Monthly Archives: August 2022

PSC GIVES GRANT OVERSIGHT TO UTILITIES; AGENCY SAYS IT IS A VIOLATION: A recent decision by Marylands Public Service Commission allowing electric utility companies to access millions of dollars in federal grants without public oversight or input violates the commissions regulatory responsibilities, the state agency representing ratepayers said this week in its latest filing. Aman Azhar/The Baltimore Banner.

DEATH OF ELECTIONS BOARD MEMBER COMPLICATES AGENDA: Malcolm L. Funn, one of two Democratic members of the State Board of Elections, died unexpectedly Tuesday of complications from hernia surgery. He was 77. The Calvert County residents death comes at a critical time for the state elections board, as it works to certify the results from the July 19 primaries and sets rules and procedures for the upcoming general election and it adds some uncertainty to the boards short-term agenda and work product. Josh Kurtz/Maryland Matters.

LIBERTARIAN: LONG-SHOT WIN TO GOVERNORs HOUSE: Libertarian David Lashar acknowledges his bid to become Marylands next governor is a long shot. But, he says, this is not a no-shot situation. Nationally, Democrats are feeling the drag from President Joe Bidens low approval ratings and an economy heading for recession. Closer to home, Republicans have nominated a candidate for governor, Dan Cox, who attended then-President Donald Trumps Jan. 6, 2021 rally at the Ellipse before a mob overran the U.S. Capitol building. Pamela Wood/The Baltimore Banner.

POLITICAL NOTES: SCHULZ CONCEDES, PRETTY MUCH: As counties across Maryland completed ballot counting from the June 19 primary on Friday, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kelly Schulz issued what amounts to a concession statement that night. Robbie Leonard conceded in the Democratic primary for Baltimore County states attorney on Friday, after having a slim lead in initial returns on election night. Danielle Gaines and Josh Kurtz/Maryland Matters.

OPINION: THANK OUR ELECTION WORKERS: With some races still undecided and more ballots left to count, the 2022 Maryland primary election is not yet behind us. But as the final votes are tallied, we should all take a moment to thank the thousands of our neighbors who rolled up their sleeves and made this election possible. Every poll worker, election judge, canvasser, volunteer, candidate and vote counter deserve our deepest thanks for making democracy work. Nate Tinbite, Ananya Tadikonda and Matt Post/Bethesda Beat.

PEROUTKA CONSPIRACY THEORIES DATE TO 9-11: Michael Peroutka, the Republican Partys nominee for Maryland attorney general, hosted a series of five radio shows in 2006 devoted to arguing in support of 9/11 conspiracy theories questioning if the terror attack was the work of an elite bureaucrat who had demolition charges in every building in New York City and even suggesting if those who died after a hijacked plane hit the Pentagon were killed elsewhere. Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski/CNN-TV News.

BLAIR LEAD WIDENS, THEN SHRINKS IN MO CO EXEC RACE: In the Democratic primary for Montgomery County executive, pitting David Blair against Marc Elrich for the second time in four years, Blair, at the end of Saturdays canvass, held a wafer-thin 21-vote lead, down from a 134-vote edge at the conclusion of the tally a day earlier. Louis Peck/Bethesda Beat.

HAIRE BEATS McMILLAN IN ARUNDEL EXEC PRIMARY: Edgewater County Council member Jessica Haire became the Republican nominee for Anne Arundel County executive Friday, defeating former Annapolis Del. Herb McMillan. Dan Belson/The Capital Gazette.

OPINION: COX WIN PUTS HOUGH IN A TOUGH SPOT: Republican Sen. Michael Hough, who was unopposed for the nomination for Frederick County executive, awoke to this nightmare scenario on Wednesday after the election: If he refuses to support far right wing gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox, he will alienate the GOP base in the county, making it impossible to win. But if he backs Cox, he will alienate a sizeable minority of Republicans, a number of independents and virtually all Democrats, making it extremely difficult to win. Editorial Board/The Frederick News Post.

HANNA THROWS SUPPORT TO BATES IN CITY STATES ATTY RACE: As expected, defense attorney and former prosecutor Roya Hanna is ending her independent candidacy for Baltimore states attorney, all but ensuring Democratic nominee Ivan Bates will become the citys next top prosecutor. Hanna had dropped out of the Democratic primary race in March but planned to run as an independent in Novembers general election. There are no Republicans running for states attorney. Alex Mann/The Baltimore Sun.

BATES HAS A PLAN FOR SQUEEGEE WORKERS: Ivan Bates said he has a plan to get squeegee workers into diversion and employment programs like those championed by Mayor Brandon Scott as soon as he can take office in January. It would rely on issuing citations to the workers for violating Marylands pedestrian laws. Lee O. Sanderlin/The Baltimore Sun.

SHELLENBERGER WINS: Baltimore Countys incumbent states attorney beat back an upstart primary challenger and will move on to the November general election. On the final day of counting, incumbent Scott Shellenberger added 182 votes to his nearly 2,000 vote lead and edged out Robbie Leonard. Bryan Sears/The Daily Record.

