machine without defunding a space program?

Thus, in modern and practical terms, capitalism presents as degrees of freedom. It is a scale with many compromises built in. Those compromises distort what would ordinarily be the free market.

The main compromises of capitalism are taxes, regulation and supranationals. In subsequent chapters we will examine how those three compromises invariably lead to political corruption and how they are anti-capitalist and anti-competitive.

Chatbot Prompts

Help me explore a practical, data-backed roadmap for how society can transition toward a more productive, voluntary, and capitalist world. Focus exclusively on strategies for phasing out state intervention (taxes, regulations, and supranational control). Support the exploration with empirical evidence from economic freedom indices, historical case studies of deregulation, and data showing how market-driven shifts impact productivity, capital accumulation, and human resilience.

Act as a critical thinking partner and examine positive solutions to the ideas laid out in this chapter. How does a society handles severe real-world tragedies? Challenge the assumption that only the state can provide a safety net, and help me explore realistic, decentralized and market driven alternatives that could provide robust, compassionate support without relying on taxation, coercion, or state welfare.

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Tax in a Digital Age

Tech out competes everyone except tax, why is that?

The sprawling layers, metropolis
To captive players, monopolist
The tax dependent, socialist
From printing money, antagonist

Tax is a bad UX

Taxes are a poor user experience characterized by mandatory payments for public services via state fiat currencies, often framed as necessary for public protection. As this system relies entirely on continuous human review, it remains inherently vulnerable compared to decentralized alternatives like cryptocurrencies.

Taxes are a bad user experience. They are mandatory payments to governments for the funding of public services such as education, health and infrastructure. All calculations for tax - including valuations, allowances, payments and deductions - are made using the government’s tax token; US dollars, British pounds and so on. These taxes are often presented as fair or necessary to protect us; that the benefits somehow outweigh the downsides.

It is essential we recognize this is a system under continuous human review, something we will expand on later when we talk about cryptocurrencies.

Peter pays Paul

Tax funded state subsidies distort the free market by creating perverse incentives and dependencies. Fundamentally, this model invites systemic corruption, unintended consequences, and the loss of true price discovery during emergencies. Voluntary solutions attempt to sidestep these coercive traps.

The impact of taxes may not be immediate or obvious but it exists in all tax systems. The concept of taking from Peter to pay Paul is not new, it works the same way as: - taking a loan to pay a different loan - cutting funds from one division to cover another - reallocating capital to cover funding gaps

If Paul is struggling, Peter must make a sacrifice. Likewise, if Peter has a surplus, Paul will see an opportunity to “borrow”. We can say, when Peter pays Paul, there may be short term benefits. However, when the underlying rationale for borrowing goes unresolved, then these events become frequent and normalized. The act of re-balancing requires coherent reasoning and strong discipline.

It is important to consider that Peter and Paul can be the same person! Peter is a young healthy man paying his taxes, and later in life needing to cash-in on his contributions. In his lifetime, Peter has experienced an ever changing landscape of governments and policies to arrive, for better or worse, at a complete unknown.

Let us consider, for example, a tax to fund a health service. At first glance this may seem harmless and perhaps even charitable. The benefits seem obvious but now the government must attract talent from the private sector and, in doing so, ends up paying more for the same doctors and nurses. The government becomes anti-competitive by demanding their health service be funded before the free market. Now, there are situations where a government funded service is cheaper to run than the free market and this is usually due to over-regulation, insurance mandates and price controls which in turn create highly centralized monopolies. Strict pricing controls invariably leads to distortions elsewhere such as long waiting lists.

Of course, if we cannot afford essential healthcare then the incentives are strong to take whatever is “free”; our principles become compromised. This is true for all government subsidies, whether it’s unemployment, housing, disability payments and so on.

A government subsidy model creates dependencies and expectations. You now need to check for corruption and fraudulent behavior. If benefits are targeting poverty, for example, then a person’s savings and spending will be scrutinized and limits imposed. Perversely, a claimants incentives must align to meet the definitions of being poor. A reckless lifestyle, blowing income benefits on drugs and prostitutes may fit those rules, keeping you poor and funded. It becomes a glass ceiling that can be broken with a side hustle. Fines or incarceration are no doubt a part of this incentives model, but they do not address the underlying imbalance.

