The Silk Road Less Traveled

Freedom for Ross Ulbricht and the Legacy of his Silk Road marketplace...

(The Gadsden Flag, flown by revolutionaries since December 20, 1775)

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

~ P.J. O'Rourke, from Parliament of Whores (1991)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

As dear readers know, our beat here is Free Markets, Free Minds and Free People.

We’ve been following this pithy tricolon, on and off, for most of our writing career. Over twenty plus years... across ninety countries (and counting)... we’ve been fascinated by stories of human liberation – whether intellectual, geographical, financial, political, philosophical etc. – in the epic, age-old battle of Man vs. the State.

You can imagine our delight, then, when news crawled across the “socials” earlier this week that Ross Ulbricht, the American entrepreneur and creator of the Silk Road online marketplace, was given a “full and unconditional pardon” by President Donald Trump. From his Truth Social:

Ross spent more than a decade behind bars after his arrest, at a California public library, back in 2013. What, exactly, was Ross’s heinous crime against humanity, that he should be handed a sentence that extended well beyond his earthly years?

Did he receive millions of dollars in bribes from foreign governments by peddling access to his influential father, a.k.a., The Big Guy?

Perhaps he funneled hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to US “defense” contractors, by way of a war torn country in Eastern Europe, which he swore to defend until the “last drop of their blood”?

Or maybe he used taxpayer money to fund a Chinese research lab that leaked a synthetically manufactured virus into the human population, resulting in tyrannical worldwide lockdowns and immeasurable death and despair?

Not quite. Besides, as we’ve learned in recent weeks, such petty misdemeanors carry no sentence whatsoever. At least, not in this life…

At the time of Ross’s arrest, the U.S. government claimed it shut down the highly popular Silk Road website, and cuffed its creator, because that renegade outfit “facilitated the purchase of drugs” which the State deemed illegal, using cryptocurrency to “launder” the profits along the way (thereby cutting the State, forever with its greasy palm outstretched, out of the deal).

But before we rush to judgement, let us first consider...

What was the Silk Road, anyway? And why was the State so keen to cut it down... and to make such a pariah out of its founder?

Like most of its self-serving projects, the State’s so-called “War on Drugs” is not really about victory as advertised... but rather extracting, by monopolistic force, as much money out of the market as it can squeeze. It is not about ending drug use, in other words, or minimizing societal harm, as much as it is about prolonging...and profiting... from the exchange.

It stands to reason, then, that any competition would come into conflict with the State’s primary interests: money and, by extension, power. Read on for more...

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The Silk Road Less Traveled

By Joel Bowman

First up, a couple of cold, hard facts:

• Drugs exist.

• People who want them exist.

As with all markets, the drug market exists to fill the space between the two: between supply and demand. Of course, man’s desire to experiment with mind-altering substances is hardly new. Archaeological records indicate the presence of psychotropic plants and drug use in ancient civilizations as far back as early hominid species about 200 thousand years ago.

We make this last point neither to condone nor condemn drug use, but merely to suggest that millions of years of demand seems unlikely to yield to the arbitrary, man-made edicts of the day.

The U.S. government's disastrous, multi-decade “War on Drugs” stands in service of precisely this point. Anyone who doubts this reality is invited to Google “drugs in U.S. prisons,” where they will encounter no shortage of literature on how, even in the State’s own cages, “supply and demand” trumps “laws and commands.”

Until relatively recently, the illegal drug market was largely confined to dark alleys and celebrity parties, where violent gangs – both outside the government's reach and within its own ranks – fought turf wars for market supremacy. The tragic results are well enough documented elsewhere.

Then, in February 2011, the game changed... perhaps irreversibly. A website called Silk Road – named after the old trade routes between Europe and Asia – brought the drug trade out of the gutter and onto the Internet. Suddenly, individuals were free to transact anonymously through Tor hidden services technology.

Predictably, the site flourished... until the U.S. government shuttered it. (Though, perhaps just as predictably, Silk Road 2.0 was soon up and running... followed by a rapidly growing list of competing sites thereafter, many of which exist today. The toothpaste, as the saying goes, was out of the tube.)

Suffice to say, Silk Road may not be for all people... but it was clearly for some people.

Freedom vs Force

Proponents of the website argue that Silk Road helped to reduce violence (by keeping drugs off the streets), lowered costs (by providing a competitive marketplace) and increased product quality and consumer safety (through a trusted user review system, similar to Trip Advisor, whereby merchants trading on their reputation were dis-incentivized from providing low-quality goods and services for fear of bad reviews).

Nearly 1 million people who used Silk Road agreed: The online market was preferable to the highly controlled, gang-centered game on the street... a game that wrecks millions of lives annually and costs taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars along the way.