FORMER DEPUTY BEATS SHERIFF IN CITY: Theres a new sheriff in town. After a week of early voting, primary night vote tabulations and six days of counting mail-in and provisional ballots, challenger Sam Cogen emerged as the winner in a heated contest for Baltimore sheriff that pitted him against his former boss Sheriff John Anderson, the citys sheriff of more than three decades. Emily Opilo/The Baltimore Sun.

ANNAPOLIS CITY HALL ENTRANCE PROTOCOLS TIGHTENED: After several difficult confrontations with a man who makes frequent visits to Annapolis City Hall, where he has recorded heated encounters with city employees and posted them on YouTube, Annapolis officials are overhauling security protocols. From installing a metal detector to ending Mayor Gavin Buckleys open door policy, visiting City Hall will be a different experience. The new security measures went into effect July 22. Rebecca Ritzel/The Capital Gazette.

JUDGE JOSEPH MURPHY, 78, DIES: Judge Joseph F. Murphy Jr., former chief judge of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals who ended his judicial career in 2011 as a judge on the state Court of Appeals, died of cancer Wednesday at Stella Maris Hospice. The Cockeysville resident was 78. Fred Rasmussen/The Baltimore Sun.

See more here:

State Roundup: PSC gives grant oversight to utilities; death of elections board member adds uncertainty to work; Libertarian a long-shot for...

Near the end of July, Andrew Yang - whose previous political projects include an unsuccessful run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, an unsuccessful run for the 2021 Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City, and what initially looked likely to be an unsuccessful new "third party," the Forward Party - announced a re-launch of that last effort.

While it's still called the Forward Party, Yang's vehicle is merging with two other (also previously unsuccessful) "third party" efforts, the "Renew America Movement" (co-founded by Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey, who will co-chair "new" Forward) and the "Serve America Movement" (chaired by former Republican congressman David Jolly of Florida).

The merger, Yang tweeted, creates "the biggest 3rd party by resources in the United States."

He may be right about that: The Libertarian Party, which previously held claim to the title of "third largest political party in America," seems to be circling the drain after a four-year internecine fight culminating in a Memorial Day weekend "takeover" by a Republican astroturf operation, the "Mises Caucus" (disclosure: I've been a partisan Libertarian since 1996, but have re-registered in my state as "no party affiliation" and cut off my meager financial support for the national organization pending a hopeful libertarian re-"takeover" of the party).

But are the "resources" Yang speaks of enough for the Forward Party to realize its vision?

In a July 27Washington Post op-ed, Whitman, Jolly, and Yang tick the usual "moderate" boxes. They're against "polarization." They believe most Americans "want to move past divisiveness and reject extremism." They want (and are trying to create) a party that "reflects the moderate, common-sense majority."

And therein lie two problems.

First, while most Americans seem to agree that "polarization" sucks, most Americans are also, well, polarized. They may think of themselves as "centrists" or "moderates," but so do their neighbors, who all have very different ideas about where the "center" really is.

Second, to the extent that a "center" exists, it's already well-covered by a Venn diagram of Republican and Democratic policies and constituencies.

As the late L. Neil Smith once wrote, "great men don't 'move to the center' - great men move the center." Within the context of electoral politics, the same is true of any party that hopes to actually create systemic change. The Overton Window (the spectrum of the politically "acceptable"), like most windows, has its handle on the edge, not in the center. Change comes from the edge and its ability to change the minds AT the "center."

The news may not be all bad for the Forward Party's prospects, though. While its rhetoric is "centrist," its stated priorities focus on individual freedom and its specific policy proposals - Ranked-Choice Voting, Nonpartisan Primaries, and Independent Redistricting Commissions - are at, not beyond, the edge of the aforementioned Overton Window: Good ideas that most people like but that the "major" parties refuse to touch.

Will they excite voters enough to move the needle? Time will tell. But time may be running out on American democracy.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Read the original post:

Third party hopes to move things 'forward' | Columns | reporter.net - Lebanon Reporter

This is a transcribed version of a special edition Bitcoin Magazine podcast with Aleks Svetski and Michael Saylor having a long-form conversation about the implications of Bitcoin and its effects on the world.

Watch This Episode On YouTube Or Rumble

Listen To The Episode Here:

[00:00:13] Aleks Svetski: The level of craziness and the level of intervention and the level of kind of like. What Alan Watts would call do-goodery. right. You've got people who, whether their intent is good or bad, irrespective their process is a little bit ridiculous.

And ESG is one of these examples, right? It's trying to pretend your way into prosperity. It's, you know, let's let's wrap corporations and institutions and companies, and at some point individuals into another set of arbitrary rules for the stated purpose of saving energy or doing social good, or, you know, good governance or whatever, but you actually end up doing the opposite.

So, you know, in many ways, Bitcoin ends up in the firing line of that, whether we like it or not, and we can be as apolitical as we want about it. But, you know, there, there comes a point where you need to sort of draw the line and say no, you know, this is. We're jumping off a cliff here.