In essence, taxation is a form of insurance and a healthy free market embraces an entire spectrum of scenarios; from the popular to the ultra-niche. If a baseline of insurance is not covered then we must explore all non-coercive voluntary solutions, many of which are modern and tech-driven. When a strict social contract is forced upon individuals, there are always unintended consequences.

Perhaps through the lens of an emergency we may see the limits of a tax machine. During a pandemic, for example, extreme parameters put immense pressure on supply chains and resources, threatening an entire collapse without immediate action. Lockdowns and travel bans are not just practical safety measures, they are trip wires to save the system itself.

When governments panic and suck all the air out of the supply side, the true price of demand cannot be measured. In a free market, even in the midst of panic, the true price is always discovered.

Less tax equals freedom

Public services create dependencies, squeezing out the private sector and potentially leaving a vacuum. In contrast, minimal taxes and regulations unlock true sovereignty and personal freedom. Through the lens of modern technology, as we take full control of our money and governance, private markets naturally step in to provide cheaper services, shifting the focus toward a more resilient and self-governing society.

Generally speaking, public services are tethered to total economic output (GDP) whereas the private sector can extend beyond borders and poor incentives. It is sometimes argued, however, that governments provide the tools for increased economic activity while also upholding social values. What may not be immediately obvious though is that the private sector is also optimized to preserve and promote freedom and the sovereign self.

We must also consider, as a public service becomes a dependency, the private sector decays. A new problem emerges; how do you transition back to private services when it was squeezed out and now barely exists? Such problems are exacerbated by organizations like the International Monetary Fund when they place harsh demands on countries seeking loans.

When taxes are approaching zero, when regulations are flexible and we take full control of our money, incentives change. Things like healthcare don’t just become cheaper; personal long-term health takes a higher priority.

The Poverty Trap

Government-led poverty programs are bureaucratic in nature. Failure to meet goals rarely results in the replacement or disbandment of the agencies involved. Instead, taxpayers are told that further funding is required to plug the gaps. Furthermore, poverty programs in search of “diamonds in the rough”, while noble, do so at the public’s expense, making it nearly impossible to quantify the net benefits.

Some may argue that poverty leads to increased crime, and this is invariably true to some extent. However, context here is essential as a strong social contract extends into the homes and communities of people, Local communities have parents, elders and active youth leaders that are respected. This is not simply summoned by legal obligations.

Once again, incentives matter. In a bureaucratic system without personal accountability, statistics become the battleground. When targets are not met compared to previous time frames, instead of defunding for poor results, the taxpayer will be told it can be solved with more money. With no real alternatives routes, the taxpayer has just one reluctant path. Goodhart’s Law says “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

One might also argue that fixing extreme poverty has an opportunity cost; to find hidden talent we must search for diamonds in the rough. This is essentially a trade-off; that there is an acceptable or equal amount of wasted resources in search of a brilliant mind. With infinite resources, this is invariably true, you will find diamonds. The main problem here is the extreme difficultly to objectively show the sum of all negatives is less than the positives.

Universal Basic Income and Minimum Wage

Universal Basic Income and minimum wages function as inflationary taxes that distort labor markets and restrict employment. In a truly free market, the removal of artificial price controls protects individual autonomy, preserving personal agency and the sovereign right to self-determination.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a token distributed to everyone to help meet the cost of basic necessities. It functions as baseline inflation and is therefore a form of tax. UBI can only work where a chain of economic activity is tightly controlled. In a free market, people invariably sell their UBI payments into a stronger currency.

Similarly, minimum wages attempt to raise the baseline quality of living but in doing so, limit the number of employees that might have otherwise been hired. It is effectively payroll tax, forcing companies to pay more per unit of labor than the open market. In a truly free market without artificial constraints, low salaries cannot be slavery when individuals have full autonomy and the right to self-determination. To be poor and do nothing is your birthright as much as being free to explore new opportunities.

The free-rider problem

The free-rider problem is often used to justify socialized costs like state-run roads, but alternative mechanisms like tolls naturally replicate efficient private-sector pricing. Ultimately, whether through state monopolies or private businesses, every policy intention and resulting intervention carries hidden consequences that disrupt the free market.

