After Restricting Your Personal Freedom, Governments Are Going After Your Financial Freedom

Inflation is the hidden tax governments will use to expand their power, keep the population desperate, and lower our standard of living.

Let there be no confusion at this point:

Governments around the world are deliberately attempting to turn their societies into more authoritarian states, seeking to restrict personal freedom and turn back the rise of free speech that the internet has enabled.

As we can see, events are moving in only one direction when it comes to government action:

Less personal freedom, more centralized authority.

This process was beginning even before the Covid pandemic.

The rhetoric of ‘safety’ was being used to try and crack down on free expression on social media.

Remember, while many have directed anger at the heads of the social media companies, their crackdown on free expression was urged on by governments, who often used the threat of regulation and massive fines in order to convince those companies to restrict free speech and silence certain individuals.

For example, Twitter head Jack Dorsey had originally resisted calls for crackdowns on users, saying that the ‘block’ button was the solution for users to stop others from replying & commenting.

And, in a world that truly valued free speech and personal responsibility, that would have been enough.

If you don’t like what someone is saying to you on social media, the ‘block’ function takes care of that problem.

But that would have been too easy, and wouldn’t have given governments that kind of power that they demanded.

So, the issue became ‘safety’, with ‘safety’ referring to the ability to silence others.

By embracing ‘safety’ rather than freedom when it comes to social media, the groundwork was laid to start ratcheting down the range of ‘acceptable’ conversation.

And, with a whole generation of young people rising to positions of power after being raised with ‘safety’ as their top value, freedom has been under sustained assault.

Of course, after laying the groundwork to use ‘safety’ as an excuse to restrict freedom, we have all seen how politicians took that to an extreme level over the past year and a half. Indeed, we have unfortunately learned that many things we thought were ‘rights’ have ended up as privileges controlled by politicians and public officials.

Restricting your personal freedom isn’t enough

In times when personal freedom is restricted, many are able to secure a large degree of freedom through other means.

The more money someone has, the more resources they can command, and the more independent they can be.

Thus, even when governments are cracking down on individual freedom, personal wealth enables people to build their own citadels or redoubts of freedom for themselves and others.

Further, a populace with substantial financial resources at their command is more difficult to control, and will often wrest power back from authoritarian politicians.

For that reason, those who seek to restrict personal freedom don’t stop there.

Financial freedom must also be restricted.

But you can’t just tell people you’re going to make them poorer.

Even a country with so many submissive people like Canada would push back against something that obvious.

So, you find an excuse, and you do it in such a way that it can’t be directly traced to the government.

Hence, the ‘climate crisis’ and inflation.

Using climate change as the excuse, politicians have been able to impose policies like carbon taxes.

Those taxes – which tend to go up every year – results in an ever-increasing transfer of wealth (thus power) from individuals to the government.

It’s the dream of power-hungry politicians: A tax you can ‘justify’ to be about ‘saving the planet,’ while raising it every year to put more money in government coffers.

But even that isn’t enough.

So what next?

The Inflation Tax

If you want to get away with keeping a population desperate and beholden to government, there’s nothing better than inflation.

Inflation not only reduces everyone’s purchasing power, but perversely it does so while making people feel like they have more money.

After all, they do technically have ‘more money,’ but that money has less value.

The government can claim wages are going up and they can point to higher GDP. The inflation then often causes people to try and buy more things initially, which results in a short-term surge in economic activity.

Further, the loss of purchasing power caused by inflation is more subtle than seeing the GST on a receipt.

With inflation, you begin to feel that everything is getting more expensive.

People wonder why their money isn’t going as far as it once did.

People are confused as to why they feel poorer and poorer.

None of it can be directly traced back to government, so people often get angry at their employers and at the stores they shop at, wondering why the ‘selfish’ business owners keep raising prices.

Ironically, since inflation leads people to falsely direct blame at the private sector, we often see more demands for government intervention and government action, despite government being the culprit.

The incompetence & deviousness of those in power

Many of our ‘leaders’ are both incompetent and devious.

They are incompetent when it comes to actually improving things in this country, but are devious enough to continue manipulating people in order to expand their power.

As we know, the same politicians who claimed covid was ‘low-risk’ a year and a half ago when it hadn’t even entered Canada are now the ones creating a disturbing two-tiered society and demanding that people continue to give up their freedoms.

In the same vein, the head of the Bank of Canada is still claiming higher inflation will be ‘transitory,’ and officials are either trying to downplay it, or claim it’s a good thing.

Tiff Macklem, the head of the BOC, is even saying that inflation isn’t ‘broad based,’ and thus isn’t a big cause for concern.

Back in the real world, try telling anyone that higher prices aren’t ‘broad based.’

Nobody believes that.

But this is the arrogance of those in power.

The Bank of Canada printed a gargantuan amount of money, and continues to enable a huge expansion of the role of government and government spending.

The Liberals are locking-in hundreds of billions of dollars in new government spending, at a time when they also continue to incentivize people to remain unemployed, and instead get government money.

There is simply no situation in which this wouldn’t be highly inflationary, and here we are.

Freedom is found outside of government

The solution for all of this isn’t complex:

Less government, more freedom.

It’s no coincidence that interest in cryptocurrency continues to surge.

More and more people are realizing that governments don’t have our best interests in mind, and that those in power are deliberately trying to destroy our purchasing power.

Thus, decentralized systems, systems that can’t be manipulated or destroyed by governments will continue to rise.

This is the battle of our era: Governments trying to restrict freedom & centralize power, and individuals seeking to defend freedom and decentralize power.

As governments seek to attack our personal & financial freedom, more and more people will push back and the forces of decentralization will grow more powerful.

Spencer Fernando

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