This behavior is ridiculous. You know, Sri Lanka, I saw Marty bent, posted something about Sri Lanka today, who was one of the first countries, you know, messing around with this ESG stuff. And, you know, they're having a collapse of food and energy and all this sort of stuff. So I feel like it's tricky.

It's it sounds nice and principled to be apolitical, but at the same time, it's almost impossible to kind of stay apolitical when everything is becoming political.

[00:01:41] Michael Saylor: So I, I think that you have to engage in the political dialogue. That's true. But you also could do it in a constructive way, or you can do it in a destructive way. For example the ESG narrative is just used by a competitor to undermine another competitor. So the oil companies used ESG to get people to shut down nuclear power plants.

Okay. So if you are, if you're going to be effective, you need to identify who your real enemy is. Your enemy, the enemy of the nuclear power plants. Weren't people that wanted to protect the environment. The enemy of the nuclear power plant was lobbyists paid off by oil companies to shut them down. And if you actually put, if you actually put that front and center, you'd probably be much more effective.

[00:02:33] Aleks Svetski: actually.

[00:02:34] Michael Saylor: When online gambling was shut down, it was Indian reservations funneling money through fundamentalist Christian organizations to a lobbyist in DC that convinced politicians that gambling online is an abomination of the eyes of God. Okay. So if you're supporting online poker, you could declare a war on, you know, like all of the evangelical Christians and 25 million Southern Baptists, but they weren't really your enemy.

You're your enemy. Your enemy was a couple of marketing people working for a casino on a reservation that actually, you know, staged a gorilla marketing effort. And if you were to go to every church, And protest against the churches and say, you know, the churches are our enemy and Christianity is the enemy.

You would've picked a fight that you can't win. That was unnecessary. The ESG objections to Bitcoin don't come from environmentalists. They don't come from institutional investors. Are, they come from alt corners. It's the proof of stake networks that pay the lobbyist to lobby the politicians.

They write the op-ed pieces. They plant the stories. They pay for academic research. All of this stuff is sponsored by the other crypto competitors. And so if you were to say, oh the Europeans are stupid or the politician is stupid, or the environmentalist or enemy or big companies are enemy, or the institutional investors are enemy.

You would basically be chasing a red herring, right? You effectively, what's going on is your enemy wants you to go to war with someone a hundred times as big as you, and they're laughing their ass off and you're taking the bait, right? It's like I go into a town, you know, and there are two gangs and they each have a hundred warriors.

So I kill one of the warriors from one gang and I pin it on the other gang and I kill one of the guys from the other gang and I pin it on the first gang and I leave town and I wait for the two gangs to kill each other. And then I come back and take over. You see, as there was, this was all just a false flag, operation of sorts.

So yeah, that doesn't mean you can't get engaged with politics, but you probably should keep in mind, you know, who you're really competing against generally. It's competitors are weaponizing the political process to defeat their arrival. Right. And if I'm gonna do it right, I have to wrap myself in the mantle of being environmentally friendly, or I have to be doing it for the public.

Good, right? Like my competitor, whatever is bad for the environment. And then I get some politician to do that, and the politicians are gonna want some moral justification, but ultimately if you follow the money, you'll find that, that they're just supporting another competitor. And it works both ways.

Right? Ironically the oil companies buried the nuclear power companies using the political process. And then later on you know, the solar and the wind people bury the oil companies using the same process. They're just weaponizing the political process. So you can't not engage, but. You can be a little bit more thoughtful about how you engage

Figure out who really is, who is driving the narrative. And generally most of these organizations they're influenced by their donors to do whatever is right. You know, it's interesting. If you look at the American diabetes association who gives money to the American diabetes association in order to fight diabetes

[00:06:15] Aleks Svetski: it's not like Coke and Pepsi and all those guys or the candy companies.

[00:06:20] Michael Saylor: and and when you and when you read the ma head, it says something like we don't really know what causes diabetes. Okay. But we do know what causes diabetes but the organization doesn't wanna say what causes diabetes, because. To a certain degree, their sponsors have have a vested interest in no one deciding what causes diabetes.

It's better. If it's just an unfortunate disease that we can treat with expensive drugs.

[00:06:48] Aleks Svetski: Yeah, but see, at what point does one draw the line and stop playing within a false Overton window, right? Because that's what all of these things seem to be. I guess what I'm hearing from you is that the strategy is, you know, U use their Overton window and use their arguments. , you know, kind of like a, almost like an Aikido, you know, flip the energy back their way versus, you know, the other strategy being more confrontational and just saying no, that I will not operate in that Overton window.

This is true. And this makes sense over here, not over there. So I dunno it's a tricky one. I mean, I'm obviously more confrontational when I see something stupid. I need to point out that it's stupid because it's stupid. And it's it's a tricky one.

[00:07:37] Michael Saylor: Yeah I think it's complicated. Your best strategy is to is the strategy, which persuades the people with the power to support your point of view, right? if you don't persuade the people with the power to support your point of view, you haven't succeeded. So you just gotta figure out how to do that.

Generally, I find that being constructive and cheerful and educational is a lot more effective than being toxic and confrontational. Look on Twitter. If you're toxic and confrontational, you just get blocked and then you have no influence over anybody that follows that person ever again.