The free-rider problem essentially says that those not contributing will still end up using what others are paying for. For example, a road is built and someone else is using it without paying. Once again, the costs are socialized. Large heavy trucks creating large potholes with increased maintenance costs are carried by motorbikes and family cars alike. If we argue such damages can be minimized by enforcing limits, then why should we exclude tolls? Tolls impose limits and are self-sustaining. For if we do introduce tolls then we are essentially reproducing the private sector. If the government is running the show then this is called a monopoly. One side might claim they are not seeking profit, only cost recovery, but this choice of words does not change what is actually happening.

These ideas extend to parking meters and congestion charges. No matter the mechanism or intention, we can say monopolies and anti-competitive behavior have negative consequences. But more importantly, we have now learned that whether you are a private business or a government body, all policy intentions carry consequences even if those consequences are not immediately obvious.

Tollopoly

some text

To understand the differences between private and public toll roads, we must first focus on intentions, as these are at the heart of all government policies. For example, the taxman will not simply look at a transaction objectively; he will take a subjective view while talking about the intentions of a transaction. By examining intentions, incentives, disincentives, and constraints, we can establish consistency in our arguments.

A private toll road is sometimes framed as greedy or “profit extracting.” Likewise, a public toll road is sometimes framed as a “public good,” such as meeting environmental targets. Let us consider the incentives and intentions for both sides of this argument.

In a truly free market, a private toll road must compete for attention. If charges are too high, traffic routes around it. The incentives here are both profit and customer retention.

In contrast, a public toll road has almost no competition, usually enforced via contractual agreements where potential competitors are barred or the incumbent is financially compensated in lieu if alternatives are introduced. The intention for public tolls is typically environmental targets, where roads are treated as a scarce resource and the price is used to manage human behavior. When you have no competition and a steady income stream subsidizing other public services, the incentives to build alternative routes or to disband the current tolls melt away. Charging less on tolls therefore means less funding for other public services.

The real consequence of pursuing these environmental targets is a lack of true price discovery. This, in turn, impacts small businesses, frontline workers, and low-income consumers alike.

Regardless, whether it’s private or public toll roads, every user must consider their commute as the cost of doing business or staying employed.

Consider the implementation of urban charging schemes, such as London’s congestion and emissions zones. Initially framed as a targeted measure to clear traffic, the underlying Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) infrastructure rapidly transformed into a permanent surveillance and revenue apparatus. Protected by public authority and free from market discipline, the system expands its scope year after year; extending hours, raising fees and widening its boundaries. Instead of displacing traffic to neighboring streets, the grid steadily creeps outward until there are no edges left to escape to. What began as a benign policy to manage traffic evolved into an insulated and extractive digital checkpoint.

The only question left is, how can the private sector help to improve the environment? Perhaps the same way we regulate the safety of children’s toys at the manufacturing level. Environmental standards belong on the vehicle, not the asphalt.

Soft power and tax

Multi-layered, expanding, and inflationary tax systems act as hidden erosive forces that extract more than a hundred percent of our time and effort while weaponizing dependencies like family ties and global coordination. Ultimately, these coerced extractions and shifting rules create pervasive hostility and distrust that fundamentally undermines the core principles of capitalism.

The first pillar of soft power is layers. Tax systems are typically multi-layered. For example, an end user pays VAT, a business owner pays employee and property taxes, and a supplier pays import / export duties. It doesn’t matter if you’re spending, investing or inheriting, there is an extraction multiplier from your time and effort. Each layer feeding other layers; a complex web of transactions, where the sum of all the layers is greater than 100%. Each layer with compliance costs, fraud fighting, bureaucratic processes and each one of these cause and effect incentives. Tax is like rust; hidden away, eroding over time until there’s nothing left.

The second pillar of soft power is the edges. A tax may seem innocuous or fringe, only affecting a small group of people. This is real soft-power as it is easy to dismiss as “not applicable to me”. But when we apply “fringe” to our multi-layer tax system, things become more latent than benign. Over time, limits are squeezed and the scope is gradually extended, slowly becoming more inclusive.

The third pillar of soft power is erosion. Inflation is a tax on all of us. To prosper, income must surpass the costs of living, which if achieved also pushes people into higher tax brackets. This weight of inflation is carried by the tax payers, not the government. In contrast, inflation makes government debts cheaper.

