Monarchy (and money), revisited.

The past was indeed a foreign territory, but perhaps you’d like to (re)visit with me…

Perusing the New York Times or any other USAID-funded agitprop-pravdas today and you might be persuaded that the intellectual foundation for Trump‘s brave new Regency Era has been laid by the likes of Curtis Yarvin – the supposed “bad boy” underground nerd who honestly looks like he couldn’t change the oil on a Harley Davidson much less foment a terrorist regime changeⁱ – but of course those of us who were terminally online a decade-plus ago and actually waging (or at least on the front lines witnessing) the subversive electronicⁱⁱ warfare against the Ancien Regime know only too well that the actual foundations of Project 2025 were laid by one Mircea Popescu, that behalo’d student of antiquity who lit and largely carried the torch of monarchy and (bitcoin) maximalism until his passing in 2021. But like dear old Socrates, MP’s ideas survive him, so in honour of the early success of Caesar‘s DOGE-fueled blitzkrieg and its subsequent gutting of the unelected FDR-era bureaucratic deep state, let’s take this beautiful Sunday morning to review some of MP’s timeless intellectual pillars on which this riveting historical moment rests:

From 2014: On The Superiority of Monarchy (or, adnotations to Why the Worst Get on Top)

From home we bring the concept of Monarchy, which is that form of political organisation of a group where the sovereignity of the entire group is vested in the person of one member of that group. The only practical alternative ever seen, and the only theoretically possible alternative for that matter, is not having the sovereignity of the group invested at all. […]

The various political forms of organisation that fail to be a Monarchy find themselves in the practical world roughly in the situation of the various flying machines that couldn’t fly pre 1900, or of the various perpetuum mobile machines that aren’t actually perpetually mobile today : unable to actually distinguish themselves from their alleged peers substantially, they proceed to distinguish themselves through generous application of colorful paint, generally understood as “branding”.

So in this vein, bureaucracy (often spelled by older authors “democracy”) tends to represent the unvested sovereignity as having in fact been vested in some sort of positivist abstract value, such as “the well being” of the group. Meanwhile collectivism (often referred to as “socialism”, “communism”, but confusingly also “democracy” though usually with a helpful “people’s” nearby) tends to represent the unvested sovereignity as having in fact been vested in some sort of moral abstraction. Needless to say, none of this gargle can ever work – the young woman in question (virgin or more likely not) could never be impregnated either by some sort of “Holy Ghost” or by some more positive if pedestrian representation thereof as “the Father”. Strictly, strictly a man put the bun in her oven if anyone did at all, and equally strictly a man will be the sovereign if anyone (or anything) will be the sovereign at all.

Power certainly seems to be re-vested in (loyal) individuals over at USG.HQ doesn’t it. Nature is healing!

From 2015: The problem of the state.

1. It is an incontrovertible fact that violence is extremely expensive a behaviour. The principal avenue through which it is expensive is that you don’t want to piss off the wrong people, and there is no cheap way to distinguish them from the general population. The secondary, and comparatively unimportant, avenue is the “emotional cost” involved, which is to say that millions of years of evolution have baked into the hominid brain a good approximation of the cost of violence and so therefore it is loath to indulge. […]

6. It is a mistaken proposition that the state is evil. The state is not evil, the state is merely caught in the very unenviable position where it is on one hand drastically inept, and on the other hand “it has been decided” that it is upon it to provide the impossible, cheaply and effectively. […]

8. This arrangement has very unfortunate consequences. On one branch, the state is even worse equipped than individuals to ascertain whom to kill. Consequently, it is an absolute given that the collapse of any state is merely a question of time – statistically speaking it certainly will fuck with the wrong guy and get wiped sooner or later. On the other branch, as explained other places, the “monopoly on violence” immediately reduces to an actual monopoly on property.

Indeed, which is precisely why pissing off Elon & Trump has proven to be such an utter travesty for the fragile, decayed Socialist Paradise of The Greatest Possible of Americas as we knew it for nearly the last century. Furthermore, it’s why asking “permission” to build is no longer a tenable strategy for agentic individuals in the West, for the simple reason that it turns out that The Beast exerted 99% of its force through indoctrination (public education, control of media) but is in point of fact utterly toothless in the face of people who just do things. Of course, if you “can’t even” then third worlders will be imported who can and that will be the end of your bloodline. Tertium non datur. Darwin doesn’t care about you. Now, do you care about yourself?

From 2014: The problem of ideal social systems – reprint

Man can desire two kinds of things. Firstly, he can desire things with a concrete reference. “I want a beer” or “I want a fast car”. Man can also desire things without a concrete reference. “I wish to be happy” or “I want a beautiful woman”.