So. And it, you know, if you walk into a mayor's office and you're toxic and confrontational, you just get kicked out and that's the end of that. And they just assume that whatever you liked is wrong and they, and not only do they not give you what you wanted, they go outta their way to, to not give you what you wanted because it's personal.

So I think you never really wanna make it personal. And you that phrase, those, that gods would destroy. They first make mad.

And the other point is, you know, do you wanna succeed or do you just wanna fight? Right. because the, I, if we come back to sun zoo and the like, right, the ideal thing is to win the war without fighting,

Not to engage in a hundred battles that you win. Right. And so coming back to Bitcoin, what you want is for every nation, organization and individual to embrace it and support it. That's what you want. So if you're if you're spending a lot of time to tell the world why somebody is stupid and has character flaw, right? You're ripping somebody else down, but that's not building a Bitcoin, right? Ultimately you gotta choose your fights very carefully. And I think there's some fights we're taking.

For example, I think it's reasonable to fight the gold bugs because we both agree with sound money, but every dollar invested in gold is a dollar non invested in Bitcoin. And that's a battle we can win. We should win because it's a benefit to them when they switch. It's a benefit to Bitcoin when they switch. Right. I don't think it's all that constructive to fight a battle to eliminate the, you know, the Euro like. The odds of actually persuading 20% of gold bugs to abandon gold and adopt Bitcoin as the reserve currency are a lot higher than the odds of persuading 20% of the Europeans to stop using the Euro and leave the EU.

You see? So, so there's some battles that just, I don't think make that much sense and other battles make a lot of sense. They're ones that are winnable and by the way, the best battle is, if you must fight a battle, the battle you wanna fight is against ignorance. And the past in favor of the future, everybody wants to go into the future, knows they're going into the future.

And you'll find, I would think 95% agree if I said, do you think modern technology can make your life better? I think you find not everybody. Some people would say I wanna live off the grid, you know, with. 19th century tech but most people would say, yeah, modern technology is generally better and I wanna embrace it. So if you look at the really powerful entities and companies that grow very rapidly, they grow by not forcing people to make a difficult decision. you know, I give away free Facebook. I give away free Google. Like how hard is it for Google to spread to a billion people? They give it away for free. They don't tell you, you have to abandon your religion or abandon your nation, or abandon your citizenship or fight with your government or fight with your employer. They just give you a free search. So, so I think that the best thing is just give people, technology. Technology represents something better in the future that came out of human ingenuity. The, and if you can do that, you don't have to fight with anybody. You're just at your pure education. The next best is if you must fight is fight a battle to persuade people that they're better off buying a Bitcoin than buying a rental apartment as a store of value, or they're better off buying a Bitcoin than buying a bar of gold and explain to them why Bitcoin is better than a bar of gold or better than a rental apartment, or better than, you know, a bunch of lumber in the back of the house. And, you know, if you frame it like that, right, the nation of Lumber's not gonna get offended. I mean, we're probably the gold bugs get a little bit upset, but a again at the end of the day, they're the most organized. What about all the other, you know, person that wants you to buy three apartment units and Airbnb them on the weekend in order to like retire that person's not gonna fight you back.

So I think if you fight that asset war, there's a hundred trillion dollars there, right? We're 500, we're less than 500 billion. So Bitcoin can can increase by a factor of 200 from here simply by getting people to change their asset allocations. And you know, so between that and technology, those are just educational pursuits. And then you're gonna ha you're gonna have competitors that'll say, yeah don't use Bitcoin use my BI use my proof of stake thing and do it without electricity. And you're gonna have to explain that without the electricity, you don't have a commodity, you have a security and a security needs to be registered and taken public with full and fair disclosures.

Cuz it's centralized you. You need to explain that in a cheerful constructive way, but you need to explain it and then you, maybe you need to explain how. Yeah, regardless of all those things, right? The Bitcoin network is 10,000 times more secure and more reliable and more long lived than the other thing.

And so you have to explain that, but you're better off. I think a classic marketer would say you're better off to segment the market. You're better off to say, Bitcoin is digital energy. It's a commodity, you know, you buy it because you can't stockpile oil and you don't wanna own 37 rental apartments and you don't wanna carry gold bars through airports.

That's why you buy Bitcoin. These other things, they're securities their software companies and software programs. If you wanna invest in apple or Google or Facebook or some proof of stake network, they're all investments, make sure you got full and fair disclosure, make sure you know, who owns it, make sure you know what to expect, but their investments in technology companies and Bitcoin's competing. you're gonna warehouse soybeans for a decade. Yeah. It's competing against steel and oil and natural gas and land. And it's it's a digital property, digital commodity, and it's the highest form of digital commodity. It's digital energy. It's IOR to last forever. You can oscillate it at a thousand megahertz.

It's a cool thing. Let me tell you all about it. If you segment the market like that. No, it's like, I guess I'd like some of that. What else is digital energy? There's another network a hundred times smaller, you know, check out the market cap of the other proof of work networks. They're one, you know, there are 50 basis points, 70 basis points of Bitcoin.

