By Allan Stevo -05/23/2021
US Senator Elizabeth Warren said last week that bitcoin consumes a lot of electricity. In doing so, it makes a judgment about the “correct” amount of electricity usage. But this raises the question of who has the right to make such a judgment.
It's fine for Warren to judge for herself, but it's no good if she tries to foist that opinion on others through government force or coercion.
A question from a decent reporter might be, "Isn't there enough power available?"
At least two centuries of oil exist underground at current levels of use. It's not a question of whether it exists; it's a matter of how expensive it is to extract. Uranium supplies will last longer than that.
Energy is plentiful and easy to supply in a free market environment. However, finding a free market environment can be difficult as the government will not allow a free market for energy to exist. Governments around the world are so eager to control energy generation and distribution that the supply-and-demand mechanism cannot do its job. Instead, we're left with a bunch of impractical government stipulations from know-it-all politicians and bureaucrats.
Clearly, whoever makes this decision about whether there is enough energy is operating with an artificial scarcity mentality.
With unlimited sunlight, nearly unlimited uranium and similar substances, and many years of oil, any argument that there is not enough energy is at best misguided. In a market, there would never be a worry like "Is there enough?" Instead, there would be a question of "How much is there at what price?" The market handles scarcity well. It is the government that imposes artificial barriers to the management of needs such as energy to foster economic development.
No one is saying that Facebook uses a lot of energy, but it has over a billion people using its network every day. In contrast, there are thousands of computers operating on the bitcoin network at any given time.
No one is saying that online pornography consumes a lot of energy, but it is the dominant use of the internet.
No one is saying these things because we have long considered it a person's right to decide how to use their resources. They must decide what they do with their time and money, not someone from the government.
What does a senator have to do with this area of ??life to say that?
Since time immemorial, bad people have figured out how to take other people's property, and good people are discovering how to protect their property from those people. "Thou shalt not steal" is not "Thou shalt not steal unless he is a senator."
The government has long extorted money from people by threatening them with imprisonment. Fed up with this process, they often made revolutions in which people freed themselves from oppressive governments and thieves. The American Revolution was seen as a fiscal revolt by many participants. People wanted government hands off their properties. It wasn't long after the revolution that Washington, DC, was extorting far more taxes than any king across the Atlantic had ever extorted from his subjects. Worse still, in 1913 a form of serfdom was added to the Constitution of the United States with the implementation of the income tax in the Sixteenth Amendment, a policy whereby a portion of a man's work should belong to the government.
Man has the ability to decide what is of value to him and to operate accordingly. What has economic value for one may not have value for another. Economic value is subjective. What Elizabeth Warren and many others are really saying is, "I declare to myself the power to decide that economic value is not subjective but objective and based on government decisions."
This is the heart of socialism: government control of an economy. When tried, it always fails. It removes the all-important pricing tool, which shares so much information in a market and is needed by the individual, and instead allows a committee to engage in brute-force central planning.
This is very harmful to society.
It is revealing that Elizabeth Warren wants people to have her weed and pornography, items that weaken and harm, but she doesn't want people to have her bitcoin.
Original article here