In all the stories where the devil offers three wishes and things end up badly, saved in extremis by the third wish – “I want everything as before” – the mistake of the wisher is to wish for things without concrete reference. […]

For a capitalist prime-minister, the problem reduces to finding out whether A will bring more objects than B or not. That’s all. For a third party, the PM’s choice carries meaning : if indeed the chosen measure brings more objects, the third party is in agreement. If it doesn’t, he isn’t. Either he believes him stupid, incompetent, corrupted or otherwise, the problem as far as the third party is concerned is localised, and therefore solvable : the prime-minister.

For a socialist prime-minister, the problem is quite inapproacheable. Which of the two measures is “more socialist” ? This is, en passant why “being socialist” is a theme recurring to obsession in the discourse of socialism, but “being capitalist” is rarely if ever heard in capitalism. The lack of reference induces a compensatory complex. […]

Be so kind then, to believe whatever you will, but never speak to anyone about something that can’t be measured. They who provoke you to speak on such matters are ill intended, whether knowingly or just stupidly, and they who fall for it are damned, in the most moral sense of that term.

Did you read the above and note quite rightly that, for the last 50 years at least, China = Capitalist and USA = Socialist? Let’s see if the end of the American Republic and creation of the American Empire can make the West great more concrete again! Less DEI/ESG/BBQ soup, more real butter, bricks, and bullets.

From 2013: The dilemma of fake money

The Fed can easily push “liquidity” into the market, and by the boatload if “need” be, but only inasmuch as it’s properly “sterilized”, which is to say only as long as proper safeguards are in place ensuring that money never gets spent. Which is fundamentally the problem that the junior populist senator [Elizabeth Warren] is exposing, much to every senior elitist’s chagrin : the Fed now has before it the uncomfortable dilemma of either publicly admitting that all that liquidity is meaningless, a publicity exercise sensu stricto or else… explaining to the hungry, to the desperate, to the young and frustrated why they can’t have some. I suppose we’ve identified the exact place reality clefts, that proverbial hole through which the night comes in.

And you wonder why we “live in the wealthiest country in history” with horribly crumbling infrastructure and the price of eggs up +50% this year alone.

From 2012: The problem of too much money

The problem inflationary currency bestows upon capital allocators is insolvable. They are given money of no certain value (pretty much the only sure thing about the paper currency is that it is, literally, burning in your hands, it ticks away like a bomb, it blows in the wind like dust – all this while you’re holding it) and have to do something with it. They always, always, always, absolutely always have more than is in fact needed. […]

The end result is nothing else than a horde of poor unfortunate fucks running around like headless chickens trying to stuff bills where they don’t belong, trying to give engineers that need 5k to build a car 50k instead and generally speaking wreaking all sorts of havoc.

Capital misallocation is the magic word. Inflationary systems produce it, necessarily, unavoidably and unerringly. Capital misallocation is the feared word. Its effects are the Holodomor, its effects are the collapse of Socialism, both in Russia and Eastern Europe, its effects are without exception and without possible salvation unmitigated disaster.

Capital misallocation is actually the principal reason inflationary models do not hold, do not work and do not help. Let capital allocators allocate capital, rather than impersonate headless chickens. We’ll all be better off for it. Including the hungry, the cold, the ethnically colored and the lusciously hipped. Everyone’ll be better off, just leave the currency be.

And you wonder why Sam Altman “needs” $7 trillion while his competitors in China have no problem keeping up for… 1 millionth that amount. Turns out that being good at fundraising isn’t the same skill as “changing the world.”

From 2013: The wonder of inflation

My chief complaint with the US version of “progress” is exactly that : it consists of taking a county where a hundred people live in brick and concrete housing, dressed in cotton and wool and enjoying actual meat and actual potatoes on their table and replacing it with a county where two hundred people live in vinyl-siding “housing”, dressed in nylon and polyester and enjoying ground hooves and chemical paste on their table. This is not progress, even if a county with 160 low information voters is more likely to toe the line and “not cause problems”.

This is not progress, but apparently it is exactly what the USG is after, even down to its peculiar redefinition of what inflation means. As such being a part of the evil empire is today and remains as always a crime against humanity.

Anyone else looking forward to a future of buildings made of stone, iron, and brass, lovingly detailed and decorated? That’s the post-plastic, post-consumerist future we dream of, and will build with our children.