So they're like I think I wanna own the one that's a hundred times bigger.

Okay. And just and then go knock on the next door. there's a lot of doors to knock on, right?

[00:15:28] Aleks Svetski: a good framing. That's a good framing. I mean, I mean, what about all the people who are kind of fed up with all of the overreach and shenanigans, particularly over the last two years? You know, cuz there seems to be, I mean, when I've been out there pitching Bitcoin, there seems to be a craving for the message that I know is more adversarial, but people seem to be.

Wanting or craving, like how do

[00:15:59] Michael Saylor: that's, there's a political party and a political message, which is, you know, the libertarian party reflects that message less government,

Right? The Republican party, you know, reflects a slight difference from the democratic party and the libertarian party reflects a bigger difference. The Ron Paul libertarian party.

Kind of aligns closest with what the Bitcoiners would say. I think I would say join that party, pursue those politics, but I would brand them as libertarian or brand or create that party. I don't think I would conjoin it with Bitcoin. See if your position is you think the government's overreached fiscally, you don't agree with their foreign policy, you don't agree with the tax policy.

You don't agree with their domestic policy. You don't agree with their energy policy. You don't agree with their medical policy. You don't agree with their education policy. You don't agree with their trade policy, their tariff policy, their domestic manufacturing policy, their labor and union policies.

Sure. But that's politics. You know what I mean? Like that's a lifetime of fights. And remember back to laser eyes, each one of those fights is just as hard. In fact, probably a lot harder than the Bitcoin. So I think that if you said you have to win all those fights for Bitcoin to be successful, right?

You're kind of, you're picking a hundred other battles to fight and it's counterproductive and destructive because we need those people, right. There are people that, you know, in the democratic party, we need them to support Bitcoin. There are people in the Republican party, we need them to support Bitcoin.

You might disagree with Republican politics. You might disagree with democratic politics. the majority of the country. I don't know if it's 50% or 80%, but the majority of the country disagrees with the libertarian party. Otherwise they would've elected somebody by now. So those are political fights and yeah.

The Bitcoin community is is very aligned with a lot of those views. Right. And so am I, but my point is, yeah, you don't need to fix, you're now dealing with the 50% other problems in the world,

Right. You're trying to fix the schools and fix the hospitals and fix the foreign policy and fix the fiscal policy.

And you're trying to, let's say it a different way. Why's the currency collapsing because of all these policy interventions. So if you wanna fix the currency, you have to fix a hundred things that are radical, that are highly confrontational that are that no one can agree on. If you wanna fix the Fiat currency, or you can simply educate people that Bitcoin is better than gold and Bitcoin will be a million dollars a coin, and you're not gonna fix any of those other things.

You're just gonna fix Bitcoin. And you're gonna make everyone that supports Bitcoin a hundred times as powerful.

So you see, like, do you wanna actually incrementally do good or do you just wanna fight? Cause I don't, you know, I think that if you just wanna fight, right, you can also go to Ukraine and you can fight on one side or the other side.

It's not clear to me. Like we fought in Iraq for 20 years. What did we fix? Like, like how much energy do you have to fight over this? And I would say there's noth, there's no reason why you can't get involved in politics if you want to. I just think that conjoining the politics, it's a mistake for Bitcoin to become associated with one party or the other party like is Bitcoin pro-abortion or anti-abortion I don't think it's either of those things.

Right. It's better to stay neutral and stay Switzerland. At the point that the Bitcoin becomes politicized at that point 45, 40% of the country will reject you reflexively without listening to a word. You say,

[00:20:15] Aleks Svetski: Yeah. I agree with that. I think

[00:20:16] Michael Saylor: What let's pick any of a hundred challenges we have in this country name one thing out of the hundred biggest disagreements we have that we have worked through in a civil fashion in the past 10 years.

[00:20:28] Aleks Svetski: yeah. Zero. Yeah.

[00:20:30] Michael Saylor: but so, so there, there aren't many Alex there aren't examples of six political successes in the last 10 years.

We don't have many, but there are plenty of examples of technology, successes, Uber technology success. Apple, Google Netflix, Facebook Disney, plus what's up all the games, even arguably cryptocurrency Bitcoin technology, successes. We have many. And why, because technologies are neutral apolitical, and there's a general consensus in this country that we are technology leaders, not every country, right?