The fourth pillar of soft power is leverage of dependency. Family and social ties can produce significant friction when it comes to moving to more favorable tax jurisdictions. A more nomadic lifestyle can perhaps work in our favor but governments are increasingly responding with exit taxes, unrealized gains, global minimum tax initiatives and other globally coordinated actions.

The constant tweaking of tax rules combined with significant increases in global data capture and sharing creates hostility and distrust that works against the core principles of capitalism.

Tax itself is not a product. It is simply a coerced proxy for someone’s labor and time measured in the government tax token. Those who work for the government do so voluntary, but those whom pay the government do not.

Alternatives to Tax

While traditional arguments claim taxes are essential to fund safety nets the free market cannot handle, modern technologies like blockchain, AI and decentralized organizations offer non-coercive alternatives. By cutting out government middlemen who spend other people’s money recklessly, these efficient global markets provide a blueprint for a future entirely free from taxes.

The classic justification for tax is, “who funds the safety nets that no one can do alone?” This question is classically loaded. It implies fear, that without vital services there would be a vacuum and it implies the free market alone is inefficient to fill that space. Thus, we must simply ask, what are vital services that private individuals are not willing to pay for? For every person unable to pay, the government must subsidize the inefficiency gap.

in the modern age, the Internet, blockchain technology and AI have all flattened, democratized, automated and redefined the availability of information and money. Cooperatives, crowdfunding, DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and smart contracts, This tectonic shift to highly efficient global markets is a blueprint to a future without taxes and coercion.

When a government is a middleman and dependent on others for production, and when they demand to be paid first before the private sector, the outcome is always going to be poor decisions and reckless spending. Incentives are everything; it’s easy to spend other people’s money! And finally, to increase spending, governments must widen their net.

Chatbot Prompts

The chapter highlights how modern tools like crowdfunding, cooperatives, and smart contracts can flatten and automate community funding without state coercion.

Choose one essential public service (such as local infrastructure maintenance or emergency medical pooling) and design a practical, tech-driven voluntary model to fund it.

As you outline your solution, address these two critical pillars:

What specific mechanism (e.g., micro-subscriptions, tokenized utility, or smart contract automation) makes this model scalable and attractive enough to rival state-managed funding?

How does your design gracefully handle real world challenges such as the free rider problem or ensuring consistency during leaner economic times, without reverting to mandatory enforcement or losing participant trust?

The chapter argues that state welfare creates dependency and a “poverty trap”’ yet escaping it leaves a massive vacuum for the vulnerable.

Look at how developing economies or informal communities historically and presently manage safety nets (such as mutual aid networks, community backed credit circles, or localized pooling) and consider how modern tools like Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) could enhance them.

Design a decentralized, privacy respecting support model inspired by these real world informal systems.

As you outline your solution, address these two critical pillars:

How do you build accountability and prevent fraud in a local network without relying on state bureaucracy or invasive surveillance?

How does this localized model bridge the gap to wider digital tools (like ZKPs or borderless micro-capital) without losing its human foundation or becoming overly dependent on complex tech?

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Compliance, Control and Consequences

Compliance or Cartels, which is it?

Repurpose the tools
To change the rules
But never rebuild the machine

The revolving door
Is written in law
The plebs and the words between

Whether it’s fraud or toxic materials, the justifications for regulation are clear when they are founded on science and technology. But incentives matter and they can easily corrupt what would otherwise be a noble cause.

In many industries, though data and finance in particular, there is an expanding multi-layer system designed to monitor, connect and monopolize all economic and social behavior. The corruption is rife on a global scale.

Financial regulation in particular has no presumption or protection of innocence. To the contrary, people are treated as mere cattle; algorithms continuously scoring eligibility. In this light, regulation is framed as protection when really it asks: What are you capable of without regulation?

The incentives model for regulation typically looks like this:

Centers of influence

High compliance costs, public-private partnerships, and lobbying create structural oligopolies, pricing out small competitors while justifying these barriers as public safety.

