Contrarian Impulses

Plus, Javier Milei "pulverizes" inflation in Argentina, the everytown where "Cash is King," the revolution in revolutions and more...

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Moffat Beach, Australia...

When we left you earlier in the week, we were ambling through Queensland’s verdant hinterland... partly in search of weird and wacky fauna (which we found in droves at the legendary Australia Zoo) and partly to get a feel for what you might call the “local’s lay of the land.” 

The trouble with relying on the mainstream news to form and inform one’s worldview is that it’s exceedingly difficult to cut through all the jabber and twaddle. So much of what passes as news is “messaging” and “narrative shaping” and good ol’ fashioned propaganda, it’s sometimes tough to know where the government’s talking points end and reality begins. 

As Samuel Clemens – a.k.a. Mark Twain – wryly observed: “If you don’t read the news, you’re uninformed... if you do read it, you’re misinformed.”

Over the years, we’ve come to rely on legacy media outlets as steadfast contrarian indicators. When they say zig, our knee jerks promptly to the zag position. When they say duck, we instinctively dive. And when they assure us, on behalf of the political power mongers calling the shots, “They’re from the government and they’re here to help,” we recall President Reagan’s cautionary statement regarding the nine most dangerous words in the English language...and search hastily for the egress.

The Pub Test  

So when we want to know the state of affairs in, say, our native Terra Australis, we prefer the chatter at the local watering holes, where we’ll take the reliable word of a sparky (electrician), chippy (carpenter), dunny-diver (plumber) or garbo/garbologist (trash collector) over the distorted deceptions of shiny bums, desk drivers and assorted scumbags orbiting Canberra, the nation’s capital and seat of political power.

It was with no small measure of delight, then, that we discovered the spirit of freedom and independence alive and well in the sleepy country town of Maleny, an hour and a half north and a tad west of Brisbane. We even snapped this delightful message at one of the local bookstores...

Our own “small act of rebellion:” paperback copies of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, proudly paid for in cash. 

But let us return to our reliably unreliable media...

The Revolution Revolution

When we are informed that we have “two weeks to flatten the curve,” or that a new medical treatment is “safe and effective... and mandatory,” or that the “science is settled” (and by consensus, no less!) we puzzle whether the purveyors of popular opinion ever heard of Nicolaus Copernicus or Johannes Kepler or Galileo Galilei. 

Before the Copernican Revolution, in the early 16th century, the scientific “consensus” held that the earth was the center of the universe, that the planets (from the Greek “planḗtai,” or “wanderers”) paraded across the night skies in divine choreography for the delight of God’s special, chosen, and galactically sedentary species.

Only kooks and outsiders doubted the geocentric model. Aristarchus of Samos, a toga-clad astronomer, mathematician and all-round village brainiac, proposed the heliocentric model as early as the third century BC, long before eccentric billionaires were launching electric cars into the great beyond. Nor was he alone in his “out of this world” suppositions. Aristarchus himself was influenced by the pre-Socratic philosopher, Philolaus of Croton, who posited a great fire at the center of the universe. Anaxagoras, moreover, reckoned our sun was but one of countless other celestial fireballs, known today as “stars” (from the Proto-Indo-European root “h₂stḗr” which traces back to “to burn” and is the source word for “ash”). 

But though they had the weight of the universe on their side, when it came to cosmology, Aristarchus, Philolaus and Anaxagoras were nonetheless considered the “anti-factsers” of their time. So, for almost two thousand years, the geocentric models of Aristotle and Ptolemy carried “the day” (defined as a period during which the sun dutifully revolved around our own little blue dot).

And yet, as far as we know, our ancestral cosmosquabbles did nothing to augment the structure of the universe itself. Reality is no more subject to opinion than it is to minorities or majorities thereof. (Such is our opinion, anyway!) That one-fifth of Britons and one-quarter of Americans (according to Gallup polling) continue to believe in the geocentric model – to this very day – does not make it true. 

Point being, every man is entitled to his opinion...but not the right to force it upon others who may see things differently. Which brings us back, full circle, to our regular beat.

Pulverizing Inflation

Perhaps you’ve heard – maybe even from a fringy Substack publication dealing in contrarian theories and political pub tests – that there are rumbles of libertarian rebellion emanating from the End of the World, down in Argentina. “The Greatest Political Experiment of Our Time,” we’ve been calling it.

And how is this weird and wacky enterprise in free markets going? The latest figures, released earlier this week, show that Public Enemy #1 (red hot inflation) is cooling like a white dwarf (ok, ok... so we went down a bit of a cosmology wormhole). 

On Tuesday, Argentina posted its first single-digit monthly inflation figure in more than six months, as the rate slowed from 25.1% m.o.m. in December...to 20.6% in January... to 13.2% in February... to 11% in March... 

...to 8.8% in April. 

“Inflation is being pulverized,” wrote presidential spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, on X (née Twitter) after the official figures were released. “Its death certificate is being signed.”

That the all-knowing majority in the popular presses thought this could not be done... that slashing rampant government spending was impossible... that taking on the powerful, entrenched interests of the “political caste” was a death sentence... that Argentina was doomed and liberty dead...

…still did not make it true. And thank goodness for that. 

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Might unpopular ideas – free markets, civil liberties, common sense – be enjoying a resurgence… even in the doomed West?

Might thoughtful individuals be ready to ditch the ‘statist quo’ in favor of a more peaceful, voluntary existence?

Might citizens be ready to shrug off the illusion of choice proffered by their would-be political leaders and their puerile porters in the mainstream press?

Such a reality might be closer than you think. Already, millions of people in hundreds of countries have tuned out of state propaganda, meant only to divide, conquer and impoverish people.

How do we know?

Well, we don’t… but we have reason to be cautiously optimistic. Even these humble Notes now reach dear readers in all 50 states across the US… and in 130 countries around the world. Not bad, given that we only just kicked off this year.

Of course, the ideas of freedom, liberty and independence are not going to spread themselves. And that’s where our dear members come in. Thanks to their support, we are able to remain fully independent… which means no advertisements, no bosses and no bias.

Just free markets, free minds and free people… all the time.

If you’d like to support our work and join the growing community of folks interested in these lately resurgent ideas, please consider becoming a Notes member today. Cheers!