Like let's say we lived in a fundamentalist religious theocracy that fought that technology was evil from Satan and we would all burn in hell and they were against new FAL gadgets. Then maybe the technology strategy wouldn't be a good one in that country. Like I, for example, I don't really think in North Korea, right North Korea, Cuba they're against property rights. right. They'll murder you for trying, saying, I wish to own private property, right? That's a felony. Okay. So there are certain jurisdictions where they're very hostile to to a property strategy. There are theoretical jurisdictions where it be, they be hostile to technology strategy. Although it's practical matter. Most people like technology, like even the north Koreans, they were into hacking. Right. I mean, they must totally love the guys that hacked the Sony servers right. To steal all that contraband. So they're not against that. So, so we're back to this question, right? What can you accomplish? I think Alex, I'm 50. I'm 57. And so I've, you know, I've gotten dozens of patents and I've launched dozens of businesses and I've had lots of ideas and I love them all. And I've had thousands, tens of thousands of employees, and I've tried different things and I've spent billions of dollars doing different things. And what I've learned over the course of my life is generally you overestimate what you can accomplish when you have a passion for a good idea, and you underestimate the maintenance cost and you underestimate how challenging it's going to be to to profit and to enjoy that idea. So like you, if you have a good a good business, you have to factor a huge amount of energy. If you work full time to maintain that business, it'll stay effective. As soon as you say it's like I launch a restaurant and then I go and I open up another restaurant, the other side of town and that's successful.

So I go to Chicago and I open up a third one and then I go to San Francisco and open up the fourth one. And then, you know, I go to Miami and open up fifth one and I get back to, you know, New York city where my first restaurant is and all my customers are gone and my employees quit, you know?

And then the New York times is writing an article about how my restaurant used to be good, but now the food is garbage. And then the other restaurants, you know, the partners like default on something or the landlord basically triples the rent. And pretty soon I've like gone bankrupt, you know, some politician rezones my district.

And what you realize is you underestimate all of the challenges you overestimate, what you can accomplish, and people get bored very quickly. So they, you know, they tend to wanna go on and fight the next fight. It's like, you know, like, Napoleon charging, he lost an entire army charging into Russia on the path to Moscow stupid.

But then he charged into Egypt, Napoleon lost an army in Egypt. Okay. Really then, you know,

[00:24:40] Aleks Svetski: Germans did the same thing.

[00:24:41] Michael Saylor: and the Germans are the same thing, you know, and the Americans, you remember Charlie Wilson's war, Charlie Wilson's war is all about how stupid the Russians are to go in Afghanistan and how Americans gleefully made fun of the Russians were being so stupid as to go in

[00:24:55] Aleks Svetski: Then did the same thing.

[00:24:57] Michael Saylor: I think we did the same thing. It's like, you know, the human can, by the way, Julius Caesar lost an army in Egypt, right? It's a never ending story, which is people always overestimate what they can accomplish. I launched about 10 businesses. The first one is still. The winning business, right? The first one, and what I found is that one you really had to focus on with your heart and soul. And generally what you find is in your thirties, someone hits it big and they launch a successful business and then some, and then they think two years later, what's my next big success. And they have this idea. They're just gonna knock off five big successes in a row. Okay. And everybody, eventually they hit that in Tropic frontier where they can't compete anymore.

And it's, it could be thought of a different way. There's probably 10,000 things you can do that you can acquire, that you can buy, that you can launch that you can do. There's probably a hundred of them that you can be competitive in. Where you are as good as the best person in the world.

Everywhere else. Yeah. You got it in the business, but you're not world class, maybe a hundred and there's probably one of them that you can be competitive in and make a profit at and grow consistently better at over time, such that you stay competitive.

So that threshold of enter the market, be profitable, make money in the market and grow forever against the smartest, most competitive people in the market that is 10,000 times harder than a, can you just do it? So people tend to pick fights that they can't win and then they pick fights that they win, where they win the battle, but they lose the war.

It's like, okay, you, okay? So what are you gonna do if you actually get Russia? Okay. Like you're not gonna be able to govern it. You wanna fun read the history of William, the conqueror, William, the conqueror, you know, rose through, through unfortunate circumstance.

He was an orphan and he rose to conquer Normandy and was a success, got everything he ever wanted, you know, got married, had kids, perfect life. And then he decided he got in his head that he was the rightful heir to the UK. And he had to charge across the channel and conquer Britain. And he's thought a thousand years later is this great, awesome guy, William, the conqueror.

That's his name? He's the only guy in a thousand years that ever conquered Britain. But if you read the story of what happened, he had only took him a couple of weeks to conquer Britain, but he couldn't govern Britain. His entire life fell apart. His family fell apart. His wife turned against him, his son declared war on him.

He fought two civil wars against his own son. And eventually he died at war with his own children, you know, and was rolled into a ditch penniless, you know, couldn't even afford a funeral, this greatest of all conquerors of a thousand years. And if you read the biography, the conclusion is he overextended bit off, more than he could chew because he had a massive ego. And so the story of people with massive egos wanting to write the wrongs of the world, Is throughout history, everywhere in every business, every company, you know, like it's a 99% mortality rate in my business, they all fail because of bad acquisitions. The reason software companies fail is cuz the CEO has to keep expanding.

They have to keep growing. And if you can't grow and they either try to grow organically and they break the company or they grow through acquisitions and they break the company and it's literally like 99% likely. It's just, that's what happens. And so when you look at that, the conclusion you come to is if you have one good idea, get up every day and figure out how to spread that message or how to protect that good idea. Like we, we shouldn't be trying to fix 27 other problems in the world. What we ought to do is make sure that no one corrupts the Bitcoin code. It's more important for example, that we don't F with the network and screw it up. It's more important that we protect the integrity of what we have. And 98% of the world doesn't even know what we have. And so educating France or educating Germany on why the auto adopt nuclear reactors or getting in some massive fight over, you know, government overreach in the medical business, all of these things are just other battles. They're for somebody.