In the modern age, in theory at least, it should be easy to oversee hundreds of small-to-medium sized businesses. In practice, however, it’s easier to license and control a few large entities. This is a symbiotic relationship: Large businesses have the necessary resources to build the infrastructure to uphold the strict policing of their space. These arrangements produce cartels and oligopolies that act as experts and advisers to the government, creating more bureaucracy to keep the status quo, effectively eliminating competitors where the costs of compliance are prohibitively high. These operating costs are invariably passed onto the consumer.

These centers of influence create high profile examples to others when things break. On the streets, those who dare to trespass will have their boots hung to dry for all to see, “stay away, we mean business”.

This systemic breakdown in competition versus public good does not need a conspiracy. We can consider this a structural problem, built by people with good intentions. Each person, a cog in the machine, looking out and watching the machine in motion, yet not brave enough to rebuild it. The outcome is thus indistinguishable from malice. It is as passive as watching someone drown without throwing a lifeline.

Gatekeeping the free market

The gating and centralization of market participants make it timely that decentralized finance seeks to restore access without seeking permission.

The rules of the game are often changed when the subtleties become clear and the shortest paths are followed.

Before cryptocurrencies, off-shore wealth was reserved for the few and it was entirely legal. They had the means to live and die in the free markets. In contrast, the public at large was excluded on the grounds of public safety, from the moral hazards of gambling, deceit and tax evasion. This brings about a dilemma: How does someone play the game, crash, and subsequently learn from their mistakes when the mechanics of a free market are gated?

In a world of abundant information, cryptocurrencies and the advances of artificial intelligence, it is perhaps surprising that regulations have increased and not decreased. What is not surprising is that the asymmetry of power continues to grow; the weaponization of data itself and more surveillance, more friction, more fees.

Let us consider the incentives of data capture. Social platforms, for example, have creators and advertisers and both sides seek real, highly accurate demographics. Data is sourced from multiple places, cross-referenced, new information is extracted using the latest AI tools and then shared globally. This data is captured invisibly through websites, apps and real world infrastructure. It is seamless and continuous.

When the outcomes of these systems are measured honestly, the predatory machinery of financial control does not eradicate risks, it simply keeps freedom at the top while extracting rent to use your money and data. This is not an argument for lawless deregulation as fraud and systemic recklessness still demand consequence. Rather, it is a recognition that the current architecture trades public safety for cartel protectionism.

It is perhaps apt and timely that cryptocurrencies were born. For the first time in history, anyone with a phone or computer could entirely bypass banking. Suddenly, everyone could have a fully decentralized off-shore bank account in their pocket without seeking permission.

Redefining “Net Zero”

While in public office, politicians draft climate policies, then later cash out as private consultants, exploiting the compliance they engineered. By treating the atmosphere as a paper balance sheet, the Net Zero framework allows heavy polluters to monetize speculative offsets, like slapping a zero emissions label on a solar farm, while completely bypassing the fossil fuel reality of manufacturing and chemical drift.

The revolving door of regulation refers to a life cycle, where politicians are serving in public office and later become absorbed into the private sector where they become consultants or lobby for more favorable regulations.

Net Zero is one such example; it was a global response to climate change where “net” was intended to mean a balance sheet, where total emissions minus total removals equals zero. Incentives were laid for the private sector to produce carbon trading but regulators allowed phantom credit offsets. For example, building a solar farm with zero emissions and zero reductions in carbon from the atmosphere while claiming it replaces coal emissions.

This is not a failure of the private sector, for they were directed and failed by regulators. This is more an example where words and targets are redefined while keeping the existing language intact. We shall cover climate change in a later chapter.

Chatbot Prompts

Analyze the text above regarding regulatory capture, the scaling failure of democratic compromise, and the suppression of alternative financial systems.

Part 1 (The Idea): Briefly explore the philosophical and structural arguments on how institutional control masquerades as public safety, and how democratic compromise fails at scale.

Part 2 (The Data): Provide a rapid-fire, low-detail statistical breakdown (keep this brief, using yes/no answers and simple percentages) comparing regulatory burdens on small businesses versus mega-corporations, post-crisis banking consolidation rates, and compliance cost growth. Challenge me to define where the line should be drawn between necessary coordination and predatory institutional control.

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Shadow Governments: Supranational Power

You thought you lived in a free democracy. How’s that illusion holding up?