From 2014: The bezzle-USD and the tide-USD

there’s a virtual economy, denominated in bezzle-USD. There’s also a real economy, denominated in tide-USD. These both pretend to be using the same unit of account, the USD, but in point of fact they do not. On the basis of this pretense of identity some de facto convertibility between bUSD and tUSD does exist, but it displays limitations which are often unexpected surprises for the naive (as the equivalency breaks down in practice causing fault lines in the convertibility that seem to come “out of nowhere”). Let us expend some effort to understand the surface and edges of both types of USD, as well as how they interact with each other.

bUSD is what you receive in your bank account any time your tax-paying employer pays you. bUSD is what you hold whenever you exchange valuable goods or services (such as your own labour) for government promises, which includes ANY form of credit issued in the US or by US corporations without exceptions and any other form of virtual “money”. A promise of MF Global to buy a product for you as your broker, a promise by Freddie Mae to repay a debt to you, a promise by JPM to share their future profits with you, a 401k fund of any type, social security future payments predicated on previous deposits or not, a promise of some “authorised agent” to repay you gold in exchange for paper gold certificates, a piece of paper saying X bank holds Y of your dollars and any other form of government-backed virtuality. They’re all equally obligations of the US Government, the various pseudo-corporations and fronts used to disguise this matter notwithstanding. You are well advised to be at least as smart as the courts when judging your own affairs : if a court will see through a front intended to deceive in bankruptcy, divorce and other patrimonial disputes, so should you.

tUSD is what you receive from supermarkets and other retailers (in exchange for your bUSD) whenever you buy (using a credit card, check etc) any items, such as Tide, or cough medicine, or asparagus. Considering that the supply of bUSD is unconstrained either in law or practice, whereas the supply of tUSD is constrained by reality, should the supply of available tUSD become stretched too thin for a gushing of bUSD coming at it, you may expect restrictions. Such as your not being allowed to buy cough medicinevi or only being allowed one can of Tide a week or only one fill of gas a month, or being required to keep “your gold” as paper gold certificates issued by an “authorised” government agent. […]

This split isn’t in any sense novel or remarkable, by the way. Argentines have lived for many decades under a dual system of exactly this kind, except in their case the bUSD is called “peso” (the tUSD is actually the tUSD). The only problem that may come to upset this arrangement, of course, is that Bitcoin has been slowly displacing the tUSD as a “good money” standard. That displacement has been accelerating, and will further acceleratevii at an ever increasing pace. This means the process will be complete in rather short order, perhaps as short as just a few years. You’ll definitely know when it’s too late, incidentally, because the last leap of such an unwind is always quite explosive.

Ever wondered why “taxes” are so bloody high in the West at present? Because if you actually tried to spend the “money” from your bullshit spreadsheet-maxxing job, the price of turkeys and Tide would be many, many multiples of what they are today. So as it stands, you get pretend to be “virtuous” because you “don’t eat meat” and “it’s a choice” yadda yadda but you’ve basically just reinvented the Indian caste system complete with “sacred cows”, now how’s that for progress?

From 2012: Let’s dig a little deeper into this entire deflation “problem”

These are all problems of ecology : everyone being a consumer, and everyone being driven into a consumptive frenzy by the inflationary nature of currently used scrip puts some serious pressures on the environment.

And I’m to somehow believe that replacing the gunky US Dollar with a non-inflationary currency is going to cause “problems”. What exact frigging problems is it going to cause ? People coming out of consumerism, is that it ? In what sort of parallel universe of hundred-years’ worth of accumulated stupidity would this be a problem ? […]

So, does a deflationary currency prevent all spending ? No, it does not. Does it prevent useless, meaningless and ultimately stupid spending ? Yes, it does. That’s incidentally why welfare and big governments will be the first to go : because they are stupid expenditures.

Will all this force absolutely everyone trying to make money to come up with actual, legitimate, functional and valid value propositions ? Yes, it will. From the government to the last street vendor, including whores, university professors and absolutely everyone. The old gimmicks are indeed useless in a new, non-gimmicky economic environment.

2025 is truly the 1st year of the 21st century: when the tide of history turns back towards human flourishing and excellence. It will be another decade or so before the changes we’re witnessing today really start to gel, but the next golden age is very much around the corner and we can clearly see its foundations in Trilema of yore.

Happy Sunday reading!

1. To be fair to the “New Right,” it’s not even easy for Cosa Nostra to find good (ie. hard) men these days! ↩
2. Yes, yes “atoms > bits” and “we’ve focused too much on bits so now it’s time to pivot to atoms” herpy durr, but did you notice that the 6 pimply-faced teenagers who just mugged Treasury and Personnel did so with keyboards, not Kalashnikovs? So while violence is still the ultimate trump card, it’s overly simplistic to assume that there’s no such thing as electronic violence, and that in many cases bits are upstream of atoms. Or have you forgotten Black Square Day? ↩