But, you know, if you really wanna be a nuclear activist, I would say you should be 150% focused on That thing. Right. Don't tie yourself to any other thing.

[00:30:01] Aleks Svetski: you mentioned before. We haven't seen any political wins, which I agree with. But we've seen many technological ones. Do you think we've seen any cultural or social sort of wins or revolutions or come up ins in the last couple decades?

[00:30:18] Michael Saylor: I mean, I guess the progressives could argue that. I mean, they've, there have been a lot of progressive, you know, agenda items that have made good progress over time.

[00:30:27] Aleks Svetski: Is that more political or cultural or do you kind of place them in the same bucket?

[00:30:33] Michael Saylor: Yeah. I think they're the same.

[00:30:35] Aleks Svetski: Interesting. Okay. What makes political and cultural the same in your.

[00:30:38] Michael Saylor: There are cultural war, but let's take Critical race theory, right. Or something going on in the school system or or teaching any particular theories in school. The reason they're political is because the government controls the school system and the government, you know? And so the political unions contribute to the party which contributes, you know, guidance to the government.

The government changes the rules to to spread a certain policy through the schools,

To the extent that the government has power over, over whatever right.

[00:31:11] Aleks Svetski: So it becomes cultural in that sense. So it's kind of like top down cultural enforcements that have. Bottom up emergent culture, which is, I mean, naturally how it was anyway,

[00:31:22] Michael Saylor: Look, politics matter. Right. So there's no doubt, like, like politics shut down the nuclear power industry.

Politics do matter in a lot of places, politics resulted in say single family homes, getting subsidized by the government via Fred Mac and Fannie Mae. And that drove down the cost of home mortgages and it drove up the price of homes and it it shifted the dynamic and it enriched a lot of people in the real estate industry.

Right. So politics do matter. I'm not saying they don't matter. What I'm saying is that if you're in, if you believe that Bitcoin is good for the human race and good for the civilization, you should limit your political engagement to what's good for Bitcoin and not get involved in all the other political fights.

The other political fights make you toxic cuz half the politicians, right? Pick a, take a position, right. And you're gonna actually alienate 30, 40% of the politicians. And you might need those politicians. There's if we come back the way a company act. Right. Like, let's take the Disney corporation.

No, you know, the Disney challenges they've got in Florida of late with Disney world, they got political

Companies, shouldn't be political. They shouldn't express political preferences this way or that you're, you know, you remember the old phrase shut up and sing.

You know, you, if you're a singer, you want everybody in the audience to love you for your song. As soon as you start to express a political opinion, whether it's right or left or whatever it is, then there's gonna be some in the audience that's gonna take offense. And you've just diminished your ability to spread your actual message. So the question is, what are you trying to do?

Are you trying to sing a song or are you trying to actually spread a political message? If you were a really good rock and roll singer? I wouldn't say go on stage and say gold sucks. Bitcoin is good. You know, like. right, because your agenda is to entertain the audience, right? So be profe being professional means keeping your personal views out of your professional platform. So I, I just think generally, if you're gonna be professional, if you're professionally pursuing the agenda of fixing the energy and the civilization via Bitcoin, and if you believe that Bitcoin is great technology, which is, will be great money, which could be a great currency, which can fix a lot of things. You're better off to just stay professional and cheerfully, constructively advocate for Bitcoin. You're gonna find people that disagree with you and they hate you, or they hate Bitcoin. But like, if some, when somebody that's really a critic or a hater on say Twitter, when they say something really offensive, I don't go and directly attack them.

That's not gonna persuade anybody. They have 5 million followers that follow them because they respect what they have to say. So if you attack that person, you alienate their followers. And if you engage in a debate with anybody about any subject, other than Bitcoin you're potentially alienating followers. So, I mean, so, in this particular case, the constructive engagement is just is if you're gonna troll, somebody is to say, you know, you have that point of view. There are some people that happen to have this point of view. And this is the reason they have this point of view. And here is a place you can go to get more information, right?

Like you, you can turn a conversation 90 degrees. Like sometimes you think the Bitcoin is bad because you think it's a currency, but did you know it's actually, we think of it as a property, not a currency. Someone will say, Bitcoin is bad, cuz it's bad for the because it's a currency and I like the us dollar.

See the article here:

How To Spread Bitcoin Adoption To Everyone - Bitcoin Magazine

In Ukraine, libertarian think tanks and politicians are already making plans for the period after the war. The future of Ukraine was one of the major topics at the Europe Liberty Forum 2022 on 12 and 13 May, organized by the Atlas Network, the leading global association of libertarian think tanks. The event was originally due to take place in Kyiv, but was moved to Warsaw because of the war.