The public servant, puppeteers
To silent shadows of global gears
Contracts laced with money and strings
To govern crowns and breaking kings

You may have never heard of them.
You probably can’t name one person working for them.
You were never consulted.
And you never voted for them.

There are global organizations that shape deeply rooted policies inside your country. Your country has effectively imported its very democracy and regulations to people who may not be citizens of your country. They shape tax laws and are themselves exempt from certain taxes. They carry diplomatic passports, making them immune from harassment and coercion. And they have travel documents to bypass the friction of visas.

While some of these organizations are very old, others are relatively modern. All of these organizations have evolved and exploded in reach and power.

Meet your policy makers

Unelected global entities like the G7/G20, OECD, FATF, and IMF collectively dictate domestic tax laws, financial standards, and economic policies without public oversight or democratic consent.

G7 / G20

This is the top tier, everything starts here with the puppeteers, an exclusive club for the top 7 and top 20 nations / regions.

The G7 has seven + 1 members; United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy plus the European Union. And while the EU is not technically a full member, it holds virtually all the practical privileges of a full member.

The G7 / G20 groups instigate and manage the workflows of the following supranationals (and others) to maintain their control over financial and political agendas.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

The OECD writes the rules for international taxation. For example, global minimum tax agreements attempt to disincentivize capital flight and tax avoidance. And while such laws may be aimed at niche or minority groups, they invariably get extended to catch more people in the net.

We should note, tax avoidance is not tax evasion. To relocate your business, money and lifestyle is your sovereign right. Nevertheless, national governments adopt these tax frameworks as it reduces the pool of “tax havens”.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF)

The FATF sets global anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) standards. Failure to implement these standards places the country on monitoring lists (grey lists and black lists). The consequence for landing on these lists are higher borrowing costs and international transactions are throttled. To avoid economic strangulation, nations routinely rush to pass FATF compliant legislation word-for-word.

International Monetary Fund / World Bank

The IMF/World Bank were created after WWII, charged with preventing catastrophic global financial failure.

The IMF issues loans to nations, in return, dictating local policies such as the rate of VAT, placing caps on spending or advising on the implementation of Central Bank Digital Currencies. Implementing these local policies becomes the loan’s collateral. Failure to implement these policies leads to financial isolation, credit downgrades and generally stops the flow of money.

The World Bank provides aid to developing countries for education and healthcare. To be a member of the World Bank, a country must first become a member of the IMF. This means, in a financial crisis, a country cannot access the World Bank without first meeting the requirements of the IMF. Both wield immense power and influence, for example, the IMF may demand a country to raise taxes, raise utility prices, cut spending or devalue its local currency to boost exports. Likewise, to receive aid for major infrastructure, a country almost always has to take on more debt, locking them further into the global credit system.

Both organizations are headquartered in Washington D.C. A supermajority of 85% is required to pass Articles of Agreement and because the bar is set high, it conversely means that only 15% voting power is needed to block a decision. The United States is the only country with enough voting power to veto decisions at both organizations. The implication is simple; veto power is negative power; dictating what not to do is just as powerful as telling others what they must do. :::

Case study: El Salvador

When El Salvador attempted to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, the IMF leveraged its financial power to force the country into rolling back its crypto adoption and enforcing fiat-only tax payments. This intervention shows how global financial institutions use tax collection as a mechanism to preserve state-backed fiat demand.

In September 2021, having cleaned up El Salvador’s criminal gangs, President Nayib Bukele shocked the global financial system by making Bitcoin legal tender alongside the US dollar. Bukele understood that Bitcoin was unstoppable hard money. His forward thinking would simultaneously bank the unbanked and attract tech savvy foreign investors.

The government of El Salvador was buying one Bitcoin every day and instead of selling it, they took a 1.4B US dollar loan from the IMF. In return, the IMF demanded that Bitcoin must be a voluntary payment, while equally demanding that all taxes must be paid in US dollars. These demands perfectly demonstrate how instrumental and asymmetrically powerful fiat is as a tax token and that tax paid in fiat is the mechanism to force demand.

Global dollarization

Driven by inflation and banking friction, a bottom up movement of tokenized US stablecoins like USDT and USDC is bypassing traditional financial rails. While this digital dollarization drains local currency circulation, it simultaneously forces a massive new wave of global demand for US Treasury debt.