Whatever one's own personal opinion of drug use and/or abuse, the Silk Road experiment invites us to ask some important questions, to have a real and meaningful conversation about this very important subject...

The U.S. government's opposition to Silk Road was, in a very real way, a stated opposition to having that conversation. The motivation is not hard to understand. After all, the drug business is big business for big government.

By enacting myriad laws prohibiting individuals from making consensual decisions regarding their own bodies (and what they freely choose to put inside them... or not), the government sets itself up as the judge, jury and executioner of its own, arbitrary rules. It claims a monopoly on justice, in other words... at least as it chooses to define the word at any given moment.

Through its so-called “War on Drugs,” the State is able to funnel vast sums of other people’s (taxpayers’) money unto... itself.

Local, state and federal police departments all have quotas to make and budgets to bloat. The DEA, FBI, DHS et al. each carry their own wish lists of must-have police gadgetry. Think Tasers, lasers, tanks, drones, machine guns and all the other weapons-grade toys required to “keep the peace.”

Conveniently enough, the military has plenty of leftover killing machines to swap out for newer, shinier models (another racket of epic money- and life-wasting proportions).

But hey! Whatever it takes to keep people safe from themselves!

Prison Planet

Of course, there's little to no evidence that all this iron-fisted policing actually reduces drug-related crime or violence. Au contraire! By making certain substances illegal, the government naturally drives up the price of the product - and therefore the profit incentive for black market suppliers.

And since the market is now a risky one – owing to the government's cages and guns and foot soldiers crowding out honest competition – it stands to reason that only the toughest, riskiest players remain in the game. It is hardly surprising then that these actors – the very same drug cartels to whom the Feds were found selling weapons in their “Fast & Furious” operation – enjoy record profits year after year.

The same thing happened during the last Prohibition era, which gave rise to the Torrios, O'Banions and Capones of the 1920s and ‘30s. And it's not only the wise guys – both inside and outside the police departments – getting rich off the War on Drugs.

The government's lucrative arrangement likewise benefits its own prison systems, with a steady stream of minor offenders (and offending minors) sent to occupy cellblocks around the country and around the clock.

Since President Nixon officially declared a war on drugs back in 1971, the prison population in the Land of the Free has risen by a non-trivial 800%. By 2015, more than half (52%) of all inmates were incarcerated on drug-related charges. At around $24,000 per head and $5.1 billion in new prison construction annually, the US government's human caging racket consumes more than $81 billion in budget expenditures per year. Over the same time period, more than $1 trillion has been funneled into drug related law “enforcement.”

In 2010, the year before the Silk Road began operations online, more than 1.5 million Americans were hauled away for non-violent drug violations. Half of those arrests were for marijuana-related infractions... almost 90% of which were for possession only... the vast majority of which would be non-criminal offenses today.

With barely 5% of the world's population, the U.S. somehow manages to account for more than 25% of the planet's prison population, making the country the world's single largest jailer... by far. By comparison, Communist China, which has a population more than 4 times larger than the US, contributes roughly one-sixth of the global prison population. Russia, whose population is about 42% the size of the US, accounts for ~4% of the world’s prisoners.

According to a report by the Pew Center, one in every 31 American adults was under some form of correctional control - i.e., prison, jail, parole and/or probation – around the time the Silk Road was founded.

Laws of the Jungle

What would you expect, dear reader, from a bull market in government? Where abject failure is rewarded with an ever-increasing budget and where no idea is too vicious or too stupid to be given a place on the growing list of federal agencies?

Market-based alternatives, like the Silk Road, pose a clear and present threat to this cozy arrangement. Hence the reason the State wants them shuttered, looted and stomped out of existence. For all its lofty rhetoric about a government of, by and for “the people,” the State remains, by its very nature, an agent of force. In the end, to “govern” is not to “debate” or “converse” or “compromise.”

It is to employ force, violently if necessary. As Allen Thornton wrote in his classic essay Laws of the Jungle:

“When you advocate any government action, you must first believe that violence is the best answer to the question at hand.”

After half a century of State aggression... millions of humans in cages... and trillions of dollars spent on enforcement that fails on every meaningful measure... the inquiring mind begins to wonder...

Is that really the best we can do?

At the very least, Ross Ulbricht and his Silk Road marketplace invited us to consider the alternatives.

In light of Ross’s full pardon and pending release, we offer our heartfelt congratulations to Ross and his family, in particular his mother, Lyn Ulbricht, who fought tirelessly for her son’s cause.

Their victory is all of our victory... and a victory for free markets, free minds and free people everywhere.

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

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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