One of the guest speakers was Maryan Zablotskyy, a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament and of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy's ruling party. Zablotskyy also used to be a member of the Ukraine Economic Freedom Foundation, a libertarian think tank founded in 2015. Income tax in Ukraine, Zablotskyy said, was recently lowered to two percent, and numerous regulations and tariffs have been abolished.

We are currently the most economically free country in the world, he tells me.

It is beyond extraordinary for a country to cut taxes and abolish regulations while it is at war. Normally, in wartime, governments massively increase taxes and expand their reach. In 1942, the US government passed the Victory Act, causing the top tax rate to skyrocket to 88 percent, a level that rose further, to 94 percent in 1944, as a result of various surtaxes. In Britain, the top tax rate rose as high as 98 percent in the 1940s, and in Germany it climbed to 64.99 percent in 1941.

We believe that we are stronger when we are economically freer, Zablotskyy said.

Due to the billions of dollars in international aid flowing into the country, Ukraine is an anomaly of history: a country engaged in a bitter war that is more economically free than ever. The goal, Zablotskyy says, is to ensure that these economic reforms, which were adopted as temporary measures, remain in place after the war.

After the war is a phrase that echoes repeatedly throughout the Europe Liberty Forum.

No one from Ukraine discussed how the war might end, instead they focused solely on the opportunities that will arise after victory. Nataliya Melnyk, representative of the Bendukidze Free Market Center in Kyiv, said it would be wrong to aspire to rebuild Ukraine.

We cannot aim to return to the conditions of the pre-war period, we need to create something new, Melnyk explains

She speaks of a window of opportunity and refers to the findings of the Heritage Foundations Index of Economic Freedom, which ranks Ukraine as the most economically unfree of 45 countries in the European region. In the global ranking, Ukraine comes 127th, trailing countries such as India and Nicaragua. The Heritage Foundation identifies Ukraines property rights, rule of law and labor market regulations as the greatest deficits.

Roman Waschuk, Canadas ambassador to Kyiv from 2014 to 2019 and now Business Omdudsman for Ukraine, takes a more nuanced view: Ukraine is not as economically unfree as the Heritage Foundations Index and other statistics would have us believe. Such rankings only evaluate official statistics, which fail to capture Ukraines enormous shadow economy, Waschuk explains.

Many people in the West, he says, have been surprised by the fact that Ukraines army is in a far better state than they assumed. And the same, Waschuk says, is true of the countrys economy.

Especially in the IT sector, which according to Nataliya Melnyk comprises at least 250,000 technology specialists, companies make extensive use of tax loopholes. The top rate of tax in the Ukraine used to be 20 percent, but there is a regulation that allows individual entrepreneurs to pay just 5 percent. Actually, Waschuk says, this tax was originally designed for small-scale sole-traders, but it has also been used by entrepreneurs, including IT specialists.

Everyone agrees that there is an urgent need for reform, especially as so many of the regulations in force in Ukraine date back to the Soviet era of the 1970s. Tom Palmer, Executive Vice President for International Programs of the Atlas Network, suggested that Germanys post-war Minister of Economics Ludwig Erhard, who introduced the market economy after the Second World War, could serve as a model for the future Ukraine. There are also frequent calls for a Marshall Plan for Ukraine. Palmer believes that it is not a Marshall Plan that will help Ukraine, but only market-economy reforms similar to those introduced by Erhard.

Palmer is undoubtedly right. The economic course charted by Erhards free-market policies clearly contributed more to the Federal Republic of Germanys subsequent economic miracle than the Marshall Plan, named after the then American Secretary of State George C. Marshall, which provided aid to relieve the suffering and hunger of populations across Europe after the war. The programme had a volume of $13.1 billion. Despite the British receiving more than twice as much from the plan as the Germans, Great Britain did not develop anywhere near as well as Germany. While the British were governed by socialists, Erhard introduced the market economy in Germany having already devised his policies during the war.

Libertarian think tanks in Ukraine have closer links to the countrys politicians than similar think tanks in most other Western countries. Alexander Danilyuk, co-founder of the Free Market Centre, was Ukraines finance minister from 2016 to 2018, and Zablotskyy, a member of parliament, believes that a majority of Ukraines parliamentarians subscribe to libertarian principles. However, the libertarian Atlas Network also helps Ukraine in a very practical way.

Atlas has raised $2.3 million to date in support of Ukraine. Germans and Americans who belong to the network not only contribute money, but also supply medicines, night vision equipment, drones and body armor to Ukraine. An article in The Spokesman-Review appeared under the headline: In Ukraine, an informal web of Libertarians becomes a resistance network.

The libertarian program for Ukraine is clear. When we talk about the new Ukraine, we mean three things above all, says Nataliya Melnyk, fighting corruption, rule of law, and economic freedom.

Maybe it sounds a bit dramatic, she says, but freedom is our religion. Throughout the Atlas event, at every opportunity, people implore each other: Next year in Kyiv.

Rainer Zitelmann is a German historian and author. His latest book is Hitlers National Socialism which was published on 22 February 2022.

More here:

How Ukraine Could Become the Most Libertarian Country in the World Once Peace Is Achieved | Dr Rainer Zitelmann - Foundation for Economic Education