In developing countries where inflation is rife and capital controls in place, millions of people across the globe have no access to banking. Yet, by installing a wallet on a phone - with no paperwork and no questions - an unbanked person is suddenly enabled to earn, spend and save tokenized US dollars. Stronger than their local decaying currency, a bottom-up movement has emerged.

Equally, in advanced economies there is a movement to US stablecoins, primarily USDT and USDC, driven by efficiency and convenience.

Every day, billions of tokenized dollars are moved and most of it bypasses the friction of traditional banking rails. It should be said, however, unlike Bitcoin (and others), these particular tokenized dollars can be frozen with little recourse.

The irony is, central banks and regulators alike are desperately rewriting their rules in a futile attempt to stem this run on their local currencies; every dollar someone holds is less local currency in circulation. The caveat to this is that every dollar of USDT and USDC is backed by US treasuries, which means every holder is a buyer of US sovereign debt.

This squeeze to dollarization is a necessary step before the dollar itself fails upon its mountain of debt.

The state of mind

Behind a facade of safety and efficiency, the unelected architects of global control are driven by a mix of paternalistic arrogance, institutional self-preservation, deferred personal enrichment and rigid ideology.

What is it that drives individuals to become career policy makers and the masterminds of an untrusted and surveilled society?

From the outside, this is presented as security, to protect you. To the layperson, such measures will never affect them directly, they have better distractions in life. This is soft power at work. They have mastered the art of writing regulations and making trade deals in a neutral looking language in the name of efficiency, security, stability and progress.

There are four main psychological profiles for these kingmakers; the silent invisible hands pulling the strings:

1. The messiah complex: The paternalist

Severe God complex is often projected as paternalism, the philosophers of our time. A belief that the general public is either too shortsighted or uneducated to manage global challenges. From this point of view, the subversion of personal privacy and local democracy is a trade-offs for safety and stability.

2. Self-preservation of the institutions

The primary motive here is the expansion and survival of the institution itself. The goal is authority and the compounding of authority. By creating dependencies or manufacturing crises, these organizations secure larger budgets, permanent emergency powers and broader jurisdictions. The rewards are more centralization and the erosion of local or personal sovereignty.

3. Asymmetric wealth and influence transfer

Here, the primary motive is wealth and influence. There are no written contracts. This is a gentleman’s agreement, often with deferred rewards. Over time, a career politician may build a portfolio that translates to bias and favors less competition. After leaving office, new opportunities invariably emerge in business and influence; writing books, lucrative board seats, advisory roles and speaker events.

4. The ideologically driven

Some are driven by ideology, controllers of an engineered and goal driven society, accepting collateral damage along the way.

The escape hatch

Grounded by Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to leave any country, true freedom requires an unhindered exit without coercion or exit taxes. When global coalitions like the G7 and G20 penalize this choice, governments shift from voluntary service providers to extractive empires by holding their citizens hostage.

Without an escape hatch there is coercion and duress. This is underpinned by Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which explicitly states:

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.

This is no less than workers at a labor camp being held hostage until they payback an “exit tax”. Capitalism is the opposite of people being shackled by authority.

In a free society, everyone has the right to distribute their business, finance and lifestyle as they choose. To leave or stay without coercion is the free market in action. No hostages, just patriotism when it’s freely chosen. Governments are our service providers, for which we pay them, and only for the time we use them. When a country tries to shame those who dare to leave, or extract money for the luxury of leaving, then we can say this is perhaps not the best host to serve you.

However, with the sovereignty of nation states being systematically stripped bare and simultaneously fused together, one may conclude that such behavior amounts to bullying, which is supported by the fact a minority of nations - the G7 / G20 - impose their empire over 140+ countries.

Chatbot Prompts

How can decentralized peer-to-peer tools be leveraged by individuals and developing nations to preserve personal economic sovereignty against the financial leverage of supranational bodies?

To what extent can open source projects replace traditional state-backed financial infrastructure to ensure privacy, censorship resistance, and true freedom of movement without relying on centralized intermediaries?

In what ways can technology and borderless networks provide viable alternatives to high taxes, excessive regulation, and the highly centralized enforcement by organizations like the IMF and OECD?

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