Michael Suede

Michael Suede is an Austrian economist and author who holds a business degree from the University of Wisconsin. Michael is a veteran of the US Navy and an advocate of voluntarism.

Man From The Future Shares His Story

10 minute read

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Man From The Future Shares His Story

By Michael Suede

Posted June 29, 2011

MS:  Today I’m speaking with Dr. Hannes Alfven of the Tesla Electric Power Collective.  Dr. Alfven joins us from the future to discuss events that will soon be unfolding in our time.  Dr. Alfven please introduce us to yourself.

HA:  I’m a plasma physicist from the year 2090.  I have a doctorate in electrical engineering from Intel University.  I did my undergrad at the Tesla Electric Power Collective.  Currently I’m employed with Tesla Electric working on the development of teleportation devices, which is how I came to be speaking with you today.

MS:  Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today Doctor.  I noticed you mentioned you got your doctorate from Intel, is that the same Intel chip manufacturing company that is around today?

HA:  Indeed it is.

MS:  That seems so incredibly odd to me.  Why did Intel decide to open a college?  Were they having trouble finding qualified applicants?

HA:   Well, after the State was eliminated, private industry was forced to pick up the tab for educating their own employees.  A lot of the major high tech manufacturing organizations opened up educational facilities on their campuses to train their own workforce.

MS:  Wait a minute, back up.  Did you just say the State was eliminated?  How in the world did that happen?

HA:  In a few years from the present time, the current Anglo-European monetary empire will come to an end as the debt Ponzi comes unraveled.  The States ended up trying to print their way out of the Ponzi fractional reserve debt scheme they had created and wound up destroying the value of their money.  When they could no longer pay their bureaucrats, police forces and armies with money that had value, they collapsed.

As the fiat money of the world was devalued into worthlessness, people began looking for alternative currencies that could retain their value.  The electronic currency that was struck upon by the markets was called Bitcoins.  Basically they act like a digital commodity; so in the future, monetary transactions are conducted using what you might call “virtual gold”.

MS:  So why didn’t the populations of the world simply reconstitute new States that operated under this new monetary system?

HA:  Well, you can’t loot other people’s Bitcoins.  This makes it impossible to have a coercively funded State government.   What ended up happening was people became responsible for their own security and subscribing to their own “public” services.

So there are no police, only private security guards.  There are no “laws” per se, but most people deal with trade disputes through private “loser pays” arbitration courts.  So contracts between organizations and people define what the “law” is.   Murder, rape, and other violent crimes are basically non-existent, but when they do occur, communities typically ensure justice is swiftly dealt.   You might call it vigilantism by community consensus.   People don’t take very kindly to murders, thieves, and rapists in their neighborhoods if you catch my drift.  Since everyone is usually armed, robbing or hurting someone typically winds up like a gun store robbery today.  The person attempting the crime gets gunned down rather swiftly or driven out of town by private security.  Lord help them if they kill someone.

Private insurance companies basically deal with private property protection in the future, just as they do today.  So most people subscribe to an insurance contract which indirectly funds their local security and fire\emergency protection services.  Engaging in a crime voids your insurance protections, which typically doesn’t end well for the criminal.

MS:  Fascinating.  And the public is fine with this?

HA:  For the most part.  Since victims don’t like paying to put their assailants behind bars, the prison industry evaporated.  This left justice to be dealt with at the individual and neighborhood level.  It is important to note that reputation plays a massive role in your future society.

People don’t rob or harm others because a bad reputation can force you into total poverty.  If you become notorious, you’ll end up either getting hunted down and shot, or people will refuse to do business with you, which means you will typically end up starving to death.  A bad reputation can be more brutal than a life sentence in a prison today.

MS:  So Doctor, tell me more about this monetary system that makes it impossible to have a State.

HA:  The monetary system is an encrypted peer-to-peer electronic currency with a distributed transaction database.  Basically it is a system of encrypted tokens that are used as money.  The tokens can’t be reproduced or inflated, but they can be infinitely divided.  Because there is no central authority that can issue the coins, and because new coins can not be arbitrarily created, fractional reserve banking is impossible and the coins constantly gain value as the economic productivity of the world expands.

In my time, a full Bitcoin can buy you nearly an entire city block worth of property and merchandise.  Today the currency is still in its infancy, but its value will grow exponentially over time until all the goods and services that exist on the planet Earth are represented by the currency.  People also use gold and silver as cash substitutes or as a secure store of wealth, but the vast majority of retail transactions take place in Bitcoins because they are much easier to work with than physical metals.

MS:  Wow, that is incredible.  So what does the future look like  for us in the short term and the long term?

