Bob Livingston Alerts™
If you were to examine the entire spectrum of globalist policies and programs from the U.S. to Europe to Asia, including climate controls and carbon credits, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), cashless societies, vaccine passports, biometrics, agricultural controls, the "Great Reset," the Fourth Industrial Revolution, AI monitoring of transactions, etc. you will come to the same conclusion I have... almost everything they do revolves around locking down and micromanaging trade.
Not just international trade and the import/export of resources, but all trade including the average person's grocery purchases and private barter. If they get their way you won't even be allowed to grow a garden in your backyard. Think I'm exaggerating? Just look at what happened during the attempted COVID lockdowns. There were leftist state governments trying to deny people access to jobs and food without vaccination status, and at least one (Michigan) tried to stop people from buying garden seeds. In many places (including Hawaii), they tried to arrest people simply for being outside in parks and beaches. Keep in mind, it is nearly impossible to contract or transmit a virus in the outdoors where open air and sunlight actively kill diseases. Yet, science was completely ignored in order to control people's behavioral patterns, social interactions and economic participation.
I have long argued that one of the primary purposes of the COVID lockdowns was to acclimate the public to the idea of rationing. The government takeover of production and consumption as a means to bottleneck trade. Rationing erases any last vestiges of the free market and turns the buying of necessities into a privilege instead of a right. It was also an attempt to demonize the concept of prepping as a form of "hoarding." In other words, if you planned ahead and bought food and medical supplies years in advance, you were a selfish person withholding valuable goods from others in dire need.
I think the chaotic flurry of activity during 2020 and 2021 had a lot of people confused; many have forgotten how incredibly close we came to full tyranny, including total economic tyranny.
The purpose of economic controls is obvious: If you control people's access to supplies and income then they are far less likely to rebel against you when you turn the screws and take their freedoms. This has been the strategy of every communist regime around the world since the 20th century and was a mainstay of feudal empires in the Middle Ages. The process of trade controls is at the core of the agenda of our modern-day oligarchy. Ruling at the barrel of a gun is not as viable a strategy today (at least for now), so, they are opting to use indirect methods to gain compliance until the population can be disarmed.
Beware the Digital Dollar: Unveiling Its Terrifying Realities Discover the dark side of the Digital Dollar: Uncover the likely threats to your financial freedom and personal privacy. Learn More This trend forces the liberty-minded to adopt alternative economic systems. If we do not, then we will not be able to maintain our ability to fight back against authoritarianism. If you can't feed yourself, then you can't fight. But what would these alternative systems look like?
Essentially, they would be black markets. Study the tactics of gun runners and drug dealers of the past several decades and the alternative economy of the future will probably look similar, though on a much larger scale. Most of what we do will eventually be treated as illicit, unless it is specifically sanctioned by local or state governments, but this will not stop centralized authorities from doing anything they can to shut down private production and trade.
Then there is the issue of economic collapse, which we are already beginning to experience in the form of a stagflation crisis. Trust me, it's going to get a lot worse in the next couple of years, so establishing alternatives should be our top priority. If your currency is consistently losing value, prices are rising, and you have to work harder every day to attain the same number of resources then the end game will be slavery and servitude unless you can walk away from the broken economy.
Here are the steps that would be necessary to defeat the socialization of trade, and all of them will require a certain level of risk.
Localized Resource Production Large groups of people in counties and states will have to organize the extraction of vital resources from areas typically managed by the federal government. Meaning, if your state produces a lot of oil, or timber or coal or copper or steel, etc., then the production will have to focus on domestic markets rather than foreign exports. Americans either at the state or county level will need to ignore federal restrictions on resource management that favor large corporations and create a supply chain for domestic use only. The more counties and states that do this, the larger the resource network will become and the harder it will be for federal or global interests to shut down wider production of goods and services. If you want to bring back an economy of independent producers and tradesmen in the U.S., it all starts with localized resources.
Barter Markets I've been writing about the value of barter markets as a means of rebellion for almost 20 years now, and I continue to believe that this tactic is an incredible tool for defeating economic tyranny. The bottom line is this, though: Barter markets need producers in order to stay viable. They need people who make things, grow things, fix things and teach things. It can't just be about trading goods you already have on hand; you have to be willing to add value to the market by creating useful items and services.
Barter markets can operate on a small neighborhood scale up to a county level, while states can trade with each other to stockpile vital commodities. All of this, though, would have to act as a stopgap because barter relies on an ambiguous value system. Any item or service is going to be worth something different to each person, making standardized prices difficult. In the end, some kind of universal trade mechanism (currency) will have to be introduced that functions outside the Dollar system.
Alternative Currency System Yes, this concept has been discussed at length from every angle within the liberty movement for years. Most of the talk has revolved around cryptocurrencies, though, which I view as a distraction from legitimate solutions. Almost no one you run into on a daily basis owns or trades crypto; why would they when is it a currency based in virtual reality? People want the option to hold their buying power in their hands, to know that their wealth is tangible. This means a convertible currency mechanism, either a cryptocurrency or physical note that is backed by a commodity or a basket of commodities that are held in escrow safely and securely. These commodities would have to have storage capacity and be relatively portable: gold, silver and copper, wheat, oil, rice and so on. A basket averaging out relative values can be used to determine the buying power of the new currency.
Of course, such a system would have to be developed at the state level. It's unlikely that counties and cities will have the resources to create such a system on their own. Though, localized script might become common in smaller towns if they are highly organized. This is an idea that needs to be pursued now, beforean economic collapse and dollar collapse play out.
A "Reset" Of The Tax and Corporate Model If taxes are to exist at all, they should be limited to the local level and the benefits of those taxes should be readily visible to the local population. Federal income taxes should not exist (they didn't exist permanently until the formation of the Federal Reserve Bank). They only serve to feed the authoritarian apparatus and grow the government ever larger. Federal operations, if they are to exist at all, should be funded through tariffs on foreign goods as was the practice in the U.S. centuries ago.
Corporate charters should no longer exist. Corporations are a socialist concept given protection and special treatment from governments. They should be replaced by legal partnerships and no longer be treated as "too big to fail." Also, when business management knowingly commits a crime, they should be prosecuted, not protected by limited liability. The tax model and the corporate model are both massive drains on the modern economic system. They disrupt the buying power and the production power of the average citizen, thereby keeping entrepreneurs from advancing due to rigged competition and dragging down the consumer with steady wealth depletion.
If we are to save the economy or build any kind of functional alternative, then these two millstones will have to be removed from our collective necks. To truth and knowledge, Brandon Smith