HA:  Well let me start off with the good news first:

Since there are no violently funded States to squander wealth in the future, global productivity in my time is so incredibly high that most people only work a few hours a week.  All of humanity’s energies are directed into private markets that serve consumer interests.  For example, since there are no shipyards building aircraft carriers for State governments, those same ship yards are now building cruise liners for the public.  With the State out of the way, people were forced once again to only produce things that individual consumers actually desire.  Obviously it goes without saying that there are no wars or military dictatorships since they can’t exist without the ability to steal wealth from the public.

The defense industry was wiped out when the States of the world collapsed, which also freed up an absolutely tremendous amount of resources for the production of consumer goods.  Raytheon is now the number one producer of plasma convection ovens in the world.  McDonald Douglas went out of business and was folded into General Electric.  Their old plants are now producing personal flying vehicles for the public.  They actually use TEPC’s plasmERG engines that I helped refine.

Consider that all of the hundreds of millions of men and women who work for military organizations, prisons, bureaucracies, defense industries, intelligence agencies, etc.. etc.. in your time today will be released into the private sector in the future.  This massive addition of highly skilled and motivated labor to the private markets drastically increased global productivity.

In your time today, the workforce of the United States is only devoting about 60% of its energies into private consumer markets, with the other 40% being controlled by State spending.  That will ultimately change to a 100% consumer market driven economy.

The elimination of centrally planned interest rates with the implosion of the central banks also drastically reduced the misallocation of resources within the private sector.  So really, the economy you are experiencing today is only a fraction of its real potential to produce wealth and an abundance of consumer goods for the masses.  In the future, following the elimination of the State, the full potential of the economy to produce wealth will be realized.

I suppose I should now move on to the bad news:

In the near term, many people will end up starving to death.  There will be massive political upheavals.  There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth as the violent system of State sanctioned looting comes to an end.  Many of the people who have become dependent upon the redistributed stolen wealth of the State will engage in violence to protect their paychecks and handouts.  It will not be a pleasant experience.

When States hyper-inflate their currency, what they are really doing is transferring the ownership of wealth within a society to those who get the new money first.  Since printing money doesn’t actually create new wealth, all it does is change who can buy what little remains within the economy.

A State undergoing a hyper-inflationary scenario can expect that common consumer goods, food stuffs, and energy costs will skyrocket since they are necessities that everyone must purchase.  This state of affairs will continue until the money finally becomes totally worthless.  At which point society will devolve back into a barter existence like they did during the dark ages.

This is why the dark ages followed the collapse of the Roman empire, and so too will the people of the world experience a similar “dark ages” today.  However, the dark ages that will soon befall you will not last very long at all.  If you are young, you will live to see an age of prosperity emerge from the ruins of civilization.

So take heart, unless you are old and poor.  In which case you are basically SOL.  I’m sorry to inform you, but your governments already spent the money they promised they were saving for your retirement.  It doesn’t exist, and you’re not going to get any of it.  If you do get any of it, it will be in an amount that will not buy you a loaf of bread.

MS:  That is a lot for me to digest Dr. Alfven.  I’m curious about the plasmERG engine you mentioned earlier.  Could you tell us more about what future products await us?

HA:  Certainly.  The PlasmERG engine uses expanding plasma to drive pistons in the same way a combustion engine does, but it does so using a very tiny fraction of noble gases which cost virtually nothing to produce.  This is just one of many technologies that will explode on to the market in the wake of the State collapsing.

You see, a tremendous amount of innovation is stifled by patents and copyright law.  When the State collapses, people will be free to produce whatever they like by copying others.  When people are free to copy the ideas of others, it means the economy can produce more things more rapidly.

Competition will become very fierce and trade secrets will become tightly guarded.  Those who are first to market with a new idea stand to make a tremendous amount of money, which is reward enough for those who innovate.   In the future, the ability to take others’ ideas and improve upon them will become central to building a prosperous society.  It is a backwards archaic notion to think that inventors need State protection in order to come up with new ideas.  Consider that patent law is intentionally designed to create monopolies which harm consumers.

Also, an absolutely enormous amount of waste comes from the legal battles that revolve around patent laws.  With the elimination of patent laws in the future, companies will not have to worry about defending themselves from lawsuits, which means they can take that money and put it towards building better products.

MS:  Thank you Dr. Alfven for your time today.  I look forward to meeting with you again in the future! (LOL).

HA:  My pleasure Michael.

I plan on bringing Dr. Alfven back for continuous series of interviews.  Consider this part 1.

Additional reading:

If you would like more insights about the future, check out Jeffery Tucker’s work It’s a Jetsons World.  The book is free in pdf format and covers issues such as patent laws stifling growth, the miracle of free market productivity, and why the State destroys abundance.

Some lectures by economists that touch on the topics this article covers:

How Government is Unraveling Civilization by Force - Jeffrey Tucker

A Private Law Society - Hans Hoppe

Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle - Roger W. Garrison

The Evils of Intellectual Property - Jeffrey A. Tucker

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